Simon Wilson, senior sales manager, gives a live parts and remanufacturing tour.

While Zoom meetings and Webinars seem to be the preferred method of meetings in the COVID-19 era, Hitachi Construction Machinery Loaders America Inc. (HCMA) decided to step it up and produce a full-on TV production virtual meeting.

With several topics of discussion on the agenda, there was concern over a 3-hour virtual meeting and keeping dealer personnel engaged. The solution was to make this meeting top quality, engaging and, most importantly, a platform for dealer personnel to provide input on various topics.

"This platform gave us the opportunity to expand our audience. Normally, in face-to-face dealer meetings, dealers are represented by executives tasked with taking the messages back to their team. We chose to expand our audience to include all dealer personnel allowing us to not only reach key personnel, but to encourage input from all members of the dealer team," said Sam Shelton, marketing manager.

"Our meeting theme, Solutions Simplified, symbolizes the overall objective of many of the initiatives presented in this meeting."

The 300-plus attendees participated for the full 3 hours, staying engaged with polls, videos, trivia contests, customer testimonials and Q&A from the field. The topics were a mix of new announcements, product and program launches, and future initiatives mixed with topics suggest by the audience through the pre-meeting survey. The result was a mix of informative and educational content.

The meeting also set the stage to announce the 2020 MVPs and Dealer Award Winners.

Earning the President's Award, an award based on market share growth, were All Island Equipment, Chappell Tractor Sales Inc., Frank Martin Sons Inc., LinkBelt MidAtlantic Construction Company, Westchester Tractor Inc. and APCO Equipment Corporation.

Earning the Chairman's Award, an award based on market share, growth, and customer engagement, were RECO Equipment Inc., Great Southern Equipment Company and Garton Tractor Inc.

Building a pop-up TV studio on campus to host this inaugural venture required participation from several departments, including the IT team. The production team from RIVE, based in Washington, D.C., produced remotely from Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; Boston, Mass.; and Atlanta, Ga., reaching an audience throughout the United States and Canada.

Attendees were treated to a parts facility and remanufacturing plant tour, as well as the Hitachi Construction Machinery primary global parts facility in Japan, and several of the manufacturing facilities world-wide.

"I want to thank our team for facilitating a great program and for our dealer network who had all of their different departments engaged throughout the meeting. This wasn't designed as a one-way meeting. The technology gave us the opportunity to make everyone feel like they were in the room with us. It was a lot of fun and exceeded my expectations," said Simon Wilson, senior sales manager.

For more information, please visit www.hitachiwheelloaders.us.

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