2024 is shaping up to be one of the most exciting years ever in the automotive industry. Over 2023, key industry metrics like sales and earnings were all trending up, and inventories are finally roaring back after the stagnant pandemic years.
This is great news if you’re one of the growing number of car dealerships in the United States today, but better markets also mean increased competition. If you can stand out from the crowd with excellent service and maximize your revenue opportunities, you’ll be in a position to make 2024 a banner year.
Being at your best means integrating fantastic phone skills for your sales team, streamlining scripts to optimize your revenues, and making ongoing training a top priority as you flip the calendar. Here are the top auto sales training strategies every dealer should consider to take advantage of this year’s market.
The Importance of Leveraging the Phone
Consumer habits are changing, and it’s had a big impact on how car dealerships interact with their leads. Rather than walking onto a lot, most people start looking online and then make contact over the phone before they start thinking about a face-to-face meeting.
That means a phone call is likely to be the first point of personal contact in a dealership’s pipeline. It’s critical to establish a strong, customer-oriented relationship from “Hello!”, and it should be supported by scripts that allow anyone on your team to deliver a consistent message no matter who picks up the phone.
That means laying a foundation for phone success with the following training principles:
- Identify your dealership’s personality, products, and customer base, and figure out how best to maximize your strengths to appeal to your local market.
- Leverage branching sales scripts that efficiently guide your employees and customers to closing, all while covering common sales and customer service scenarios.
- Engage a training partner who utilizes active coaching and individualized support to ensure your team is performing optimally and evolving with changing trends and market conditions.
Getting each one of these elements right is key to making the most of your opportunities and meeting your sales goals. And like all things in business, there are a lot of layers to consider for each one.
Planning Your Campaign
Every dealership needs a unique personality that helps it stand out from the pack and connect with its target customers. Basic principles and data points can be applied to any sales strategy, but there are also less tangible aspects of a dealer’s presence that are vital connections between customers and business.
A good training partner can give you an objective look at what’s working and what’s not when it comes to linking messaging to sales. If there are aspects of your team’s presentation that seem to resonate consistently with customers, they’ll be in a position to identify and highlight those interactions. Similarly, weak content that falls flat can be weeded out or optimized to align with your audience and goals.
Developing and Deploying Sales Scripts
If your dealership is well-established, you more than likely have your brand in hand—but it doesn’t do you much good if it’s not being presented consistently and uniformly to every customer who picks up the phone. Detailed, branching scripts make sure that your team always presents a message that reflects your company’s values and makes customers feel at home. Auto dealer training strategies in 2024 will lean more heavily on scripts than ever, and the best scripts will ensure the following advantages for competitive dealers:
- Customers will know instantly it’s your dealership regardless of which employee picks up the phone.
- Salespeople have a solid and reliable template that helps them provide consistent, high-quality customer service supported by accurate and reliable information.
- Improve the chances of closing and capitalize on all revenue opportunities by keeping conversations moving efficiently toward conversion.
- Formalize customer needs channeling into an efficient and repeatable flow so customers get the information they need to make their best decision.
Of course, getting excellent scripts won’t do your dealership any good if your people don’t deliver them well. Active coaching is essential to making the most of your auto sales training investment.
Coaching Your Team to Success
The best coaching agencies don’t give you one-and-done experiences and then hope for the best. Coaching should be both active and ongoing to ensure that training points stick and translate into real sales. You should expect to see the following from any reputable auto sales training pro you’re considering for 2024:
- Real-world experience in the automotive industry is a must. The car sales market is extremely unique and competitive, and generic training companies will never be able to give your team the specifics they need to make bottom-line improvements.
- Active coaching means supporting training points with hard data and tangible feedback for improvement. A great agency will deliver detailed performance evaluations generated from individual coaching sessions and concrete analysis.
- Mystery shops are a proven method for discovering how your team is actually performing when the pressure’s on—not just what they remember for a post-training quiz.
- Tailored scripts are a must for any dealership to separate itself from the competition. Not only will a great phone sales expert help you generate scripts for your business, but they’ll also work with your team to customize language for each person’s style so scripts always feel natural.
Hire the Best!
With the right auto sales training strategy, 2024 promises to be a rewarding year for dealerships who are committed to taking on the future of the industry. Staying competitive means constantly refining your game to keep up with new trends, and car sales are rapidly evolving into a highly specialized and integrated proposition.
This is where experienced coaching agencies like Phone Ninjas can help! We’ve got decades of combined experience in our leadership team and a great track record of coaching dealership employees in our weekly one-on-one coaching sessions.
Our scripts are hand-tailored to match your dealership’s brand exactly, and we support all of our guidance and training with detailed evaluations and active coaching. We use mystery shops (and include two free!) to ensure our training reflects real-world interactions and follow up with additional practice to ensure your customers get the same high-quality service no matter what.
Reach out to Phone Ninjas so we can set up a demonstration of our amazing auto sales training program, and make 2024 your top-performing year ever.
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.
