SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Discount Tire/America's Tire is leveraging 60 years of experience servicing fleets to expand its business with that segment of the market.
While Discount Tire, the nation's No. 2 independent tire retailer with over 1,070 stores, has been offering services to fleets of passenger cars and light trucks for decades, the company has begun to formalize the program and market it externally.
In 2017 the company pulled together a team to build up the fleet program and named Mark Marrufo as vice president of fleet operations. Last November, the company hired Chris Adams as vice president of B2B to focus on specific segments and help accelerate growth in fleet business.
- This article appears in the Oct. 26 print editon of Tire Business.
"We have been doing fleet and commercial business for a very long time and our store personnel have done such a wonderful job at cultivating these relationships and building their businesses with these local fleets, that it really made it easy for us to build on their foundation that they already set," Mr. Marrufo said.
"Downtime is always a big part of a fleet manager's consideration and being that we only do tires and wheels, we're able to install or service vehicles within an hour's time frame. We have a robust appointment system that we can take care of not only our retail and BOPUS (buy online/pick up in store) customers but also our fleet customers in that same appointment range.
"We're keeping their costs down so they are able to service their customers better, as well. That's another big part of what we're trying to build upon within this group," he said.
"We're investing in a sales force that will go out and talk to those (fleet) customers that are right in our backyard. These businesses may have known us for years and done some business with us, we just didn't have a formal program," Mr. Adams added.
"We're a trusted brand and have been serving customers for 60 years and we continue that with our customer-first mentality," Mr. Marrufo said.
"We've grown to [more than 1,070] stores across the United States, so that makes it real convenient for customers to shop with us, and these big fleet companies know us because they shop with us personally. We offer value and competitive pricing. ... And most of all we provide such a great peace of mind with some of the technology tools that we've invested in order to make sound recommendations to our customers. ...
"Some of the solutions that we've been able to develop in the last couple of years has really helped fleet managers to look at their problematic vehicles and we're able to drive some better tire solutions for them."