Is your dealership looking for more vehicle sales? Do you spend an exorbitant amount on advertising and marketing to acquire new prospects? How many times have you lost a potential sale because you don’t have a proper follow-up process for these incoming prospects? The only way to truly master your dealership’s follow-up is to figure out a way to maximize results and minimize effort. Check out these six easy tips to revive your unsold prospect follow-up.
Implement Data Collection
One of the most important things a business can do to improve prospect follow-up is collect pertinent information. So many times salespeople are unable to follow up with a prospect because they don’t have all the necessary information to do so. You’ll want to set a standard for data collection among your sales team. This standard should reflect what type of marketing you’ll be doing to follow up with these potential buyers. For example, if you plan to use email marketing to communicate with potential buyers and bring them back to your dealership, then you’ll want to make sure your salespeople are always collecting an email address. Other data points to think about collecting are physical address, phone number, vehicles of interest, trade information, and financing details. With all necessary information about your prospects, you can properly follow up with them and encourage meaningful interactions with your sales team.
Qualify Prospects Properly
The truth is there are plenty of prospects who walk through your doors and visit your website every day, but this doesn’t mean these individuals are all potential buyers. Properly qualifying prospects can save your sales team a lot of time and energy. How you qualify a particular prospect should also dictate that specific prospect’s follow-up process. For example, if your team qualifies someone as a “hot lead,” then the salesperson should follow up with them almost immediately, otherwise they may find themselves at your competitor’s dealership to do business. On the flip-side, if someone is qualified as “just looking,” then you may want to follow up with them differently and probably not as aggressively. This tip is one of the most important in this article because without properly qualifying each prospect, your team is literally shooting in the dark, which causes missed opportunities and wasted time spent on unqualified prospects. If your sales team is properly qualifying each prospect, then they understand what that individual is looking for and how to sell to them.
Measure Follow-Up Process
The statistics show prospect conversion goes up significantly after six contact attempts have been made; however, statistics also show most salespeople give up after making one or two attempts. Do you know how many follow-up attempts your salespeople are making to bring prospects back to your dealership? Do you know how many attempts they should be making to convert prospects? With a measureable follow-up process, you can rest assured that no opportunity gets lost in the shuffle and each prospect is followed up with enough times to generate a conversion. Think about it, if each prospect receives the same follow-up for their specific lead type, then you can begin to see trends for how much follow-up is needed and begin to tweak your process to receive optimal conversion.
Make To-Do Lists
In a perfect world, your sales team would come to work each day and they would have a follow up item in their to-do list for each unsold prospect. Depending on your specific process, they should have calls to make, emails to send, and notes to take to move each prospect closer to the sale of a vehicle. A salesperson’s to-do list must be very easy to follow and execute, although it may have a couple dozen tasks to complete. The to-do list for a salesperson should be ready for them each morning and be worked on throughout the day when they aren’t attending to new prospects. If possible, to-do lists need to be finished before your sales personnel leave for the day. By making daily actionable to-do lists, your team is not wasting time but rather working each prospect to ensure they purchase their next vehicle from you.
Enforce Prospect Follow-Up
This tip is easier said than done, but should definitely not be taken lightly. Probably the most important tip for maximizing your dealership’s follow-up process is to enforce it among your entire sales team. From collecting the proper data to following a precise follow-up sequence, from qualifying each prospect properly to creating daily to-do lists, each and every step you designate in your follow-up process is important and should be accounted for and required. It’s easier to enforce rules and processes when using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. With a CRM solution, you can set up your ideal follow-up process for each type of lead and then have the system enforce the rules.
Utilize a Dashboard
Visibility is important when trying to run an efficient and actionable sales team. Without a dashboard, you will have a difficult time figuring out where each customer is in the process, how they are being qualified, who is responsible for the next to-do item, how many prospects have been converted today, and so on. If you don’t have one already, now is the time to create a customer dashboard. Ideally you should be able to use your current CRM to compile all pertinent metrics for your sales team into one location for easy viewing. Just think about it, if all the information you needed on a daily basis was presented to you in one spot without having to pull and re-pull report after report, you’d save time and increase the overall performance of your sales team.
If you’re looking to sell more vehicles, it’s time to revive your unsold prospect follow-up process. Really focus on maximizing the results from your sales team and minimizing their efforts needed to close a deal. Organization, recording proper information, and timely follow up are the keys to the solution. With these six tips, it’s time to track more, bring back more, and ultimately close more.