Having a reliable process for your incoming calls is essential. By having a solid process, you get a better idea of where your potential breakpoints are in the customer's experience, and what objections your teams need to tackle. Some of the other vital things to look at when reviewing incoming calls are daily volume vs. staffing, time of day, source of the call, and whether the call was logged into your CRM. Most of today's vendors offer easy CRM integration. If your calls are not hitting the CRM, you could miss out on sales and service opportunities. Keeping in mind that the goal is to use these calls to help your dealership tackle each objection!

Three Things You Can Do to Increase Your Results:

1. Consistency is Key When Handling Incoming Sales Calls. Is Your Staff Equipped to Answer Incoming Calls?

The first step in handling incoming calls is making sure your sales consultants or BD Agents are properly trained and equipped with the right word-tracking. That is, making sure they know how to approach inbound calls (this is where having a word-track is key), and make sure that all of the calls are logged into the CRM. If your teams are not logging the calls into the CRM, you could be missing sales opportunities, and coaching opportunities. As a failsafe, it's essential to have the incoming calls automatically go into the CRM. Having your sales managers or BD Manager review the incoming calls daily ensures that every opportunity is accounted for! This also outlines the coaching opportunities so they can conduct One on One's, which don't take much time, and it's time well spent! By actively monitoring coaching opportunities and reviewing calls, you could increase your monthly sales, which could make all the difference!

2. If Your Sales Consultant (or BD Agent) Doesn't Handle the Call Properly - Train them! Don't Just Take Away the Calls.

It can be easy to just take the calls away from your sales consultant or BD Agent if they don’t handle a call properly. But doing so does not fix the breakpoint or help them tackle objections. Making sure your teams have the right word-tracking, and practice will help them approach objections from all sides of the business (incoming calls, emails, texts, & dealer visits) with confidence and, more importantly, success! To help keep your team sharp, and remain consistent, it’s best to pull a few calls a week and conduct one on one training sessions. The role-playing (recreating the call) can help your team better understand how they can improve, which means better results when handling the next call in a live environment when it counts, conquering one objection at a time!

3. Too Many Calls? How to Handle Overflow Calls.

There isn't such a thing as too many calls, right? But what can happen is depending on the call volume, your team might not be able to effectively handle all the calls. For example, most of us who worked on the dealer side experienced the day when we heard "sales call line one and line two" - and we were already on the phone or working with a customer. To ensure that we can offer each customer the service they deserve, there needs to be a process in place. That’s for the overflow of phone calls. In most cases, depending on your store setup, the overflow calls could go to a Virtual BDC. This way, the customer is not left on hold with a high likelihood of hang-up and no chance of receiving a call back!  

At the end of the day, training is critical, regardless of your phone process. The more equipped your team is – having the confidence and word-tracking – the stronger their results will be! And using the calls as an opportunity to improve vs. taking the calls away from the sales consultant or BD Agent can lend itself to enhancing their performance on all sides of the business.

How often do you review your incoming calls? Do you conduct weekly one-on-one sessions for your sales consultants or BD Agents? What's one objection that gets your teams stuck?