Are You Turning Every Customer Into A Salesperson for You?

What is the goal of a salesperson in a dealership?

Most would say to sell a car.

I'd challenge you to think about this: Does a salesperson make the same today selling 10 cars as they did 10 years ago?

Absolutely not. Why? Because grosses have eroded.

Salespeople need to hit bigger unit counts just to make what they made 10 years ago. So how has the goal of a salesperson changed?

The goal now is to convert each customer into a salesperson for you.

So what's the recipe to turn someone into a salesperson for you?

Creativity, curiosity, and intentionality.

CREATIVITY

There's a huge push in the industry to send a video to every customer who puts in a lead. We hold salespeople accountable for it, and in DriveCentric we can track who sends the video first. The problem is, we do a bad job of explaining why.

So why is it important to send a video to every single customer? Because everybody has a different communication style, and there are only three: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (hands-on).

If you send a text message, what style does that hit? Visual.

If you make a phone call? Auditory.

So how do you reach the kinesthetic people? The only way is to send a video. And the bonus is that a video hits all three.

If you're not sending videos, you're alienating a third of the way people communicate.

You don't have to be crazy or wacky. Caroline Cargill does a great job with this on Instagram and TikTok, and she creates video templates you can use to get people in the store.

CURIOSITY

The great Damien Boudreaux says people make decisions for two reasons. They're either trying to solve a problem or moving toward a possibility.

So how do we figure that out? We make it not about the car. We ask questions about the problem or possibility they might have. Once you find out what it is, you're going to sell a car.

That means paying attention. See a baseball bag or golf clubs in the trade-in? Ask about it. A single mom with three kids might need a third row. It's not so much about the car. It's about why the change is happening.

INTENTIONALITY

We need to be looking at what's in the vehicle. A bumper sticker. A can of Ghost energy drink. A bag of gummy bears. We can use everything we find in trade-ins, in the service department, or in customers' vehicles to create moments of intentionality down the road.

Our goal is to create a "this salesperson understands me" moment. The great Sandy Cerami calls this a getcha vs. gotcha moment. When customers feel like we get them, we've turned them into salespeople for us, because that feeling is what they share with other people.

Find a can of Monster, a pack of Sour Patch Kids, or a Boston Red Sox sticker? Work it into your delivery. A $5 can of Monster can turn a customer into a salesperson for you.

SO WHAT'S THE GOAL OF A CRM?

The goal of CRMs started off like the goal of salespeople: help you sell cars and manage tasks. But as the car business has changed, the goal should be to help scale relationships with technology.

Most CRMs were built 15 to 20 years ago and haven't really evolved since. Their primary philosophy is still managing tasks. DriveCentric is one of the only CRMs focused on scaling relationships with technology and moving conversations forward. After all, relationships are based on conversations.

If you let someone sit on red for an hour, is that a deposit or a debit in that relationship? Can you see that in your current CRM? Are you getting notified? Most likely not, especially when most salespeople are texting from their own cell phones.

So ask yourself: Is your CRM powering its AI with conversation data, or just transactional data? Without the conversations, you can't add the same level of context.

Are you stuck with technology built 15 to 20 years ago? Or are you adapting to how this industry is changing and turning customers into salespeople?