Blog

Does your dealership have a process in place for a quick transition from the sales floor to the finance dept?  Are your customers waiting for a hour or more to get into the finance office?  Does your F&I producer come out to meet the customer before the consumer get's to his/her office?  Ladies and gentleman I could go on and on with questions that I talk about with automotive managers and what we find is very concerning. 

First, the transition from the sales floor to the finance office should be seamless.  I was in a Toyota store a little while back and they had what was called a finance lounge.  Now the goal with their finance lounge was to remove the customer form the sales floor over to a much more comfortable lounge so that while they were waiting to get into the F&I office they could begin the process of getting logged into the Toyota system database.  It is a very upscale lounge with Ipad's at each chair and snacks if someone is hungry.  Now unfortunately most dealerships have a completely different process in place and it's as follows: the customer just agreed to purchase your vehicle and now they have to sit in those hard chairs and round table for the next hour while they wait to get into finance!!  What do you think most of these people are doing while waiting to go to finance; they're talking about how maybe we're moving too fast we didn't plan on buying today, let's get on our smartphone and see how much the car we just bought is down the street or even worse after a hour of waiting you go to get your customer and they're gone!!  For the love of God this is not what people want to deal with after they just made the next biggest purchase next to buying a home. 

Consumers after they give us their business need to be in the F&I office as quickly as possible.  Another brillant strategy is to have the F&I producer get out of his/her office and come out to the sales floor to meet the customer for a interview to build some rapport and gather field intelligence.  What this does is make the process much easier when you present a menu to sell products. 

In this day and age the old school way of doing business has to change.  Their is too much money on the line to take the chance of conducting business as usual. 

I was talking with a GSM today and he had no idea how many calls his coordinators were making per day.  Equally relevant, is that I talk with people that have positions of authority in the dealership all the time and it's unfortunate to see the majority have no clue when it comes to their E-Commerce Dept.  The E-Commerce Dept is the heart of your sales dept and the sales staff are the body i.e. without a heart the body will die.  We also talked about a store that they have a few miles away and the GSM mentioned that at that store the leads are given to sales people.  WOW!!!  As we know the sales staff are not going to consistently follow up with the leads and unless the consumer buys within 5-7 days most salespeople are never going to call again. 

Now the purpose of this blog is to spend some time talking about the importance of your coordinators making 120 calls per day.  As you know you have a 11-14% connection ratio when making phone calls.  In other words per day if you make or take 120 calls you will get 13 to 16 people on the phone per day.  The thing that blows my mind is that I know of stores that have coordinators that make 50 calls per day.  When you look at your connection ratio that's only 5-7 people per day!!  I speak from experience in regard to coordinators making every excuse for why they can't make 120 calls per day.  I've been told "I don't have anybody else to call" and when you check their leads in the ILM they have people that haven't been contacted in days.  Even better I've been told that "I don't want want to bug the customer." 

The key to success in your E-Commerce Dept boils down to the coordinator's pounding the phones!!  50 calls per coordinator is not got going to get the results that the owners/GM/GSM are wanting to see.  Demand excellence and put spiffs in place for the coordinator's like you have for the sales staff and watch your E-Commerce dept grow to the point where it's generating a major percentage of total sales.