In my previous post, I discussed the difference between selling and guiding consumers in your dealership, and why it was so important for dealerships to act more like guides than salespeople. The problem here, of course, is that there’s sometimes a fine line between guiding and selling.

Even if you feel as though you’re guiding a consumer to the best possible choice, it might very well feel like selling in their eyes. This can be especially true for consumers who are pursuing your dealership’s website. For example: Having the option of “arranging your deal” might seem helpful, but what if a consumer isn’t ready to set up their deal? That being said: What does guiding actually look like to a consumer as opposed to selling on a dealership’s website?

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that, in general, salespeople are more disruptive than supportive or helpful. A good example of this (from the consumer’s POV) would be “Getting Up’d”at the dealership.

You, as a consumer, know what it is YOU want, but the dealership clearly doesn’t. However, you’re being treated as if you and the dealership have had long conversations about preferred services & inventory. You’re classified as a prospective buyer as opposed to someone who’s just looking at their options.

In a nutshell, the sales people who have “Up’d” you aren’t listening to what you have to say.  They’re offering suggestions with 0 knowledge of your purchase preferences and they aren’t guiding you to the things you want. Even if a dealer is genuinely trying to help (and believe me when I say a lot of them are), they aren’t personalizing their approach. Not only do I see this in dealer showrooms, I see this very often on dealer websites.

Dealers are now being provided with lots of opportunities to personalize the online experience for their consumers. Dealers can now make the experiences on their website smarter and more connected; thus incentivizing consumers to move further down the purchasing funnel: from the research phase all the way down to the purchase phase in the showroom. On a website, you can’t feasibly guide a consumer through anything without knowing anything about them. Connected experiences allow your website to collect useful information from the consumer.

The expectation from consumers is that if you they enter something into a website (regardless of what that experience is), the website is going to learn from that and help them move along their shopping journey. If your website doesn’t remember their information or even provide immediate viable solutions to smaller obstacles, the consumer will give up and leave your website.

When we think of good salespeople, we think about how helpful they were. Good salespeople don’t “trap you” (take information and provide nothing of value in return) or make you do things that you didn’t wanna do  (talk to a salesperson while simply looking at inventory).

Static forms are arguably the biggest and most prominent lead trap on dealership websites. Despite this fact, lots of dealerships still think this is a perfectly valid method of lead capture. Static lead forms are primary examples of things that SELL rather than guide on a dealership website. They don’t assist with anything. All they’re made for is collecting information.

Regardless of the type of experiences you place on your website, big or small, if you’re providing a consumer with valuable information and basically pointing them in the right direction when they’re on the site or when they come back, your website is doing a great job of guiding consumers. Selling (or trapping consumer information on a lead form) is the quickest way to push consumers away from you and off to a competitor.