Reduce the unhealthy competition between your auto dealership's Internet department and your floor salespeople - and streamline communication with the customer.

Today’s customers expect and demand an amazing customer experience. The dealership with the right vehicle and the best experience will ultimately win the business. To deliver the best experience possible, you must maintain expertise about your customers and their shopping behavior.

The average consumer today visits only one or two dealerships before buying. The odds are good consumers will purchase from your store if you focus more on delivering a great customer experience than on being lead-centric.

How do you do that? By mastering three touchpoints: research, communications and the showroom visit.

Research

Shaping that exceptional experience begins with research. According to AutoTrader, nearly 80 percent of shoppers use third-party sites to research and locate vehicles. Make sure your inventory pages on these sites are highly descriptive with critical information above the fold, including pricing, options, and interactive photos or videos.

Digital retailing tools can differentiate your dealership and enhance the experience. Consumers today do more work online. If customers are forced to rehash steps when they arrive in the store, it leads to frustration and erodes the great experience you’re trying to create.

But, if that previously-completed work flows into your CRM and DMS, it translates to a shorter and more pleasant in-store experience. That’s where your digital retailing tool comes in.

Communication

When you receive a phone call or lead form, don’t simply answer a question about price or availability and end the conversation there. Differentiate your dealership by offering customers critical information to make informed decisions.

For example, along with information on the requested vehicle, present information on similar vehicles in stock with more and less equipment, as well as a pre-owned option. Now the conversation isn’t only about price. It’s about defining what is really important to the customer and how your dealership can meet those vehicle needs.

Learn which communication channel the customer prefers and engage with them there. Be transparent about pricing and financing. Focus on delivering high-quality and relevant answers before asking for an appointment. Asking too soon can stop the transaction in its tracks.

Remember that the human touch still matters. Be warm, welcoming, and competent. Once you’ve answered every question, it’s time to ask for the appointment. By this point, you will have earned it.

Between setting the appointment and the showroom visit, continue shaping a great customer experience. Email the customer valuable information, such as a video of the vehicle of interest, or outline what to expect once they enter your store.

Maintain follow-up with an appointment reminder that clearly states the customer is coming in for a pre-scheduled VIP appointment.

If the vehicle of interest sells before the appointment, reach out immediately with details of other vehicles that meet the customer’s wants and needs.

A NADA survey found that 80 percent of consumers buy a different vehicle than the one they inquired about, so even if the vehicle of interest is still on the lot, prepare a list of alternates.

The Showroom Visit

On the day of the appointment, pull up the vehicle and make sure it’s spotless and ready for a test-drive. Write the customer’s name and VIP status on a prominently-placed appointment board for the customer to see as soon as they step on the floor. Ensure your receptionist has an up-to-date list of appointments and can greet each customer by name.

When you’re with the customer, be a product expert. Demonstrate all the vehicle features and how to use them. Set up preferred radio stations and synchronize mobile phones with the vehicle.

Introduce every customer to your service manager to close the gap between sales and service. This also lets the customer know that you care about the ongoing maintenance of the vehicle and are invested in a long-term relationship.

If the customer misses the appointment, follow up immediately through their preferred communication channel. Give them options of several new appointment days and times and let them know the vehicle is there and ready for the test drive.  

Winning more sales requires an amazing customer experience. Don’t see customers as just leads to be closed. Deliver the best possible experience throughout the customer journey and you’ll see results.

Good selling!

In the past, a vehicle sale started and ended on the showroom floor. Today, many of the discovery and purchase steps take place online.

Online retail giants like Amazon have conditioned customers to expect timely and relevant communications across channels, plus a personalized buying experience informed by past behavior.

For automotive retailers, meeting these expectations requires different capabilities within your CRM.

Before, a CRM was primarily a system of record, a place to organize and store customer information. But today, your CRM is a system of engagement.

What does that mean? Your CRM can help facilitate and orchestrate the customer journey through more personalized and seamless interactions across all customer touchpoints.

Yes, your CRM is an essential business tool. But it’s also a way to interact with your customers personally to build trust, and so you can optimize your profitability. 

How do you know if your CRM is a system of engagement? Look for the following four capabilities.

Data aggregation and analysis

Your employees need to be able to deliver relevant information and messages that help build a deeper connection with your customers. A CRM built to engage makes this task easier by aggregating and analyzing customer data. It should also optimize across channels to capture every customer interaction on every device. This way, employees can see the customer’s history and create personalized messages that speak to their needs.

Integration with key systems

The more integrations you can access, the more powerful your CRM becomes.

Think beyond the DMS. An engagement system should communicate with your website, digital shopping tools and third-party integrations. By using this data with your CRM, you can improve the customer experience and enable your staff to have more productive customer conversations.

Intelligence tools and process automation

Predictive and behavioral analytics allow your CRM to analyze and contextualize customer data, inferring customer intent and behavior. With that information, you can segment customers and send out highly targeted communications.

And it pays to leverage pertinent customer data. Open rates for untargeted emails are in the teens. Open rates for targeted emails range from 25% to 30%.

Process automation automates tasks and content based on customer details and segmentation data. You can set up trigger events so customers receive a relevant message through their preferred channels immediately after they perform an action (email, phone call, website form, etc).

Unified customer data management

CRMs designed for engagement give managers a global view of customer activity across all stores in the same dealer group. This ensures that a customer will still be treated as a valuable repeat customer if they call or show up at a different store in the dealer group.

Unfortunately, 99% of dealers don’t enable this feature because stores in the same group may be in competition for the same customer, so they don’t want to share information. That’s crazy! A customer belongs to your brand, not a specific store.

Sharing information enables customer personalization that breeds loyalty and repeat business. It’s better for everyone in the long run.

When you examine your CRM as a system of engagement, remember to prioritize its ability to personalize communications, integrate with key systems, create process automation, deliver intelligent insights and unify data management.

These capabilities will help you deliver a personal, seamless buying journey across channels to win the business of today’s vehicle shoppers.

Text messaging is the most popular data service in the world. It’s quick, easy and effective. The open rate for texts is a sky-high 98 percent, while email open rates hover at only 20 percent.

The average person looks at their mobile phone 150 times a day. It’s no wonder more than 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes of being received.

Texting is an effective way to communicate with prospects, engage with current customers and send inventory or service status updates.

Texting allows for two-way conversations in real time. That means the information you share is up to date, which is especially important when talking about inventory.

It also eliminates putting customers on hold. Sales staff can answer multiple questions simultaneously for a better customer experience.

Let’s dive into a few best practices to ensure that your dealership remains compliant while driving sales success with texting.

1. Know the rules

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act includes very specific rules about obtaining consent before sending texts to customers. Make sure you review them carefully before taking any action. Do your research and be sure to train your employees, so they know how to stay in compliance. It pays to play by the rules.

1. Own your devices

Too many dealers allow sales and service personnel to conduct dealership business on their personal phones. This is simply a bad business practice.

A private phone is not tied to your CRM. You can’t capture conversations, monitor for productivity, or review exchanges for training purposes.

It’s crucial to be able to monitor and measure conversations. Just because your employees look busy doesn’t mean they’re focused on activities that produce results. Even a motivated salesperson may need some help figuring out how to have conversations that drive conversions.

With high employee turnover in our business, you’re also taking the chance that employees will take customer contact information with them if they leave the company.

So, how do you mitigate this risk? Purchase business-only cell devices for employees. The cost is minuscule compared to losing valuable customer data and conversations.

1. Make it relevant

Don’t give prospects and customers a reason to opt-out of text messages. Whether you use an automation solution or prefer a more informal one-on-one texting strategy, make sure the messages you send are relevant and personal to the recipient.

For example, don’t send a text about new vehicle inventory to a customer who just purchased a car. Instead, group contacts into categories such as “sales leads” and “service leads” and craft your messages accordingly.

1. Gather analytics

Route all device numbers through a call tracking solution so you can gather analytics to measure customer opinions, feedback, reviews and more.

Your analytics can also reveal valuable training opportunities. For example, if the phrase “test drive” often appears in a salesperson’s text conversations but appointments are stagnant, that person may need more training to get customers through your doors.

Texting is a fast and easy way to communicate with prospects and customers and deliver a better buying experience. Follow the four easy steps outlined above to maintain compliance while boosting vehicle sales and service through texting.  

New leads are important, and you always want to keep the pipeline full.

Yet, it can cost as much as five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Doesn’t it make more sense to spend time nurturing the leads you already have?

According to research firm Bain & Company, a five percent increase in customer retention can increase profits by as much as 25 percent.

Therefore, nurturing a customer you already have is more profitable in the long run.

Loyal customers refer friends and family, and are less expensive to service. Many will stay loyal even if you don’t always have the best deals. Why?

Because they buy into your value proposition and prefer to do business with a dealership, sales staff and service team they already know and trust. 

Of course, you still need to market to new customers. But the biggest opportunity to keep costs down and increase profitability lies in nurturing the relationships you already have in your CRM.

These three tips will help you create a strategy to nurture your existing leads.

Personalize your marketing

Today’s customers expect a personalized experience that speaks to their needs and wants.

Technology has advanced to track a customer’s online behavior and make relevant purchase suggestions. Therefore, customers have become conditioned to that level of personal engagement from companies they do business with.

So, how can you meet these expectations?

Use historical data in your CRM to predict when a customer will be in the market for a new vehicle or service.

Create service offers that target a particular customer segment or promote a seasonal service.  For example, offer oil, brake, and tire specials for customers hitting 50,000 miles or run an air conditioning deal in the summer.

Send personalized messages through the customer’s preferred communication channels – and increase reach and frequency with multi-channel marketing.

Identify and reward VIP customers

Eighty-percent of your future profits will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers, according to Small Business Trends.

There are various ways to identify your VIPs.

Track dollars spent over a defined period in both service and sales.

Analyze the best reviews on your website and social media.

Count the number of friends and family referrals.

Once you’ve identified your most supportive customers, implement a reward or recognition program to maintain these relationships. Consider rewards points, loaner cars, service discounts, gas cards, and other perks.

Include the human touch  

Digital retailing is gaining in popularity, and it’s safe to say all customers research online before stepping onto your floor.

But this is still a people business. Don’t forget the power of human connection.

Encourage your sales and service teams to pick up the phone and send check-in emails to your customer base.

The better relationship your employees have with your customers, the more likely those customers will return to your dealership.

To prioritize the customers already in your CRM, remember to engage with personalized communications, identify and reward your VIPs, and never forget the power of human touch. These three strategies will help you increase customer retention for greater profitability today and in the future.

Good selling!

The “always connected” shopper trend continues to grow.

In the last year alone, the number of consumers using mobile phones to research vehicles jumped 11 percent. It’s safe to say that 99.9 percent of the people who walk on your lot have searched online with a mobile device or computer.

When an online lead gets handed off to an in-store salesperson, it causes friction between salespeople and confuses the customer.

So why are so many dealerships holding on to the old-school divide between an Internet sales department and physical lot sales staff?

A better sales model may be when the lead is worked by one person from cradle to grave.  Imagine a shark tank where the person who grabs a lead first gets to work that lead to completion.

This structure has a lot of benefits. Think about it.

It creates accountability for the tremendous amount of leads that go without proper follow-up.

It reduces unhealthy competition between Internet and floor salespeople because they’re now one unified team.

Most importantly, it dramatically reduces miscommunication with the customer. It’s the efficient, consistent and integrated online to in-store experience that today’s consumers expect.

So, you’ve decided its time to abolish the Internet sales department and embrace a one-salesperson model throughout your store. How do you go about re-structuring your sales department?

Take the time to explain what you’re doing and why. Once you lay down the benefits, your sales team should embrace this new structure. After all, they probably don’t like having to split commissions in the first place!

Next, make sure you have the CRM system in place to handle this new lead structure according to your specifications.

Some dealerships choose a round-robin system where reps are assigned leads in rotation. Others choose a system where the first rep to respond gets the lead. Your Sales Manager can also manually delegate leads based on availability.

With connected consumers, conversion only happens if you respond quickly with the information they requested. Focus on speed, accuracy and personalized responses.

Allow salespeople just 30 minutes to follow up with a lead. If they don’t send an email or pick up the phone within that time, the system assigns a new rep to the lead.

Whichever approach you choose, remember the ultimate goal is to convert leads into buyers.

When all shoppers are digital shoppers at some point during the buying experience, it doesn’t make sense to silo Internet salespeople and floor salespeople.

Transforming your sales department into a one-salesperson model reduces friction, increases lead follow-up and gives customers a consistent experience.

Deliver a better experience to today’s “always connected” consumer by allowing them to connect and build rapport with a single representative of your brand.

And the benefit to you? The potential for more conversions.

Good Selling!

Bill Wittenmyer shares why knowing what to say when talking to a customer over the phone is essential in this episode of Witt's Wise Words.

Have you ever seen the show "Naked & Afraid?" Two contestants strip down, head into the wild and basically starve for three weeks until someone comes to pick them up. Every time I see the show, I wonder how the contestants can call themselves survivalists when they can't hunt or find a consistent food source.

Then recently, it struck me that the contestants are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing: surviving.

To survive for a short time in the wilderness, you really only need fire and water. The contestants always have water; I'm pretty sure the show producers see to that.

They also need fire to boil water, keep them warm at night and help keep the bugs and wild animals away. Even if it takes days to make a fire, they won't stop trying and once they get it going, they make sure to protect it, foraging for firewood and putting in the effort to keep the fire going.

To be fair, the contestants do look for food but most of the time they have to decide whether the necessary energy expenditure is worth the effort. Let's face it; most people have some extra fat on them, so they're not going to starve in three weeks. They make the choice to simply survive. That's the goal of the show.

The goal is not to thrive out there. Trust me, if the contestants were dropped in the middle of the wilderness with no expectation of a helicopter or boat coming to pick them up, they would put a lot more effort into finding food, or they would die trying.

You might be wondering by now, what does this have to do with car sales?

The difference between surviving and thriving is really a mindset. If you're a car salesperson and your goal is to pay the bills every month and be comfortable, then you're surviving. You do what you have to do to reach your goals, but you're never going to be super successful because the necessary expenditure of energy to improve your situation isn't worth it to you.

If you want to thrive, you are willing to expend extra energy to exceed your goals or die trying. You log every customer inside your CRM, you do your follow up - make the extra phone calls and send out the extra emails. You keep in touch with your customers consistently with informative, relevant information, send out thank you notes and ask for referrals. You're nice to everyone because you never know who will be your next customer.

With a survivalist mindset you may want your situation to improve, but you're really hoping that someone or something else will magically appear and improve the situation for you. You're waiting for the helicopter.

With a thriving mindset, you know the helicopter isn't coming. You accept 100% responsibility for propelling yourself from your current situation to a better one.

The mindset you choose is up to you. Are you naked and afraid, or do you prefer to thrive?

Do you ever wonder why dealerships and consumers alike are all programmed to buy cars at the end of the month? Asking how this happened is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.

For sales teams and managers, the end-of-the-month crunch is a grind. When it's over, it's natural to relax a little before diving into the new month. For consumers, all the commercials and pressure to buy are pushed out towards the end of the month, so many of them are programmed to know they can get a better deal if they wait.

Then there are the manufacturers, who throw out additional incentives towards the end of the month to keep managers and salespeople motivated.

It's a vicious cycle, and I've often wondered what would happen if we could break it. Think of what your numbers would look like if you could create that same sense of urgency all month long!

Keeping a steady pace of sales throughout the month might help to avoid the crunch and the burnout that sometimes goes with it. Here are a few tips to try:

1) If you give your sales team spiffs, try adding weekly spiffs for specific goals. For weeks one and two, make the spiffs more substantial than weeks three and four.  Salespeople are motivated at the end of the month by income and sales goals more than they are spiffs.

2) Create an equity mining campaign at the beginning of the month to load up your lead pipeline. Target your best 300 to 400 prospects and organize an outgoing call campaign. If your sales team can't handle the volume, consider outsourcing the heavy lifting to a BDC. This is a great strategy if you need to boost sales volume by 10-12 vehicles a month.

An equity mining campaign in itself won't help you avoid the end-of-the-month crunch, but if you can create a process where you're actively nurturing leads at the beginning of the month, those consumers should be ready to close by mid-to-late month. Besides, more leads are never a bad thing.

3) Ramp up your marketing efforts to drive traffic at the beginning of the month, then let the natural flow happen towards the end of the month. Since you rarely have problems getting traffic towards the end of the month, focus on marketing offers to bring customers in sooner rather than later.

4) Focus your sales team on daily activities. Does your CRM have a dashboard that displays metrics for individuals and compares those metrics to the team as a whole? If a salesperson logs in and sees they're dead last in entering prospects, and second to last in logging ups, they should be motivated to take corrective action. Managers, be sure you review these metrics in daily one-on-ones.

5) Review CRM metrics on a regular basis. How are you pacing with new and used sales? If your goal is to sell 200 units per month, that's an average of six or seven vehicles per day. If you fall more than 15 units behind that pace you're playing catch up the rest of the month.

Also, look at no sales. If a salesperson hasn't sold a car in three to four days, something's wrong. Look at their activities to see if you can find out why. Are they making enough phone calls and appointments? If so, they might need some coaching in other areas.

When you sit down with the salesperson to discuss, don't be negative, judgmental or criticize. Provide them with positive, constructive coaching to help get them motivated.

Creating a sense of urgency at the beginning of the month is difficult, but the rewards are worth it. Try adding equity mining, outbound calls and marketing campaigns. Track activity metrics and coach your team, so they feel that motivational push sooner rather than later. You should see overall sales volume rise, which will help to ease the end-of-the-month crunch while still having a net positive effect on your bottom line.

In this episode of Freebie Friday, VP of Sales CDK Global Bill Wittenmyer shares the three most important traits that your BDC should have.