Faced with tightening margins, low vehicle inventories and a narrowing opportunity to rebound in 2020, auto dealers are looking for additional ways to maximize dealership profitability at every step.

This begs the questions: How many times can you make a profit off a single vehicle in its lifecycle? With excellent dealer inventory management strategies and strong coordination between new and used sales, service, finance and marketing, the same car can generate profits for your dealership repeatedly.

In this post, we share how to maximize dealership profitability by focusing on cultivating your dealership’s homegrown inventory and best practices for generating additional profits at every rase, including:  

• – Original new vehicle sale

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• – Vehicle service

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• Acquire the vehicle as trade-in to enable the next new sale

• – Certified pre-owned (CPO) sales and service

Homegrown Profits Start at the First Sale

Dealership profitability through homegrown dealership inventory starts with maximizing ROI on the initial new vehicle sale. With little flexibility to raise prices, this means minimizing costs, with many dealers looking to improve both the efficiency and efficacy of their marketing to make an impact.  Mastermind’s dealer partners set the bar for this, achieving the lowest cost-per-sale in the industry at $115, versus the $624 industry average.

They do this in part by maximizing lead quality through our Behavior Prediction Score®, which empowers dealers to identify prospective buyers before they enter the buying process. From here, our dealer partners are empowered to engage prospects with effective predictive marketing solutions that build off each other to convert high-potential new and pre-owned car buyers faster. The result is 15x ROI over traditional models. 

Service: Maximize Customer Experience, Loyalty and Profitability

The sales cycle doesn’t end after a buyer converts, and neither do opportunities to maximize your dealership’s profitability, especially with your dealership’s inventory strategy. The service drive is a key component of the customer relationship – and excellent service interactions benefit your bottom line beyond solely service revenue. Industry research finds 74% of buyers who have their car serviced by the dealership of purchase are likely to return for their next purchase, versus only 35% of those who have their cars serviced elsewhere.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience in the service drive is critical to defending against competitor’s conquest efforts, as well. Gartner research found truly helpful customer service interactions create an 82% chance a customer will stay with a company when a competitor attempts to conquest them.  

Even if you didn’t sell the car to your service customers, service-not-sold conquest is also an important contributor to homegrown dealership inventory management. For this reason, service notifications are critical, as is informing service customers of changes to their vehicle’s trade-in value and updating them on any attractive trade offers available at their time of service.  

Market EyeQ’s Service Conquest capabilities help automate this process by identifying high-value sales prospects in your service drive and mapping them to relevant offers and available vehicles in your inventory, tailored to their unique wants and needs. As a result, our dealer partners report converting service customers to new car buyers at a 4x higher activation rate than our competitors due to Market EyeQ’s 99.8% VIN match rate.

Acquire as Trade-in and Sell New (or Pre-Owned) Vehicle

More than leads are acquired in the service drive. According to NADA, roughly two-thirds of car dealership inventory on the used vehicle lot comes from trade-ins, with 43% from new car purchases and 22% used. That’s a very clear reminder of the importance of trade-ins to supply a dealer’s pre-owned car inventory, but also their critical role in powering new car sales.

To make the most of both opportunities, your fixed ops and variable sales teams need to work in tandem, working toward collective goals and allowing for a more seamless customer handoff. For this reason, many dealers are unifying their new and used sales teams on a single sales platform as a best practice, improving visibility, coordination and dealership inventory management. 

This approach allows auto dealers to ensure their service drive successfully acquires in-demand trade-in makes, models and trim packages to make your car dealership inventory more profitable. Dealers who leverage Market EyeQ can take this approach even further by automating the process and prioritizing prospects with in-demand and potentially highly profitable trade-ins.

Don’t Sink Your Auto Reconditioning Profits

According to NADA, the average dealer’s reconditioning costs more than doubled between 2009 and 2017, from $288,479 to $635,453. How much of that was a good investment in dealership inventory, and how much of it was chasing sunk costs?

Auto reconditioning decisions in a dealership are critical to profitability. By utilizing the same data-driven tools and processes used to identify profitable service-to-sales leads to analyze insights like a customer’s maintenance and overall vehicle history, dealers can more effectively predict reconditioning costs and prioritize their more valuable opportunities. 

Keep Dealership Profitability High With CPO ROI

Once reconditioned, dealers are tasked with flipping that pre-owned vehicle before it spends too many days on the lot. This is where predictive marketing tools, such as Market EyeQ with its pre-owned functionality, empower dealers to maximize the profitability of their used vehicle sales by identifying the best pre-owned prospects and automatically mapping them to vehicles on your lot. 

This make-model-trim level approach revolutionizes dealership inventory management and allows you to optimize car dealership inventory turnover ratio.

How many sales teams does your dealership have? If your answer is more than one, you may be missing valuable opportunities related to uniting your used and new car sales teams into a cohesive dealership team.

Auto industry sales trends illustrate shocks to customer finances and reduced new vehicle inventory has many would-be new car shoppers opting for pre-owned car options. As a result, a recent used car sales study found used vehicle sales grew by 105.5% from April to May 2020.

By uniting your dealership’s new and pre-owned sales teams, you empower them to take advantage of every opportunity by matching prospects to the vehicle they’re most likely to purchase (whether pre-owned or new) and delivering a consistently excellent dealership customer experience. 

In this blog post, we’ll share how dealership leaders can bring together their new and used car sales teams by:

• – Setting clear expectations

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– Rewarding the right behaviors

– Working from the same information

Set Expectations and Inspire Action

The road to a united car sales team starts with clear expectations and direction from dealer leadership. Your people need to understand that working together as a united sales team will benefit the dealership and one another by improving the customer experience and ultimately the bottom line.

This needs to be part of your efforts to create a dealership culture built on delivering great customer experience, as your sales team is a critical component of that effort. Research finds salespeople are the largest driver of car buyer satisfaction, ranking more than twice as important to customers than the time a purchase takes or even the vehicle sales price.

Find opportunities, such as during your daily Save-a-Deal meetings, to inspire your team while setting collective expectations and promoting collaboration by giving your teams a collective goal to work toward.  

Recognize and Reward Teamwork

When your team meets these car sales goals – reward them. Make sure your compensation and employee recognition tools can identify and track both individual and group efforts. Reward teamwork that closes a sale and gives the customer a great experience.

For example, one key dealer solution Market EyeQ includes in the performance insights reporting is a user-by-user view of how each of your salespeople is using the dealership platform tools, including total activity, activity by deal type (lease, cash or finance) and activity by Behavior Prediction Score®. 

This practice is valuable beyond just your sales teams, of course. BDC, F&I, fixed ops – if there were ever a time to identify and recognize employees who are making an extra effort to help deliver a great customer experience and contribute to the dealership’s bottom line, it’s now.

Work From the Same Information and Insights

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of having your entire car sales team working from the same set of customer and inventory insights. Collecting and analyzing data from your dealership’s CMS, DMS and inventory from a single sales platform allows your sales team to create a consistent sales experience while maximizing customer engagement by efficiently matching customers with the right offer and vehicle.

For example, Market EyeQ provides sales teams with unified customer insights to allow them to identify which prospects in your marketplace are most likely to purchase, whether that’s new or used. It also interfaces with personalized marketing campaigns to engage your best prospects with high-ROI marketing touchpoints selected by predictive analytics tools that deliver actionable offers at the right time, in the right form and through the right channel to maximize customer engagement.

Beyond solely improving your used and certified pre-owned (CPO) lead generation, marketing ROI and closure rates, putting everyone on a single platform also sends the message that your dealership places equal importance on both new and used car sales teams. It makes it easier for employees in different roles to work together to meet customer needs and expectations and reduces the potential for friction between teammates.

Despite uncertainty over the exact details of how the automotive industry will respond to and recover from the current public health crisis, one certainty is that digital retailing currently is, and will continue to be in the future, more important than ever for auto dealers.

Whether it’s simply a question of unexpectedly accelerating the existing automotive digital retailing transition or driving more dramatic changes in the automotive industry (such as encouraging more customers to skip the dealership visit altogether through OEM delivery programs), the automotive retail marketplace will almost certainly take a dramatic digital shift in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. Dealers need to consider where their own challenges and opportunities lie in the months and years to come. 

In this post, we share insights into COVID-19’s impact on automotive retail trends, including:

• - Auto sales trends post COVID-19 disruption patterns in Asia
• - The rise of home delivery of new vehicles during and after the pandemic
• - Choosing the right automotive digital retailing solutions for success

Accelerating the Online Dealership Transition

One early sign that the COVID-19 crisis may have accelerated preexisting digital retail trends is seen in Asian countries that have recently begun to reopen closed sectors of the economy. 

In China, shoppers didn’t come back the instant the country’s automotive retail showrooms reopened. In the first week China’s dealers reopened their doors for sales and service, showroom traffic and parts and service department revenues averaged roughly two-thirds of normal levels. 

According to J.D. Power, U.S. auto sales markets had already begun to fall by as much as 80% in March, even in states that were allowing car dealerships to remain open. Consumers clearly are not relying solely on government guidelines when making the decision to visit their local auto dealership, and that is likely to continue in the future when states begin making the decision to reopen.

With buyers potentially hesitant to return to in-person car buying experiences, dealers must be ready to identify and engage consumers in a sales process that is largely online-based if they are going to compete in what could be a dramatically tighter sales market for the duration of 2020 and beyond.

Eliminate the Auto Showroom? 

Many automakers and dealers have launched or reinvigorated programs for home delivery of new vehicles during the pandemic – and it’s likely that at least some of those programs will continue in the aftermath. 

Automakers aren’t alone in this. Home delivery services are exploding in popularity across the country, including products like cars that had largely been retail-only and alcohol. 

While many consumers may take every opportunity to leave their homes in the immediate aftermath of lockdown orders being lifted, in the long term it’s likely that at least some will have gotten in the habit of moving every component of a traditional retail transaction (except product delivery) online.

For dealers, this means making your participation in your OEM’s delivery program something you’re planning on doing in the long term, rather than just doing in the interim.  when there are social distancing orders in place. It should involve considering how you have it staffed and managed, what metrics you’re watching, how your customer experience culture should inform and interact with those services, how you integrate it into your dealership’s loyalty marketing program and much more.

Forward-looking dealers can also take investments in delivery programs and use them in concert with data-driven loyalty and conquest marketing programs. If your analytics identify consumers who are likely to be in the market for essentially the same vehicle, consider proactively offering them a hassle-free delivery as part of the offer. This may not only work for loyalty customers, but also as a potential conquest option for customers who may have moved into your market or do not have an existing dealer relationship with your brand.

Review and Update Existing Investments for Digital Retail

Dealers have invested in a variety of capabilities to be as effective as possible in their digital retailing efforts – from strategic investments in Business Development Centers and predictive analytics tools, to tactical efforts to keep up with technologies, such as voice search or video trends. 

This is a good time to look at what investments you’ve already made and consider whether you’re getting the most out of them. Additionally, this is the right time to look at whether those tools and technologies you put in place a few years ago have kept up with the state of the technological art. 

You may not want to incur new IT costs or other investments right now, but the auto sales market is likely about to enter one of its more challenging periods in years. Hamstringing your ability to compete with outmoded automotive digital retailing solutions is a recipe for disaster. Dealers who proactively adapt to changing automotive retail trends will be better equipped to not only survive but thrive during COVID-19 disruptions and beyond. 

If you’re taking this opportunity to review your automotive digital retailing capabilities and are interested in what Mastermind’s predictive marketing sales platform has to offer, contact us for a free virtual demonstration.

As we approach the end of the year, holiday car sales are upon us, with Black Friday and Christmas being the tentpoles of many dealerships’ end-of-year sales strategies. With so many dealers competing to land price-conscious car buyers , how can your dealership leverage the holidays to finish the year strong?

In this blog, Mastermind shares 3 ways dealerships can maximize their holiday sales and sell more cars:

• - Get a head start on identifying and targeting the best prospects for your holiday sales offers 
• - Use your service drive as a conquest and upsell tool
• - Tweak your holiday sales standard practices for today’s customer

Get a Head Start on Holiday Dealership Deals 

Getting a head start on your holiday dealership marketing is key to staying ahead of the competition. Don’t wait until Black Friday – the right time to begin your holiday auto sales process is as soon as you know what offers will be on the table. That’s when you should turn your analytics tools loose on your potential customer base to identify and rank the prospects who will be most likely to buy the vehicles you’re selling.

It’s an especially powerful time to use Market EyeQ’s automotive equity mining tools and capabilities to identify existing customers who have positive equity in their vehicle and could profitably be traded into a new car during the sale. These deals offer big payoffs for dealers in addition to the new car sale by frequently triggering service, F&I, used car sales and other revenues, especially if the trade-in qualifies for factory certified pre-owned status. Market EyeQ factors in household demographic data from IHS Markit, consumer financial information from TransUnion and vehicle-specific insights from Carfax to highlight the customers who will be most likely to jump at the opportunity to trade in and trade up.

Once you have your prospects identified and ranked by likelihood of purchase during the sale with their individualized Behavior Prediction Score™, the next step is to engage them with effective and personalized marketing communications designed to maximize their likelihood of connecting to your dealership and entering the process of buying a car

This is where the science of data meets the art of automotive sales, and it’s never more important than during a crowded holiday sales season. Predictive dealership marketing is much more than printing someone’s name on the mailer. Rather, it’s an integrated and data-driven process of delivering the right message, in the right format, at the right time, to the right person. 

Once you have the prospect in the showroom, make sure your sales and F&I team are armed with data-driven customer insights, including deal parameters and personalized talk tracks, to help close the deal. 

Service Drive Shines During Holiday Sales

We’ve written more than once about best practices for turning service drive customers into sales prospects, and holiday sales are a great time to lean heavily on vehicle service conquest and relationship marketing to generate prospects and fill the sales pipeline one last time before the year is done.

In the run-up to holiday sales, make a special effort to get customers in the door with vehicle winterization offers and other service specials. Service is a local business with most people getting their vehicle serviced within a 10-mile radius of their home. Consider supporting a hyper-local charity such as a neighborhood senior center or school program in connection to service visits, emphasizing both your community support, as well as your proximity to potential service customers and the convenience your dealership offer as a result.

The run-up to the holidays is a good time to look at the communication structure between your service and sales teams. Do you have people whose responsibility it is to ensure that the handoff between service and sales is seamless from the customer’s perspective? Are your service personnel incentivized to help unearth sales prospects, and does turning a large-ticket service customer into a sales prospect penalize your service department’s numbers, creating a disincentive for them to make that handoff to sales? Dealerships who have those questions answered, using data-driven processes and tools such as Service Conquest feature are the best at converting service customers into new car sales.

Switch Up Your Dealership’s Holiday Sales Tactics 

Your customers don’t want to be stuck at the dealership for hours, working through paperwork while the season’s hot gifts and best deals fly off the shelves at toy stores and other retailers. Today’s popular video games are often available to be downloaded ahead of their launch date to avoid long download queues, you too can invite your prospects to “Pre-Load Black Friday” by handling F&I and other paperwork remotely ahead of time, minimizing the time they will spend in the dealership that day. Make sure you’re doing everything possible to get them in, out and on their way in their new car as quickly as possible, and make sure they know it.

With affordability being such a huge concern for consumers and contract lengths extending further into the future than ever before, it’s a rare customer who can pull off the traditional “red bow in the driveway.” This creates not only challenges but also opportunities for creative dealers to find ways to work with customers who want to surprise their significant other with a new car – but need their signature on the F&I paperwork to make it happen. Big red bow aside, consider the other ways you can help the gift-giver create that special moment they’ve seen in advertisements for years. 

The tightening auto sales market hasn’t made 2019 a year of good cheer for many dealers. But by combining cutting-edge data analytics with sales and marketing best practices (and a bit of creativity), dealers can close more deals and ring in the new year on a high note. If you’re not confident in your dealership’s ability to turn holiday sales into strong sales numbers, contact us to set up a demo.  

Customer experience (CX) is more than customer service. While customer service certainly influences CX, the concept extends throughout the entire relationship a customer has with your dealership, from their first online touchpoint or glimpse of marketing materials, through the end of the ownership cycle and beyond.

Getting CX right matters to a dealer’s bottom line, but it doesn’t happen by coincidence and it doesn’t happen just because you’re trying hard at it. It requires a data and evidence-based management strategy, backed by the right automotive data tools to empower your staff. In this blog, Mastermind shares:

 - What dealership customer experience management is, and why dealers need it

 - Why customer experience is critical to a dealership’s bottom line

 - How to create a customer experience management strategy that works for your entire dealership – with the tools your staff needs to succeed

What Is Customer Experience Management for Dealerships?

As with virtually any other facet of business, successfully delivering on CX requires defining and managing an actionable customer experience strategy. Without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish and bringing your team together in pursuit of that goal, you risk even the most well-intended teams pursuing inconsistent and potentially mutually-exclusive visions of customer experience that risk negating its value – or even causing unintended harm to your relationship with your customers.

Customer experience management is the process through which dealers come to understand what their customers care about so they can develop a vision and plan to meet those needs and expectations, defining goals and measuring progress at every appropriate touchpoint.

Even as increasing amounts of the research and communication involved in the automotive sales journey move online, consumers are expecting more personalized attention from their dealers at every touchpoint. Without a coherent customer experience management strategy, dealers risk failing to meet those expectations; losing customers to dealers who deliver on them.

Why Dealership Customer Experience Matters

Research is clear that the automotive customer experience plays a critical role in dealership bottom lines. For instance, research from Capgemini found that more than half of American car buyers would change dealers after experiencing poor customer service as early as the interest phase of a car purchase.

However, the dealership customer experience isn’t all about avoiding dissatisfaction. The same survey found that customers who’ve had a positive shopping and service experience at a dealership are willing to pay for that experience – in fact, more than 60 percent of them are willing to spend as much as 24 percent more.

An Autotrader survey broadly agrees, finding that more than half of consumers would buy from a dealership that offered their preferred experience, even if it didn’t have the lowest price, and two thirds said that in general, they are much more likely to buy from a dealership that provides their preferred customer experience. 

Additionally, while 65 percent of customers said they would drive further to buy from a dealer who had the lowest price, even more – 73 percent – said they’d drive further to close a deal with a great salesperson.

How to Create a Customer Experience Management Strategy

The key components of  creating a customer experience management strategy are:

1. Understand what your customers care about

2. Define a vision for how your relationship with those customers will fit into those expectations

3. Share the vision broadly and consistently throughout the entire dealership. Work with your team to define measurable goals at each customer touchpoint that contribute to achieving your visionEnsure that your team has the training, tools, resources and authority to meet those goals

4. Measure your progress toward those goals, including through direct feedback from customers

5. Update your strategy based on your measurements and feedback

A successful customer experience management strategy begins with understanding what your customers care about, and that means often considering feelings more than facts. Emotions are incredibly important when it comes to CX, and dealers can’t focus so much on hold times and satisfaction surveys that they forget to simply look at how they’re making their customers feel about the entire relationship.

A Harvard Business Review study defined a number of “emotional motivators” that drive consumer choices, and many of them hold opportunities for dealers to create emotionally motivating connections: “Stand out from the crowd,” “Enjoy a sense of well-being,” “Feel a sense of belonging,” “Feel secure” and “Succeed in life” all offer potential avenues of emotional connection to customers. 

When you’re defining and sharing your vision, that must involve making sure that your employees understand how you want your customers to feel about their interactions with your dealership. What kind of emotional connections are they being asked to make or encourage?

Arming Your Staff With the Right Tools to Succeed

From a practical and more measurable perspective, there’s a great deal of strategic value to focusing resources on the exact things that your customers aren’t expecting you to do well. The Capgemini research that found more than half of car buyers would change dealers over poor customer service during the car-buying process also identified areas where dealers had the most ground to make up to meet their expectations: Quality of answers from dealer staff, speed of customer service and proactiveness by staff. All of those are measurable and go directly to customer experience.

Fortunately, these are exactly the areas in which automotive analytics tools such as Market EyeQ can help dealers make huge strides. When dealership employees proactively receive the information they need about a customer, the quality of their interactions improves along with the speed with which they’re able to address customer needs.

Additionally, behavior prediction tools offer dealers an unparalleled opportunity to move from a reactive to proactive model for many customer interactions, improving the customer experience to meet their expectations . They also deliver additional measurement and management tools, empowering dealership leaders to constantly review, update and effectively manage their strategy.

Are you interested in seeing how Mastermind’s solutions can power a transformative dealer customer experience management strategy? Contact us today to set up a free demonstration. 

Historically, relationships with customers began when they walked through your showroom doors. Today, thanks to the Internet, sophisticated marketing campaigns and increased consumer research practices, the customer experience journey begins long before they ever set foot in your dealership. How can dealers design and structure their operations to ensure they’re making the right first impressions? In this blog, Mastermind covers:

- How to use personalized, data-driven marketing to set high expectations for a customer’s   relationship and experience with your dealership

- How a data-backed automotive sales platform can drive exceptional customer experience

- How to convert prospects into customers with a personalized marketing

- How to integrate data-based personalization into all aspects of your dealership’s interactions with prospects and customers

Predictive Marketing Establishes Great CX from the Start

Simply put, predictive marketing delivers the right message, to the right prospects, at the right time through the channels that are most likely to get their attention. This data-driven process includes the production of personalized offers and marketing materials designed to engage customers or prospects and drive them through the sales funnel to purchase. 

Modern consumers are taught to expect this level of personalization in so many other facets of their lives and have come to view personalized marketing as a benefit they value from a company. By communicating with messaging that is relevant to their unique needs, you can show prospects they matter to you, establishing a great starting point for the dealership customer experience. 

If you’re concerned about your dealership team’s ability to execute an effective personalized marketing campaign, don’t worry. Mastermind’s dealership veteran support team can work with you every month to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing dollars.

Data Drives Personalized CX

Of course, you can’t deliver on personalized marketing, or any other component of CX best practices, without good data. Where does this data come from? Some of it is yours, from your existing DMS and other legacy tools. Some of it is public information, including things like social media and other nonproprietary data points. 

What makes a real difference in the effectiveness of your analysis and the CX on which it depends is the inclusion of information from critical proprietary databases. At Mastermind, our proprietary automotive marketing data partners include IHS Markit, TransUnion and the CarFax Snapshot Tool, ensuring our dealers have access to extensive customer insights such as household demographic data, personal finance information and social media interactions to deliver the most relevant and profitable offers possible.

With so much available data in today’s increasingly digital world, it’s nearly impossible for dealers to “know their customer” the old-fashioned way. You need the right tools and training to put data at the heart of your dealership’s interactions with your customers.

Effective sales people rely on traditional sales skills and on digital sales platforms to deliver all the information and insight they need about a prospect. A dealer sales platform also ensures your customers that your dealership understands them as an individual and wants them to be satisfied through every step of the car buying journey. 

Turn Automotive Prospects into Customers 

These days, the sales process often starts while the customer’s at home, engaging with your website or social media. This is a critical point in the car buying journey and is a good reason for dealers to consider an integrated business development center (BDC) to manage those communications to ensure they’re personalized and data-driven.  A BDC is a powerful marketing tool to convert leads into sales, a great asset to your dealership’s marketing efforts. BDC is a powerful tool. It also plays a key role in setting CX expectations when it’s a prospect’s first point of contact and delivering on them from the first interaction they have with your sales team. 

Once a prospect walks through the door, your sales and F&I teams need to be armed with actionable and reliable information, too. These customer insights should include not only relevant facts and figures, but also suggested deal parameters, highlighted areas of concern and a selection of personalized messaging that’s likely to play the most effective role in closing a good deal with a happy customer. 

This isn’t a simple change, and even the best sales team can use help incorporating customer data and CX best practices into their car sales techniques. That’s why Mastermind offers not only introductory car sales training for new salespeople, but also ongoing refreshers for veteran sales team members, at no additional cost.

Car Dealership Customer Service Extends Beyond the Sale

Your customer’s experience doesn’t stop with the sale and neither should your data-powered CX interactions. Customer relationship management, including service loyalty, keeps customers satisfied in their experience with you all the way through to the end of the sales cycle and the start of the next.

The end of one sales cycle and the start of another is a place where a modern, data-driven sales platform such as Mastermind’s Market EyeQ pays dividends. By integrating your existing customer insights with equity mining tools that proactively identify when an existing customer has become a valuable prospect for a lease-end or turn-in deal, you can drive a variety of potential revenues from factors such as new and used car sales, lease initiation, upsells and initiation fees.

Additionally, service departments and other fixed operations are fertile ground for data-driven conquest, with some estimates finding that turning a service-only customer into a new vehicle sale is five times cheaper in terms of cost of acquisition than other methods. Mastermind’s Service Conquest tool automates the drudgery of the service conquest process, empowers our dealer partners to convert service customers into new car sales. 

When your CX is effective, happy customers speed up the sales process, lower your cost of acquisition and make a measurable difference in your bottom line. Learn how automotiveMastermind can help you improve your dealership’s customer experience from the first touch to the last. Schedule a consultation today.

A productive and efficient sales team is the lifeblood of a dealership. While many auto dealer sales trainings focus on big-picture tips and tricks, not enough dig into the core factors that truly help dealership salespeople succeed: finding high-quality prospects; knowing what motivates those prospects to buy; and nurturing customers with the kind of experience that ensures dealer loyalty. 

Car sales training matters. But when it comes to empowering salespeople, all the training in the world can’t replace the customer data and analytics-driven capabilities of a modern digital sales platform in creating an environment for success. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses how to:

- Fill the pipeline with high-quality sales leads without breaking the bank

- Arm salespeople with the information and insights they need to close more deals

- Ensure the entire dealership is committed to ensuring a great customer experience

Filling the Car Sales Funnel

For auto dealers, customer prospecting goes back to the day the first store opened its  door

s. For a century, dealership sales teams have been unhappy with the quality of their leads and managers have tried to manage their marketing budgets without crippling their sales forecast. Modern personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools for dealers aren’t going to eliminate more than a century’s worth of history and habit. But they do give dealers a powerful set of capabilities to improve the quality of leads a salesperson receives, while lowering the cost of acquisition for dealers by identifying and targeting potential customers who are most likely to purchase a vehicle. Personalized dealership marketing tools are able to do this because they don’t rely on “spray and pray” advertising to broad demographics such as TV viewers, radio audiences, ZIP code residents, or the like. 

Rather, they consider essentially every consumer in the dealer’s entire market and analytically score them by the factors that make them more or less likely to purchase one of the dealer’s vehicles. Simply by doing this, they’ve already performed a valuable service to a sales team by identifying the best – and worst – prospects in the market, cutting down on time and effort wasted on unqualified shoppers. 

Other prospects will show up in your service drive. Industry figures suggest it’s five times cheaper to conquest a non-sales service customer than it is to acquire one through traditional marketing channels, which is where our Service Conquest marketing solution helps dealers turn this flow of potential prospects into qualified and actionable leads for their sales teams.

How to Arm Salespeople with the Customer  Information and Insights they Need to Succeed

“Know your customer,” auto sales professionals are told from their first day in the industry. Today, they can know more – and do more with that knowledge – than ever before. If knowing your customer is the key to success, then arming your salespeople with deep and actionable information about their prospects is one of the most powerful things you can do to help them confidently sell and consistently succeed.

That information comes from a variety of sources and includes both information that a good salesperson would likely have looked up already about a prospect as well as proprietary information from private databases, credit bureaus, and research firms. But time is precious for salespeople, and data overload is often worse than no information at all. That’s where the power of predictive marketing analytics comes in, working its way through the sea of data to identify the most relevant and important information and highlight opportunities and areas of concern in simple bullet-point form for the salesperson to have in hand before their first conversation. 

Of course, there’s both an art and a science to using all this information and insights. Mastermind’s technology is designed to be intuitive, and easy to understand and use at any skill level. Getting the most value out of new personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools requires training. That’s why Mastermind offers not only introductory car sales training for new salespeople but also ongoing, personalized car sales training to ensure that every member of the sales team is able to use these tools as successfully as possible – at no additional expense to the dealer. Consider us an extension of your sales team!

Consistent Dealership Customer Experience

Salespeople can’t do it alone. They need tools, specialized support such as a well-designed and managed business development center (BDC),  great F&I colleagues and strong leadership. But what a sales team really needs to make a dealership successful is to be part of a dealership team that’s committed to delivering a consistently great customer experience.

Dealers know customers aren’t solely won or lost on the sales floor, but it’s only relatively recently that some dealers have started to truly embed a commitment to customer service throughout their entire dealership. For those that have been successful in doing so, the benefits are significant and quantifiable on the sales floor.

Happy customers come back, again and again, boosting your dealership’s retention and CSI scores. This isn’t news to dealers. But ongoing research into “customer experience” – or “CX,” as it’s known – and its value in the dealership environment has shown the power that a consistently well-treated customer has to make the sales process faster, more cost-effective and easier for the sales team. 

For maximum value in putting salespeople in a position to succeed, CX is much more than simply a philosophy of customer service. Rather, it’s a data and analytics-driven process that ensures everyone in a dealership who comes into contact with a customer has access to both the necessary information and the important insights about that customer.

Modern customer experience management tools are also constantly keeping track of those interactions, watching and learning more about the customer and how they behave. When it comes time for their next vehicle, analytics watching the automated interaction between the service drive, F&I team, marketing and sales functions will often be aware of the customer’s readiness for a new car before they are. A trained salesperson armed with these data-driven insights as they reach out to a highly-scored customer who’s had an excellent experience with the entire dealership is in the best possible position to succeed.

What would that look like in your dealership and what difference could it make for your bottom line? Contact us to set up a demo today.

Don’t close down your F&I department just yet, as it turns out the dealer-assisted loan might not be dead after all. Despite what some media reports recently claimed, your ability to put customers into the right financing for the right vehicle will continue to be a critical component of the dealership sales process for the foreseeable future. In this article, we’ll break down everything dealers need to know about the current state of automotive financing.

Automotive Industry Reports on Financing

In early March, Automotive News and other media outlets reported on a survey from credit scoring analytics firm FICO that found dealership-acquired financing was down 10 percent in 2018 from just a year earlier, at 63 percent from 73 percent in 2017. More concerningly, the survey said only 40 percent of surveyed consumers planned to acquire financing for their next vehicle through their dealership. Obviously, this kind of massive – and incredibly fast – transition in the relationship between dealers and consumers concerned many dealers who see F&I as a critical component of their interactions with their customers.

However, a lot of questions were quickly raised about FICO’s survey results, which didn’t seem to reflect dealers’ actual experiences. Few dealers had reported seeing a 10 percent drop in finance deals in 2018, and captive lenders weren’t reporting similar figures.

What the Data Says, The Real Report

NADA’s economists dug into the question, and it appears the issue isn’t that consumers aren’t getting financing through their dealers any more, but rather consumers apparently aren’t very good at remembering or explaining how they got their vehicle financing. Despite what the 510 consumers surveyed by FICO told researchers, the much more comprehensive JD Power Power Information Network (PIN) dataset, which includes millions of transactions from 14,000 participating dealers across the country, showed dealer-assisted financing had held roughly steady from 83.1 percent in 2017 to 83.7 percent in 2018.

In short, FICO collected the responses they were given and the media reported the results in good faith, but the reality appears to be that consumers are still reliant on dealers to walk them through a financing process that continues to confuse them, even with all the options for research and shopping available to them.

Automotive Financing Lessons Learned

There’s also a related lesson here in that just as good data is far more helpful than consumers’ anecdotal input for industry researchers when consumer finance is involved, so too does good data help dealers work with individual customers to find the right financing for their personal situation – whatever they may think that is. Dealers know from experience customers can run the gamut from wildly optimistic to wildly pessimistic about their personal financial status, which is why it’s critical to make solid data a part of the sales process as early as possible.

Looking beyond their survey results, FICO’s industry experts identified just this form of data-driven finance engagement as a real opportunity for dealers. “There’s certainly a lot of opportunity for lenders to improve the digital process,” said Ken Kertz, senior director and practice leader of auto and motorized vehicles at FICO in an Automotive News article. “We’re still seeing that the dealer is the epicenter, and customers would prefer simplicity and preapproved offers with rate subvention and incentives.”

It’s good to hear that dealers are still at the epicenter of the automotive finance process. The more dealers put good data at the center of their own processes, the longer that will continue to be true.
automotiveMastermind centers our products and services around advanced data analysis that drives sales with personalized marketing and unparalleled CX. To learn how we can transform your dealership, contact us to set up a demo.