One of the greatest advantages a company has over its competitors is system of distribution and product support, i.e. the dealer network. Dealers play a vital role in helping a company build and maintain close relationships with customers and gain insights into how they can improve their products and services to fulfill customer needs. And a company can achieve customer loyalty through dealer loyalty. Therefore, it must make efforts to build their competence for more effective performance. Dealers who are long established members of a company can get close to customers, but to tap the full potential of such dealers, a company must forge extremely close ties with them and integrate them into its critical business system. When treated this way dealers can serve as a source of market intelligence, as proxies for customers, and as consultants. Although these investments take the usual form of money, it also includes softer aspects such as training and development.

The customers are more forthright in giving their feed back about a product or a service to the dealers than to the staff of the company or a surveyor.