How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer – PART 21

How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer (PART 21)

TRANSCRIPT: Old school trainers by the way will tell you to slow down the process and they have the data to prove it. Old school trainers have that data to prove that slower process works, but that’s yesterday’s data. You cannot apply yesterday’s data to today’s buyers.

Speed, when I say be faster doesn’t mean you’re careless. It doesn’t mean you’re rushed and it doesn’t mean you’re not building rapport. It just means we are assuming that they’re buying. See our buying process should look something like this. This is our new road to the sale. It’s a shortened road to the sale where we do steps concurrently.

Our first step on our buying process is meet, greet and license scan. Why? You want to get them in the CRM right away. We want to assume they’re here to test drive. We want to assume the sale. When we meet and greet it’s something like this, “Hi, I’m Steve Stauning. Welcome to Steve’s Honda. What vehicles did you come in to see today?”

That’s going to throw them off and regardless of what they say we’re going to say, “Great, let’s get your license scanned so we can take you out for some test drives.” Boom. Simple as that. It’s seamless. We’re walking them right in. They’re coming into the store. We’re going to scan that license. We’re going to get the keys and we’re going to go for these test drives right away. This is simple. It’s intuitive and it’s seamless. It’s transparent and it’s fun. It’s guiding the customer throughout.

When we talk about trade-ins we want to make sure that we take our appraisal process, that that happens before the test drive. We’re going to show them MMR or wholesale black book. The idea here is we’re going to take them to a touch screen kiosk or tablet and we’re just going to walk them through and we’re going to do the same sort of down selling of their trade that we did in the past. This is that trade walk piece. We are going to show them though a whole sale value.

The reason we want to show them the wholesale value before the test drive is we want to bring down their entire mindset on what their trade is worth and then we’re going to go on the test drive. This means because we’re doing the test drive, as you can see, demo drive. We’re going to do our feature presentation of the demo drive. The trade evaluations going to happen in the demo drive.

Wait a minute Steve, what? Yes. Our managers are going to be working on the appraisal offer so that as soon as we get back from the test drive the deal can be presented and we can present the entire deal including the trade and we’ve done a good job of selling in what we’re going to get them on the trade, haven’t we, by showing them the MMR. By bringing down their expectations early.

When people come back from their test drive they’re at their highest point. They’re more likely to sign a contract at that point than any. Taking them after a test drive and then going beating them up on their trade makes absolutely no sense. Using touch screens or kiosks, tablets, any of that can make this really seem simple, seamless, transparent, and fun.

Prior to the demo drive, we’re going to point out major items on the vehicle. We’re really going to do our feature presentation during the demo drive if necessary. We’re not doing a full walk around before the demo drive. We’re not going to butterfly the car. We’re not trying to win a trip to Detroit. We’re just going to show them a couple of items. We’re going to defend the price. We’re going to defend the addendum via seed planting.

We talked about this in earlier parts, but the idea is if you have an addendum on all your vehicles, let’s say if you showed your new vehicle online for let’s say MSRP 42,000. Your online price was 38,500, but you’ve got a $700 addendum which took it to 39,200. They came in expecting 38,500. They got a phone that says hey it’s 38,500, but the disclaimer doesn’t say dealer added options. The disclaimer says it doesn’t include dealer added options.

During the pointing out the major items, during the vehicle presentation if you will before the demo drive, you’re just going to casually point to that addendum and say, “As you know the factory builds vehicles for the entire world and what’s good in Alaska isn’t always best here in Texas. That’s why we equip every vehicle that we sell with a Lone Star convenience package and this package includes …”, and then you defend it. They’re not going to question why it’s $700 more.

Number two on our buying process is that demo drive. During the drive is when we’ll make sure that they understand some of the features. This is a miniature feature presentation. We’re not going to talk about how the polymer used in the headrest is the same as on the space shuttle, none of that stuff. We’re going to do that while our manager is evaluating the trade and while the manager is doing the write up, so that when we return to the dealership we can present them with a fair pencil.

What’s a fair pencil? It’s a pencil they’re going to take. It’s the first pencil that they’re going to take because we’re not going to start at MSRP plus, plus, plus, plus. We’re going to show them the price that’s already been agreed to. The price that they saw online. Even if we don’t think they’ve been online, they have. We’re going to give them a defensible number on their trade.