We had the opportunity to chat with Scott Eisenfelder, at Affinitiv, about omnichannel and your fixed ops department.

“Communication doesn’t stop at the mailbox, or the email box”

In order for omnichannel to work properly, you need to be consistent with your messaging and your offers throughout the entire process. Not being able to carry over your promotions and offers to when your customers schedule an appointment can seriously harm their experience and prevent you from gaining a repeat customer.

“All of the communications we do today are what I call highly segmented”

When you communicate with your customers these days, it needs to be highly customized and specific to each customer. Knowing when to contact a customer and what channel they would most likely prefer can get you in front of a customer’s eyes more effectively. 

We had the opportunity to speak with Mike Cavanaugh, Executive Vice President, at MAX Digital about what leadership means in the automotive industry. 

“You don’t have to be the owner, the GM, the CEO, the president, the VP. You can be a leader right now doing whatever you do.”

Leadership happens at every level, you don’t need to have a fancy title to drive innovation and progress your dealership for the better. It’s a common misconception that if you aren’t a ‘big wig’ at the top of the company, you don’t have any room to lead. But that line of thinking is faulty. If you want to be in a leadership role, the best thing you can do is to display leadership wherever you are at right now.

“It’s not so much about who has the most cars available today, but who provides the best experience.”

Customers are drawn to streamlined and flexible experiences. That’s why there was a big push on digital retailing last year. But the more we see dealers advance towards a fully Amazon-like environment we realize that it’s not strictly digital retailing that customers like, it’s the ability to conduct business with dealerships at their own pace. They like the transparency of Amazon, and the convenience of being able to shop on their time. 

We sat down with Steve Smythe, CEO at Market Scan, at NADA 2020 to talk about the current state of automotive and where it’s going.

“Dealers are better off when they’re transparent”

The era of your sales manager being the only one that knows truly what a car costs is gone. With everyone being able to look up and compare prices on the internet you have no choice but to be transparent with your customers. The best thing you can do to your customers is to be upfront and be completely transparent on price.

“We’re all spoiled by amazon”

When customers can’t spend time in a dealership, it’s up to the automotive industry to adapt to online retailing. We need to perfect our digital retailing processes in order to sell and deliver vehicles with as little face-to-face contact as possible.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, our thoughts are with dealership employees and their families.  Retail has been hit particularly hard with officials encouraging social distancing. This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us.  In the near future, this situation will impact the way we sell and service vehicles.

At DrivingSales, our goal is to help dealers optimize their greatest asset, their people.  We feel that it is important to continue to provide dealership leaders with the tools they need to develop their employees and improve the customer experience.  Because of this, we are implementing the following:

The DrivingSales Presidents Club is moving online.  We will host this event at the end of April, and any dealership employee can attend.  Additional information will be provided in the coming weeks, and you can find more details and register on the Presidents Club website.

The DrivingSales Community will continue to be a source for employees to ask questions and discover how other dealerships are addressing the different facets of their operations.

Also, we have been having some great discussions with industry experts addressing how dealers are responding to the challenges we are facing today. Check out the latest Roundtable discussion here. Stay tuned for more discussions coming soon!

A moment like this is a reminder about how we all need to band together to navigate these challenges and complexities.  DrivingSales is working at full capacity, and as always, is here to help you in any way we can.

Stay safe.

The DrivingSales Team.

At Nada 2020 Kate Colacelli, Senior Director of Marketing at Dealer FX, told us how to manage every step of your service process and how personalized marketing will help you capture service customers by developing trust. If a customer declines specific services you can then market the same service to them for their next time appointment. Creating an option for your customers to text and email to schedule and check-in into service will make it easier for the customer to choose you over competitors. Consolidating different service touchpoints into one tool will help you streamline processes and keep your service department busy.

DrivingSales sat down with three automotive executives to have a roundtable discussion about how dealers are selling cars during social distancing. 

With the coronavirus impacting or halting, the normal dealership operations, dealers have had to think fast and prepare themselves to be as virtual as possible immediately.  During this discussion, dealers asked questions on how others were being impacted and were met with responses of how to approach operations and procedures for the current situation.

In the discussion, there were some common themes.

• - How to meet the challenges from shelter in place requirements. Dealers shared examples of how they were selling and servicing vehicles e without breaking any social distancing requirements.

• - The importance of building relationships of trust and value with customers. The discussion focused on how helping customers in any way shows how much you care.

• - Why dealers need to change their website to inform your customers how you are handling sales and service. This discussion centered around leveraging the dealership website to communicate. One idea was to make sure your service page was updated with how you are handling different service appointments. 

• COVID-19 has drastically changed the way dealers operate in a very short amount of time. Now more than ever dealers need to band together to keep automotive employees and customers happy.
  
  Stay tuned for more posts talking about specific takeaways from the roundtable.

The younger is no different than the generation prior to it. Everybody wants to be seen, heard, and understood. But the time and the world that the younger generation has grown up in has changed. There is not a strategy or a quick hack to get the younger generation to work well. When you treat them as people, and not a generation, then they will respond and work hard for you, just like the generations before them. 

CRM’s have become so cumbersome to use that people avoid them. How do you fix this? By eliminating manual entry into the CRM. Then take it a step further by having the CRM actually do something for the end user like prioritizing tasks. Now it becomes a useful tool. Dealers that are really dialed in have great people, excellent processes, and tools that tie all of that together. The tools they choose will be just as important as the people and the processes.

Developing and improving the people in the dealership is the best way to get a solid ROI. Employees will work harder when they are cared for. Making the work environment comfortable from day one goes a long way for retention efforts. The best way to make employees feel cared for is by creating a comfortable work environment for them to constantly progress.

A lot of dealerships still don't have many processes to help newcomers assimilate into the culture. Onboarding that is informal is ineffective. Asking employees to shadow and hoping a trial by fire gives them the knowledge they need to be successful is only setting employees up for failure.

Develop a five-part plan where you assess where an employee is in their knowledge of a product or process. Then make a plan to help improve their understanding of that process or product. Once you've identified what you need to work on the next phase is to develop. In this phase of the plan, it will be all about experimenting to determine what works, and what doesn’t, to help the employee develop a skill. Then once those three steps have been completed it will be time to measure progress. After progress has been measured make sure to reward the employee to reinforce how important it is to go through the whole five-part plan.

After you have:

1. Assessed

2. Planned

3. Developed

4. Measured

5. Rewarded

Then it is time to do it again and again.

This process is key for new hires. It will help them understand how to do their jobs better as well as give staff the ability to determine shortcomings so that appropriate action can be taken to help employees develop more skills.

This process is not only for new hires though. It should be used for every employee at the dealership. It’s a great way of knowing how capable an employee is on a process or procedure. Training should be ongoing. This is one of the easiest and most reliable ways of implementing meaningful training.

Check out our podcast that goes into detail on this topic.

Click a link below for your preferred listening experience.

Apple Podcasts

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Working with people is like a bank account. You are constantly making withdrawals and deposits of trust to help establish a working relationship. It is important to constantly be making deposits of trust so that when you need something in the future you have established a strong relationship and you can withdraw when needed.