Solve Dealership Turnover (PART 10)

How To Solve Dealership Turnover & Staffing Issues Forever (PART 10)

TRANSCRIPT: So let’s write some processes, okay? Here’s how we write processes. First we identify the goal. In the case of our road to the sale process, our goal is easy. Sell a car, right? Then we work backwards from there using simple steps. We start at sell a car and then we work backwards. Selling the car is the bottom. We work all the way back to the first step of the process and then we smell test the steps. What do I mean by that? I mean we give them a smell test. Are these steps necessary? Does step three really help you get to step four? Then we ask, is this a great process? What do I mean by great process?

A great process is one that’s loved by employees and your customers, and so we’re going to look at that on all the processes that we write. Let’s talk about the internet sales process. Remember that is a CRM process. What’s our goal when we get an internet lead? Our goal is to get a connection, get the customer on the phone. That’s our goal. We’re going to work backwards from there. This is an incredibly short process. Here’s our connection and here’s the attempts we’re going to make to connect and here’s where the lead arrives. That’s the whole process. Lead comes in to the CRM. We make some connection attempts via email, text and voice. Then we get the connection. That’s the process.

Let’s write steps. Write the when and the what. Here’s my 2017 internet sales process. Now it doesn’t have the templates in it, but I want to go through this. We’re going to smell test our steps. I decided, based on watching my clients, based on looking at CRMs, based on how long it took before people reconnected, and whether we were realistically selling the car to someone we sent an email to 90 days after they sent their lead. Then we shortened to 45 days. That’s what you see on this graph. Our calls only go through the first 15 days. The emails are on the top of this continuum. The phone calls are on the bottom.

You might say, “Steve, where’s the text message?” It’s in there. It’s not written on here, but we’re going to do one text request if we’re doing text the right way through our CRM. We’ll do one text request on day one as well. The nine emails are basically an autoresponse, a day one personal response. That’s the email that’s in black. All of the rest of those red emails, those are all automated emails on days two, four, eight, 14, 22, 31 and 45. Simple. Our calls, we’re only making nine calls on the whole process. The whole 15 days is only nine calls. We’re going to make two calls on day one, a call on day two, three, four, five, seven, 10 and 15. That’s it because remember, by the time you’ve made your sixth call, you have reconnected with 93% of the prospects who were willing to reconnect with you and by your ninth, it’s something like 97%. We’ve smell tested the steps. They all make sense.

Now we’re going to say, is this a great process for employees and customers? I’m going to say yes, it is because your employees will actually make these calls. The problem with our longer processes is employees were faking the 23 day call, the 30 day call, the 45 day call, whatever it was and they weren’t making those. What also makes this good for employees is all those automated emails. They’re not spending time, wasting time typing out an email or having to select a template, put it in the CRM and shoot it off. Those templates go out automatically. All they have to do is call people and after 15 days, they bury the dead, they move on.

Is this a great process for customers? Well, it reconnects with them and it puts the emphasis at the beginning of the process. It puts the emphasis early on when the lead first came in. There’s a lot of emphasis on connecting. There’s a stat out there that the dealer who connects first with a new prospect is 238% more likely to sell them a car than the dealer who connects second. That’s why the process was written this way. Is this a great process? I don’t know. Is it easy? Is it easy to follow and easy to explain? Is it simple? Yeah, it is. Is it intuitive? Do the steps make sense?

Yes, this process makes sense. Is it repeatable? Absolutely because it’s a CRM process, right? As long as we get in the CRM and we enforce it, it will be repeatable. Is it effective? Will customers and our good employees love it? Notice I said good employees. See, your bad employees are going to fight everything that you want to put in place. Do not worry about them. They can go work for someone else, okay? Listen, if somebody can’t work with us, again, it doesn’t make them a bad person. It just means they’re not a fit.