So, you’ve decided to bring in a consultant to help take your dealership’s sales and marketing past your regional competition. Congratulations, you’re on the right path! Success is a team sport that requires a lot of specific expertise, and the right agency can deliver many benefits that will jumpstart critical KPIs.
But there are so many different agencies from which to choose. How do you identify the company that will work best for your business?
Never fear! We’ll help you separate the wheat from the chaff. There are many things these game-changers should all do well, but when it comes to finding winning automotive consulting services, strategy is the biggest differentiator. They’ve got to target the areas of your business that are ripe for improvement and understand how to leverage complex market dynamics to convert them into dollar signs.
While this varies from dealer to dealer, there are a few biggies that most dealerships would benefit from.
1. Conduct Market Analysis
The first thing any automotive consulting services strategy planning session should begin with is a market analysis. If they don’t know who your customers are, what they expect, their buying habits, and all the other important factors that affect your business, how can they possibly know what to tweak? Anyone who shows up and claims to know what’s best for your business had better be able to back it up with solid data on your customer base—not generic marketing materials and pre-written phone scripts.
These are six essential steps your potential partner agency should emphasize when developing a marketing strategy:
- Research the dealership and parent company/products.
- Analyze the competition. Look for weaknesses AND strengths.
- Identify gaps in the market. These missed opportunities can be a gold mine if you catch them before your competitors.
- Define the target market. Knowing who will likely buy your products is key to developing your campaigns.
- Emphasize obstacles that may prevent you from maximizing your revenue.
- Create a sales forecast. This establishes target KPIs to enable you to analyze your consultant’s work and results and see what tweaks need to be made.
2. Develop a Marketing Plan
Your partner should have ideas about what sort of marketing plans would work for your business and your customers. This can take many forms, but any comprehensive (and serious) strategy for dealerships should involve both phone sales and online content development, social media, and evolving your brand voice and business culture.
Here are some good ideas to consider, and a great automotive consulting agency will have many more:
- Select a spokesperson. People connect with people, and having a friendly, sociable person who gives a human face to your business helps your brand connect with customers. This person could be a local celebrity, the CEO, or a particularly magnetic employee.
- Leverage Meta (and other social media) ad campaigns. These can be cost-effective ways to get your message out to the public. Modern ad campaigns leverage the power of AI to generate multiple variants of your ad that are tailored to all of your customer segments.
- Focus on Institutional marketing as well as highlighting inventory and service. Highlighting the product is great, but building a great vibe around your business causes people to react positively whenever they see your brand and elicits the trust you need to succeed in the automotive industry in particular.
3. Look at Your Processes and Structure
Remember that as a part of any automotive consulting services strategy blueprint, they researched and analyzed your business. They should show you a way forward by developing a plan to address inefficiencies, structural problems, and procedural pitfalls.
Common areas to examine are:
- Redundancies. Duplicating wastes time and money.
- Inconsistent customer service is usually a result of sub-optimal CS procedures and protocols.
- Inventory policy reviews. The immense cost of our products, especially in the automotive industry, requires very careful inventory management. If (like so many dealerships) you are using interest-only financing to fill your inventory, surplus loan costs can really eat into the bottom line.
- Business structure streamlining should be touched on, especially in large businesses with many departments and management layers. You cannot afford to carry dead wood in this industry, and overly large management teams of organizational components will rot your profits from within.
4. Phone and Internet Training
Once you have a plan in place, the final piece of the puzzle for implementing it—and that means creating critical content like phone scripts and training your team to deliver. These are the areas that will translate directly into sales, and they will need to be tailored to reflect all aspects of your new marketing strategy.
Although it might seem complicated, there are actually a number of simple places to start that can make a big difference in your business’s performance. For instance, believe it or not, only about 20% of phone and internet customer contacts result in an in-person appointment, and it’s often because employees simply forget to ask! With dealership foot traffic falling year after year thanks to the internet, you need to generate foot traffic. Having an “industry average” conversion rate is unacceptable by definition and should be at least three times that.
To achieve this, it takes a dedicated consultant who’s committed to actively coaching your people to reliably deliver on your marketing plan so that everyone—especially your sales team—can reap the rewards of their work.
Developing the Strategy for Success
Phone and internet sales consulting is one major area where Phone Ninjas can rocket your business to new heights. Our comprehensive automotive consulting services strategy has proven itself repeatedly, with clients routinely seeing 60% appointment rates from our time-tested, individualized coaching program. Some motivated dealerships are even seeing rates in excess of 80%!
Our free scripts are a great starting place, but the real magic happens when our experienced team of mentors develops custom content and coaches your team up over time using real examples from their day-to-day jobs. We teach your people to deliver our scripts enthusiastically and consistently in one-on-one weekly sessions that maximize each person’s growth in a way mass seminars can never replicate. We do our own mystery shops to verify your team is on point, following up to reinforce success and coach up any rough areas until everyone’s a rock star.
Contact us today for two free mystery shops and a demonstration of how we’ll transform your business! We can’t wait to meet you and your amazing 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.
