Online brokers are increasingly eating up market share in the automotive sales industry. The traditional ways for brick-and-mortar dealers to attract customers are changing, and 70-80% of all leads come from the phone or the internet. Tomorrow’s dealer sales solutions need to focus on perfecting phone communication and maximizing every possible sales opportunity to compete.
A great website is a must today, but that’ll never provide the personal touch so important to closing sales. Excellent phone skills and preparation are still underutilized tools to help your team make these all-important human connections in this more anonymous age.
A good strategy is to double down on fantastic customer service solutions, perfect phone sales strategies, and emphasize personal customer contact and care. You can separate yourself from the faceless pack of online dealers and industry peers by unifying your brand message and customer interactions, using active employee coaching and scripts, mystery shops, and finding the right customer service partners.
Here’s how to leverage all these tactics to boost your monthly sales goals and get an edge over the competition in 2024.
1. Unify Your Brand and Customer Service Presentation
In the past, selling your brand image and maintaining quality customer interactions were largely left up to each person on the sales team. While they might be individually talented communicators, the rise in phone interactions has made it increasingly necessary to provide a consistent and uniform message. Also, most contact with your dealership and inventory will start online, and employees need to be prepared to greet customers at a variety of points in the funnel, not just the top.
To create a consistent, integrated experience, branding, and customer service protocols need to be a top-down concern for dealers as part of a larger sales strategy. GMs need to invest in content and coaching support for channeling customers through the dealership, as well as training associates to nurture and capitalize on all sales opportunities.
These are big steps, but once you’ve developed a strategy you can get your whole team on board. Every employee will know what’s expected of them and how to respond to any situation so that your customers experience the same wonderful customer service every time they reach out.
2. Active Employee Coaching
Sales training in the automotive industry has historically focussed on handing information to employees and hoping their commission is enough motivation to absorb it. Unfortunately, in 2024, that’s just not going to get the job done.
It can be tempting to hold a training session or two that involves everyone watching a lecture or PowerPoint presentation. But how much will they remember? Will they be able to apply what they’ve learned?
True mentors know deep, thorough learning is a process that takes time and requires consistent coaching to make new skills second nature. You’ll need to invest in active training that’s based on analysis, feedback, and repeated personalized interactions to make sure it sticks.
Owners and GMs have the knowledge to fill this role, but they rarely have the time to invest in the individualized training modern phone sales strategies require to execute well. A dedicated training partner with industry expertise is a must for 2024.
3. Customized Sales Scripts
Sales scripts have a bad reputation in some circles, but that’s largely the result of poorly-written and lazily-delivered content. The best scripts are created by industry insiders who’ve seen and heard it all, and they provide a myriad of advantages over improvised banter when presented by enthusiastic employees who know them backward and forward.
Great scripts should always:
- Keep salespeople moving towards the sale, and limit distractions that don’t contribute to answering customer questions and building
- Ensures your customers experience your dealership exactly as you want them to, every time.
- Have many branching paths that enable employees to tackle any situation they might encounter with confidence and expertise.
- Improve lead generation by building in mechanics to identify new leads, especially in difficult or complicated situations where your team members may miss opportunities while preoccupied with managing the situation.
While you can write your own scripts, it’s a lot of hard work and takes significant field testing to refine and polish them. A dedicated coaching partner has the experience and resources to get them dialed in the first time.
4. Mystery Shops
Mystery shops are some of the best feedback you’ll ever get for your phone sales game. Traditional customer surveys, online questionnaires, and comment cards have a degree of utility but, in the end, don’t really provide much actionable intel. These old-fashioned dealer sales solutions don’t offer the chance for dynamic follow-up questions and rarely lead back to specific employee deficits.
Mystery shops take care of all these problems. When trained mystery shoppers pose as customers, you’ll get specific and solid data on how each team member performs. And the best mystery shopping companies back it up with effective active coaching and offer follow-up practice to help employees grow and perform more effectively.
Find the Right Coaching Partner
As we discussed, this is a lot for any owner or general manager to take on, and you already have enough on your plate. Given this reality, hiring an active coaching agency that covers all these bases is a smart play.
Phone Ninjas was founded by auto industry sales experts with over half a century of combined experience selling cars and trucks. And while other generic sales training companies may have file cabinets full of stock scripts they hand out to everyone with a checkbook, we hand-tailor our scripts to your dealership’s every need.
We also cover all the bases for implementing your sales strategy so you can focus on running your business and evaluating the results of our work. At Phone Ninjas, we coach individual employees in one-on-one sessions until they’ve nailed everything. We also follow up with mystery shops to guarantee the training is implemented properly and tailor further coaching to correct issues identified in these shops. Our two free initial mystery shops help you see exactly how we’ll help and set a baseline for performance development.
We’re confident we can turbocharge your goals with solid, time-tested dealer sales solutions. Please let us know when we can chat and set up a free demo of our services!
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
