What Good is a BDC

A Business Development Centre or Customer Development Centre is a dedicated call center ideally located within an automotive dealership. A BDC utilizes and enhances your company's marketing and promotional materials by directly contacting potential clients, resulting in a measurable increase of new, qualified sales opportunities. Your BDC Representative uses all touch points choosing appropriate qualified scripts to place motivated customers in front of your sales team. This ultimately creates deeper market penetration and cultivates customer brand awareness and loyalty.

Mixed feelings regarding the necessity and efficacy of a dealership BDC  

While many dealerships and dealer groups find their BDC to be highly effective in generating traffic to their sales reps, some have misgivings. In the eyes of some sales managers BDC generated traffic can lead to the perception that their sales reps are lazy because they sit idly by and wait for appointments. Others struggle with the concept that the purpose of the BDC is neither to qualify the prospect remotely, nor to close the client over the phone.

Dealerships can be loathe to surrender the space required for an in-house BDC. A band-aid for this can be a remote call centre, where the dealership farms out their BDC service. This patchwork solution brings its own set of issues. Although less expensive on the surface, the true cost comes in the form of isolation from your dealerships' culture. Without day to day direct contact with your reps, management and internal processes, the remote agent is less likely to effectively build a strong relationship between your dealership and your client base.

Two big barriers to creating and maintaining a profitable BDC are cost and training. After the initial set-up costs of space, furniture and hardware comes the more daunting expenses of hiring and training. As difficult as it can be to find and acquire the best people, training and keeping them is where many BDC’s fall down. 

Motivation, remuneration, inclusivity and a reliable source of affordable training are key. The bottom line is a BDC must always be a profit center, however, a BDC is a call center not a sales department and must be operated as such. Remuneration, motivation and rewards should reflect the purpose of the BDC, which is to set appointments.

Dealership management and culture will ultimately determine whether a BDC is the right fit for a dealership. Call me if I can help.