By Jess Lee, CEO, Bitesize
Once upon a time, using text messaging to communicate with customers was out of the norm, going the extra mile. Today in the year of 2022, everyone is doing it, including your internet sales manager, your doctor, and your barber.
Acquiring inventory is an additional challenge for dealers today, on top of selling cars over text messaging. Since every dealer is sending text messages to customers on their CRM, whether it be Vinsolutions, eLeads, Dealersocket, Reynolds, or DriveCentric, you need an advanced texting strategy to acquire inventory and win in your market.
So how do you win in your market and increase inventory at a time when everyone is texting? Some dealers even send text “blasts” or have automated flows set up, with mixed results. The answer is to use targeted text campaigns as a recurring source of inventory, while empowering your staff to have more customer sales and retention conversations per hour. How can you do that in real life? This workshop will show you.
Making texting a successful revenue generator at a dealership is slightly more complex than the old adage “be where your customers are.” Day-to-day dealer staff are not your typical office workers sitting in front of their desk, only focused on responding to customers’ texts. They are fielding phone calls, going back-and-forth inside and outside the store, and yes, taking Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. Texting is only as good as the staff who is there (or not there) to answer the customers.
If you’ve worked at a dealership, you have at least once heard a customer say “I never heard back from Jim! (or Bill or insert any salesperson name)” When dealers go into their CRM and take the time to click on each individual customer and check the text message conversation record, they are disappointed to find out that, indeed, Jim never got back to the customer.
The truth is, there is no way to easily check who hasn’t been responded to in the CRM. So if Jim has 48 customers waiting for him to respond, it’s extremely unlikely that he would even know it. Nevertheless, those 48 customers were business opportunities lost to another dealership down the street.
Until now, much focus has been placed on just figuring out what to say in the text. But the success of a text campaign truly relies on how we optimize the texting program for the dealership staff — not just the customers who are purchasing or selling vehicles to your store.
At the upcoming spring 2022 Digital Dealer Conference and Expo, I will be sharing 3 key strategies that are practical and easy to implement at your store during my session, “Text Messaging Strategy 2.0 – How to Level Up Your Texting Game & Increase Profit.” Two extremely talented managers, Michael Lefthand from the Jeep Store in New Jersey and Eddie Close from Findlay Acura in Nevada, will be joining to share what they did, step by step to leverage advanced texting strategies to increase inventory and beat their competition by miles. Join us at Digital Dealer and take your store to the next level!
