How Convergence Data's (CDS) Dealer Industry Insights (DII) program gave a leading North American HVAC manufacturer early visibility into loyalty erosion across its internal dealer network, and competitive risk across a landscape of 60,000 dealers spanning 30 HVAC brands.
Customer Overview
A leading North American HVAC manufacturer has expanded aggressively through strategic acquisitions, absorbing major HVAC brands and regional distributors including its owned brands and independent distribution partners. As its distribution footprint grew across the U.S. and Canada, managing dealer and contractor loyalty and identifying competitive channel risk became a paramount strategic priority.
To establish early visibility into dealer network behavior and protect market share, the manufacturer partnered with Convergence Data to deploy its Dealer Industry Insights program, conducting an annual analysis of HVAC dealer locator data across 30 major brands. The initiative combined large-scale automated web scraping, AI-powered data normalization, and dealer website content analytics to uncover patterns in dealer affiliation, competitive overlap, and brand loyalty.
The goal: give the manufacturer data-driven insights to improve dealer retention, understand competitive threats, and optimize network strategy, shifting the organization from a reactive to a proactive dealer strategy.
Business Challenges
Loyalty combines affiliation with HVAC brand dealer programs and the brands a dealer actually shows on its own website. As the manufacturer's brand network grew, leadership faced several critical operational and channel questions.
Dealers increasingly represent multiple HVAC brands. Sales figures can look steady even as key contractors quietly feature competitor lines or shift promotional focus.
Traditional sales reporting only reflects dealer losses after revenue has already declined, leaving channel teams reactive rather than proactive.
Dealers registered on the manufacturer's own website were, at the same time, promoting competitor equipment through their digital channels.
Identifying which dealers frequently switch brand allegiance versus those deeply aligned with the manufacturer required cross-brand, multi-year historical tracking.
Dealer data across the HVAC industry is riddled with duplicate names, PO boxes, and inconsistent branding, making manual comparison impractical.
Reviewing 60,000 dealers and 34,000 dealer websites by hand was never going to work at the scale the manufacturer needed.
Why It Matters
Without early signals, channel decisions are made after the outcome has already been decided.
Business Value
The Solution
Convergence Data deployed its purpose-built HVAC Dealer Industry Insights solution, converting fragmented public dealer data into decision-ready market intelligence through a repeatable analytics pipeline.
Annual web scraping of dealer locator pages across the top 30 HVAC brands in the U.S. and Canada, normalized into a single structured dataset.
Multi-year data matching lets the manufacturer evaluate movement over time rather than reading a single snapshot.
Pinpoints flexible dealers who carry multiple brand affiliations or frequently pivot between manufacturers, so sales teams can prioritize outreach for increased retention.
Cross-references registered dealers who are simultaneously featuring competitor products, powering precise phone and direct-mail re-engagement campaigns.
A machine learning driven engine resolves duplicate names, PO boxes, and inconsistent branding across tens of thousands of dealer records.
Dealers are categorized by their level of affinity to the manufacturer versus competitors, creating a consistent scoring framework leadership can act on.
Key Findings
With loyalty grades assigned, the manufacturer has a mechanism to see where dealer loyalty is eroding and identify retention risk based on exclusive versus competitive loyalty.
Neutral dealers are increasingly aligning to brands. Dealers are being actively recruited into programs while brand ecosystems either strengthen or weaken, adding urgency to neutral-dealer outreach.
Competitive overlap is dominated by a handful of brands, often aligning around product lines dealers can service across a subset of manufacturers.
More dealers maintain active websites each year, though many still have no web presence beyond social media or local business listings.
Helping dealers expand their web presence by providing manufacturer-created content gives dealers ready-to-publish assets while extending the manufacturer's brand onto their websites.
The Headline Result
60,000 dealers and 34,000 dealer websites across 30 brands, refreshed every year into one decision-ready view.
How the Manufacturer Uses the Data
The analysis is not purely observational. It directly informs the manufacturer's operational and strategic decisions.
Identify at-risk dealers showing early signs of competitor affiliation, prioritize outreach and incentives for high-risk segments, and track which brands dealers are switching to.
See which brands are gaining share inside the manufacturer's own dealer base, benchmark competitor expansion and network restructuring, and treat sudden affiliation shifts as an early-warning system.
Use dealer-level exports for precision targeting, apply predictive analytics on historical brand associations, and run market share analysis by geography and dealer type.
Benchmark loyalty and growth against industry averages, link loyalty-program data with brand-association data to test incentive spend, and evaluate brands carried per dealer.
Dashboards and maps are shared across the manufacturer for internal exploration, and an AI copilot will enable natural-language querying of dealer data.
Evaluate where the manufacturer is gaining or losing presence to guide recruitment, and anticipate demand shifts when a competitor loses significant dealer share.
Why Convergence Data
Data collection, normalization, and analytics are handled in one program with no hand-offs between vendors.
Industry-specific intelligence focused specifically on HVAC dealer networks, not generic channel data.
Annual today, with planned 2026 enhancements already underway.
A clear trajectory to AI-driven, self-service intelligence rather than static reporting.
Coverage across the U.S. and Canada, producing what CDS considers the cleanest, most accurate dealer dataset in the industry.
Dashboards, maps, and exports put the answers directly in the hands of channel and marketing teams.
"This is no longer just data. It's becoming a core system of intelligence for managing the HVAC dealer ecosystem."Jeremy GrubmanVice President, Strategy & Operations
See which dealers are loyal, which are drifting, and where your next growth opportunity is hiding.