There is one thing a CRM cannot do and that is stop your sales team from taking the easy way out.  (That takes management).  My team actively mystery shops dealers all year long and the one guarantee we can make is that the majority of leads are flipped to a CRM status that automatically cancels your ongoing follow-up process.

You might have a 90-day process in place, but I promise you that, without management looking, a good majority of your leads are being flipped to “Lost” or “Bad Lead”  or “Out of Market” because it is simply too easy for your salespeople to end the cycle.  Even if alerts are set up in the system that catch leads switched to “Lost”, it takes someone diligently holding feet to the fire and ensuring leads aren’t trashed for no reason.  The path of least resistance is taken with your leads far more often than the lead management process is allowed to do its job.

You must train your people as to why the processes should run.  Allow the automated emails (going out with their name on it after all) to fire.  Maybe something in a latter email won’t offend, but entice.  Maybe the topic of a 75-day email reaches them at the right time and engages rather than annoys.  Your salespeople don’t always know their buying trends so they shouldn’t be allowed to cease the processes you put in place.

Over the last year, we at DealerKnows had over 400 mystery shops performed – and that doesn’t include the CRM email correspondence policing we do for our own dealers.  We also create and customize templates and long-term follow-up processes for our dealers.  Even with this, we’ve seen that the average number of days before all communication from dealership to prospect ends is roughly 8.  Eight days is the number of days the average dealership follows up with an Internet lead.  Now I know that your processes are built out longer than that, so I urge you to train your sales team to let it go.  Training and management will be the only way to stop them from dropping leads early.

Let the ongoing emails do their job.  Let the scheduled outgoing phone calls be made.  Let the automated alerts reach the customers. Nowadays, it takes more communication to sell vehicles, not less.  Let your scheduled follow-up rain down on the consumers until they say no more.  Otherwise you are wasting well spent money that could still be converted into a sale.  So for that reason, I ask you to… let it rain.

The challenge of “saving deals” has not been the inability to commoditize those deals needing saving into a software, but it is changing the overall mindset of management. (Granted, having a tech solution to funnel this deal info and print it into reports is exceedingly helpful nowadays). First and foremost, the biggest challenge of saving deals is that management simply has never created the processes necessary to make it a standard way of life within the dealership.

Here are the two most effective ways to save deals that I’ve found while involves just a little effort and time from multiple departments.

1) You must institute daily meetings to ensure that no stone is unturned and no customer is lost without trying twice. Your management staff should collectively review the previous day’s in-store and online opportunities (preferably pulling a detailed report quickly from a CRM module that gathers the data automatically for you) and meet every morning. They should hold daily meetings with F&I to determine necessary actions to finish off any unclosed deals and hold a brief 5-minute one-on-one meeting with each individual sales representative to discuss what can be done to convert lost customers into be-back sales.

2) The second most important step to saving deals is having your Business Development Center be the backstop for your dealership. There are ways technologically to ensure your sales people are making their follow-up calls to past and recent customers, but you have no way of knowing if it was the salesperson that may have prevented the deal closing in the first place. Use your BDC staff to act as a Customer Care Center and let them be a second voice at the dealership for your customers. When you have someone else reaching out to your customers, you are ensuring that no customer is being discarded by a salesperson and you are opening another channel for that customer to discuss a potential deal.

So remember, a dedicated policy of saving deals requires effort from your management, F&I, Sales and BDC teams, but it will all be well-worth it come month’s end.

Joe Webb - Automotive Internet Sales Trainer - DealerKnows Consulting