Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 3

Creating an Appointment Culture- Part 3

TRANSCRIPT: Right now you are probably living off the Up-bus. What does that mean? It means your traffic goes through peaks and valleys. Most of your traffic is probably on the weekends, creating lots of bottlenecks. See, when you live off the Up-bus, your traffic controls you. What we want to do is learn to live off of something called the Appointment-bus. When we live off the Appointment-bus, we can smooth out the traffic. With appointments, we are in control of our next hour, day, week, month, and even our next year. This is because we are living off appointments.

As the owner of a car dealership, imagine you are turning the key tonight at nine to go home, and you know that you have fifteen appointments set for tomorrow. You already know that you are going to sell ten cars. So, how many of us have fifteen appointments tomorrow? How many of us even have five? Very few car dealers have any appointments scheduled for tomorrow, and if they do, they are generally not confirmed appointments. Many dealerships’ show rates stink.

What are some of the benefits of having an appointment culture? Well, we already talked about having a balanced day and week. What that allows you to do is make better staffing decisions so that you are not flooding the floor on days when there are no buyers coming in. It also helps you reduce bottlenecks like F & I and delivery. Other benefits include higher closing percentages that we already talked about. There is another benefit that you may not be aware of. When you sell someone a car from an appointment, they give you a higher grade on your CSI. They are more satisfied with you. It also gives you higher grosses, both front and back when you schedule appointments.

One of the things I really love about appointments is that you are able to get greater sales per person which leads to higher employee satisfaction. If an employee is selling more cars, they are more satisfied. If employees are satisfied, they don’t leave. This results in lower turn-over.