For many, that remarkable portable fitness guru, the Fitbit, has replaced the personal coach for motivating and encouraging higher levels of healthy performance. Spending on technologies like online marketing and CRMs can bring customers to the showroom, but what happens after that? Are you effectively converting your walk-ins? How are you measuring the ROI on technology spending?

Imagine a Fitbit-like outcome for the dealership showroom. A device that monitors the heartbeat of show room ups and lead activities and holds the sales associates accountable for creating a better experience for customers that leads to higher conversion rates.

Attendees of the Digital Dealer 23 Conference and Expo interested in providing a livingroom-to-showroom journey for their customers should plan now to visit Booth 131, TagRail™ to demo this remarkable tool.

Jenan Culic, General Manager for Downtown Toyota, Toronto, a part of the Downtown Auto Group, describes those outcomes from his use of a new customer engagement management (CEM) platform his store installed recently.

“Since using the TagRail platform in our dealership, we’ve noticed a more relaxed environment, with our sales consultants now handling decision-making once left to the sales manager, and therefore our closing ratios are on the rise," he says.

“I attribute this improved closing ratio to how TagRail acts like a Fitbit platform for the car dealership, providing performance feedback, accountability, and measurement that tells us how we are doing and how to continue to improve customer engagement, sales efficiencies, and retention,” he adds.

Dealerships like Downtown Toyota have transformed their sales process by changing how each customer touch point is handled and measured while improving workforce and workflow dynamics throughout the dealership

With the right CEM like TagRail as your Fitbit-device, managers get real-time digital feedback about their associates’ performance related to road to the sale practices, test drive and walkaround completion, and other metrics that increase showroom up conversion.

CEMs contribute to more customer-centric experiences that makes buyers brand enthusiasts. Isn’t that the word you want on the street and what others say about your dealership and personnel on popular dealer review sites? With Fitbit-like simplicity and motivation, you can be assured it is so. www.tagrail.com

Have you tested the wind lately? It is now a headwind, that gentle breeze known as negotiation-free selling that first rippled lot flags in the early ‘90s.

Even as more dealers embrace these winds, some consumers will continue to want to negotiate. Many enjoy the banter and are skilled negotiators, and sales departments will continue to take them as ups.

Dealers are prudent to employ among their sales team professionals skilled at moving shoppers through the steps to the sale and price negotiation.

Yet, more and more, sales people are expected to be a different breed – technically sophisticated, people-engagers, concierges of sorts to escort shoppers along the shopping journey they’ve already determined would be their path to their purchase.

You know the surveys about this:

• Especially Millennials, which is now the second-largest economic engine behind fading Boomers, don’t want to negotiate. They spend up to 15 to 17 hours shopping online for their perfect vehicle before walking into the dealership. They’ve checked prices, compared prices, and perhaps consulted TrueCar to understand what they should – and will - pay for that vehicle.

• CarFinance.com and Accenture note respondents to their surveys rank negotiating the sales price as the worst part of buying a new car. “If given the opportunity, they would consider making their entire car-buying process online,” notes Accenture.

• Just 17% of consumers surveyed by AutoTrader “like the current car buying process just as it is.

Whichever type of consumer engages with you, whether first as as an online up or as a showroom up, the prevailing wind requires you navigate with them differently in those environments than ever before.

To a great degree, your team is already doing a more thorough and skilled job allowing customers to  control more of the experience as you transition them from their online to their in-store experience.

Yet all of us, being mortal and prone to falling back into old behaviors and practices, can benefit from tools that help us stay the right course with customers, say the right things and at the right time, ask better questions, and keep on track.

Fortunately, customer engagement management (CEM) tools now being used in dealerships can help staff deliver this customer-centric sales process. The control over the process it gives shoppers and sales associates alike puts all parties at ease and builds trust during the in-store process that make buyers brand enthusiasts.  

However business comes to your dealership, you must convert more ups, calls, and be-backs into sales. These leads likely originated today from online engagement with your dealership, so how you handle them in the store must parallel that experience. This calls for consistency in your online and in-store cultures and your pricing, payments, trade evaluations and other intricacies of the deal in either place.

Closing rates increase when customers engage sales associates in a better organized, thorough, consistent and seamless sales process. With customer engagement, this is the wind blowing most fruitfully.