Purpose – Crane owning companies evaluate the supply service offers for their spare parts need in different ways. The subjects that they consider important during the evaluation and the decision making can be different too. This causes loss of customer/income to the spare parts suppliers who have problems determining the priority of customers criteria. The purpose of this research is to determine the criteria priorities of crane owning companies to give suggestions to the suppliers for them to be able to implement the best fit sales strategy. Design/methodology/approach – In this research, first of all, the sales data and customer portfolio of Turkish spare parts supplying company are investigated. By basing on the total number of offers and orders, the total price of offers and orders, offer/order ratios, the target companies list is constructed. The literature is investigated and the industry specialists are conducted to determine the criteria which are considered important by the companies during decision making about spare parts supply. A questionnaire form is included thirty questions to evaluate the interrelated importance of criteria. The forms are sent to five spare parts supply specialists, eight crane management, and nine port management companies selected from targetted companies list. The answers to the questionnaires are evaluated by using DEMATEL and as per the result, the criteria importance list is formed for each company. Later, criteria priority comparison between the companies is done by using polar representation. Findings – As a result of the analysis, it is found out that during decision making the most important criteria for the specialists is “price”, whereas for the crane owning companies it is “dependability”. Besides, the criteria priorities of the crane operating and the port operating companies are determined that are in accord with the criteria priority of the crane sector in general but the most important criteria for many of crane owning companies is different than the others’. Discussion – As a result of this research, it has been seen that every company could have different criteria priority independently of its related sub-sectors criteria priority. Therefore, the suppliers should investigate each of these companies separately as per their criteria priority to determine the best-fit sales strategy for each of them. Besides, due to the dynamic structure of the crane industry, the suppliers should repeat such analyses regularly to maintain continuous customer satisfaction.