Auto dealerships are constantly chasing customer trends to make the most of their opportunities and maximize conversion rates. Today, that increasingly means training your sales team to take advantage of phone interactions to generate leads and close out deals.
Unfortunately, most dealerships haven’t improved their phone skills in the last 20 years and are only turning about 28% of their phone interactions into appointments. You’re here because you’re looking to improve that number. The good news is, with the right strategies you can more than double your appointments and take advantage of all your revenue-generating opportunities.
Phone scripts are one of the best auto dealership solutions for making sure you’re not leaving money on the table during these critical interactions. By using phone scripts and taking the time to train employees efficiently and effectively, a sales team can present a unified brand message for your business, answer questions reliably and accurately, and start getting more calls to the finish line. Here’s where to begin.
Get Your Scripts in Order
It’s hard to believe that one of the top reasons dealerships aren’t getting appointments from their phone calls… is because in many cases employees just don’t ask! Of course, this is just one obvious correction that a good phone script will ensure isn’t overlooked, but it’s not the only one.
Boosting your conversion rate and getting more leads into the showroom is about building a comfortable and inviting customer-oriented relationship during those brief phone interactions. That’s why it’s so important to have phone scripts that project consistency, familiarity, and direct answers to the make-or-break questions your customers have.
A great phone script for a dealership will:
- Unify a consistent customer experience no matter which team member picks up the phone.
- Keep the conversation moving efficiently toward closing.
- Eliminate extra chatter that can kill a sale.
- Provide associates with a branching subject tree so they’re ready for any situation.
- Get customer contact information and figure out exactly what they need.
- Ask for an appointment, confirm that appointment, and let the customer know someone will be calling them later to confirm and answer any follow-up questions.
- Thank the caller and close the conversation.
As you can see, phone scripts have to do a lot while saying very little, so they need to be written carefully with your dealership’s priorities in mind. Getting everything right takes a dedicated phone sales expert who will work with your business to customize content for your company.
Coach Your Team
Scripts don’t work if the employees delivering them sound bored, like they’re reading a book for the millionth time. Team members need to know how to organically incorporate their natural skills into the framework of a sales script so they can deliver an enthusiastic experience with a solid strategy.
The secret to achieving the right balance is active coaching over time. The best training environments involve long-term relationships between teacher and learner, and the most effective programs will never be one-off auto dealership solutions.
Team members need to be allowed to tweak scripts to match their style of speech so they can play to their strengths. They also need to memorize scripts, and the “leapfrog” method is excellent for this: number each line of the script and have employees speak them forwards, backward, odds, evens, and completely out of order. Now they’re prepared for any conversational twists.
This level of familiarity and customization delivers sales conversations that establish a friendly and helpful rapport with customers on the phone. They’ll consistently get the information they need about the things that matter most to them, and feel like they have an ally who cares about them personally. That’s the recipe for converting sales calls into appointments and signatures on the dotted line.
Individual Coaching Sessions
The best type of coaching is one-on-one private sessions. Unfortunately, although you’re highly qualified for the job, most GMs and owners simply can’t commit the time. That’s why hiring a dedicated training partner is worth the investment.
Of course, nothing leads to fewer conversions than day-long seminars and bulky training strategies that eat into your employees’ time and keep them off the phones. The best coaches can deliver highly effective training in as little as 15 minutes per session, and follow up on subsequent meetings to ensure training is sticking. Your people will get the support they need to make a difference on the phone today without losing momentum with their monthly goals.
Mystery Shop to Fine-Tune the Results
For years, businesses have been relying on phone and internet surveys to gauge their customer service quality. But in reality, these are woefully inadequate, giving little actionable intel to improve your auto dealership.
Mystery shops, on the other hand, give your training partner very specific feedback about exactly what your customers are experiencing. They also allow the shopper to identify missed opportunities and correct issues that are getting in the way of conversion—like forgetting to ask to set up an appointment!
Any agency you work with to handle your training should do their own mystery shops to give you an actionable baseline for improvement.
Phone Ninjas Can Handle All This and More
As owner or GM, you’re already bordering on overloaded just taking care of the day-to-day business. Training departments are incredibly expensive to run and time-intensive to manage. With evolving customer trends, it takes a dedicated expert to identify and correct the nuances in your game that will make a difference for your bottom line.
Phone Ninjas is a world-class phone and internet active coaching agency that takes care of everything. Remember earlier we talked about how most dealership phone calls only convert 28% into appointments? Most of our clients hit 60% after training, with some as high as 80%.
How do we do this? We learn your business, hand-tailor our scripts to work for you, coach your employees in one-on-one weekly sessions, and mystery shop them to make sure our training sticks. We cover all the important bases to ensure our auto dealership solutions are turning your sales calls into dollar signs and taking advantage of every revenue opportunity.
But we can’t do it until you contact us to set up a demo! Call today so we can start flooding your business with high-quality leads and higher conversion rates than ever before.
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.
