Every dealership has been through it: stagnating sales with no identifiable reason. While economic swings or seasonal shifts can affect business, at the end of the day a great sales team will find ways to engage customers—if they have the right strategies and support.
So, when your sales team is struggling, where do you turn for the tactics they need to crack the market? It can be hard to drill down to root causes in an industry as complex as ours, and customer trends can change quickly.
More often than not, the place to start is re-examining the fundamentals of selling to make sure your people are operating on a firm foundation. The best way to efficiently identify where the gaps are in their game is by bringing in a training partner who can find them quickly and give them the sales coaching tips they need to succeed.
Which Fundamentals Should Be Checked?
Because professionals of all sorts are so skilled and successful at what they do, it can sometimes be difficult to zero in on basic errors or omissions. For sales coaching to be effective, you need to have a firm grip on modern car sales principles and strategies.
First Contact to Appointment Setting
The phone is typically the first point of contact your team will have with customers, and there’s a lot of pressure to get this short interaction right. In most cases, the reason someone picks up the phone is because they can’t find any more information online and they need your help.
That means your team has to establish rapport and start immediately building value in an appointment they will hopefully set on the call. There’s a lot of nuance to this as you want to answer customer questions… without giving away so much that they don’t need to come to the showroom.
Phone Ninjas’ sales coaching expert Nicole Marcellino has put together an excellent primer that will take your people through the exact steps and procedures needed to leverage your inbound call traffic.
- The Greeting
- Qualifying a Generic Vehicle
- Qualifying a Specific Vehicle
- Obtaining Contact Information (enables precise CRM tracking)
- Ask for the Appointment (crucial to bringing the customer into the dealership)
- Driving Towards Closure
- Giving Proper Directions (helps ensure they’ll keep the appointment)
Reaching Out to Customers
Growing any business means reaching out to new and previous customers. This includes handling referrals, cold calling, follow-ups, sharing special offers, alerting customers about service appointments, and a host of other sales-generating activities.
Many of these situations are either cold calls or interactions that are based on very little information. Many customers can be resistant or uncomfortable with these interactions, and it’s perfectly understandable. After all, they usually only call a dealership as a last resort because they can’t find what they want online, so a call with information they didn’t know they might want can be extra tricky to navigate. Fortunately, Nicole from Phone Ninjas also has a concise but information-packed video series on these outbound calls:
- Be Prepared
- Confirmation
- Authorization
- Introduction
- Reason for Calling
- Talking about the Opportunity
- Advantage of Buying Now
- Ask for the Appointment
- Driving Toward Closure
- Plan for the Future
Giving your team sales coaching on these ten steps greatly improves your chances of generating an appointment that brings the customer into the dealership.
Overcoming Objections
This might be one of the most important skills for your salespeople to have. Once the customer has been properly qualified ahead of time and has shown up for their appointment, you’re 80% of the way to a sale… but with so much money on the line, customers will naturally have any number of objections your team will need to overcome.
Again, Nicole Marcellino has you covered with her series covering ten tools that will allow your team to overcome most common objections:
- The Base Price Technique
- The Best Price Technique (New Cars)
- The Best Price Technique (Used Cars)
- Finance Rates Technique
- Financially Challenged Technique
- How Much Down Technique
- Mileage Technique
- No Information Technique
- Tentative Appointment Technique
- Trade Technique
Partnering with a great training agency will allow your team to practice these powerful tools in the field with a professional coach at their side. This type of sales coaching will help take abstract learning into the real world in the form of durable skills.
The Right Partner Does the Work for You
Owners and GMs are busy people, and training takes time and money—two things in short supply for every business. Compared to the cost of establishing an in-house solution, hiring a professional training partner to perform sales coaching saves you a lot of time and hassle, and ultimately, money. In fact, a great training partner can be the revenue-driving force your dealership has been looking for.
Now that you’ve seen Nicole’s tips in our series of videos, you know she’s got the answers. If you’d like her and the rest of Phone Ninjas’ amazing roster of coaches to help your sales team reach new levels of excellence and profitability, drop us a line!
What makes our sales coaching better than anyone else’s? Unlike so many one-and-done coaches, we’re in it for the long haul. All learning takes time, and people learn best when they’re paired with a mentor who works directly with them. We do both, using active coaching, mystery shops, and a hands-on approach that frees up owners and GMs to focus on their business while we work with your team.
Our clients routinely see appointment-set rates from calls triple, even quadruple after working with us. That’s a lot more people walking through your door every single day, primed and ready to buy. And we’re ready to prove it, too— reach out today for a free demo and two free mystery shops and find out what a great training partner can do for your sales team.
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.
