Investing in a great training program is one of the best ways to increase all of your key metrics and meet your monthly sales goals. By bringing a specialist consultant who understands the auto industry and what it takes to sell effectively in this unique environment, your sales team can stay ahead of the competition by following the latest trends and perfecting vital skills like appointment setting and lead management. 

That being said, sometimes it can be difficult to prioritize sales team training. It takes employees off the showroom floor, costs money, and never seems to stop. Employees often dislike training for similar reasons—every second they’re not selling it’s costing them money, so if they don’t instantly understand how it translates to better sales, they’re going to check out fast. 

However, if you work with a partner who delivers skills and strategies that put more money in their pockets, they’ll be eager to put their foot on the gas when it comes to training. Here are six excellent reasons to keep your team’s skills sharp with a highly effective training partner.

1. UNIFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE

Today, twice as many companies compete on customer service compared to twenty years ago, and 96% of customers say the quality of service they receive is key to their brand loyalty. If you want to keep your customers happy while maintaining the consistency of your brand message, sales team training is one of the best ways to keep everyone in your sales department on point. Your training partner can achieve this through:

• Sales scripts that are well-crafted.
• Coaching that keeps delivery fresh, drives toward revenue, and improves long-term brand/dealership awareness.
• Individual training sessions that help each team member utilize scripts naturally for their own style and personality.

2. GET NEW EMPLOYEES UP TO SPEED FASTER

Turnover is a given in every business, and sales team training is critical for helping new hires hit the ground running. The faster they can align their sales skills with your brand and business, the faster they can operate as part of the team to generate maximum revenue for your business. This includes general training on the use of scripts, understanding inventory, and general phone skills, as well as more advanced concepts like appointment scheduling and lead qualification. 

3. ENSURE REGULATORY COMPLIANCE AND FINANCING

Automotive dealerships have any number of requirements they must adhere to, ranging from brand policies to the law. Consequences for failing to comply with these directives, even in single instances, can come with severe penalties. And as the owner of the business, you’ll be the one paying the price.

Also, many customers will be interested in financing options for purchases, and a great training partner ensures your people are delivering compassionate, accurate information to customers on this sensitive point every time. Plus, they can help your sales team understand how to make the most of the opportunities your dealership can offer. 

4. KEEP VETERAN STAFF UP TO DATE

The sales environment is changing right before our eyes thanks to the internet, phones, and developments in the industry at large. Phone skills are more important than ever, and the top dealerships are integrating and aligning messaging and customer experience from initial online searches to well past the final sale. 

That means even the best team member is facing a constantly evolving environment, and your most experienced salespeople are perhaps the most vulnerable to falling behind. They may be closer to retirement, overconfident from decades at the top, and may need some extra assistance adapting to the modern environment.

A great training partner can easily bring them up to speed, answer any questions they have, and use their expertise to help instruct the rest of the team for maximum success. 

5. BRING IN MORE CUSTOMERS

Getting people through the door has been increasingly challenging over the last few decades thanks to the ever-increasing number of competitors and internet sites. Appointments from phone calls are a huge driver of foot traffic, but the average dealership only converts these at a 20% rate.

Proper sales team training can boost that number to 60%-80% of your call traffic. It’s surprising how easily a few seemingly minor missteps on the phone can be the difference between eager customers in the showroom and an empty lot. 

6. INCREASE PROFIT

At the end of the day, everything that happens at your dealership is about delivering a return on your investment, and training needs to give your sales team a big bang for the buck. Fortunately, a great auto sales consulting partner who specializes in supporting sales teams can give you an edge in a number of ways:

• 84% of companies that work to improve their customer’s experience see increased revenue. 
• Good training on sales scripts helps your team close leads and identify revenue opportunities they might otherwise miss out on.
• Employees who are well-versed in CRM software and strategy keep the central data collection effort streamlined, organized, and functioning as it should, critical to the effective functioning of your BDC.
• Not everyone is going to have a natural talent for sales, and training helps build the skills they need to bridge that gap. 

IMPROVE ALL ASPECTS OF YOUR BUSINESS WITH PHONE NINJAS

Sales team training touches every corner of your dealership. That being said, it is a specialized type of long-term coaching, and finding the right training partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an owner.

At Phone Ninjas, we’ve made a name for ourselves by working with some of the top dealerships in the industry to get their sales teams ahead of the competition—and keep them there. Our clients regularly see increased KPIs across the board, including appointment-from-call rates that are three to four times the national average, giving their sales teams far more quality leads to work with.  

If you want to set your people up for success with industry-leading sales team training, contact Phone Ninjas today for a free demo and two free mystery shops!

Time is money, and your sales force needs to be efficient in their work. Extended pitches can derail closing and waste time, while a laser focus on identifying customer needs and pain points is key to solving problems and overcoming objections.

However, achieving this is easier said than done, and training is essential for keeping your team sharp. They’ll need to focus on the skills that matter and deliver individualized coaching to ensure every team member has the opportunity to develop their skills in the most efficient way possible so it doesn’t interfere with achieving your larger business goals.

So, what should you look for in a training partner who can create the biggest returns in the least amount of time? Glad you asked—here are the areas they should focus on to keep your team firing on all cylinders and burning clean. 

LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS WORK

Training is not a one-and-done solution for any business. It works best as an ongoing process to grow skills over time in a supportive active coaching environment. The benefits of this type of long-term relationship are many for both the employer and employee: 

• Increase employee confidence.
• Confidential sounding board for ideas and challenges.
• Improved awareness of other sales techniques and styles.
• Individualized training that leads directly to revenue.
• Durable skills that stand the test of time.
• Employees feel more valued, improving employment length, loyalty, and productivity.
• Solid training relationships that become more valuable over time. 

All of these qualities lead to more efficient training programs that ultimately deliver increased ROI. 

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC TRAINING

The program you choose should be heavily customer-centric instead of employee/product-centered. Survey data shows that when companies focus on improving the customer’s experience, 92% see brand loyalty improve, 84% see revenue increase, and surprisingly, 79% see cost savings.

To achieve these results, your training partner should prioritize teaching employees to find solutions to customer challenges rather than pitching products, and there are several areas to focus on:

• Active listening skills can dramatically increase sales team efficiency by improving their understanding of their customer and what they value and require. 
• Techniques to identify customer needs and explore products and services that will solve those needs.
• Awareness of customer pain points is key to quickly qualifying customers and overcoming objections.
• Focus on bringing customers into the dealership with solid appointment-setting processes. 

SALES SCRIPTS

Sales scripts are essential for delivering optimized service that efficiently maximizes your revenue opportunities in the modern car sales environment. They give your sales team a roadmap to success, prioritize your business’s values and goals, and make it much easier to deliver for your customers. 

Here are some great techniques your prospective training partners should highlight:

• Emphasize memorization of the script to make navigation easy.
• Practice the script sections out of order. This improves the durability of memorization and flexibility of message delivery when agents have to shift gears quickly.
• Give employees the freedom to tweak non-essential language for a more personalized and natural conversation. 

These basic tips lead to more advanced tactics that your sales team will be able to explore over time. Also, as market dynamics change and evolve, your training partner will be in the perfect position to update scripts so your business can begin taking advantage immediately. 

THEY HANDLE THE DETAILS

One of the most valuable benefits a great training partner delivers is that they will save you time and energy as well. Ideally, they can work with your managers and team members directly, and only engage you as necessary or to deliver reports. After all, management fatigue is a real thing, and you’re already overloaded. 

By streamlining the training process from the top down, they free everyone up to focus on the things that lead directly to revenue—and avoid the complications that don’t. 

FEEDBACK AND ANALYSIS 

There’s no efficiency without effectiveness, and any great training program will build in evaluations and feedback. However, not every approach is ideal for a unique sales environment like the automotive industry. It takes an expert consultant with years of experience in the business to know what works and what doesn’t—especially on the phone. 

Training on real sales calls helps with this, but mystery shopping is the best way to check up on your sales team’s work. Your training partner should be using mystery shoppers to evaluate your employees’ work. Not only does this verify trained skills, but it gives coaches accurate feedback to focus on in subsequent training sessions.

MAXIMIZING EFFICIENCY WITH A GREAT TRAINING PARTNER

When you find the perfect fit with a training partner, they’ll be able to achieve levels of sales team efficiency that give you a lasting edge over the competition. At Phone Ninjas, we’ve spent years honing our training program to routinely boost KPIs across the board for our clients. With one of the most efficient and effective training programs on the market, we’re able to increase appointment rates by 300%-400% over industry averages for our clients. 

Our coaches work with your sales team in weekly one-on-one sessions that deliver valuable insights in less than 20 minutes per employee. This helps your team build skills that focus on improving your customers’ overall experience. Our mystery shopping team follows up to evaluate skills and target areas for follow-up training, and all of it follows the shortest possible path to raising your bottom line.

Call today so we can set up a free demo and two free mystery shops!

Over two-thirds of customers say a business’s customer representatives are key to a great experience. Given that your business development center is the communications center of your entire dealership, the BDC reps you choose can make or break appointments and customer relationships before they even get started. 

But how do you pick the winning candidates from the stack of resumes? What are the personal qualifications, experiences, and intangibles a new BDC rep needs to excel?

We’ve put together a list to help your hiring team find the right people for the job. Some of these elements can be developed or trained, and others cannot. But because you’ll know exactly what personalities and skill sets to prioritize, your hiring processes will be more efficient and productive. 

1. ENGAGING PERSONALITY

Expert Phone Ninjas coach Amy Hayes puts it best: “Anyone can learn the secrets of selling—but you can’t teach someone to have a personality.” 

Your customers will mirror the energy your BDC rep brings to the call, so the people you hire need to project an inviting and engaging experience by being:

• Warm and likable.
• Empathetic and a careful listener
• A real “people person”.
• An enthusiastic presenter.

Rarely will you find someone who is amazing in all these ways, but if they’ve got some degree of each of these four checkboxes, your coaching partner will have plenty to work with. 

2. ACTIVE LISTENER

The University of Southern California notes that up to 70% of all employees exhibit poor listening skills and habits that result in misunderstandings, errors, and missed opportunities. This is one problem your BDC team—and your dealership—simply can’t afford. Every BDC rep needs to have excellent listening skills, as these are key to qualifying customers and nurturing them toward setting appointments. 

This is even more true in an age where sales scripts are becoming the norm. Active listening will help your team know when to pause or elaborate on the script to address customer concerns instead of pivoting at awkward moments or missing opportunities. 

Your agents also need to listen to what customers are telling them as well as what they aren’t saying. Things like intent, tone of voice, confidence, and more all shape an effective approach to fulfilling customer needs. 

3. GOOD COMMUNICATOR

This is more than just having a decent vocabulary. Every successful BDC rep must have the ability to make meaningful connections with customers through nothing but their verbal communication.  

When interviewing candidates, listen carefully to how they respond to you. Great communicators will:

• Speak clearly and concisely.
• Be accurate in their facts.
• Display an understanding of appropriate word choice and tone.
• Restate what you have asked to confirm they understand you (up to 40-60% of message content can be lost between speaker and listener).
• Ask open-ended questions to avoid conversation-killing “yes-no” answers.
• Use regionally-accepted professional modes of speech.

People with these aptitudes and skills are going to be a lot more effective when delivering customer service as they’ll be able to quickly identify needs and deliver helpful responses. 

4. QUICK THINKER

The last thing any customer needs to hear is a BDC rep caught off guard by a question and fumbling for an answer. 

This doesn’t mean your team has to know everything that might be asked. Rather, they need to be able to process information quickly and come up with an answer that keeps the conversation moving—even if the response is a polite delaying tactic to give them time to find the answer.

5. HONESTY

This is a biggie. Instead of inventing an answer to move the conversation along, your team members need to have the courage (and the freedom) to say, “I don’t know—but let me find out for you.” 

Honest customer service reps will bring a number of benefits to your dealership:

• Build trust.
• Foster brand loyalty.
• Increase repeat business.
• Raise profits. 
• Prevent customers from being surprised during their appointments, leading to more productive sessions.

More than half of all customers say honesty is critical to earning their business. By hiring candidates with integrity, your customers will learn to trust your dealership.

6. GOOD TIME MANAGEMENT SKILLS

Your BDC department is making and taking hundreds of calls a day, especially during peak hours/seasons. A BDC rep who knows how to manage their time effectively will get to all their tasks on a given day. 

They will also have a superior ability to pivot between tasks, which they certainly need to do in this fast-paced environment.

7. PASSION FOR YOUR PRODUCTS

This one is very difficult to train, but customers can absolutely tell when a BDC rep is enthusiastic about your products and services. After all, they will mirror the energy your employees bring to their phone calls. 

There are other advantages as well. These candidates will be more likely to learn about your product line on their own time, which will result in product knowledge and use scenarios you won’t find in the technical manuals. Product information will be remembered more consistently, and these types of BDC reps may have personal experience with your products.

SET YOUR TEAM UP FOR SUCCESS

Even perfect candidates will require the right support and training to be successful. Sales scripts are incredibly valuable, but they aren’t shortcuts to success; every team member needs a mentor or coach who can help them grow and develop in natural, effective ways.

Phone Ninjas is the training partner that can make that happen. Our active coaching program is designed to work with each BDC rep individually on your scripts and style so they can deliver your company’s customer service and brand message in a relaxed, natural manner that customers will embrace. 

Our training program is helping some of the nation’s top dealerships stay ahead of the competition by doubling and tripling appointment set rates from 20% to nearly 70%—and we’d love to show you what we can do for your business. Contact us today for a free demo and two free mystery shops.

Many dealerships have built an auto business development center to drive appointment rates and generate more sales. The leading dealers are making money hand over fist on these investments—but it doesn’t feel like your BDC is delivering the same for you.

What are they doing differently that’s working so much better?

Measuring success can be tough because a BDC doesn’t sell cars. It sells appointments, and that means you’re looking for revenue a little farther downstream. On top of that, there are many different angles to upping appointment numbers and generating leads, and all of it depends on the hard and soft skills your phone representatives have. 

The biggest secret to success is working with a dealership consultant who’s an expert in developing those skills. That’s when you’ll see these three key metrics for your auto business development center start to skyrocket—along with your bottom line. 

APPOINTMENT SET RATE

The appointment set rate is the percentage of all calls that result in an appointment being booked. The industry baseline of all inbound and outbound calls is about 20% on average—nowhere near enough for a BDC to be profitable. 

The top performers are converting at least 50% of inbound and 20% of outbound calls. Sound impossible? Not with the right mentality, says Phone Ninjas expert coach Amy Hayes:

“People will do everything they can not to pick up a phone. When they call you, it’s because they want a car, they’ve hit an informational wall, and they genuinely need your help. At that point, it’s your appointment to lose or sell.”

With the right strategy for handling these tricky dynamics, the top teams Amy works with are seeing appointment rates of 60-80% of inbound calls and 25% of outbound calls. And that’s where a BDC’s work starts to be measured in dollar signs. 

APPOINTMENT SHOW RATE

Setting appointments means nothing if customers don’t show up. A well-run auto business development center has scripts and protocols in place that help make sure at least 60% of all booked appointments show up.

“If you get somebody to actually commit to spending their time with you, you have to build value in that appointment,” Amy cautions. “We teach that there’s a fine line between giving away too much information and providing excellent customer service.” 

Your BDC team will also need scripts that efficiently gather everything they’ll need to confirm appointments and open the door to more questions a customer might have when they arrive.

They should guide representatives to:

• Obtain customer data (half of all agents do not).
• Enter the data into the CRM software.
• Provide the customer with your contact information, address, and directions.
• Have a manager call back a day before the appointment to confirm and follow up on any questions.  

LEAD GENERATION AND QUALIFICATION

The #1 task of your BDC representatives is to drive appointment rates, but they are also in the perfect position to develop your leads. The top dealerships are using their BDCs to analyze lead quality and prioritize opportunities, deliver valuable information to the sales team, and even handle referrals and introduce upsell opportunities. 

 “We want to get all of your numbers higher,” said Amy. “By talking with 20 people instead of 10, you can get more sets, more shows, and end up with five sales at the end of the month instead of one.”

And by coaching auto business development center reps to properly evaluate leads, up to 40% of the customers they send their sales team will be high-intent buyers they can capitalize on instead of only 10-20%. 

INTANGIBLES

While these KPIs tell most of the story, it’s important to keep in mind there are a host of intangible benefits that help your auto business development center drive profitability:

• Your BDC frees up other departments to focus on what they do best instead of spreading them thin. 
• Your BDC can proactively meet customer needs, as well as target promotions and help customers take advantage of your service department. 
• A well-run BDC will grow your customer base through their outbound call game identifying and contacting potential customers.
• Once again, there are a lot of ins and outs to successfully navigating all of these opportunities over the phone. Success and failure may depend on a few simple words, and a great training partner will ensure your team gets it right when the pressure’s on. 

MAXIMIZE WHAT YOUR BDC CAN DO FOR YOUR DEALERSHIP

Your BDC may not hand over the keys, but with the right coaching strategy, these business powerhouses can put everyone in your dealership in a position to capitalize on potential opportunities. 

This is where Phone Ninjas can supercharge your auto business development center’s performance. We have decades of experience in the industry, and we know every angle and tactic to make the most of your phone game. As a result, our clients regularly see appointment set rates three to four times the industry average—and that speaks directly to your bottom line. 

“Sales Managers and GMs have a lot going on, and I think they could rely more on what a partner like Phone Ninjas can deliver,” Amy said. “Of course, ‘What are your scores?’ is an important question—but we can tell you why and what to do about it.” 

Contact Phone Ninjas today for a free demo and two free mystery shops, and find out what a true automotive training and coaching expert can do for your business. 

If you’re concerned as an owner or GM that you’ve been putting too much time into your BDC, you might be right. A business development center is not the type of department you should need to micromanage. With the right manager and training partner, your BDC should be driving revenues in every department, and all you’ll have to do is make a few big-picture decisions here and there. 

Of course, getting a great team isn’t enough—they will also need a few tools for the job. If you give them a solid foundation with great hardware and software, phone scripts, and coaching, they’ll be in a position to make the most of your investment while you focus on other aspects of your business. 

So, what do they need to succeed? Here are the basics every BDC should have to maximize appointments, generate leads, and boost every aspect of your business—without eating into your daily routine. 

1. SEPARATE SPACE

Everyone deals with space limitations in their businesses, but your BDC is somewhat unique in that it really does require a dedicated workspace that’s physically separated from other dealership activities. After all, they’ll be focusing 100% on customer needs, and that means being removed from distractions and noises that will filter through. 

In fact, unlike other aspects of your dealership, a BDC doesn’t even need to be on the premises! They can operate efficiently from an offsite space, and this is a common choice when a BDC is acting as a hub for several dealerships at once. 

2. COMPUTERS AND CRM SOFTWARE

These two go hand-in-hand. A great CRM (customer relationship management) platform will allow your team to organize and analyze every customer detail, and it’s the foundation of their revenue-driving activities. You’ll also need to ensure they have hardware that can run it quickly and efficiently, so speak to your automotive consultant for details.  

You’ll need a dedicated workstation for each employee to maximize what they can deliver for you, and invest in some good-quality wired headsets. Wireless headsets can run into all kinds of problems, and every loss of service is a potential sale hanging up the phone. 

3. EMPOWER YOUR MANAGER

The right BDC manager can help you capitalize on revenue opportunities in every department. On top of that, if you empower them to take the reins, they can handle all the day-to-day operations, monitor key metrics, make adjustments with your team, and generate reports. 

To do this efficiently—and without you watching over their shoulder— a BDC manager must have the authority to:

• Offer employment to candidates.
• Select employee work assignments.
• Evaluate team performance.
• Write or modify sales scripts to improve performance.
• Exert reasonable control over the departmental budget.

4. ADEQUATE STAFFING RESOURCES

With the right resources, your BDC will be able to maximize the return they deliver on your investment. There’s always a temptation to ask a little more of a great team, but make sure you don’t overload them when it’s actually worth hiring another representative. 

Listen closely to your BDC manager’s input and keep an eye on key metrics like missed calls and callbacks. Too many calls is a good problem to have, and it may mean it’s time to expand. 

5. COMMISSION VS. SALARY?

Some businesses see their BDC as a customer service department and hire employees at an hourly rate. This is outdated thinking and misses an opportunity to leverage the advantages of a commission model. 

Just like your sales team, your BDC is about pursuing opportunities to drive revenue. That’s why setting goals for things like appointment set and show rates and rewarding representatives in their paychecks for hitting goals keeps them hungry and growing your business. 

6. SALES SCRIPTS

To ensure consistent brand messaging and top-notch customer service, scripts are a must-have. They give your employees a proven road map to closing and cover any normal situation they might encounter. 

Should you write them yourself? You can, but there’s a much better option: the automotive training specialist who’s working with your BDC should be willing to write them for you. These experts have professionalized knowledge of the latest best practices and customer trends in the industry, and they’ll already be working directly with your BDC associates to make sure they’re perfectly executed. 

7. A GREAT TRAINING AND COACHING PARTNER

This is the number one place where GMs and owners lose time and money. Keeping your team on point with training updates and constructive feedback is an ongoing job that can be the difference between huge returns and constant burns. You definitely don’t have time, but believe it or not… …neither does your BDC manager. 

They’re going to have their hands full coordinating your team, and training is an extremely specialized skill. The key to a BDC that runs like clockwork and delivers huge returns is to set them up with a dedicated automotive training and coaching expert they can coordinate with on an ongoing basis. They’ll catch all the details you’re looking for, and many more you aren’t. 

CREATE A BDC THAT RUNS HANDS-FREE

The top dealerships in the country stay ahead of the competition because they work smarter, not just harder. BDCs are an indispensable part of the modern industry, and getting the most out of the investment for the least amount of time is all down to organizing it properly from day one. 

With the right equipment, a great BDC manager will have everything they need to ensure the day-to-day operations are smooth so you don’t have to stress over the details. The final piece of the puzzle is working with a dedicated industry specialist who can handle the training and coaching side of the equation. These professionals make sure your BDC is always on top of its game and deliver the ongoing support it takes to stay ahead of the competition. 

Learn more about what goes into creating and maintaining one of these revenue-generating powerhouses, and set your BDC up to run on autopilot so you focus on putting your dealership into overdrive. 

Setting up a car dealership BDC is a big step into the future of the business, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. BDCs are incredible revenue generators, but your people will need ongoing training to keep their skills sharp. Industry trends are also a moving target, and that means editing phone scripts and improving strategies to maximize its value. 

That being said, your BDC should be designed to operate with minimal oversight. You’ve got a lot going on just keeping the dealership running, and developing your team is the work of dedicated training specialists. Is this an investment? Of course, but a great partner can deliver an incredible ROI.

Ideally, the team doing the training should be able to coordinate with your manager to take care of everything so all you have to do is green-light the funds and read the good news in the reports they send. Here’s everything you need to know to keep your BDC ahead of the game. 

HOW IS A BDC DIFFERENT FROM MY OTHER DEPARTMENTS?

Unlike the sales department, your car dealership BDC doesn’t really do a lot of negotiating or outright selling. That’s the work of your sales team, but these frontline customer service representatives are responsible for setting everyone else up for success by managing appointments, routing calls, generating leads, and delivering key messaging about the services you offer. 

While they’ll wear a lot of hats depending on the nature of the call, a BDC’s work can be broken down into three broad categories.

• Greeting customers and channeling inbound calls to the appropriate contact.
• Working with sales scripts.
• Scheduling appointments

While these things can definitely be improved by your training partner, BDC reps have to have a natural flair for the work. That’s why picking the right person to do the managing and hiring is key to building a better department. 

GREETING CUSTOMERS AND CHANNELING INBOUND CALLS

These skills are drawn directly from the skill set your receptionists utilize on a daily basis. Your car dealership BDC will not be replacing them since you always need a dedicated team to meet and greet customers in person, but your BDC reps will definitely be handling most of the inbound calls.

And just like your receptionists, BDC staff are often the initial point of contact customers have with your dealership, and first impressions are everything. Here are a few excellent free training videos led by Nicole Marcellino from Phone Ninjas that will be extremely useful for developing your new team members:

• Receptionist training
• Inbound calls: 1. The Greeting
• Inbound calls: 2. Qualifying a Generic Vehicle
• Inbound calls: 3. Qualifying a Specific Vehicle

SALES SCRIPTS

The key to consistent, high-quality customer service and brand messaging is well-crafted phone scripts. If you are not using these, you are undoubtedly leaving revenue opportunities on the table left and right.   

Now, we know scripts can sometimes have a bad reputation in the industry. We’ve all had this experience: bored customer service agents robotically mumbling their way through a terrible script without ever giving you the information you need. And yes, if bad scripts are executed poorly they can hurt your business. That’s why it’s so important to work with a dedicated training partner. 

When scripts are well-written and delivered confidently, they can have explosive results for your dealership’s bottom line. Here’s what your team needs to keep improving:

• Effective scripts written and updated by qualified industry professionals (here’s a great source of free, high-quality scripts).
• Regular coaching for delivery and memorization.
• Developing the language of the scripts to suit individual styles (with your BDC manager’s supervision).

This ongoing training can be a lot of work for time-strapped owners and GMs. The good news is that there are excellent companies out there that can handle this active coaching process, and because they’re dedicated experts, they can deliver excellent results in 15- to 20-minute weekly or monthly sessions. 

SETTING APPOINTMENTS

Most dealerships struggle to convert 20% of their internet and phone traffic to in-person, live appointments. In reality, the average needs to be much higher, especially with inbound customer contacts. Well-run BDCs are averaging at least 50%, and the top training partners can deliver even bigger numbers with the right strategy and focus. 

Once again, Phone Ninjas instructor Nicole Marcellino covers everything you need to know with the second half of her series on the secrets of leveraging inbound calls:

• Inbound call 4. Obtain Contact Information 
• Inbound call 5. Ask for the Appointment
• Inbound call 6. Drive to Closure
• Inbound call 7. Giving Proper Directions (to your car dealership)

With these simple techniques and some positive coaching, your car dealership BDC will make sure your showroom is flooded with interested customers so your salespeople can capitalize. 

A GREAT TRAINING PARTNER MAKES IT EASY 

Establishing your BDC is a major hurdle to clear, but with the right training partner, it’s easy to keep getting better. This is where Phone Ninjas can deliver incredible value for busy GMs and managers who don’t have the time or expertise to handle the upkeep. We’re an automotive phone training and consulting company founded by industry professionals with decades of sales and coaching experience, and we’ve been working with BDCs around the country to keep them ahead of the competition.

Our best clients are achieving appointment rates up to 80%, quadrupling the industry average, and backing those numbers up with the skills they need to unlock every revenue opportunity. But don’t take our word for it—hear what Christine at Wesley Chapel Toyota has to say about her Phone Ninjas coaching experience.

Contact us today for a free demo and two mystery shops to find out what Phone Ninjas can do for your car dealership BDC! 

Your new business development center is finally up and running! You’ve hired a great manager, and they’re already making a big impact on key metrics like lead generation, appointment set rate, and monthly sales numbers. 

Implementing this new strategy has been the best decision you ever made, but your BDC manager is not a miracle worker. They’re going to need the right support and tools to keep your BDC operating at peak efficiency and driving your bottom line. 

Unfortunately, for many owners, BDCs are unknown territory, and ideally, they need to run without your direct supervision. That means knowing how to support your BDC manager so they can do the job on their own—and at Phone Ninjas, we’re experts at keeping these business-generating powerhouses burning clean and efficiently. Here’s everything you need to know. 

EMPOWER YOUR BDC MANAGER TO HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE

It’s easy to look at your BDC as little more than a re-branded customer service department. And while this is part of its mission, it misses the real point which is to bring in customers and maximize your revenue opportunities. 

To do this, your BDC manager must have the freedom and authority to hire the right people for their new team. It can be tempting to become overly involved in the process or water down priorities by bringing in other departments, but a great BDC needs to be narrowly focused on its role. They’re going to be routing traffic and coordinating important business opportunities to your team—and it’s their job to figure out the best way to do it. 

Of course, this support includes the budget necessary to hire an appropriate number of agents to do the job effectively. BDCs are rapidly becoming the beating heart of a successful dealership, pumping leads and money to every branch of your business. If you’re not sure what it’s going to take to operate at peak efficiency, definitely speak to your automotive training consultant to get the details.

GIVE THEM THE RIGHT TOOLS

Because they are new additions to dealerships, BDCs are often shoved into whatever space is available and given leftover equipment from other departments. This may seem like an efficient repurposing of your resources, but the truth is you’re just handcuffing your BDC manager from the get-go.

Successful BDCs require these basic items:

• Clean, safe, comfortable workspace that is separate from other departments. (It doesn’t even need to be on site!)
• High-quality, reliable internet access.
• Computers and other technology that are powerful enough to easily handle the reams of data that will be flowing through them.
• Data backup services, either local or outsourced.
• Adequate office equipment to do their job well.
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These resources are non-negotiable. After all, your BDC manager is focused on delivering the biggest return on your investment possible, so skimping on these is being penny smart but dollar foolish.

REWARD THEIR TEAM FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS

Your BDC manager and their team will be the primary driver of sales going forward. It’s important to keep them hungry, and the best way to ensure high productivity from employees is to pay them for their performance! In other words, you’ll get their best by setting up a common-sense commission structure. 

What should those numbers be? That’s a great question for your training partner. These professionals have a deep knowledge of what makes a BDC tick, as well as a solid understanding of industry standards and regional trends. 

In general, it’s smart to structure pay packages in ways that compensate BDC agents beyond just their sales. Examples would include:

• Commission for setting valid appointments that actually show. That’s how you know their phone scripts are well-written and the team is properly prepared by the BDC manager. 
• Base salary or hourly wage that is a draw against commission.
• Bonuses on reaching appointment volume benchmarks.

By properly rewarding your BDC manager and their team for their efforts, not only will they become fabulously productive, but you’ll have solid data to qualify just how critical their contributions are to your bottom line. 

UTILIZE GREAT TRAINING RESOURCES

Well-trained employees are productive employees, and BDCs are no exception. If you expect your BDC manager to deliver the goods, they need to have access to high-quality training programs and partners that ensure their team members are set up for success.

What does a great training program look like? It should include every one of these four components:

• Provides high-quality initial instruction that is engaging and effective.
• Prioritizes mentoring employees individually over time to fully integrate new skills.
• Uses mystery shoppers to accurately measure the efficacy of the training.
• Delivers a long-term relationship that helps adapt to changing market conditions.

It sounds like a lot, but the best training teams can achieve all these goals with a surprisingly small investment of time. Typically, a few key examples shared with the team and short 20-minute touchup sessions are enough to address BDC manager concerns and keep the team on point. 

PHONE NINJAS WILL GET YOUR BDC UP AND RUNNING FAST

Getting your people great training is the most basic thing you can do to support your BDC manager. We founded Phone Ninjas specifically to empower your team to deliver maximum ROI, and we’ve designed our comprehensive training program with the best research-led strategies to impart all critical skills to your new business development center employees.

Our active coaching model partners a talented Phone Ninja with each team member, and they work together in one-on-one weekly sessions to build skills using real-life BDC calls they’ve been taking to best implement our training and scripts. Our clients are shocked to see their appointment-from-call rate skyrocket from the industry average of 20% to 60%, or even 80% and beyond. This is exactly what you want your BDC manager to bring into your business, and this is what Phone Ninjas’ hard-working coaches deliver.

There’s no time like the present to join the top dealerships with a modern BDC strategy. We’d love to show you how we’ll make this happen with a free demo and mystery shops—but we can only help once you reach out. Call us today to get started!

Evaluating your dealership’s sales team performance may seem as simple as looking at the bottom line, but in today’s market, it’s actually a very complicated equation. The top competitors are utilizing every tool and strategy at their disposal to maximize revenue, including sales scripts, BDCs, and extending vehicle sales conversations to integrate other services and drive return business. 

Because of this complexity, dealership owners and GMs need to use many metrics to evaluate how well the business is performing. In fact, it’s increasingly common to bring in dedicated specialists who can take a deep dive into the sales side to develop coaching strategies that take advantage of every opportunity. 

But what are these experts seeing that you might be missing? Here’s what to look at to evaluate sales team performance and keep your people working at peak efficiency. 

THE HARD DATA

While there are many nuances to modern sales strategies, anything that can be measured should be. Every GM should be familiar with the relevant data sets, what they mean, and—most importantly—what you can do to improve them. 

Vital KPIs

The following list includes the main metrics that can be used to monitor various aspects of your dealership’s sales strategy. They are the starting point for any consultant’s work and point them in the right direction to find possible gaps in skills or issues in sales scripts. 

Dollar metrics

Inventory turnover

Per-vehicle revenue targets

Used/new vehicle sales ratio

Sales per employee

Call-appointment ratios

Lead follow-up times

Conversion rates

Of course, many aspects of these numbers are related, and it takes a keen eye to understand exactly how they’re influencing your overall sales goals. 

Analyzing Trends

The next step is to use the information these metrics are telling you as a baseline for evaluating particular aspects of sales team performance and setting goals for improvement. This is where a dedicated training partner can make a big difference, both in terms of time and results. After all, an expert who knows what they’re looking for will find the problems immediately, whereas in-house processes often have a steep and expensive learning curve.

An automotive sales consultant will use this information to:

Evaluate work efficiency

Predict customer behavior changes

Identify unmet customer needs

Accurately evaluate employee strengths and weaknesses

Support key strategic decisions

Identify emerging trends 

Help you get out in front of potential challenges

Suggest effective product selection and marketing channels.

And this is just the beginning. A good statistical analysis of your sales team performance data is absolutely required in this day and age. It gives you the edge over the competition, helps you accurately understand employee needs, identify hidden strengths, and uncover trends and problems before they become serious liabilities.

EVALUATING SOFT SKILLS AND PHONE STRATEGIES

Once you understand the numbers, you’ll be ready to take a look at your team. This includes reviewing all your materials and observing their actual performance on the job. Ideally, you should use techniques that let you do both at once and you’ll need to review how your training procedures will address the issues. 

Mystery Shoppers

Human beings have a natural tendency to change their behavior in the presence of observers. In this case, that means you or your management team. So, the mere attempt to directly measure your employees’ skills will cause them to react differently than they would with regular customers.

This is where mystery shopping comes into play. A mystery shopper poses as a real customer on the phone to obtain a highly realistic impression of your sales team’s performance. These calls can be extremely revealing and often highlight concrete reasons why certain KPIs are underperforming. For instance, do you know why so many dealerships have low appointment rates? Their sales reps forget to ask. 

Whether it’s a script omission or just a performance issue, mystery shoppers give you the information you need to quickly correct every instance of an employee accidentally talking your dealership out of an opportunity to sell. It’s so important that many of the top dealerships in the country have dedicated business development centers (BDCs) that do nothing but handle and route customer calls. 

Examine Training Quality

To reach high levels of quality and consistency in your customer service, your coaching partner will need a training strategy that translates evaluations to real-world sales team performance improvement. Here’s what you should expect to see from a top consultant:

High-quality, engaging instruction and materials.

One-on-one mentor relationships that emphasize coaching.

Training module that limits direct instruction to six-minute training segments, separated by interactive activities and discussions that encourage engagement.

Long-term strategies that space out the learning to maximize retention.

Verifying the training with mystery shoppers and following up to ensure skills stick.

PHONE NINJAS CAN HELP

With the hurricane of responsibilities owners and GMs have to wade through every day, most of these processes are beyond the reasonable scope of what you can achieve alone. A great partner can be an invaluable asset when judging sales team performance.

At, Phone Ninjas we’ve spent years analyzing sales teams in the automotive industry, and we have a long track record of boosting underperforming KPIs that make an impact on your bottom line. Our clients routinely see appointment rates double and triple, and that’s just one of the many ways we can get your sales department firing on all cylinders. 

Maximizing sales team performance starts with the best automotive sales consultant in the game, and no one does it better than us. Drop us a line for a free demo including two mystery shops so we can show you exactly how we’ll transform your salespeople into superstars!

The reports and spreadsheets that flood your desk are not the only tools you should be using while tracking sales performance KPIs. They are highly valuable, but do they really deliver the whole picture?

Nope! Not by a long shot. And while receipt, phone, and internet surveys can help bridge the gap in some ways, they are very old-school and deliver little if any real value.

Mystery shoppers can be the missing piece of the puzzle you’ve been looking for to get a complete picture of your business through tracking sales performance. But to do this, you must consistently employ them so you can match details of specific performance trends to the hard data.

NUMBERS DON’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY

Sales reports and KPIs are popular metrics for tracking sales performance, but the problem with them is that humans can’t be reduced to an Excel spreadsheet. It turns out we are heavily driven by our emotions, and that’s why the effectiveness of sales calls is much more difficult to analyze beyond success and failure. 

Mystery shoppers are a key tool to learning why your customers buy what they buy, shop where they shop, and if they are ever coming back. It takes time for a human to evaluate emotions, and because mystery shoppers pose as customers, they will directly experience how your team and business policies impact your customers.

Evaluate Customer Service

If you’re watching over their shoulder, or if they feel like they’re being otherwise evaluated, your employees will act differently than they will with regular customers. It’s just a fact of human nature. So if your sales are rising or falling unexpectedly with no clear reason in the reports, your customer service should be a top concern.

While a sales call can feel highly personal, the fact is, customer service is about delivering consistent information and driving a lead toward value. Things like ensuring your salespeople use effective language for setting appointments and confirming them, for instance, can be easily identified during a mystery call, but a sales report simply points to an outcome that could be for many reasons. If you use mystery shoppers on a regular basis, you will be able to tie your metrics to actions on calls, not guess at the problem. 

Verify Compliance with Corporate Policies and the Law

These twin items are of critical importance to maintaining a healthy bottom line. Virtually every dealership of any sort has its own best practices and government regulations with which they must comply. 

If overall employee compliance is eroding, mystery shoppers will tell you before it becomes a significant problem. Considering the expensive implications of a failure to adhere to a franchising agreement, or worse, lawsuits and legal repercussions? You definitely want to catch these items early before they cause a really big problem.

Measuring Social Skills

It’s an open secret that, with the rise of the internet, social skills are in decline across nearly every part of the human experience. The isolation, loss of social norms, lower levels of interaction, reduced empathy, etc. caused by an over-reliance on digital devices and communication are affecting your customers as well as your team. 

That means intrapersonal skills are actually becoming more important these days. Customers who are less socially-abled will require superior interpersonal skills from your employees if you want to escort them to a sale. That’s one of the many reasons phone scripts are such an important point of any dealership’s game—they ensure customers are compassionately and consistently helped every step of the way and no revenue opportunity is left on the table.

A good mystery shopper will deliver the unvarnished truth of how your people’s people skills are measuring up. By matching this data with numbers collected while tracking sales performance, you’ve got yet another powerful tool at your command.

Verify Training Effectiveness 

Just because mystery shopping is intended to mimic an actual call doesn’t mean there aren’t goals. Because mystery shoppers work with you to develop an in-depth evaluation form, they’re able to measure how consistently and effectively your team is employing the training you’ve been paying for. 

And as training gets forgotten or drifts over time, you definitely want to know if it’s having an effect on the numbers you’re collecting while tracking sales performance. It will help you identify the best intervals for retraining and map overall skill growth.

Confirm Training Quality

Your people are out there in the trenches every day, and they know your customers well. If your training is obsolete or just plain bad, trust us, they know. 

If your training is based on poor assumptions, is deficient in its quality, or if the people performing the training are not up to the task, mystery shoppers will identify these problems. After all, they don’t strictly follow the evaluation form you drew up with them. A mystery shopper has the freedom and the responsibility to investigate other issues as they arise.

COMBINE MYSTERY SHOPPING AND TRAINING

Now that you see how accurately tracking sales performance requires mystery shopping, you can take the next step: combining your training program and mystery shoppers into a unified whole.

Phone Ninjas has built our entire business on this core philosophy. Mike Hoyser, our VP of Training, personally works with your team for initial analysis and strategy. Our Phone Ninjas then coach them individually over time to optimize learning and growth. Finally, our mystery shoppers verify the training so we can follow up with additional coaching if needed. 

This process is entirely hands-off for you, so you can focus on developing your business. We’re so confident of our integrated approach that we offer a free demo and two free mystery shops with no further commitment. If you choose to hire us, we work on a month-to-month basis so you can maximize your training budget without getting locked into long-term contracts.

Call or email us today so we can help transform your bottom line!

Your people are the heartbeat of your company’s success. Without them, your business would close tonight, but it’s not enough to simply keep them grinding toward monthly sales goals by dangling the same old carrots. Sales team motivation is built around shared vision, enthusiasm for the industry, the potential for career advancement, and achievable goals that translate to dollar bills in everyone’s pocket. 

To stay ahead of the competition, your employees have to feel like they matter and the work they’re doing is part of building a meaningful career. However, people can be complex, and successfully improving sales team motivation can be a difficult and occasionally non-intuitive task. What are some of the best ways to go about this?

There are two basic areas to focus on that can make all the difference: overall morale/culture, and specific incentivization. We’ll break them down so you can create a strategy that keeps your employees firing on all cylinders and hungry for more. 

WAYS TO BUILD MORALE

It’s no secret that happy workers are better workers—in fact, you can measure it. Employees with high morale generate 38% more revenue on average than their worn-down counterparts. Our first three tips are going to focus on keeping spirits up and bringing your team closer together.  

1. Recognize Performance

This is more than just a commission or an employee-of-the-week plaque. Taking your team members out to lunch, going above and beyond to help them, public thanks, and surprise benefits (doughnuts, coffee, etc.) are all great ways to improve your sales team motivation. Keep these shifting to avoid people coming to expect them, and remember: it’s not about how much you spend. Little investments that are carefully considered often mean much more than generic big-ticket expenses. 

2. Lead by Example

Employees respect employers who pitch in when hard work needs to be done, as well as understand the challenges of everyone’s job. When you’re respected, people work harder for you. Trust your team, and have their back when the going gets tough. 

This needs to be more than rolling up your sleeves, though. You should model the culture and values you want them to bring to the job. That starts with listening closely to their needs and working to minimize the obstacles in their path. Conversely, communicating the business’s challenges as appropriate is important context that can help them understand why decisions are being made instead of being left in the dark. If they don’t know why things are happening, they can easily form the wrong impression about your leadership skills. 

Finally, striving to create fair opportunities for your people is an investment that will assuredly pay you back, both in terms of a positive workplace culture and for navigating interpersonal challenges. If you avoid playing favorites, give your salespeople the chance to succeed on their own merits, and make your hiring processes about finding the best people for the job, they’ll be much more prepared to accept getting a “no” today. 

3. Give Them the Right Tools

You can be the nicest boss anyone’s ever had… but if the building is shabby, the breakroom is barren, the coffee’s bad, and their tools are old and broken, you’re going to have a lot of frustrated people on your sales floor.

A clean, comfortable, safe environment does wonders for morale, and if you couple that with the proper tools that let them show you their best, it’s a recipe for high-level sales team motivation. And, of course, don’t forget the most important tool of all: training! Invest in giving them the skills they need to succeed, and they’ll use them to generate huge returns for your business. 

WAYS TO INCENTIVIZE PERFORMANCE 

We all know the value of commissions and bonus structures, but there are innumerable additional areas where small opportunities can improve sales team motivation. Many of these ideas build on existing incentives you already have in place or can provide extra value for team members with individual goals. 

4. Simple, Individualized Compensation Plans

The last thing your team wants to have to navigate is complicated commission structures. Employees prefer bonus and commission schedules that are simple, transparent, and easy to understand.

But even this basic idea can be improved on. If you create structures that have some flexibility, it allows employees to tailor their personal commission plan to pursue the things that matter most to them. That means your overall sales team motivation will be greater compared to a single umbrella model.

5. Incentivize Every Team Member

The conventional wisdom is that people who sell get commissions and the rest of the team gets a flat rate. But if your dealership sticks to this outdated model, you’re missing out on the many productivity increases that come from paying on a commission basis. 

Now, this doesn’t mean you pay your administrative assistants a commission on each email. But finding healthy ways to tie every employee’s compensation to their daily performance furthering the success of your business (ideally in every paycheck rather than yearly bonuses) encourages all departments to work together at a higher level of productivity. These can include small monthly or weekly goals that represent modest—but cumulative—gains. 

6. Eliminate Commission Caps and “Ratcheting” Quotas

Some details of compensation plans can have a negative impact on sales team motivation. For example, many large companies impose caps on commissions, de-incentivizing their best sales reps. And “ratcheting” quotas (increasing future quotas as a “reward” for exceeding current year expectations) is a particularly destructive practice. Who’s going to work hard if the owner just moves the bar to reap the rewards of your skills?

Your compensation model should never prioritize your personal profits over fair and equitable practices. If your people think you’re lining your pockets with their nickels and dimes, they’ll never give you anything close to their best.  

7. Train Your People Well

Without the proper training and tools (like great sales scripts), even the best salespeople are relying on individual experience and improvisation. But if you train them well on those scripts, they will feel supported, empowered, and confident. They’ll have solid tools that help them master any situation, and their commissions will increase as a result.

CHOOSE GREAT PARTNERS TO SUPPORT YOUR TEAM

No one can be an expert at everything, and even if you make your team’s morale a #1 priority it doesn’t mean you’re going to have the time to give them everything they need. This is particularly true of training, which can be a huge benefit to your sales team but incredibly hard to implement in-house. 

This is where a great training partner like Phone Ninjas can ensure your team always feels like you’re giving them the best shot at success. We’re automotive and heavy equipment sales professionals with decades of combined experience, and we know what keeps your people delivering 110%. We’ve used this knowledge to craft our amazing sales scripts and real-world coaching guidance that will translate to their paycheck at the end of the month. There’s no better way to increase sales team motivation!

Our in-depth training features one-on-one coaching sessions using examples from their actual job to improve presentation, naturalness, and performance. We back this up with our mystery shopping program that gauges the success of the training and follows up with shopped employees to perfect every last detail.

Contact us now to schedule a free demo and two free mystery shops for your dealership, and get your team’s energy at an all-time high!