Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 6

Creating an Appointment Culture – Part 6

TRANSCRIPT: How do you get appointments? The key is that you have to ask for appointments. They don’t just happen by themselves. You actually have to ask the prospect or the former customer to come in for the appointment. Remember, the goal is an appointment that shows at the dealership. Your team is probably very good at calling on the phone to let a customer know that you have a particular car in stock. Then when the customer asks about the dealership’s hours, your team thinks they have an appointment which is not the case. If that customer does show up, she will be treated like a traditional Up with a closing rate of nine to twenty percent. Once you get a customer on the phone, you need to set a firm appointment. We will talk about how to do that when we talk about what a Perfect Appointment is.

By the way, Perfect Appointments, any appointments, an appointment that shows…it all happens on the phone. Your team thinks that working on their computers is working. Your floor team may think that being outside waiting on the Up-bus is working, but it is not. Save the emails. I don’t want to hear about the ONE time you set an appointment via text message, email, or twitter. Those are what we call “EXCEPTIONS”. Today there is only one thing that is working, and it is being on the phone. Anything else is not working.

One of the keys on the internet side of the business to help drive lots of appointments is that we treat every lead like it’s an order. For example, let’s say I work for your manufacturer and I order a car from the manufacturer, but I happen to live in your market. When you call me to tell me the car is in would you use traditional road to the sale questions? Would you try to build rapport? Would you say, “Hey, are there any colors you wouldn’t consider?” or “Do you plan on using this more for business or for pleasure?” No, you would treat it like the order that it is. You would tell me my car is in, and when would I want to pick it up. That is how we need to treat every lead from our internet side of the business. Treat them like they ordered the car. Let them stop us. Let them slow us down. Let them try to build rapport. When they are not in our dealership, we have one goal. That is to get an appointment that shows. There is no other goal. Whether you have a Business Development Center that is setting appointments for the floor, or you have an end-to-end team that is setting appointments for themselves, or you are letting your floor sales team have your internet leads to set appointments for themselves. Until that prospect walks in the door, we only have one goal. We are not trying to build rapport, we are not trying to build value in the dealership, nor are we are trying to build value in the OEM. We’ve got one goal, and that’s an appointment that shows.

This can only happen on the phone. It is not going to happen if we use the phone to try to sell our car. We need to shut-up when we are on the phone with prospects. The reason for this is that we can only sell the other guy’s car over the phone. Remember what I told you in an earlier lesson: People are trying to eliminate us. They have got all of these choices. If we tell them everything we can about the car, they do not need to come in and see it. They don’t need to come in and test drive it. If I sell Toyotas, and I tell them everything about the Camry, they will have it all in their memory banks. They don’t need to come in and see it. They can go drive a Honda Accord and decide if it compares to the Camry that they never drove. We have got to learn to shut-up. If we have to talk, we need to ask for an appointment. That is the only thing that we should be doing on the phones. There is an inverse relationship between information given and appointments shown. Our goal has to be to get an appointment that shows. When we give every bit of information to the prospect, they don’t need us. This means that they are not going to show up for an appointment.

There is one quick statistic that I want your team to understand: It doesn’t matter if you are internet, floor, or what your position is in the dealership, one thousand quality outbound calls equals thirty units sold.