DealerRefresh

Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager

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Tips to Improve Follow-Up With Car Buyers

It’s a classic sales question: to keep momentum going and make the sale, you need to follow up with leads in a way that will engage and move them farther down the pipeline. But how do you know if or when your customers really want to hear from you?

It’s not that prospects don’t want to hear from you, it’s just that they know what they want. And you are expected to know what they want in order to win them over. Salespeople need to provide value in every interaction with customers, especially during the car buying process. To see better results from conversations with your leads, here are three tips to improve your outreach and follow up. 

#1: When your leads reach out, give them what they want.

Whether they fill out a form, chat, call, or stop by your dealership, when a lead first reaches out, make sure you’re making the most of the opportunity. If you’re responding to a lead that recently reached out, respond promptly and completely, taking care to answer all of their questions. Do this daily, making sure there are no prospects left waiting for an email or call back in your CRM. 

When following up with leads who recently reached out, keep these tips in mind: 

  • Don’t rely on auto-responders. There is a time and place for auto-responders, but you should monitor when and how they’re used to make sure you’re not mistakenly assuming your leads are getting the information they want and need. If you are using auto-responders to ensure a timely response during busy periods or after dealership hours, make sure any personalization that can be dynamically populated is added. Include an invitation to visit the lot or call the dealership directly in the auto-response. And always make sure to personally follow up with each lead after.
  • Answer all of their questions (and ask some of your own). If there are multiple questions included in a form or email, make sure you’re providing thorough answers in your response. Most prospects will have questions about price, payments, and availability early on. Don’t avoid these questions. Address each one and include some follow up questions of your own. Emails with one to three questions are 50% likelier to get replies than emails without any.
  • Don’t overwhelm them. If you want to make the sale, make the sales process as easy as possible on your prospects. While there is information you need and asking questions of your own is a good thing, be careful not to ask too much of your leads. Prioritize must-haves versus nice-to-haves, and use sales tools that help you fill in missing information or details (more on that below).
  • Always include next steps or a call-to-action. A study found that 72% of dealerships did not ask leads for an appointment when they called. Whether you’re communicating on the phone or over email, use one conversation to lead into another by always asking follow up questions and planning next steps. 

#2: When there’s new information, be proactive in sharing.

If you follow up too often or with no valuable, new, or interesting information, you’re going to train leads to ignore you. Instead, reach out when you have new information to share that’s relevant to what each lead is looking for. Remember your communication should be about them, not you. 

Consider the following reasons to reach out to prospects:

  • Price Drops. When the price lowers on a vehicle they’ve looked at or a vehicle that previously wasn’t in their price range, let your leads know!
  • Incentives. When seasonal incentives or offers roll out, make sure interested prospects are the first to know.  
  • New Inventory. New inventory is a great reason to reach out. Whether there’s new technology or a brand new model, let leads know when new vehicles arrive on your lot that they may be interested in test driving. 
  • Sold Inventory: If a vehicle your lead was looking at sells, don’t assume you’ve lost that lead. Reach out as soon as possible to let them know and share similar vehicles they may be interested in. This saves them from being in the dark (and lets them know that inventory moves quickly and so should they). It also gives you a chance to turn one sale into two. A study found that 35% of dealerships did not suggest alternate inventory if a lead’s first vehicle of choice was already sold. Don’t make that mistake—use sold inventory as an opportunity to keep a lead engaged by recommending similar inventory.

#3: Understand what your leads are looking for and when they’re interested, even if they aren’t telling you.

Only 13% of customers believe a sales person can understand their needs. Correct that misperception by following up in a way that lets prospects know you truly understand their wants and needs and can help them find what they’re looking for. Sales intelligence tools can help by letting you know where each lead came from, what they have been searching for online, and when to follow up with them. 

Level the playing field and use sales intelligence to understand:

  • What inventory they’ve viewed. No more ‘invisible shopper’ or leads who don’t tell you what they’re really looking for. Use website tracking technology to inform your follow up conversations. 
  • What they’re searching for. Look at everything your leads have looked at on your website. Whether they’ve searched within certain price ranges, researched a trade-in, filtered by color, or viewed lease incentives, you can see a complete record of when each page was visited. 
  • When they’re shopping your website. Part of improving your follow-up is knowing when to follow up. If you know when a lead is on your website, you can prioritize the leads you know are in-market, actively shopping your site. 

Having a window into the online shopping activity of each lead, with a complete picture of the makes, models, trims, price points, and even colors they’re interested in, is a game changer. When you can see what your leads are doing online and understand what they’re really interested in, your follow up can be customer-centric and guided by what each lead wants.

Improve Your Customer Experience By Improving Your Sales Follow-Up

Give customers the information they want, when they want it. With the help of these sales tips, you can better tailor your follow-up to each lead and have more effective sales conversations. Not only will that improve the overall customer experience, but it can help you sell more cars. 

For continued sales success, learn how salespeople get the most from their email follow-up and understand what tools can improve lead engagement by downloading this free email marketing guide for auto dealerships. 


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3 Tools to Re-Engage Cold Leads

If you’re looking to the end of the month and are feeling like your lead funnel isn’t as full as you’d like, there’s good news. With the help of a few tools, you can re-engage cold leads and find warm leads you thought were lost.

1. Use Sales Intelligence to Reconsider Lost Leads

Our data study found that 22% of leads marked ‘lost’ were still shopping dealership websites after 7 days without any CRM sales activity or outreach. If you think 1 out of every 5 leads are lost when they’re actually still interested, you’re missing a huge amount of warm leads that you could be engaging!

Right now you have customers who are actively browsing your online inventory, viewing VDP pages, and submitting forms, chats, or calling your dealership—clear indicators that they are interested car buyers. Some are new leads, but a good portion are existing leads that you may not realize are still in the market. Revisit your cold lead lists to see why they were marked ‘lost’ and who may be a good candidate to follow up with. If you have sales intelligence, use it to monitor the website activity of your leads in real-time. A sales optimization tool can alert you to prospects who are back on your website and give you insight into which cold leads are not actually lost.

2. Use Your CRM to Reconnect with Past Customers

Once an appropriate amount of time has passed, sold lead lists in in your CRM can turn into upsell opportunities. Use your CRM to filter by model year purchased, lease end date, etc. to build a prospect list of past customers who may be ready for a new vehicle. Use upcoming 2020 models, sales on 2019 models, vehicle technology, safety advances, and other new information to let sold leads know why you’re reaching out and reopen the conversation. 

In addition to purchase data, consider the date of last service. CNW Marketing Research found that customers who regularly serviced their vehicles at a dealership became repeat vehicle buyers at that dealership 86% of the time. Look for loyal customers in your CRM and consider skimming your dealership’s review and social media pages to spot brand advocates who have the potential to become repeat customers.

3. Use Dynamic Email to Re-Engage Leads

Dynamic email can be used to engage cold leads, unsold leads in your CRM, and not-so-lost leads found using sales intelligence. Nearly 75% of adults say that email is their preferred method of communication and 91% of shoppers want to hear from companies they do business with over email. By personalizing email content to each lead, and including specific vehicles and inventory they’ve already shown interest in, you can re-engage each lead type and bring them back into the sales funnel.

Start with dynamic, inventory-specific emails that share new information, such as lower prices, new inventory, similar vehicles they may be interested in, and sales events or incentives to take advantage of. You can create and send these messages manually or let a dynamic email software take care of it for you. Monitor responses and if you don’t get a response, follow up with a personal phone call to reiterate why you thought of them and what new information or incentives you have to offer.

Sales Tools to Keep Leads Engaged 

With the majority of car buying research and conversations happening online, salespeople often feel left in the dark. But these tools should shed light on your sales process and provide insights to help you determine which leads are in market and re-engage prospects. To drive real results, make sure you have tools that work together and complement your existing sales strategies.

Foureyes is the intelligent sales platform that empowers salespeople with sales tools that help auto dealerships engage, understand, and close leads faster. Schedule a demo to learn how Tap and 20/20 can help you engage leads and get more sales from your existing pipeline.

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Stop Trying to Netflix and Chill Your Customers

Maybe I’m not the ideal person to make this analogy. After all, I haven’t been single for almost 20 years. That was before smartphones. Before Google. Before social media. Wifi barely existed. There was no Kindle, we actually read paper books. And Netflix wasn’t even an idea.

Regardless, the phrase “Netflix and chill” has become parlance for a laid-back method of closing the proverbial deal romantically with another. A simple statement uttered to another, letting them know your primary goal, all under the guise of another activity.

Unfortunately, it has become customary to say it at the start of an interaction, rather than toward the end of the evening…

[Read more…]

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7 Seismic Shifts Coming to Automotive CRM

We live in a world where new technology swirls around us at a relentless and often dizzying pace, yet as we look closer inside the automotive industry and one particular area – the CRM – the winds are very calm, and the marketplace solutions aren’t keeping pace with innovation outside of the industry. In a nutshell we are operating in an innovation rut for automotive CRM. We believe that we are about to enter a renaissance that will completely reimagine what is possible with an automotive dealership CRM solution, and we have analyzed seven areas to pay especially close attention over the next twelve months.

[Read more…]

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How Customer Reviews Enrich Attribution Insights

Many automotive dealerships listen solely to CRM data and whatever they can learn from Google Analytics to understand and attribute the factors that influence a customer’s purchase decision. Both tools provide a limited perspective. And CRM data is vulnerable to error (e.g., a salesperson inputs data incorrectly or incompletely). To get a more complete picture of shopper behavior, dealerships should mine the data that customers share with you in the form of reviews.

Listen to Your Customers

About eight out of 10 shoppers use online car reviews and car dealership reviews. Smart dealers solicit reviews, listen to them, and manage them like valuable assets – not only because reviews literally represent the voice of the customer, they also track customer behavior.

Think about it for a moment. Each time a customer takes time to talk about their experience with your salesperson, they’re providing valuable data on why they made a purchase. They’re giving you documented feedback on the performance of your dealership down to the level of the salesperson they’re interacting with. And since the purchase of a car still involves a handshake between a shopper and a salesperson, reviews are the purest and most valuable form of CRM data any dealer could hope to have. [Read more…]

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Why Data Disconnects are Holding You Back – and What to Do About It

Connected data: Everyone wants it. Almost nobody has it.

Consider this: car shoppers typically switch between online and offline four times over the course of their buying journey, and want those switches to be seamless. What’s more, customers interact with dealerships across many different digital touchpoints, which means omnichannel marketing capabilities are essential. And yet, across industries, only 7% of customers are satisfied with the seamlessness of the process.

Connected data is crucial for dealerships too – it allows them to understand the impact of vendor technology and make the most of marketing spend. But there are a number of data breaks that interfere with both the customer experience and effective tracking. Let’s break down these points of disconnect to get a deeper look at some important areas for improvement: [Read more…]

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Future of CRM

You know the biggest players: eLead, VinSolutions, DealerSocket, and Reynolds Contact Manager, but do you know when they were originally coded? I believe the newest one of that pack came to market in 2003. Do you remember 2003? I think we, as an industry, were finally beginning to accept that the Internet was not going to be a fad and maybe we should start taking these Internet leads more seriously. And the biggest CRM innovation was to have a web-based system. It was an easier time.

Regardless of how much lipstick gets applied to the pig, or how many other technologies they acquire, there is no getting around age. Unlike people aging to become wiser, technology withers. It may get more feature-packed, but the original data model and technology backbones just get more and more stressed. Also, while aging, the original designers and engineers usually aren’t still working on the core product… if they’re even at the same company anymore. So, with age, the original design intent gets lost.

We all watched Microsoft struggle with legacy tech like Windows 98 and then Windows XP. We will probably watch Apple lag without the Steve Jobs passion. It is absolute fact that thousands of dealers are stuck in a time warp with outdated CRM technology right now. The crappy part for us in the car business is that few modern options are in the marketplace yet.

So, I want to take this opportunity to write about what I think a CRM in 2020 could be.

[Read more…]

Categories: CRM

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Was I Too Dumb for CRM?

In the early aughts, my dealership invested in a CRM system.

I was basically a sales guy/assistant manager who (quite by accident) had championed/embraced internet leads, and whipped-up an internal lead management system for our 15-store group. I had probably just “graduated” from 100% commission to a salary+bonus pay structure — probably 4-5 years into my automotive career, and was unknowingly building what would later become widely accepted and known as a BDC. So naturally, this CRM thing was my baby. And then, my baby was born.

I can remember instant regret, remorse, anger — this “thing” and these “trainers” that landed in my dealership didn’t much seem to resemble the system we researched. But alas, here it was, it was here, and I was here.

Here’s where, in hindsight, I look back and ask, was I that dumb? [Read more…]

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Dominion contracts CRMSuite (formerly iMagicLab) as CRM solution

Richard Keith Latman of CRMSuite

Dominion has struck a deal to license the CRMSuite product from Richard Keith Latman.  Does this mean Autobase is going away?

Read the press release from Business Wire

Dominion Dealer Solutions announced today the launch of its new CRM, Dominion VisionTM. The most advanced automotive CRM in the market today, Dominion Vision combines the most intuitive CRM interface in the market with customized reporting and consumer-focused communication tools to create an easy-to-use CRM that will satisfy customers, sales reps and management. Powered by CRMSuite, Dominion Vision is the result of a business partnership designed to integrate CRMSuite’s state-of-the-art CRM technology with Dominion Dealer Solutions’ portfolio of high-performance digital marketing and data-mining software offerings.

Dominion Vision CRM eliminates conventional CRM thinking by combining ease-of-use functionality with user-tailored dashboards. Intuitive technology erases the need for traditional action plans and lineated work flows. Dominion Vision learns about your customers and their preferences – helping your sales people connect with prospects using the best possible method at the best possible time. With real data at your fingertips, Dominion Vision is a true business intelligence tool. Mobility for all users is available via both a tablet-friendly interface and a downloadable mobile app.

“There are many CRMs in the marketplace but Dominion Vision is truly different. From our rich CRM legacy with AVV and Autobase, Dominion has always been committed to the dealer – using the latest technology to build simple and elegant solutions,” says Jack Ross, president of Dominion Dealer Solutions. “Now all of our tools, from DMS to CRM, equity mining to digital products, can work together to help car dealers sell more cars.”

Dominion Vision also includes proactive communication using machine learning to track consumer communications preferences in the form of a virtual, personal assistant, “Olivia.” No longer will customers fall through the gaps. This feature will scan the customer database on a regular basis and communicate via email, text or voicemail with prospects who have not been contacted. Customer responses will be forwarded to the salesperson to re-initiate sales and service communication.

Get a firsthand look at our NADA Booth #3716C. To schedule a presentation of Dominion Vision, please call 877-421-1040 or visit www.transformyourcrm.com.

About Dominion Dealer Solutions

Dominion Dealer Solutions improves dealers’ lives by developing advanced technologies including: reputation and social media management, responsive websites, digital advertising, SEO, SEM, multi-channel marketing, and custom market reports. Coupled with award-winning lead management, inventory merchandising, equity mining, customer relationship (CRM) and dealer management (DMS) solutions, Dominion redefines automotive retail by delivering first-class customer experiences for today’s automotive dealerships. Based in Norfolk, Virginia, every OEM and more than 10,000 U.S. dealers depend on Dominion’s foundation of innovation, integrity, excellence and teamwork to provide them with results at every turn. For more information, visit our website, like us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Youtube, or follow us on Twitter.

About Dominion Enterprises

Dominion Enterprises is a leading online marketing and software services company offering client solutions across multiple business verticals. Our B2B cloud SaaS solutions directly support clients in establishing their online and mobile brands, generating leads, and managing customer relationships. Our B2C web and mobile portals serve the housing, franchise and travel markets and include popular sites such as Homes.com. Dominion Enterprises is headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia and has offices across the U.S.