The just-released 2018 ProSales 100 shows that America’s biggest pro-oriented construction supply companies might be increasing their investments in technology, but for two key parts of IT, the level of interest is much different.
Of the 91 PS100 companies that answered the question, 72.5% already have a dispatch/delivery system installed and another 12.1% plan to get one. That leaves just 15.4% who don’t plan to get one.
In contrast, 44.9% of the 89 companies that answered the question said they have no plans to install a customer relationship management (CRM) system, while only 30.3% have one installed and only 24.7% are shopping for one.
This comes at a time in which dealers appear to be investing more in technology. As we wrote in our analysis of the numbers, you can see the trend in the question about percentage of revenues that dealers say they will spend on IT this year. Just over a third of the 2017 ProSales 100 companies that answered the question said they would allocate less than 0.25% of revenues for IT. Among this year’s respondents, it was far less: only 23% said they’d spend less than a quarter of a percent. Meanwhile, the share of all dealers saying they’ll spend between 0.51% and 1% on IT rose to 32% from 24%.
