Your Staff
If you are going to be committed to developing your Internet presence you need to make sure your staff shares your commitment and accepts their responsibility. All emails have to be responded to, all questions contained in them have to be answered, and every department Manager has to make sure that whatever area of the website they are responsible for is updated daily – or more frequently if needed.
The perfect Internet dealership understands that their improved Internet presence will result in additional customers who utilize the tools provided by the Internet, as well as customers who will come directly into, or call the dealership. They will embrace these customers and make sure their expectations are being met. They demand that their staff respond to any Internet generated contact the same way they would respond to a customer standing in front of them. They demand that department Managers understand and accept the responsibility for maintaining their portion of the dealership’s online presence.
Your Internet Sales Specialist
The most important consideration you will make is your selection of the individual who will be responsible for working with your Internet prospects. First, you need to remember that traditional theories of gauging Salesperson success do not necessarily apply to Internet Salespeople. Traditional floor Salespeople had to master the delicate art of negotiating and closing and these skills are not as important when you are working with new Internet prospects.
The Internet prospect has to be “converted” from a shopper to a buyer before the negotiating and closing process can occur. We train your Salespeople to initially approach this process as a “seduction.” Imagine your Internet prospects flowing through a large funnel. Your initial contacts are spinning around in the upper, widest portion of the funnel. As your Internet Salesperson responds to these customers, meeting all of their unique leads, offering useful information and alternatives, they will begin to build credibility with the customer. As this process goes forward, and the prospect gets closer to the end of their buying cycle, they will move closer and closer to the bottom of the funnel. If you do this process well, your closing and negotiating will occur when your customer gets to the bottom of the funnel, about to fall into your dealership.
That isn’t to say that negotiating and closing skills aren’t useful for Internet Salespeople, they are extremely important in the final process of converting Internet shoppers into buyers. However, in order to get to that point an Internet Salesperson needs to be able to establish credibility and authority by “over servicing” every customer contact that is provided to them. The most important quality an Internet Salesperson needs to have is the willingness to “jump through” what ever hoops a customer asks them to.
We have found that newer Salespeople often have the best success with Internet customers. They are usually more willing to work harder and build the needed relationships to convert these contacts, as opposed to just “cherry-picking” the easy leads that they believe will close quickly.
The perfect Internet dealership has Internet Sales Specialists who service between 60 and 80 leads a month. They are completely dependent on their success in working with their Internet customers and that is all they focus on. Their pay plan is unique, and is structured around volume bonuses as opposed to gross. They can compute lease payments and delivered figures. They have tools and resources that they can take advantage of to show and deliver cars off the dealership premises. They approach every generated contact as a sacred thing to be treasured and cherished. They work every lead they receive from start to finish, responding to every customer request for information quickly and accurately. They keep working their leads no matter how long the customer takes to make their purchase decision.
The perfect Internet dealership’s Salespeople have email pagers and dealership owned laptop computers that they take home and use on evenings on weekends so they can respond to every customer contact within 1 hour, and they write specific responses to the inquiry, not template auto-responses.
