Auto Dealer's guide to Lead Generation and Market Share Growth

Objective: To establish the progressive steps needed to provide the necessary pipeline to achieve consistent Market Share growth in automotive sales. This will involve an overview of your current environment, examination of internal and external options to drive floor traffic and closing comments.

Current Environment Review: Step #1 in the process is to evaluate where your organization currently stands with regards to floor control, global review of sales people’s prospecting skills, and ultimately establishing benchmarks for acceptable performance. This involves many things.  The first of which is the adoption of a systematic approach to managing floor traffic. Most often this means using a CRM. The objective we want to achieve in using a CRM is finding the commensurate activities needed for your sales agents to drive 5 new appointments per week. Waiting for the up bus to drive onto your lot is rarely the answer. While cold calling is a necessary tactic, prospecting from your sold database via phone and email is likely the best use of time. Further, between email, the internet and the phone you can touch 20x the number of prospects on a per day basis. 

With regards to floor control front line management must see logged floor ups, set appointments, internet leads, be-backs and sold units on a weekly basis. This will help us understand how to get sales agents on plan. Quota objectives must be established on a monthly basis with weekly reviews on a per agent basis. This will lead to increasing unit count sales per person. 

A review of sales team phone prospecting skills should be done. The basic tenants of an effective phone interaction are to extend courtesy for the chance to speak, stated purpose and close for an appointment. If denied, condensed discovery to try to uncover pain and another attempt to close. If closing is not accomplished, request permission to pass brochure info and follow up after send. These steps need to be documented and role played.

Benchmarks for sales agents, dealerships and regions should be established around the necessary working pipeline to achieve quota. This will be based on demos, appointments, and closes per day. Visibility must exist up to the executive level. 

Execution Planning: There are several options for sales prospecting. The one that never goes away is the effort on behalf of the individual sales agents. After review, some organizations find that a centralized Business Development Center (Internal Call Center) is the best plan to ensure consistent lead generation is happening. The advantages are a focused team that imports sold vehicle data, review of demographics for prospects and execution of a campaign strategy which is done consistently. Further, because it is the sole purpose of this team is to drive appointments the volume is usually quite high. 

Data pulls also can be imported into your CRM to create multi-touch campaigns. These campaigns would include email touches with scheduled follow-up phone calls. 

Another plan is to partner with organizations that leverage sold vehicle data to create campaigns on your behalf down to equity position, year, mileage, features and options packages. They then execute a campaign on your behalf.

Lastly, Business intelligence has evolved to the point where third parties know the exact the behavior of a buyer for a truck on the internet. They then look for these clicks (behaviors) and drive these leads to you. The accuracy of having a qualified vehicle buyer is high here. Further, some third parties make calls to these prospects on your behalf. 

Closing:  Some derivation of this plan should exist. Further, it must be measurable, repeatable and predictable. You may find that all of these things fit into your go-forward strategy or that some do and some do not. The details of your plan should be determined through investigation and consensus among sales leadership.