Let’s admit it: Many vehicle buyers still have trauma from poor sales staff who went for a hard sell and ultimately turned the buyer instead. The spectre of the smarmy car salesman still haunts the popular imagination for many vehicle buyers.

This is a problem, of course. Even if dealerships prac tice respectful sales techniques, many buyers avoid sales help like the plague. This both undermines the ability for dealerships to support customers on their buying journey, and it reduces sales because well-trained sales staff don’t get the opportunity to sing the praises of the vehicles on offer or guide the customer to the appropriate vehicle.

Even though this perception of the pushy car salesman will take time to fix, that doesn’t mean that dealerships are lacking options for engaging with customers during the pre-sales process. One option that savvy dealerships are starting to use is live chat, a way to engage one-on-one with prospective customers without the stigma associated with the “car salesman.”

Sales Without the Hard Sell

One reason that dealers are going toward the adoption of live chat for increased vehicle sales is that live chat avoids the stigma of the in-person sales agent.

Potential vehicle buyers can get their questions answered through live chat, but they also know they can close their web browser at any time if the sales agent at the dealership gets pushy. Thus, potential buyers can ask questions without the fear factor.

For the dealership, live chat also works. Dealers can still greet customers. They can still sit down with them at a virtual desk to pre-qualify them and to discuss in real-time what models might be good for the customer. They still can answer questions that the customer might have and guide them in a direction that will lead to a sale. With live chat, dealers also can still share sales collateral such as brochures and promotional offers.

Live chat delivers all the same benefits of being there with the customer in the showroom, but without the fear from customers that things will get out of hand.

Improved Awareness on What Customers Really Need

Then there’s the feedback loop.

“Live chat software has a number of features for helping you nurture your online customers and, thus, improve your business,” notes Jason Grills in an article published by Live Agent, a leading live chat software solution on the market. “One of those features is real-time monitoring, which enables you to gather information about people checking out your website so that you can learn more about them in order to know exactly how and when to offer a helping hand.”

Real-time monitoring shows you how your visitors have found your website, where they are located, which pages they are viewing, how long they stay on each one, as well as how many times they have visited your website and whether or not they have interacted with you before, according to Grills. This can all be used for better understanding what works and what does not in your sales approach.

Through direct interaction with customers via live chat, your dealership also can better track which questions customers

Live Chat Builds Trust

A second reason that dealerships are starting to use live chat for sales is because the platform builds trust that encourages a greater willingness to purchase from the dealership. As every effective dealer knows, trust is critical for closing the sale.

More than three-quarters of people surveyed by Bold Software said that live chat positively affects their attitude toward a company, according to the industry news portal, Digital Commerce 360.

This is because buyers can interact with a dealership even when browsing at home, turning a static dealership website into a live person-to-person interaction. Dealerships become real when there is a human interaction beyond the passive billboard-style websites that sell or provide information. With this direct interaction comes trust much earlier than the moment a buyer steps foot in a dealership to take a test drive.

Guidance Earlier in the Buying Journey

Live chat also boosts dealership sales by better educating customers, a key consideration especially for Millennial buyers who often research before talking with a sales agent.

Vehicle buyers often have a lot of questions. This makes sense because any vehicle is a major purchase. When customers go researching online to figure out the options and make sense of the market, dealerships can be ready to answer questions and guide customers by having live chat enabled on their site.

Live chat is less invasive than visiting a dealership, and it helps dealers connect with customers much earlier in the buying journey. So instead of customers researching on their own and hunting for answers to questions, live chat makes it possible for dealerships to be there early on in the research phase to quickly answer questions and take control of the sale.

are asking, and what is attracting or repelling about a particular model.

Conclusion

Using technology such as live chat to complement sales skills and general knowledge of the field can give a great competitive advantage to a salesman. Most of the niches are already overcrowded, however, in this case, only a small amount of people are diving deep into using modern technologies to differentiate one from the rest.

So while the problem of a stigma around car salesmen lingers, it still is possible to proactively sell and engage with customers. You just have to think outside of the box a bit and use the latest technology. In this case, live chat functionality.

In auto sales, you need customers that are ready to buy, right now, and have the resources to do so. You need qualified leads to get anywhere, and generating these leads can be a challenge. Potential leads are everywhere—just open a phone book and start cold-calling—but unless you're willing to waste a lot of time sifting through the masses to find qualified leads, you need ways to start generating those qualified leads that are ready to buy.

How Can I Get More Qualified Leads for My Business?

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to generate qualified leads, and some of these are simpler than you may expect.

Get Smart About Ads

There’s a reason that Facebook and Google are valued so highly as companies: They’ve become the dominant platforms for advertisements and connecting buyers and sellers.

When you’re looking for more leads, therefore, optimizing your ad buys and follow up is one of the most important ways to boost the number of solid, qualified leads.

Where many businesses go wrong, however, is how they track and respond to interest generated from Facebook and Google ads. Invest in tools that help your dealership do more with ad clicks, tools such as lead generation service, LeadsBridge.

LeadsBridge works by connecting your lead generation tools such as landing page builders or Facebook Lead Ads directly with your customer relationship management (CRM) software so prospects can be stored and acted upon more easily. If you’re using a dealership CRM such as VinSolutions, for instance, you can have prospects who come from a lead ad automatically added to a drip marketing campaign or added to a sales rep call list. This can significantly boost the effectiveness of your ads in generating leads because every lead is automatically acted upon and nothing falls through the cracks.

Answer Customers Rapidly.

If your customers are contacting you, whether looking for information or lodging a complete, the iron is hot. Strike it by responding, quickly, to those customers. A study from The Social Habit found that 42 percent of customers expect a response within an hour of contact. Moreover, 32 percent of customers expect a response within 30 minutes.

The faster you can respond to customers, the more likely you are to retain those customers. These, in turn, become some of your most qualified leads: the ones who actually told you what they will buy if you can get it for them.

Keep your Web Presence Up To Date.

Have you updated your websites lately? Are you using both mobile and desktop web presences? If you're keeping up, then you're improving the chances of customers finding you and becoming a qualified lead. There's more to this than just good website management, though.

• Be at the right place... A Dealer.com study noted that shoppers coming in from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter spend 20 percent more time on the website, and view 27 percent more pages per visit. And with 41 percent of traffic on dealer websites coming in from mobile devices—tablets and smartphones—being available where the customer wants to see more information improves your chances.

• ...at the right time. That same Dealer.com study found that over a third—37 percent—of total leads hit on Mondays and Tuesdays, so be prepared to hit extra hard during those days. Not being ready for days where customers are cropping up makes you that much more likely to miss qualified leads. Finding qualified leads is all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, and the more stalks you have to work with, the more likely you are to find wheat.

Become an Authority.

Building customer trust is a great way to build qualified leads. Since many car buyers start their search online, you can take advantage of tools like search engines and your CRM to better connect with those online car shoppers. Start writing for the web, specifically about cars. Set up your own car blog addressing those questions that you hear every day on the lot: which cars have the best gas mileage, what's a good car for a rough winter, what's a good car for senior citizens, and the like are fodder for things your customers want to read anyway.

When you become a trusted information source, you're also likely to draw more attention, more questions, and more qualified leads.

Use the Right Tools.

No one fixes an engine by hitting it with a hammer. No one makes a website more relatable by using tools that any 12 year old can use to set up his blog. Start out right from scratch by using dealer-specific website development tools like Flexdealer or Dealersocket, or the aforementioned Leadsbridge. Use inventory management tools like Lotwizard. The more industry-specific your development tools, the better the quality of your leads; these are tools inherently designed for use in this field.

Why trust anything else to the development of your main communications measures with your customers or how you keep track of what's on the lot?

Where Do I Begin To Improve My Count of Qualified Leads?

There is, in the end, no wrong way to start here. The more methods you put into practice, the more likely you are to generate leads that will give you a much better chance at sales. It's better if you don't try to put too many into play too rapidly—it's possible to have too many balls in the air to successfully juggle, after all—but casting a wider net improves your chances of landing your target.

In the end, it's all about getting more leads, and better vetting the leads you have to turn these into qualified leads.