Auto sales by phone: Help your team thrive

The leads rolling in from customer calls are the lifeblood of your sales pipeline. This is true whether the people taking and making the calls are sales staff members or work in a dedicated business development center (BDC).

When you take the time to build each salesperson’s phone skills, you’re investing in the success of the whole dealership. Turning a call into a sale is a process worth supporting with training, coaching and best practices, including the use of car sales phone scripts.

The core concept at play is the customer experience. If your people can take away some of the roadblocks that come with calling car dealerships — a lack of information, a lot of transfers, failure to offer relevant solutions — they’re more likely to keep moving down the pipeline.

By breaking down performance improvement into a few sections, you can see why each is important to creating an elite team of call handlers.

Car sales phone scripts: Roadmaps to success

The value proposition for car sales phone scripts is fairly simple. If your call handlers have consistent scripts to work from, they have a guide for staying on message and won’t forget some of the most important parts of the call.

Making a good first impression with a clear, professional opening? Collecting customer contact information? Overcoming different kinds of objections and getting appointments? These tasks can all be included in car sales phone scripts. By equipping your team members with well-tuned scripts, you’re boosting their chances of success.

Of course, a phone script alone doesn’t guarantee a call will go well. We’ll get to what to do about that. But first, there’s more to say about the scripts themselves. Namely, what separates good phone script libraries from bad ones?

Have scripts for both inbound and outbound calls

Whether you’re running a BDC or having dealership personnel field calls, every salesperson and rep should be ready to both take and make calls. Fielding a specific request from a curious caller can turn into a car sale. So can reaching out to a previous buyer or a former prospect who went cold.

Your library of phone scripts should cover everything from directing a caller to the service department to reaching out to a vehicle owner on their birthday. This variety is especially beneficial to a BDC agent, a dedicated team member assigned to generate business.

Use scripts to connect people across departments

Are car sales phone scripts just a salesperson tool? Not necessarily. Other types of calls can turn callers into prospects if handled right.

People who call in seeking parts service, for example, need to be connected to the service department quickly and efficiently. This simple request can be carried out with the guidance of a script, making sure the experience is smooth — and helping the call handler take down important info.

Make sure scripts reflect customers’ needs

There is plenty of room to get granular with scripts. This is the exact right approach — your team should be giving different types of calls for a huge variety of scenarios. Even within subcategories, such as cold calling script or voicemail script, there is room to branch out.

Is someone’s warranty expired? Have they racked up a lot of mileage? These are reasons to try and get them back into the sales pipeline, but they are different enough that they deserve their own car sales phone scripts. Specificity shows customers that your dealership is calling for a reason and that you know what they’re dealing with.

Training and coaching phone skills: Making the scripts sing

Your call handlers can’t just be expected to pick up a sales script and immediately become experts. The key is right there in the name — script. Just like an actor needs a director and a crew to bring a script to life, a car sales professional training and coaching to help them realize their potential.

You should notice that we’ve been saying training and coaching separately. That’s because they’re not the same. Training is telling someone how to do something, while coaching is an interactive, ongoing experience to help them raise their game over time.

When it comes to phone skills and using scripts, coaching is especially important. An expert coach can check out the audio of a customer call and determine how well the call handler applied the script. Did they use the right introduction? Did they get every bit of relevant info before the caller hung up?

Working with consultants on training and coaching is a way to make sure you get expert input into your team’s specific needs. Although outside personnel take the lead in these cases, there’s still an important role for the sales manager. With access to call handler performance dashboards, team leaders can keep their people accountable and hold them to consistently high standards.

The complete package for your phone call handlers

Car phone sales scripts and coaching complement each other perfectly. Your team will know what to say in any situation, and they’ll receive constant reinforcement to make sure those scenarios are playing out well.

By taking a direct interest in the way your team deals with phone calls, and by giving them the tools for success, you’re not just boosting one aspect of the dealership — the new and improved sales pipeline helps everyone.

Ready to get started? Free car sales phone scripts make it easy. Download them now!