Have you made the commitment that automotive sales are your career choice? Unless you commit, it’s impossible that you will take the necessary steps to create the business you desire. Long term thinking in addition to the normal short-term goals is the key to continued success.
When you first enter into a sales position, eighty percent of your time is spent acquiring customers and twenty percent of your time is spent maintaining those customers. Eventually, with the right efforts that model should be reversed. Eighty percent of your time should be spent maintaining your customers and twenty percent to acquire new customers.
You face a paradox of time management in building your business. The paradox is that you must work in the business and also work on the business. When you are face-to-face with customers you are working in the business but no matter how busy you are, you must find time each day to work on the business as well. Working on the business includes marketing, prospecting, follow-up, networking, delegating, automating etc.
Insurance salespeople, Real Estate salespeople and salespeople from many industries continually think and act on building their business. However, in the auto industry the majority of salespeople seem addicted walk-in traffic. Eliminating this addiction is the key to long-term success.
Lead Generation = Dollar Creation – Begin to build multiple streams of leads by building a marketing web. List every way you presently acquire leads such as walk-ins, phone prospects, be-backs, referrals, repeat customers. Then begin to list new ways you could begin to acquire leads and how you can strengthen or add to your existing methods of generating leads.
Do you presently have a software program for following and managing your leads? I’m not talking about the dealerships program. What about your program? Don’t trust anybody or anything to manage your most important resource – your customers.
Secondly, do you have a set follow up strategy? How often will you follow up? How will you follow up. What rewards will you give and what special offers will you provide to bring them into service that creates the Law of Familiarity and Obligation leading to repeats and referrals?
Email follow-up and marketing is essential today. Do you automate your follow-up using technology? Email, Autorepsonder email and Sequential Autoresponder email are all ways to follow-up and add value that can be done while you sleep or on vacation. Static emails are not enough anymore. Video email and personalization are keys to making a connection, removing the impersonal nature of email and adding the wow factor.
All salespeople need their own web-site. Not the dealerships site, but your own. The site should include sign up forms that collect email addresses. The site should be personalized with your picture, family picture, your own personal story, rewards for visiting the site and helpful information for the customer. Your web site should include an audio introduction link.
Observe your business cards. Do your cards look like ninety-nine percent of salespeople’s business cards? Most have a picture of a car, not your picture or caricature. Most cards don’t have the salesperson’s web-site, email address and slogan. Most cards don’t have a call to action for the customer to see you, call you or go to your web-site. If this is the case, throw them away, they are useless.
Maximize traffic by creating a be-back CD. Create a CD that you give each customer who does not buy and ask them to play it on the way home. The CD should include information about you, your dealership and product that would benefit the customer. Include testimonials and a reward for the customer if they come see you.
Create coupon swaps with businesses around you. Visit a local restaurant and offer to build their business on their worst traffic day of the week for free. You can build their business by creating a coupon with an offer they approve and then pass these coupons out at work from the cashier, receptionist, and all departments to every customer who enters your dealership. In return ask that the restaurant pass out coupons form you approved by the dealership with a special offer to see you.
Once you start the marketing web it will grow and take on a life of its own. Building a business first requires long-term thinking and a commitment to the industry as a career. When you commit, you have already created a business, only its shape is unfinished.
Building Your Business - To learn more about this author, visit Mark Tewart's Website.
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