Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 10


Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 10

TRANSCRIPT: Any response you give to a question needs to be around driving an appointment. It could be by voicemail, email, or personal response on the phone. Let’s look at a typical situation. You have a trade appraisal form on your website. It could be Black Book, Kelley Blue Book, or whatever. The prospect enters information on the vehicle they own because they want to get an appraisal on it. These forms also ask the prospect for a vehicle of interest. Guess what? When we find out that they have got an ’08 Camry, and they’ve put down that they are interested in a 2014 Avalon, what does our team do? They focus on the Avalon. They focus on selling the new car. That cannot be what we do.

We need an appointment driven response. One reason we can’t focus on selling the Avalon is because they may not truly be interested in it. They may have felt they needed to put something on the form. They may have been on your site for service, saw the trade appraisal form and thought, “Huh, maybe I ought to see what my car is worth.” Instead of focusing on the vehicle they are interested in buying, we should focus on the vehicle that they want to trade in. There are two reasons for this: First is that they may not really be interested in buying it at all, and second is when you focus on that, you put yourself in a price war. Now you are in a price comparison with everyone else. Let’s focus on the vehicle that they want to trade in.

Your responses should be appointment driven. For example: “Hey, listen. We are very interested in your 2008 Toyota Camry. How soon could you bring it by so we can take a look at it? Whether that is by email, voicemail, or by phone, the idea is that we want to get the focus off the vehicle that the prospect is allegedly interested in. Instead we should focus on what is going to make it easiest to set a firm appointment that shows. In this case, it is the trade appraisal.