“I don’t know if my sales team is ready to leverage better lead data.”

I’ve heard that statement from dealer principles many times over the last year. As digital strategies become more complex, dealers are working to keep them informed of changes; all the while, dealing with sales team turnover. It’s complex  and anything but seamless for the dealership.  With the growth of “buy it now” features on dealer websites, it’s now more important than ever that the sales team be prepared. Why? Because the consumer expects the experience to feel seamless between their online research and their in-store purchase.  

That’s why I’m so excited to be presenting at DSES next week to tackle this very issue.  During my session, I’ll discuss important changes in digital strategy and how those changes are impacting the sales team. We’ll review how to prepare the team, and we will go beyond theory to give dealer principles real tools and tactics that can be implemented immediately.

I need your help to make this session as relevant as possible. One of the biggest challenges our clients voice is when sales team members follow-up with online leads with the intention of bringing them into the dealership. These objections are real and tough to conquer.

In addition to tackling proactive messaging, I want to hear what objections your team faces. As with any training, we can create the most change and have the biggest impact by addressing the most frequent objections sales teams face from consumers. I can cover the most extreme consumer responses, but that isn’t likely to create meaningful change for the dealership.

Please take a moment and share examples of the most frequent or common objections your sales team or BDC team hears when they follow-up with online consumers.  

Thank you for your help and participation! I look forward to hearing about your experiences!

Join us October 23rd at 4:05 PM PST for our DSES Presentation!

Do YOU know what YOU should do?  Do you know what YOUR problem is?  It’s simple, YOU don’t know what YOU are doing in sales. I can fix it for YOU. I can make all YOUR problems go away. I know what YOU should do.  

So, are you sold yet? Do you even want to read further in this article?

Even if every fiber of your being is begging you to tune out right now, I implore you to stick with me for a second.  

Ask yourself: How does it feel to read that intro? Do you feel judged? Does it make you want to open up or does it make you want to shut down? Am I making unfair assumptions? Am I promising a solution before understanding the problem? Do you feel ready to confide in me? Do you even remotely like me at this point or are you just buying time until the comments section comes into view for your blazing response to this blog post?  

One of the most powerful changes I ever made in my professional career is changing how I talk with people, how I share ideas, how I challenge my peers and how I coach my team. It started with an entrepreneurial group called EO (Entrepreneurs Organization). Local entrepreneurs are put into small forums to meet monthly and there is training to participate.

The most important part of training is teaching entrepreneurs not to give advice. Why? Because it breaks relationships, plain and simple. When giving advice, I leave someone with only a couple options. Either they take my advice and now I’m to blame if it doesn’t work out. Better cross my fingers! Or, they don’t take my advice and I’m forever in a position to say “I told you so.” Neither is appealing for either side of the relationship.  

It wasn’t long ago I met a fellow high performing female out for drinks.  We were learning about each other for the first time. As we talked, I felt more and more comfortable and we started sharing deeper stuff.

As our conversation flowed, I shared more about a dynamic happening in my family at the time. The next time we met up, the first words out of her mouth were “do you know what you should do…?” Not a single question was asked. No update was provided. Her advice was based on 5 minutes of sharing from a conversation 3 weeks earlier.  

I started to realize that a single word was at the heart of advice giving vs. experience sharing: YOU. I began a mission to eliminate this word. As I marched down this path, I made a promise to myself to offer insights based on facts, truths and experiences.

By offering these insights, people opened up!  They shared more, and they had a choice in whether they wanted to relate to my sharing or not. I was still able to guide, direct and lead, but in a more purposeful way. I found it built more trust when I could explain what worked for another person.  

That being said, we’re left with 2 very important questions: When are “You’s” okay? And when are “you’s” NOT okay?


When are “You’s” ok?  

1. When setting an appointment. It’s kind of important to be able to talk about someone’s actual calendar.  No amount of experience sharing will ever determine that person’s availability.  

2. When asking questions. It’s ok to personalize a question as long as it’s not a leading question or an assumptive question. Yes, I dropped a lot of these early in the article to serve as examples.

3. When using it intentionally.  The problem is that most sales people don’t realize how often they use YOU. Try recording a future conversation to audit how often YOU is being used. It’s helped me as I’ve coached my team.  

4. When ascertaining facts from a prospect.  For example, at some point we need to understand our client’s web traffic in our sales process.  

When are “You’s” NOT ok?  

1. When giving advice. Frankly, stop giving advice. Start sharing stories and real experiences with clients and customers. Believe me when I say it’s 1000% more powerful.  

2. When guiding a client. Don’t tell a customer what to do next.  In my experience, clients respond well when they understand how other clients have already done something -- whether it’s a contract signature, onboarding process, involving another decision maker, or securing budget.

So, what are your thoughts? How often do you use "You" in your conversations with consumers? Let me know in the comments below! 

Dealerships have this issue where they’re attempting to cater to every single consumer all at once -- no matter what stage of the shopping journey they’re in.

While this doesn’t seem like a particularly big deal, consumers in the earlier stages might simply prefer to conduct research at a pace that comfortably suits them. Car buying can be a massive investment of time and money, so it’s important that they choose wisely and pick out a vehicle they really want. Although consumers will almost definitely find it beneficial to work with a sales person as they get closer to a purchase, it never hurts to let them explore on their own during those initial stages.  

One big thing to note is that consumers in these research phases shouldn’t be catered to in the same way as a consumer who’s ready to buy. Many dealerships seem to fall into this trap, and it can cause a bit of confusion between your sales team and the consumer. Each consumer’s needs are completely different, so the messaging and outreach for each consumer needs to be different.

Not only can reaching out to all consumers with the same message have a detrimental effect on their relationship with your dealership, but it can actually cause your best leads to slip through the cracks.

If your dealership’s website is highly effective at capturing leads, your reps might have found themselves overwhelmed and overloaded with the number they’d have to reach out to. If each lead is called in the order it was received, you’re going to miss out on consumers who are ready-to-buy and ready to speak with a sales rep.

In fact, if your sales reps are so overloaded that they can’t reach out to everyone right away, then some consumers won’t be called at all. Your “buy in 90-days” leads aren’t being acknowledged, and the ready-to-buy leads are slipping through the cracks.

Now, just to be perfectly clear: this way of reaching out to consumers was and still is extremely typical in the majority of dealerships. After all, why wouldn’t a sales rep want to reach out to every one of their leads and attempt to sell them a car? Accuracy by volume, right? Well… not really.

Back in the day, there was no way for dealerships to attain a thorough understanding of their consumers. Unless you asked them directly (over the phone), the folks you were reaching out to were just leads. They weren’t individuals with wants, needs and shopping preferences. Through the advent of web experiences and engagement technology, however, it’s so much easier for your dealership to collect that individual data and formulate a follow-up based on what’s in the consumer’s buyer profile.

As of late, the dealerships that really stand out and who have seen the most success are those who cater to each consumer’s individual needs during their follow-up. This is often done by separating different types of consumers into their own phone and email cadences. The reason for this is so your sales reps can prioritize their follow-up primarily based on purchase timeframe.

For example: If a consumer indicates that their purchase timeframe is approximately 30 days, your dealership will want to put that consumer in call and email cadence that’s separate from the consumers who indicate they want to buy in the next month or so. The cadence that’s been created for the more immediate consumers will have a sales rep attempt to make contact right away.

By separating these two different types of consumers, your sales reps will have a better understanding of different consumer priorities. The consumers who are ready to buy will be acknowledged right away and your sales reps will try to get them in the showroom.

On the other hand, the consumers who aren’t quite ready might get an immediate follow-up, but the push won’t likely be as aggressive. They’ll get one call saying that their information was received and those consumers will go into an email cadence the attempts to further engage them.

All that said, don’t feel pressured to boil the ocean with follow-up workflow creation. Start with two different cadences and segments. Separate the consumers into buckets of those likely to buy within 30 days and those likely to buy after 30 days. You can still make sure to have an urgent first touch on all leads, and adjust the timing and frequency of the subsequent touches to allow for the most ready buyers to receive more follow-up. If you can’t tell the difference between these two types of buyer preferences, then researching technology to uncover this information would be the first priority.  

Does your dealership have different call and email cadences for its consumers? What workflow works best for your ready buyers? Let me know in the comments and share some best practices with your peers!

In my previous post for DrivingSales, I discussed the importance of clarifying the “why” and “how” when integrating new lead generating technology onto your dealership’s website. One of the key points I made was that your sales team needed to be made aware of where to find this new information in order to use it for their follow-up efforts.

Now, regardless of the type or amount of information you’re able to collect (or even how you’re able to collect it), follow-up is arguably one of the most challenging aspects of a sales person’s duties. Often times, you’ll find that sales people will call a lead with the only goal being “I want to get them in the dealership.” And yes, while the ultimate goal is to get consumers to come into the dealership, no two consumers are alike.

Each individual consumer has their own specific wants and needs. Some folks are still in the research phase of their shopping journey ("I don’t know what type of car I want yet"), some folks are somewhere in the middle ("I want to know how much my trade is worth before I look further") and some folks are at the bottom of the purchasing funnel (“What special offers are available for this vehicle?”).

Basically what this means is that it wouldn’t be practical or effective to reach out to all of your consumers with the same type of sales pitch or follow-up approach. You literally need to cater to a consumer’s specific needs; or else your follow-up efforts are cold and one-sided.

Let me give you a specific example: There was a dealership who was getting consistent inquiries from the same consumer. The inquiries were all about different types of vehicles at the dealership they were interested in. Each time the consumer filled out a form to inquire about a different vehicle, they got a different follow-up call from the dealership.

This proved to be problematic because instead of linking all of these inquiries to the same individual, the sales team went on auto-pilot and didn’t pay attention to the fact that the consumer needed help choosing a vehicle. Each form-fill was followed up with a phone call as if these were several different consumers. Needless to say, this left this one particular consumer feeling rather frustrated.

Along with instructing your sales team on how to find onsite activity data and form-fill information, you absolutely need to coach them on how adjust their follow-up to the needs of the consumer. The FATWIN Web Engagement experiences that many of our clients leverage on their websites ask questions that would allow your dealership to properly filter through consumers at different stages of the purchasing funnel. Here are a few example follow-up scenarios that your dealership might encounter based on the questions in our experiences:

How Do You Prefer to be Contacted?

One of the first questions that’s typically asked in our interactive experiences is “how do you prefer to be contacted?” Often times, the options are: E-mail, phone and text. Depending on the chosen answer, your dealership’s sales team should follow-up with the consumer’s preferred contact method at least for the first 1-2 attempts.

If you call a consumer despite them telling you they prefer e-mail, they’re going to be irritated. Not only did your team completely disregard a simple request, but you likely contacted them in a way that’s deemed inconvenient for them.

The point of getting this information is so you can engage with your consumers on a deeper level. If your consumer prefers to be texted, a quick inquiry is more than sufficient. In fact, you might even ask them if they’d like to hop on a call. The point here is simply to listen to your consumer. It’s a soft skill that shouldn’t be ignored.

In an Ideal Scenario How Soon Would you Be Ready to Buy?

Another common question found in our experiences is “In an ideal scenario, how soon would you be ready to buy?” The answers often range anywhere from “NOW!” to 6+ months. This question is a little tricky because your follow-up greatly depends on the answer a consumer provides.

If a consumer tells you that they’re in the market to purchase a vehicle NOW, then possible solutions or next steps you’ll provide will need to coincide with their timeline. If they’re wanting to purchase right away, a member of your sales team might ask the consumer if they’d like to test drive a specific grouping of vehicles or work to leverage offers and incentives.

If a consumer answers that they’ll be ready to purchase within 90 days, a sales person might ask them if they’d like to check out additional inventory and test drive a few different vehicles. Not everyone wants to do the same things at each stage of the buying process, but this is the very reason why consumer follow-up is so important. It allows your dealership to ask additional questions so they can provide the best possible solutions for their personal needs.

What Best Describes Where You Are in the Buying Process?

“Where are you at in the buying process?” It’s an open-ended question, but it’s a “vague” enough questions that it almost forces your sales team to inquire further about what consumers think they need at that moment. For example: If a consumer says they’re “looking at different options,” it could mean a number of different things. In this type of scenario, your best bet would simply be to ask the consumer “what are the different options that you’re looking at?” It give your sales team an opportunity to have engaging discussions and build great relationships.

Another answer consumers could provide is “Still researching;” in which case, your sales team can offer a number of different inventory options to prospective buyers. This question is arguably the most effective for engaging consumers because it is so open-ended. Often times, questions that are too open-ended lead to confusion, but in this case, it allows your team to treat consumers like individuals.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my career, it’s that follow-up is an art form. It’s not one of those things where you should feel comfortable going on auto-pilot. Your sales team truly needs to make sure that it’s catering to specific consumer wants and needs. Outside of asking what they want, there’s no better way to engage prospective customers than to listen to them when they’re specifically telling you what they want.