We take a look at the key components of any effective phone script. It doesn't matter if its a BDC phone script or a Service Advisor phone script. Good scripts contain the same elements.

Needs analysis questions are a key part of the sales process. What are the questions that make up a successful needs analysis so you can set up your deal properly? Jason reviews the "Big Five" questions that you need to answer.

2018 Volvo XC60 becomes eligible for Volvo Employee Pricing for the first time during offer 

SAN DIEGO, May 4, 2018 –The Volvo Special Offer, a nationwide promotion for Costco members, launched this week, May 1, 2018. The offer includes Volvo Employee Pricing, additional incentives and a $250 Costco Cash Card on the purchase or lease of qualifying 2018 models through July 2, 2018. The offer with Volvo Cars was arranged by Affinity Auto Program, which manages Costco Auto Program. 

With the launch of the offer, the award-winning 2018 Volvo XC60 will be available at Volvo Employee Pricing for the first time since the redesigned model was introduced last fall. Among the recent accolades of the XC60 are “World Car of the Year 2018” for automotive excellence on an international scale and “2018 North American Utility of the Year” for segment leadership, innovation, design, safety, handling, driver satisfaction, and value for the dollar. 

“The Volvo Special Offer is a great value,” said Mark DerGarabedian services manager at Costco. “Costco Auto Program’s dedication to provide an exceptional car-buying experience paired with Volvo’s reputation for innovation, safety and reliability is a winning combination for Costco members.” 

Additional exclusive Costco member incentives include $3,000 on 2018 S90, V90 and V90 Cross Country models, and $750 on 2018 XC90 and XC60 models (T8 trim package excluded). This offer also can be combined with additional national Volvo incentives for which the member qualifies to receive greater savings.* 

To receive the benefits of the Volvo Special Offer, Costco members must: 

 Have been a Costco member by May 1, 2018. 

 Register by visiting CostcoAuto.com/Volvo and selecting an eligible vehicle. 

 Receive an email confirmation containing a Volvo PIN. 

 Purchase or lease and take delivery on an eligible new Volvo May 1, through July 2, 2018. 

 Complete a member satisfaction survey to receive the $250 Costco Cash Card. 

Costco Auto Program also offers low, prearranged pricing on certified pre-owned vehicles (CPO), powersports and recreational vehicles. Additionally, Costco members receive a discount on the majority of parts, service, and accessories at participating automotive service centers and powersports dealerships. 

For additional details about Costco Auto Program, news media can contact Honey Mae Kenworthy at (858) 777-6538 or hkenworthy@costcoauto.com. Learn more about Costco Auto Program and the Volvo Special Offer by visiting CostcoAuto.com/VolvoCars or call 1-855-722-6272. 

About Costco Auto Program 

Costco Auto Program is operated by Affinity Auto Program, which has operated the program since its inception in 1989. Costco Auto Program is recognized as a leading member-focused auto-buying program in the industry. This service offers prearranged pricing and a first-class buying experience on new and select pre-owned vehicles, RVs, motorcycles and powersports products, as well as discounts on 

automobile parts, service, and accessories for U.S. Costco members. In 2017, Costco members purchased more than 520,000 vehicles through the program. Costco Auto Program surveys members who use the program to ensure the service continues to meet their high expectations. More than 96 percent of members who responded to the survey gave the program high marks across three categories – value, service and overall experience. 

About Costco Wholesale Corporation 

Costco Wholesale Corporation (NASDAQ:COST) currently operates 749 warehouses, including 519 in the United States and Puerto Rico, 98 in Canada, 38 in Mexico, 28 in the United Kingdom, 26 in Japan, 14 in Korea, 13 in Taiwan, nine in Australia, two in Spain, one in Iceland and one in France. Costco also operates electronic commerce websites in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Korea and Taiwan. 

About Volvo USA 

Volvo has been in operation since 1927. Today, Volvo Cars is one of the most well-known and respected car brands in the world with sales of 534,332 cars in 2016 in about 100 countries. Volvo Cars head office, product development, marketing and administration functions are mainly located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Volvo Car USA, LLC, (www.volvocars.com/us) is a subsidiary of Volvo Car Group. VCUSA provides marketing, sales, parts, service, technology and training support to Volvo automobile retailers in the United States. For more information please refer to the VCUSA media website at: http://www.media.volvocars.com/us. 

*Visit CostcoAuto.com/VolvoCars for full details, terms and conditions. 

Local businesses can now interact more meaningfully with customers through text, converting online interactions into in-person visits more easily

 LEHI, Utah—May 1, 2018 – Podium, the leading customer communication platform for local businesses, today announced the launch of Podium Webchat, a new service that enables businesses to convert website visitors into customers by taking the conversation offline to a more convenient channel: text message. Empowering consumers to text a business from its own website allows both the consumer and the business flexibility to respond, helping initiate offline, in-person interactions.

Current live chat tools were largely built for online retailers and aren’t optimized for local businesses. Podium built Webchat with local businesses and their consumers specifically in mind, providing benefits for both. With the new product, businesses are able to more easily capture contact information of leads visiting their site and manage all inbound communication channels from one central location. Both customers and business owners will be able to take their online conversations on the go, giving each the flexibility they want.

“By introducing this new feature to our platform we are offering local businesses the opportunity to interact with customers in a way that fosters stronger relationships across the board,” said Eric Rea, co-founder and CEO at Podium. “We’ve found that many consumers prefer having the option to communicate with businesses via text. With Webchat, businesses can talk with their customers in a way that’s more convenient for both parties, which drives brand affinity and loyalty.”

Maintaining staff size while offering a better customer experience was one of the main goals in developing Webchat for local businesses. The platform eliminates the need to hire a dedicated staff for live chat interactions since neither the consumer or business owner needs to be online in order to communicate with one another. Instead, consumers can share their information with businesses so both parties can continue the conversation on a channel that’s more convenient for them, such as Facebook Messenger or text messaging. Not only is this a more accommodating option, but it offers visitors on the web the ability to converse directly with the source instead of depending on third-party chat operators to answer their questions and concerns.

Podium Webchat’s user-friendly interface allows business owners to easily manage and respond to all web-chats from a single dashboard, consolidating SMS/text, Google Business Messaging and Facebook Messenger conversations into one place: Podium Inbox. This gives businesses a simple platform through which they can more easily facilitate multiple channels of communication with potential customers.

Podium Webchat has already seen great success in its initial beta phase. Across the companies participating in the beta group, inbound customer communication was increased ten times using Webchat over their previous online interaction solutions. These interactions were combinations of new sales leads, customer service requests and other transaction related conversations.

“Podium, especially Webchat, has foundationally changed the way we communicate with our customers,” said Cedric Volk, General Manager of On Call Event Rentals. “As a local business, it has been difficult to find an online interaction tool that was built specifically for our needs. Podium’s Webchat has enabled us to convert on interactions that were impossible for us to capture previously and has created an entirely new channel to create business.”

Existing customers can add Webchat to their subscription by speaking to a customer success manager or sales representative. For more information about Webchat, visit the Podium Webchat information page.

About Podium

Podium modernizes the way business happens locally with products designed to help businesses be found, chosen, and gain insight into their customers’ experience. By conveniently facilitating millions of customer interactions, such as driving customer-generated online reviews and providing improved customer communication tools, Podium serves 130,000+ users across nearly 15,000 local businesses. Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, and founded in 2014, Podium is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator. To learn more, visit www.podium.com or contact us at press@podium.com.

Innovation from Lead Assign driving more effective sales process for major organizations in North America and Europe

Toronto, April 25, 2018: Artificial Intelligence innovator Lead Assign has signed a new, substantial deal for its innovative sales-enablement solution with Canadian real estate leader Royal LePage. Royal LePage will adopt Lead Assign’s cutting-edge A.I.-based lead distribution technology to enable more than 18,000 sales professionals with a solution that greatly improves the accuracy and speed of lead qualifying, parsing and quality of lead recipient. This ensures that the best possible sales team member receives an inbound lead and can respond within minutes – greatly increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

“We’re very excited to provide the talented sales people at Royal LePage with an edge when converting leads into new customers,” says Joe Steeves, Director, Global Operations, Lead Assign. “Research shows that nearly half of all sales go to the vendor that responds first, and that replying to an inquiry within five minutes can increase sales conversion rates by as much as 400% - yet most organizations lack the ability to quickly qualify and respond to inbound leads without substantial manual effort. Lead Assign uses A.I. to automate that process, ensuring the most suitable agent receives and responds to a lead in minutes, which can often be the make or break factor in closing a deal.”

Royal LePage Automates Lead Parsing to Improve Sales Performance

Speed to respond is critical in many industries, but few as much as real estate – where a hot market and fierce competition means customers have more options for support than ever when buying or selling a home. Using Lead Assign, more than 18,000 Royal LePage agents and sales teams across Canada now have access to a solution that ensures the right agent receives a qualified lead first and in seconds, increasing the odds of converting. In the event the first agent is unavailable, the solution redirects the lead to appropriate alternatives, reducing the risk of losing the opportunity due to delayed responsiveness.

“As the most trusted real estate brand in Canada, we generate over 170,000 leads annually from our digital channels”, says Kelly McCain, Director, Business Services, Royal LePage. “With Lead Assign, we can enable the quick response that is critical to engaging online customers with a better service experience while helping our agents and brokers be more productive.”

Royal LePage joins a growing list of organizations around the world adopting Lead Assign to improve their sales processes, including leaders in real estate, insurance, manufacturing and automotive sales.

Sales Spike at Santogal with Lead Assign 

For Santogal, Portugal’s most recognized automotive dealer group representing 24 automotive brands, delivering qualified leads in a timely manner to its 250 sales agents had presented an ongoing challenge for the company.

Adopting Lead Assign in 2016, Santogal enabled their sales agents across the country with Lead Assign’s smart parsing abilities to tackle the problem. Since leveraging Lead Assign, Santogal has seen impressive growth in online lead conversion rates. 

“Using Lead Assign greatly reduced our sales people’s lead response time,” says Alexandre Gomes, Digital Marketing Manager, Santogal. “We started with a few agents testing the solution and, it quickly became clear that it made sense to extend Lead Assign to our entire sales team. Lead Assign has become a vital part of our day-to-day success.”

 Increased Functionality and Accelerated Global Growth in 2018

“We’ve experienced tremendous growth in the number of businesses using Lead Assign to solve their lead distribution pain points over the past 12 months. With new customers like Royal LePage and others, we anticipate that we will have distributed well over one million leads on behalf of our clients by the end of Q3,” says Steeves.

After doubling both revenue and customers in 2017, self-funded Lead Assign is expecting even greater growth in 2018. In response to growing global demand, the platform recently introduced end-to-end support for 12 languages, enabling cross-border teams to benefit from a dynamic in-language user interface tailored to each sales representative. 

“Lead Assign’s incredible flexibility allows us to solve numerous problems in newly identified verticals like Finance and Insurance, Automotive, Lead Generators along with numerous others,” adds Steeves. “Capitalizing on these new markets worldwide we expect to increase our customer base by more than 400% over 2017, while also adding more than 100,000new individual agents to the platform in 2018.”

About Lead Assign

Founded in 2014, Lead Assign is a Thornbury, Ontario based leader in providing smart solutions to improve the performance of sales teams worldwide. By utilizing A.I. to improve lead qualifying and lead parsing for inbound inquiries, Lead Assign converts interest and inquiries into sales by combining smarter lead distribution and routing with improved response times. With customers across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia, Lead Assign is used by leaders in real estate, financial services, insurance, automotive and all industries where speed of lead qualifying and response, and intelligence of lead distribution, is critical to sales success. Find out more at www.leadassign.com.

I’m just finalizing the working sessions for President’s Club, and one of the sessions I’m moderating is Online Retailing.  I’ve enjoyed the discussions I have been having with the panelists.  Three major factors have emerged from our planning.

Consistency  

The research project we did a few years ago on Customer Experience told us that consumers valued trust in the dealership and trust in the sales rep over other considerations in our global principal component analysis.  Consistency builds trust. If you are going to jump into digital retailing, you need consistency from online to offline.  Customers expect the process to be seamless.

Flexibility

Regardless of the technology you use to approach online retailing, you must engineer a process that is flexible.  Customers need to be able to “jump in and jump out” of the process, shopping at their pace.  Let them decide how much of the process they complete online and when they want to make contact with your dealership.

Structure  

Online retailing is built to make a customer-friendly experience and add efficiencies to the process.  Do these efficiencies mean dealerships will need to restructure their org?  Does an effective online retailing strategy require a BDC to answer questions vs a sales staff to do customer demos?  I’m not saying dealerships need to revamp their showroom floor right now, but we would be remiss if we didn’t analyze the efficiencies on online retailing.

Customers today want a seamless experience.  Your dealership can – and should – take advantage of new technologies available today to streamline your lead handling and improve the shopping process for customers.  These three factors prove that integrating online retailing into your dealership can enhance and augment your sales process, but this is still a “people business”.

Make sure you can address each issue and develop a plan to integrate online retailing into your sales strategy.

If you are a Dealer Principal or General Manager, we will be discussing different approaches to solve these three questions at the upcoming Presidents Club.

BMW Tops Industry Followed By Jeep® Brand and Toyota

NEW YORK — March 29, 2018 — The automotive industry ranked second out of the 15 studied in MBLM’s Brand Intimacy 2018 Report, which is the largest study of brands based on emotions. The industry was dethroned for the first time by media & entertainment, highlighting the trend toward escapism, relaxation and distraction. BMW came in first in the automotive industry followed by the Jeep brand and Toyota. Brand Intimacy is defined as a new paradigm that leverages and strengthens the emotional bonds between a person and a brand. This year’s study again revealed that top intimate brands in the U.S. continued to surpass the top brands in the Fortune 500 and S&P indices in revenue and profit over the past 10 years.

The Top 10 in the automotive industry was rounded out by: Honda, Harley-Davidson, Chevrolet, Ford, Mercedes, Chrysler and GMC.

“While slipping slightly, the automotive industry still performed strongly due to the bonds it creates with consumers,” stated Mario Natarelli, managing partner, MBLM. “The Jeep brand has risen in our 2018 Brand Intimacy Report. We just released an analysis of Jeep and found that its recent marketing efforts have been focusing on powerful emotional themes at the core of its brand, leveraging nostalgia well and utilizing today’s marketing channels to build dialogue and strong bonds.”

“We are very pleased with the Jeep brand’s improved performance in the 2018 Brand Intimacy Study,” stated Olivier Francois, Chief Marketing Officer, FCA US. “I am most proud of what we were able to do on behalf of all of our brands last year. We continued to focus on our brands’ unique identities, what differentiates them from other brands. Storytelling is a critical part of marketing and being successful hinges on the ability to make it resonate emotionally outside the walls of your company.”

Other notable automotive findings in MBLM’s Brand Intimacy 2018 Report include:

·The Jeep brand ranked first among women

·BMW ranked first among men

·The industry had a Brand Intimacy Quotient score of 44.9, which is higher than the average of 27.1

·Two automotive brands were in the top 10 overall, BMW ranked third and Jeep brand ranked fourth

·Harley-Davidson made the biggest drop, falling from the fourth overall brand in 2017 to 18th and from first in the automotive industry to fifth in 2018

·The Jeep brand moved up from 15th overall in 2017 to fourth in 2018

This year’s report contains the most comprehensive rankings of brands based on emotion, analyzing the responses of 6,000 consumers and 54,000 brand evaluations across 15 industries in the U.S., Mexico and UAE. MBLM’s reports and interactive Brand Ranking Tool showcase the performance of almost 400 brands, revealing the characteristics and intensity of the consumer bonds.

To view the automotive industry rankings, visit: https://hubs.ly/H0btKxS0. And to view MBLM’s detailed look into the Jeep brand, visit: https://hubs.ly/H0bvmXT0.

 To download the full Brand Intimacy 2018 Report or explore the Ranking Tool please visit: http://mblm.com/lab/brandintimacy-study/.

 Methodology

During 2017, MBLM with Praxis Research Partners conducted an online quantitative survey among 6,000 consumers in the United States (3,000), Mexico (2,000), and the United Arab Emirates (1,000). Participants were respondents who were screened for age (i.e. 18 to 64 years of age) and annual household income ($35,000 or more) in the U.S. and socioeconomic levels in Mexico and the UAE (A,

B, and C socioeconomic levels). Quotas were established to ensure that the sample mirrored census data for age, gender, income/socioeconomic level, and region. The survey was designed primarily to understand the extent to which consumers have relationships with brands and the strength of those relationships, from fairly detached to highly intimate. It is important to note that this study provides more than a mere ranking of brand performance and was specifically designed to provide prescriptive guidance to marketers. We modeled data from a total of 54,000 brand evaluations to quantify the mechanisms that drive intimacy. Through factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and other sophisticated analytic techniques, the research allows marketers to better understand which levers need to be pulled to build intimacy between brands and consumers.

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About MBLM: MBLM is the Brand Intimacy Agency, delivering expertise and offerings across three areas of focus: Agency, Lab and Platform. With offices in seven countries, our multidisciplinary teams help clients build stronger bonds and deliver optimized marketing outcomes and returns for the long term. To learn more about how we can help you create and sustain ultimate brand relationships, visit mblm.com.

In the 2016 DrivingSales Executive Summit, John Boudreau introduced a concept called "separate the work".  He defines this as identifying the parts of a job role that can see increased performance from training.  Let me explain.

Think of a receptionist.  For our example, let's assume that one of the tasks of this role entering customers into the CRM.  This needs to be done properly, with good spelling and grammar, and it needs to be done in a timely fashion.  But there isn't much more to it than that.  The difference between a poor receptionist and a good receptionist wouldn't be drastic here.

Another function of this receptionist's role is greeting customers on the phone and transfering them to the proper department.  The difference between a poor and high quality receptionist is drastic here.  We've listened to a lot of phone calls.  Trust me.  There is a difference.  Between their greeting, the tone of voice, how efficient they are in transferring, there are multiple opportunities to create a favorable impression here.

Using this example, most of the training efforts should be spent on phone skills and interacting with customers.  Your dealership can benefit most by focusing here.

Let's take a look at the sales manager position.  If you walk into a dealership, the sales manager is always busy.  There are no shortage of tasks for them to do.  In my opinion, there are two functions essential to this job role.  The first is having high-quality conversations with customers.  Selling cars.  The other?  Having high-quality conversations with the sales staff.  Developing people.  How often are your managers doing 1 on 1's with your staff?

Here's another way to separate the work.  What tasks are your managers doing that you could pay someone $10 an hour to do?  Not that you need to add more staff, but if these tasks can be accomplished by someone with a lower skill set, they probably are functions of that job that require emphasis and training.

Bottom line: separate the functions of the different roles in your dealership and identify the elements that need focus and training.  Build your training regimen around these important areas and see lift from your training efforts.  The bigger the opportunity, the higher the priority.

Check out John's entire interview here.