Cold calls are one of the toughest sales pitches in any business. They are fraught with unknowns, and employees have to be prepared to answer sharp questions and navigate interactions on the fly.

They’re also a solid part of any sales plan, and if your team is close to a monthly goal, they can be the difference between clearing the bar and falling short. But how can you make the most of these unpredictable opportunities?

It turns out the best answer is also a little counterintuitive: scripts! Even though you’re going in blind, all the sales fundamentals and best practices still apply. Armed with well-thought-out cold calling scripts for car sales, your employees will have a solid roadmap that keeps them moving efficiently toward closing and maximizes potential revenue opportunities.

WHAT DO I NEED TO INCLUDE?

Whether you’re leaving a message or answering impromptu questions about the most minute details of your inventory, the basic structure will follow predictable patterns that any associate can learn to follow. Every business is a little different, but all cold-calling scripts for car sales should use a branching outline that covers the basic scenarios your associates are likely to encounter. These include things like greetings, common questions, and guidance for turning pushback into productive conversations. 

And remember: anything can happen, and a cold call can end immediately or result in a same-day sale. Your team will need to be on top of their scripts and on their toes to convert these conversations to sales. 

MAKE AN INTRODUCTION

This may seem obvious, but it’s very easy to get off on the wrong foot—especially on a cold call. How your team handles these important details can impact the later phases of the experience, and getting it right can be the difference between a hot sale and an icy fail:

The Greeting: Salespeople should politely and concisely introduce themselves, the business, and (if applicable) their department.

Establish a Relationship: A great script will guide employees through making a connection, as well as support using the customer’s preferred title throughout the call. 

Hook your Lead: When you make your initial pitch, keep it short, informative, attractive, and benefit-based.

Listen and Take Notes: Even though you’ve never met, this call is all about the customer! You’re going to need to find out exactly what you can help them with, and that means careful listening and taking notes. 

Cold calling scripts for car sales give your sales team a clear, repeatable, and professional outline to deliver consistent messaging every time. Whether they’re leaving a voicemail or speaking to a live customer, they’ll hit everything essential without any distractions. 

TRANSITIONING TO CUSTOMER NEEDS

Once they get past this tricky initial phase, a sales associate can move on to the heart and soul of the call. They’ll need to find out what value they can offer as quickly and efficiently as possible. After all, time is money, and that goes double for the customer holding the credit card. 

Qualifying Questions

Once introductions are made, a great script will start guiding a sales associate through the discovery process. Because you called them, these questions are critical to contextualizing the call and presenting a customer with exciting opportunities they don’t know about. 

Crucially, make sure you don’t leave questions open-ended! Customers will need clear choices they can respond to with definite answers to feel comfortable, less pressured, and in control. 

Appointment Requests

When you’ve established they’re interested, it’s time to invite them into the showroom to explore. Cold calling scripts for car sales should offer prompts for firm times, dates, and contact information that are followed up with polite confirmation. 

Vague language that prompts responses like “maybe next week” or “if have time after work tomorrow” should be avoided, and if customers are non-committal it may mean they need time to think. A script should be prepared to support that choice, but it shouldn’t be shy about specifics. 80% of customers feel more comfortable with a business if they can schedule an appointment. 

Confirm and Close the Call

“Thanks for your time, and we’re really looking forward to seeing you!” may sound like a decent enough way to end the call, but without a few core features this friendly closing has the potential to evaporate your lead! 

Be sure your scripts touch on the following important details:

Let them know you’re about to confirm and invite them to get a pen and paper. A missed appointment can make them feel awkward, and it’s always worth making the appointment easier for them to keep.

Make sure they know the name of the salesperson they’ll be meeting at their visit—especially if it’s you!

Provide the address and customer-relevant directions to your dealership.

Confirm the appointment time, date, and location.

Promise a follow-up call to further confirm the appointment.

Thank the customer for their time.

Including these points in the closing of your cold calling scripts for car sales will give the customer everything they need. Attention to detail lets them know you care about their business and value their time. 

COACH YOUR EMPLOYEES

To make sure your cold calling scripts for car sales work as intended, your team will need training, feedback, and lots of practice. Ideally, this will include mystery shops, active coaching from dedicated auto phone sales professionals, and repeated contact over time. 

One excellent method professional phone sales trainers use to get a team comfortable is called the “Leapfrog Technique.” It builds familiarity with your script and gives them a dynamic understanding of how to use it. It’s ideal for cold-calling scenarios that can require pivoting at a moment’s notice. 

First, number every sentence. Then, have your employees practice it in the following ways:

Read each sentence in order.

Read just the even numbers…

…then the odd numbers…

…then in reverse order…

…then evens and odds in reverse order.

Now, they can make the script work in any order circumstances may require.

ASK FOR HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT

As you can see, writing and coaching cold calling scripts for car sales is involved and time-intensive. Sometimes it makes sense to bring in outside help from professionals who write these scripts for a living. 

At Phone Ninjas, writing phone scripts and training employees to use them is our bread and butter. We deliver hand-tailored scripts for your business (not recycled sales jargon by big-box sales generalists) from our team of automotive sales champs who bring over five decades of combined experience to the table.

Even better, we take care of all training, actively coach your people over time with weekly sessions, and use mystery shops to evaluate their skills in real-world scenarios.

Let us turbocharge the performance of your dealership with our cold-calling scripts for car sales. We’d love to chat and demonstrate how to set your cold-calling game on fire.

Why you need Quality Assurance Training…

When you want to improve the quality of your phone calls, it can be challenging to know where to start. Even if you have standardized procedures and phone scripts, every phone agent operates a little differently. To improve outcomes, you need to know how to use quality assurance training and what some of the outcomes you should be looking for are.

What is Quality Assurance Training?

Quality assurance training focuses on making sure that your phone agents are having successful phone calls with customers and potential customers. Depending on the type of phone call they are conducting, this means that they should be able to resolve any concerns, answer questions, and set appointments with the people to whom they are talking. It can also focus on phone skills, conflict resolution, or any other important metrics to you and your dealership. Quality assurance training is most effective when the employees are not aware that the phone call they are currently on will be used to evaluate them and provide the basis for training. This can give you a clearer picture of what their usual phone calls contain.

How to Conduct the Training

To conduct quality assurance training, you need to start by establishing benchmarks and metrics that employees need to hit to be considered successful. The more clearly defined you can make these metrics, the better because these provide the basis for evaluation and training. Once you know what you are looking for, you should select random phone calls to record and evaluate each phone agent. These phone calls should be evaluated against the established criteria, and feedback should be noted immediately. This immediate feedback can serve as the basis for training if the phone agent doesn’t pass the evaluation, or it can be used to provide feedback and praise to phone agents that do pass. Once you have gathered the data about your phone agents, it can be used in two different ways for training. First, this information should be used to evaluate the success of each phone agent individually and provide them with steps they can take to improve their performance. It can identify areas of weakness before they cause too many problems. Second, this data, in aggregate, can help you see how your dealership is performing and what patterns are emerging. This should inform your overall training and where you should focus your efforts for improvement.

Increased Appointments

Appointments are one of the best ways to bring in new sales. People who show up to look at vehicles without an appointment can be converted into a sale, but if you know someone is showing up intending to buy a car during their appointment, you have a greater chance of success. And with so many dealerships competing for a limited pool of customers, you need everything you can get on your side. This is why ensuring your phone agents are successfully setting appointments is crucial. If you are effectively using your quality assurance evaluations and training to focus on this, you should see an increase in both appointments set and appointments that show up. 

Decreased Escalation

One of the biggest things that lead to conflict over the phone and phone calls that need to be escalated is ineffective phone agents. Customers often get frustrated when they feel like they aren’t being listened to, when no one can answer their questions, or if they are left on hold for longer periods. These issues can be reduced if phone agents are trained properly in more than setting appointments. Quality assurance evaluation and training can help you pinpoint what is frustrating customers and require phone agents to escalate a call to the next level. While you won’t be able to avoid all need for escalation, reducing the number of calls with frustrated customers is important for your reputation and overall customer satisfaction.

When used effectively, quality assurance training is one of the best tools that you have to help your phone agents be successful at their jobs and to keep your dealership running smoothly. Setting clear metrics and understanding what success looks like is key to getting the results you want.

Do you need some extra assistance with your training? Check out how our active coaching can help!

We can do many things to stand out against the competition. Quality phone skills, streamlined processes, and even an up-to-date website. Yet many of us struggle to achieve any of the above tasks. Have we ever stepped back and asked ourselves why we cannot accomplish any (or all) of the above? Sure, there's the age-old excuse of "not enough time in the day" or "we don't need that to sell cars.” Another favorite is “we've been selling cars before all that was a thing and are doing just fine." Just fine? Being just fine is just that "fine" - "average," but what about when "fine" or "just average" no longer cuts it? 

It's like we understand what the core challenges are, but we just won't tackle them until they're punching us in the face. And even then, as we're getting punched with one thing after the other, we're making knee-jerk reactions instead of focusing on the root cause of the problem. That is ensuring our teams are adequately trained, have streamlined processes, or working with an updated website that offers prospective customers a good experience. It's that word, though, "experience," that often throws us for a loop. A loop that has been on repeat for the last ten-plus years. The auto loop of having the conversations on what we could do to only half-ass those changes. 

Hiring a trainer for a one-day session filled with buzzwords is not training, sorry. Just like "grabbing your GSM for an all of a sudden brain dump meeting" isn't going to work. Have we ever thought that perhaps randomly grabbing a GSM - in the middle of their work - is a good idea? Beating them over the head with an ill-explained problem that isn't even thought out? Where their responses - being on the spot - are often bum-rushed word vomit that isn't going to solve the problem? Much less the damage it does to the morale when they go back and word vomit what their teams are or aren’t doing? And to make it worse, let's say you go back to the GSM two days later to ask what the updates are, and they give you a deer-in-the-headlights look because it is entirely out of their minds. To which, heck, you might go to a random sales consultant’s desk or BD agent and "quiz" them – the same thing happens, though. They give you a deer-in-the-headlights look. To make it worse, the GM might even stand over the Sales Consultant or BD Agent while they're on the phone to wait for an answer. There's nothing like being on the phone while trying to concentrate with someone breathing down your neck. 

So, what is that? Well, it's not good. And no, this isn't about beating up the GM, either. But it is an all-too-common problem. Not to mention, almost everyone wants to do better. It's just that to do better, you need resources. Those resources are clear expectations, training, and processes in our case. Without those, it is a free for all war zone full of chaos and uneasiness. No one wants to sit there looking like the class clown, but it's inevitable when the dunce runs the show. It's time we put the dunce cap down and focus on what can and will impact the dealer level. Take a minute and get with your GSM. Let them get with their teams to ensure that the website is up to date, ensure there is a refresher on the processes, and, most importantly, make sure there is a process in place for ongoing training. Try being proactive vs. reactive because when it hits the fan, and it will, chance favors the prepared mind. 

Taking a minute to invest in your managers - as a GM - will not just build trust within your dealership, but it will create a positive environment where your teams will be more proactive about training. All too often, training or even asking for changes is seen as being negative or "questioning the status quo," as in, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Well, are we so far past being broke that we just don't know how to fix it? Perhaps, but the good news is that there's nothing wrong with wanting to "fix" the root cause. Tackling the problems that can and will set us back as we learn to navigate the ever-changing new normal. If you're serious about fixing the problem's root cause, take a minute to complete a free stealth test.

Caller ID was created to make everyone’s lives easier. Sometimes in a dealership setting, it does, especially when a customer has a thick accent or a hard time remembering their phone number. Other times (98% of the time), the caller ID is the communication killer that staff should avoid at all costs.

Why is caller ID a communication killer? We have all heard the saying, “Assuming just makes an ass out of you and me;” well, the caller ID information being accurate is an assumption that we should never make! Too many times, we hear associates regurgitating the caller id information on their screen and the customer needing to correct them or, worse, agreeing and then the information isn’t correct.  It is not a reliable source of accurate information, and we should be working to communicate with our customers to retain their contact information through verbal communication ALWAYS. We want our customers to provide their information with every call interaction willingly. That is how we know we are creating a valuable customer experience and crucial customer relationships. 

The other topic that goes along with caller ID is assuming the customer knows or doesn’t know where the dealership is located. This is a topic to be openly discussed with the customer. When the sales associate assumes the customer is unaware of the dealer’s location and just blurts out an address, it doesn’t benefit anyone. It wastes time during the call, and anyone can throw an address out there; however, if the customer knows the dealer’s location, it’s a waste of time; if the customer doesn’t know the dealer’s location, the physical address doesn’t mean too much either. We should be having the conversation with the customer and using local landmarks and easily notable visual cues to give directions when the customer needs it. And confirming they truly know is an absolute best practice. There is nothing worse than making it through the entire call with clear communication and insulting the customers intelligence by blurting an address out at them without confirming that the customer needs it or not. This is especially present with the customers caller ID shows something other than a local area code and the associate is assuming what they know about the customer. 

So how can we adjust and make sure that our communication is solid? Ensure that there’s a system in place that gives our associate a sure-fire way to secure correct customer contact information from the start. That system should guide the associate through the entire call, keeping that communication clear, informative, and efficient. When an associate (sales or service) has a system that keeps the call flowing and communication crystal clear throughout, then there is little margin for error. When that happens, our customer service is top notch and that should be our goal for every interaction. We should be asking direct questions, listening to the customer, and engaging further from there. When we are truly engaged, we will always be providing better service. Moral of the story is, collect customer information verbally and always confirm that the customer is aware of dealer location before giving them landmark directions.

I Hate Phone Calls

I am a Gen X-er with a Millennial attitude towards the phone: Please don’t call me. I will go to great lengths to avoid answering a phone as well as placing a phone call. This affliction has plagued me since I was a kid and would freeze in a complete panic if someone asked me to call the pizza guy for a delivery. Yes, at one point in this world, we had to pick up the phone to have food delivered. Can you imagine the horror? So, I once purchased a car via text message and thought it was the greatest process of all time. I bragged about it for years. All the while, I knew I had made a mistake and that this car just wasn’t right for me.

The Process

I only cared if my new car was cute and had heated seats. It was literally the only request. So, when I received a text back saying that the car found was an “S” rather than an “SV,” I didn’t know that meant it was a basic model. I assumed it meant my dream car was found and I moved forward in excitement! They sent me pictures of the car and we even finalized the pricing all through text. I was so relieved. No human contact! This was a dream come true; until it wasn’t.

The Purchase

The car was shipped from Florida, so it took a few days to arrive. I couldn’t wait to pick it up. When it finally arrived, the process was smooth. I signed a few pieces of paper and was given a tour of the interior. I loved it. But, when I was halfway home, I tried to turn on my heated seats and realized that they did not exist. I called the dealership for help finding the heated seat button (after having a slight panic about making an actual call) and found out the hard way what the “S” model meant. No heated seats. Eventually, the car turned out to be a lemon. I never would have known that during a test drive, but at least I would have known about the seats. I made a mistake.

The Reality

As a career sales professional, I understand how silly it is to hate talking on the phone. I do it for a living myself, so I have to pause to think about what it was that I was actually trying to avoid. The answer is simple: It’s that feeling of incompetence and of wasting time. Consumers dread the car shopping experience. If a fact-finding call had happened at the beginning of the process, and I was assured that the salesperson considered my needs and my time important, I am sure that I would have had a completely different experience and probably not ended up with that lemon. It isn’t hard to build trust over the phone. Listen to what your consumer is asking for and come up with a solution that fits their needs. Don’t use that initial phone call to sell. Nobody likes feeling like are being “sold,” This call is just to find out what they are looking for and to give you an idea of how to best fit their needs. Keep the call short and sweet so as not to waste their time. Once you have figured out the best option for their needs, set an appointment for that test drive. They need to know if they are comfortable in the car. Do they like the displays, is there room for their travel mug, and does the car have heated seats?

In closing, phones have become more important over the years because they include our email, texts, apps, a calculator, calendars, and a phone. It’s more than a communication tool, it’s an everything tool. From music to sports to politics; video stores are out of business and so are payphones. Because of today’s phone. People need to embrace the phone and be equipped to handle today’s consumers on the phone on their terms.