By Dave Bowling, Automotive Product Specialist, Reynolds and Reynolds

You have plenty of tools and processes to help you manage before the sale. Your ad budget is robust, your website merchandises your inventory well, you capture leads, and you send emails and place phone calls to pull traffic into your showroom. You track this activity to make sure it gets done and can see what works and what doesn’t.

You also have plenty of tools and processes to follow up after a customer visits your showroom. You have an email and phone call schedule to bring them back if they didn’t buy, and a schedule to prep them for the CSI survey and bring them back for their first service appointment if they did purchase.

But, what do you have for managing the sales process as it’s happening? What do you have to manage the now?

The Sales Process Today

Traditional CRM tools do a fantastic job of assisting before and after sales processes mentioned before. But historically, these tools are not effective in solving challenges that happen during the sale.

Consider the following scenarios, which are so common they’re not really seen as problems.

• When on the lot or the floor with customers, your salesperson has limited access to customer information.
• Your management team has no form of communication with salespeople when they’re with customers on the floor, the lot, or a demo drive.
• Sales management cannot enforce the sales process because they have no interaction with the salesperson while they are with customers.

Currently, an astounding 74% of walk-in traffic leaves without buying a vehicle. The in-store interaction is the time you have to get a customer to make a purchase, yet it’s the only interaction with the customer that isn’t actively managed.

If your sales team can manage the sale as it happens, they have a chance to stop a customer from leaving before they consider uttering, “I’ll think about it and be back later.”

By giving your team tools to “manage the now,” you’ll proactively better the sales process and improve the customer experience.

Managing the Now with Mobile Technology

How can you improve your CRM so that it actively manages the sale as it’s happening; By leveraging mobile utility and taking it on-the-go.

Your team needs a mobile way to walk salespeople through each step to ensure customer needs are met and the sale is managed in the now.

With an on-the-go tool, those problem scenarios are eliminated. Imagine this:

• Your salesperson greets the customer using their mobile phone that has instant access to the customer’s information. Your salesperson knows their recent interactions, buying history, and personal information making them better prepared to handle the sale.
• The customer is a tough negotiator and is ready to walk out of your store. Using their mobile phone, your salesperson sends an alert to the manager that help is needed. Management can then step in before the customer is gone.
• You’ve set up a predetermined sales process every salesperson must follow. Those steps and talking points are in your mobile application, and salespeople must complete each step with every customer.

This is what managing the “now” looks like: having full knowledge of everything happening in your department so you can control, motivate, and empower salespeople to deliver the efficient, simple experience customers want.

By doing so:

• Your management team has control and oversight of everything happening on your sales floor.
• Your salespeople are empowered and ready to follow predefined processes that help them meet their individual sales goals.
• Your dealership has more control over the type of experience customers receive.

It’s Time to Make a Change

With vehicle sales remaining stagnant and predicted to dip in the coming years, every customer entering your dealership is important to your success. The experience they get at your store is more vital now than ever; if they don’t like it, they will become part of the 74% of customers that leave without making a purchase. Once they leave, they probably aren’t coming back.

Are you ready to make a change and manage the now?

Learn more by attending Dave Bowling’s session at Digital Dealer 27 Conference & Expo (Aug. 19-21 in Las Vegas, NV). During this session, Dave Bowling will walk you through the sales process today — highlighting the gaps in the process that cause dealerships to lose customers and deals, followed by actionable insight on how you can fill in those gaps by managing every aspect of the sale as it happens.

About the Author

A six-year veteran of Reynolds, Dave Bowling works with dealership employees demoing solutions and processes to show how the technology will impact their dealership’s success.