"Prevent Employees from Leaving With Customers"

According to NADA, salespeople in the automotive industry have a turnover rate of 72%. That’s 38% higher than the turnover rate for other industries. Why is this important? Because salespeople are infamous for using their personal mobile phones to handle their customer base. Consequently, when salespeople leave, they tend to take customers with them. As a business owner, that’s the last thing you want. Customers shouldn’t be following salespeople from dealership to dealership. They should be following you and your dealership.

So how do you ensure your customers stay where they belong? Follow these simple steps to prevent sales staff from taking your customers.

1. Require a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform

A CRM platform will enable you to track your leads and opportunities all in one central location - disarming the threat of the mobile phone. Here, you can monitor the activity of your entire sales team. You can view which customers the sales staff are currently working with, when they’re following up, and how (email, phone or text). A CRM platform will improve your business performance, accountability, and communication, all while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Invest in a Phone System

A high-tech phone system will also improve your dealership’s communications. It can provide your employees the power to handle calls more efficiently as customer information and details are displayed instantly alongside each call. Management tools like call tracking, automation, and self-service options help you focus more on building good phone processes across the dealership. This will result in increased staff efficiency and stronger customer relationships.

3. Perform Sales Reviews

Not only is identifying loyalty in customers important, but loyalty in your sales team is just as important as well. Performing weekly one-to-one meetings with your team allows you to discuss what they have in their pipeline, and how they are managing it. Though this sounds very similar to what a CRM platform can provide you, it simply creates an open, honest, and transparent business relationship between you and your sales team. Beyond that, it creates mentoring opportunities as your sales team will feel further invested and dedicated to your dealership through the feedback you provide.

4. Value Customer Relationships

Meeting with customers regularly is just as vital to a successful business as meeting with your sales staff. Don’t treat them with a buyer-seller relationship in mind. Make contact with them on all levels. Get to know them personally. How old are their kids? What do they enjoy doing? Do they like to travel? Relate to them and find some common ground between the two of you. Take it a step further and send a thank you note for doing business with your dealership, send birthday cards personally signed from you and the sales team, and send anniversary cards of their vehicle purchase date. Remind them every so often how much you value them and their business.

Establishing these customer relationships helps the customer acknowledge that they are doing business with an entire organisation and not necessarily just one individual (the sales person) who only wants a sale. They are less likely to view a particular sales person as the most important person; in turn, creating a stronger bond between your dealership and your customer.

We offer multiple retailing solutions to help dealers manage their business operations, including CRM tools, websites and advanced telephony all uniquely integrated to our POWER Dealer Management System (DMS). For more information, go to www.reyrey.co.uk/