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    Selling Cars in the Digital Age
    Selling Cars in the Digital Age
    Selling Cars in the Digital Age
    Ebook342 pages3 hours

    Selling Cars in the Digital Age

    By Brian Pasch, Marc McGurren, Glenn Pasch and Edward Shaffer

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    About this ebook

    A comprehensive guide to boost profits at your dealership through better lead handling processes and accountability,
    In this book…
    Automotive marketing pros, proven industry thought leaders, and former auto dealership internet managers and salesmen outline the concepts, strategies, and game plan to help you boost the productivity of your sales team. Sell more cars in a digital age by mastering your CRM and by understanding how consumers shop for vehicles online.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 22, 2016
    ISBN9781483590967
    Selling Cars in the Digital Age

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      Book preview

      Selling Cars in the Digital Age - Brian Pasch

      line.

      Creating the Foundation

      Defining Your Objectives

      Something that one’s efforts or actions are intended to attain or accomplish; a goal or target; a purpose. – Webster’s Dictionary

      Car dealers regularly set objectives for sales, service, parts, and F&I departments. Running a multi-disciplined business without objectives and goals is akin to operational suicide, yet objective setting is not consistent in all areas of dealership operations.

      Ask yourself the following:

      How important is objective setting at your dealership for sales?

      What level of accountability is applied to the objectives set each week, month, or year?

      This book focuses on how a car dealership handles sales leads: phone calls, chats, and Internet leads. Our recommendations will require leadership and clear performance objectives for all sales departments. With the processes in place and clear objectives set, dealers will sell more cars.

      We have a few questions for you regarding your dealership:

      Does the dealership have clear performance objectives (closing ratios) for each type of sales opportunity? (calls, leads, chats, texts, etc.)

      How were the performance objectives for leads set?

      Does the dealership measure how its closing ratios compare to their peers’ ratios?

      Are monthly unit sales goals based on the opportunities present in the marketplace or based on increasing sales based on last year’s numbers?

      What would the dealership define as a successful outcome if it implemented the processes and advice in this book?

      If your dealership is underperforming, then this book is perfect to increase the effectiveness of your sales team. If you are a market leader, then you will increase your lead on your competitors.

      The top performing dealers keep a sharp focus on daily objectives for each role in their dealership. This discipline has fostered greater productivity within their team and a greater conversion rate for all sales opportunities.

      Incorporating Objective Setting into Your Culture

      Objective setting can be applied to simple daily tasks at the dealership, such as staff meetings. Have you ever attended a poorly run dealership meeting where nothing seems to be accomplished? Did you find yourself shouting inwardly to yourself: I could be doing five other things that are more important than being here.

      In stark contrast, you may also have attended a dealership meeting where the conversation was focused. You were asked to provide your opinion and you were part of a collaborative discussion. You came out of this meeting invigorated. Your time was well rewarded.

      Rarely do business owners run a post-mortem after a failed meeting to determine why it was unproductive. Great meetings do not happen by chance. Productive meetings are the result of good planning and clear objectives. With dealership sales goals based on a fast moving 30-day clock, do you have the luxury of avoiding objective setting daily?

      Objectives can apply to simple things like how we speak. When communicating with others, consider your objective:

      What do I want to accomplish with this call to a customer?

      What do I want to accomplish with this meeting?

      What is the outcome I want to achieve from this conflict?

      Remember that meetings and phone calls pull people away from what they are doing. If your interaction does not have a purpose, it can be perceived as a waste of time. We never want our customers to think that we don’t value their time on the phone!

      Once you set an objective, the next step is to outline what specific actions are needed to accomplish the objective. A sales professional preparing for a showroom appointment might list these steps:

      Familiarize myself about the potential customer

      Prepare a customized sales presentation

      Highlight key points that solve the client’s pain

      Listen to the client’s responses carefully

      Clearly communicate the value proposition of the dealership

      Once steps are outlined, the sales professional can execute the process, monitor the interaction, and change tactics as needed to accomplish the objective.

      By having your objective in mind ahead of time, and by planning the steps you need to accomplish your objective, you control your actions and responses versus being unprepared and potentially losing control of the conversation. We all have experienced the embarrassment of saying something we shouldn’t have, which may have been avoided with better preparation.

      Watch children. They are the masters of focused attention on accomplishing their objective. They adapt very quickly and change tactics if their actions are not leading towards success. We all need to commit to our own objectives with the same childlike intensity and have the flexibility to change tactics when needed.

      If selling more cars and building more loyal customers is your objective, then we have the blueprint to achieve that objective. Take the time to read and apply the principles in this book. You will be well-rewarded.

      Objectives Based on Units Sold per Month

      Once you finish reading this book, you will understand why setting an objective to sell a specific number of cars per month, without measuring opportunity, could be holding back your overall success. Opportunities are the Internet leads, phone calls, chat sessions, and showroom ups in each month.

      Your monthly unit sales objective should be a formula: Opportunities Multiplied by the Output of a Defined Sales Process. – Brian Pasch

      When an effective sales process is in place and benchmarks are set for converting opportunities into sales, the dealership can focus its attention on increasing opportunities. Although digital marketing strategy is not the topic of this book, the combination of solid sales processes with an intelligent digital marketing strategy is the key to market domination.

      Why should dealers stop focusing on hitting a number each month? This philosophy was clearly demonstrated when we worked with a successful dealer group in Mexico. They asked us to innovate their Internet sales process, and in a very short time we did just that!

      When we first arrived, the dealer principal summarized the dealership’s sales performance, sales structure, and what he believed to be their opportunity to grow the business. In a six-month period, using the processes in this book, their Internet sales increased by over 50%.

      Their Internet leads were up over 100%, providing more opportunities than they could handle. The total unit sales were never higher.

      We were very happy to see that the dealership was hitting new sales records. In a staff meeting, the dealer principal congratulated the team for hitting his number for the month. At face value, you would think that this would be the right thing to do, however it was not balanced with a very important fact.

      When we showed the dealer the sales opportunities he had in the month and multiplied the number of opportunities by a comfortable sales conversion ratio, the dealership should have sold another 70 vehicles.

      The dealer quickly corrected himself. He promised us that going forward, he would set his monthly goals based on the number of opportunities his marketing dollars would produce multiplied by the expected conversion ratios of his Internet and floor sales team.

      Using the advice and strategy contained in this book, PCG documented current sales conversion rates and put in place the training and processes to increase the net sales from the current opportunities at the dealership.

      Each month, the management teams review a spreadsheet that documents all phone calls, leads, chats, and showroom ups. They have all agreed on company-wide conversion metrics. If any process fails to meet the conversion rates, the team knows where additional training is

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