By Jake McCracken, Consultant, IM@CS
Over the last 24 months of traveling the country, working hands-on with many dealers and their digital strategy, it has become very apparent that many dealers still operate without a BDC (Business Development Center) or any isolated internet department. That means the sales staff handling leads are also working the floor, delivering cars, and staying on top of the latest product knowledge.
This presents several challenges for a management team in making the most of the many opportunities coming into the dealership. It’s fair to say that most dealers have a good process in place for taking care of the walk-in traffic and even inbound phone calls. It’s internet leads that seem to take a back seat to the rest when it comes to attention spent, and with most dealers shifting a large amount of their budget to digital spend, that creates a major ROI issue.
From your dealer principal’s perspective, this is not acceptable and is costing the dealership a lot of money on missed opportunity. Here’s how you fix it.
First, you must change the culture. Yes, that word again. If you have a culture of salespeople waiting for something to happen, you will get average results. If you want more, you (the manager) has to create a culture of wanting more and doing what it takes to get it. To change the culture, you have to change the habits and the way of thinking.
Measure the Proper Metrics
- Outbound Activities
The best place to start is to figure out what your sales staff spends the majority of the day doing. Are they hanging at the front door, on the golf cart, or spending three hours in the morning planning lunch? Hopefully they are spending their time looking through the CRM and nurturing those opportunities that have come across.
Start measuring their outbound activity. Calls, emails, and text messages should be monitored on a daily basis. Take the amount of total outbound activities and determine the average amount of activity each salesperson completes on a daily basis. You will likely be shocked how little they do.
- Appointments and Performance
To improve culture, you have to get everyone focused on appointments. It’s the new “up.” In a recent mid-year study, NextUp reported a year over year drop in walk-in traffic by 15%. In that same time period, appointments were up 17%. That trend is not going to change anytime soon. You should be tracking the rate of appointments set per lead as well as the percentage of appointments that show. On top of tracking these numbers, you must have a bullet-proof process in place for confirming these appointments. This is a manager responsibility and will greatly impact the amount of appointments that show.
- Quality of Response
Are you inspecting what you expect? You must be active in the CRM as a manager as well and make certain that the communication from your sales staff is up to par with your expectations. Listen to calls, spot check outbound emails, make sure the focus is on appointments, are they utilizing video, etc.
- Response Time
This one is not new; however, it is a big issue at many dealerships that have a sales team handling internet leads. It is crucial that you have a process in place that drives attention, at all times, to lead handling and make certain that you get to them quickly. Set a goal (recommend under 15 minutes) and find out the current percentage of leads that hit your expectation. Your job is to then to find a way to improve that percentage month over month.
Training Plan
Now that you have a clear vision and plan on what to measure, you have to execute. This will be determined based on the expectations you set, and the accountability measures put into place to drive the change. Remember, we’re changing a culture here.
- Modern Day Meetings
Too many meetings in the car business could be reduced. Time over time spent discussing the same topics in a poor attempt at motivation. Make more of your meetings by utilizing the CRM. You should run all of your future sales meetings out of the CRM. Put it up on the screen and review the performance. It’s all there, so use it. This alone will assist you in driving positive change. Create a culture around CRM.
- One-on-One Training
If you only take one thing away, this should be it. One-on-one meetings are not new to the business; however, they are rarely consistent. You must create a plan to have a daily one-on-one meeting with your staff for CRM reviews and follow up. Find three or four reports that shows you items discussed above such as outbound activities, appointment performance, email reviews, and closing percentage. Set goals and expectations between meetings to track growth. The hardest part about this is finding the time to do it with all of the other tasks you have throughout any given day. This is where you will lean on the entire management team to assist. The GM, desk mangers, and finance should all be involved in a hands-on approach with the sales staff and monitoring internet lead performance.
In closing, you have trackable action items to begin working on. The key is consistency. If you want it to change, your team will follow when they see you taking the proper actions. Closing internet leads at a higher rate is simply a few habits away.
About the Author
Jake brings 15 years of automotive experience, with 10 plus in management including digital marketing, inventory management, finance, and training, including the set-up of CRM best practices and processes for follow-up and customer retention, maintenance multiple dealer websites, vendor relationships, and measuring analytics to determine the best ROI of advertising expenditure.
