A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the cornerstone that keeps dealerships successful, no matter the state of the industry (as this past year taught us). As CRM technology continues to evolve with growing customer expectations, two things are consistent. Dealers want great adoption, and they want a strong return on their investment – and they want it quickly. After all, we all know the best CRM system for your dealership is the one that is actually used.

Dealers expect their staff to be able to use the system after the initial training or onboarding process, but in reality, this is very unlikely to happen. Why? You ask. Was the training not effective? Or, did my employees not pay attention? The answer is often no.

It’s more critical than ever before to think long-term about how your CRM will scale and grow with your business.  It usually takes more than just new, shiny features. Embracing shifts in culture and technology, optimizing processes and winning employee buy-in stack the odds in your favor.

In this article, we’re going to focus on three key areas you should know and inspect to ensure your people, processes and CRM are working as well as they should be.

Modernize Your Sales Culture

If you’ve worked in the car business for any length of time, you’ve likely endured more than a few painful sales meetings. Not only does taking the heat of an unhappy post-game analysis demoralize your team, but it also often means you’re managing after the fact instead of coaching strategy when there’s still a chance to win.

Suppose you’re routinely reporting on close rates versus activities or advising your team to pick up the phone and call or email more customers. In that case, it’s time to rethink customer engagement. Savvy dealers measure the speed and quality of interactions instead of relying solely on traditional task-driven workplans. The path to higher profits lies in your ability to quickly identify the dealership’s most engaged prospects and deliver personalized experiences every time.

Hire for Personality, Train for Retention

With the average annual turnover hovering at an average of 67 percent, according to the 2020 NADA Dealership Workforce Study, some dealerships are hesitant to invest in quality training for employees. But poorly trained staff can’t produce consistently and skipping training impacts your bottom line significantly.

Concentrate on hiring employees that share your dealership’s values and invest in ongoing training. A prospective employee who demonstrates a strong work ethic and focuses on building relationships is more important than industry background.

Many advantages of a CRM system are visible only at the dealership level. You must coach your sales staff to understand how using the CRM system will benefit them personally. Then, set performance metrics to measure, evaluate and change to align with business goals.

Partner with a CRM that offers a robust training program to help you deliver ongoing training for both technical skills and proven processes. With the heavy lifting of technical training out of the way – you can focus on coaching soft skills that result in better outcomes.

Put Customers at the Heart of Your Goals (And Your Technology)

While selling a single car today is great, it’s much more profitable to build long-term relationships with customers. Include key customer engagement metrics in your daily reporting and coach your team on their activities. This will naturally improve close rates. Your CRM should also help you turn prospects into loyal customers with the ability to:

Meet customers where they are by learning where customers want to interact with you and communicating via their preferred channel.

Get personal with tools that help you track and learn shopper behavior so that you can engage them with practical and relevant conversations.

Respond before your competition by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to deliver the information customers want real-time.

Building loyal customer relationships start with developing a unique sales culture and taking proactive steps to encourage employees to grow with your dealership. By guiding employees to value customer experiences, you can lead them to engage better, build stronger relationships and sell faster.

If 2020 taught automotive retail any lessons, it’s that digital experiences are no longer just a part of our business. Instead, the way dealers engage customers in digital environments is equally, if not more important, than showroom experiences in 2021.

The future path to increased profits starts with a solid foundation of technology. But it’s the buying experience you deliver with that technology that makes all the difference with today’s shoppers.

So, how we actually deliver the engaging experiences, we’ve been promising consumers for the last decade? Here are some tips….

Get Personal or Get Left Behind

Auto shoppers have more choices than ever before. According to McKinsey, 70% of a customer’s buying experience is based on how they feel they are treated.

For dealerships to remain competitive in today’s shopping environment, it is essential to embrace the power of hyper-personalized conversations. To truly engage customers along their car buying journey, tracking and learning shopper behavior is critical.

The average dealership collects thousands of customer data points, but 60% of businesses still struggle to execute an effective personalization strategy.

Why? Without the right dealership CRM, it’s often challenging to find the hottest leads, making it tough to reply with customized messages that fit your buyer’s preferences.

If you can’t rely on your CRM to aggregate your customer data, activities and conversations in one place so that your team can engage in real-time, then it’s time for a change.

So, what turns a conversation into an engaging experience?  🤔

Here’s an easy checklist to keep in mind when you evaluate how your dealership interacts with customers:

Highly-personalized to the customer journey – Use your customer data to gather key insights that help you engage shoppers with tailor-made conversations and messages that answer their questions.

Communicate like a trusted friend  – If you want to build relationships, empower your sales team to communicate with engaging text messages and personalized videos that result in meaningful conversations. Using a customer’s preferred method of communication is key.

Lean into AI for real-time interactions – Buyers want information on their own schedule. Don’t be fooled by buzzwords. Lean on true artificial intelligence tools that can truly engage consumers in a conversational manner when your sales team is occupied with other customers. 

Mobile is mandatory – Mobile tools that make it easy to engage from anywhere are essential to giving your sales team the competitive edge. If you value quick responses and the ability to work deals from anywhere, then mobile CRM cannot be an afterthought.

Strengthen your social reputation – As word-of-mouth referrals move to digital spaces, don’t let social conversations and online reviews overshadow your brand. Look for technology that fully-integrates social media to expand your reach and meet customers where they spend the most time online.   

• Seamless experiences win – Providing first-class, omnichannel retail is just as critical as brick-and-mortar experience. If you’re not offering shoppers a seamless experience from online to onsite visits – your competitors will. 

Embracing an Engagement Mindset

Rethinking dealership conversations means shifting employees from a task-driven mindset to one where reps consistently engage customers with informative, genuine conversations to build relationships. The result is better customer experiences and increases in gross profits.

A BETTER EXPERIENCE

Customers in any industry, want a better experience. Yet all we do is email, email, email. Engagement rates (responses from the customer) are only around 10% on a good day. Engagement with text is 3 times as great as email, hovering around 30% greater on average. Texting initiatives totally make sense for dealerships, but how do we change the dealership mentality of email as the default form of communication?

TEXTING IS QUICK AND EFFECTIVE

Ask your sales team if they had a party, and wanted to invite their friends, how would they contact them? By email? Probably not these days. One person doesn’t make a very good party. Let’s talk to customers the way most people communicate today. Texting is quick, short, personal, and can be effective in getting people on the phone.

ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

If we know texting creates higher engagement, how can we measure it to ensure sales people are texting their customers? Below is a chart of several stores showing their texting and email activity in one month. Challenge your team to be at a 1 text to 1 email ratio (1:1). Meaning, if your store sends out 5000 emails, you should also have 5000 texts. Once this metric is practiced, it won’t be hard to achieve your goals. In the case studies below, you can see that some very successful stores are at 2:1 ratio (twice as many texts as emails).