How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer – PART 6

How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer (PART 6)

TRANSCRIPT: This is where we’re talking about the sales and service, the marketing that you do and the things that you do pre-visit to attract the millennial buyer into your dealership.

Now when we talk about today’s buyers, how do we get them to show up? According to DrivingSales, I gave you this data earlier, 39% of buyers have some prior contact with the dealership before they buy, but 61% do not. That’s the reality with the connected customer. 61% of people make zero contact with us before they buy a vehicle.

Let’s start with the 39%. Okay? I love the 39%. I want to tell you why I love the 39%. I love the 39%, the people who will submit a lead, chat, text, Messenger, or pick up a phone. I love them because we can plan with them. Right? We can be in control of the process from the very beginning before they’ve ever set foot on our lot. Because we’re going to set appointments with them, we’re in control the minute they hit our lot because we’re ready for them. With the 39%, if you want to win with them, it is 100% about processes. You need to live your processes.

Now new school tactics are required here, not the old school talk tracks, not the old school road to the sale, or all of that stuff that we want to do on the phone. What we need is something called a one goal strategy. We need one goal throughout. Whatever step we are on with that customer, we have one goal.

When they send us a lead, I’ll get to it in a minute, we have one goal. It’s to reconnect with them. Once we’ve reconnected with them, once we’ve got them on the phone, our goal changes, but it’s only one goal: set an appointment that shows. That’s our only goal when we have someone on the phone. Once they arrive on the lot, guess what our one goal is, whatever the next step is. Evaluate their trade, take them through the process, sell them a car. Right? It’s one goal.

With the 39%, you not only have to live your processes, you have to learn something called continuous process improvement. What’s great about that is we can have a lousy process today. I can guarantee you if you’ll follow it, it’s better than no process. Then from there, you got a lousy process, you can begin to improve it, and you improve it over time. That’s called continuous process improvement.

To maximize your share of the 39%, you have to cast a wide net. What I mean by that is you’ve got to buy leads, you’ve got to use sources that maybe other people find distasteful. See, there’s a do-it-yourself movement out there. Right? AutoNation tried it for a while and they’ve abandoned it. There’s also the anti-lead movement. The people were saying, “Leads are dead.” Right? Leads are gaining momentum.

A lot of these companies want to sell you on engagement today. Listen, I can tell you, engagement is important, we’ll talk about engagement today, but that’s not the 39%. That’s on who submitted a lead. You’ve got to cast a wide net if you want to get your share of the 39%. The do-it-yourself and the anti-lead movements, they cannot cast a wide net.\

They’re simply foolish. They’re foolish movements.

Ask yourself this. Which customers can I live without? Because not everybody’s coming to your website. I don’t care how good your SEO is, not everybody’s coming to your website. I don’t care how honed in, how great your dynamic retargeting is and how great your SEM is and all of the things that you’re doing online. You’re not going to get everybody to your website. It’s just not possible. There’s no ROI in that. You need to cast a wide net.

Now we talk about engagement. I want to make sure. Are you relying on engagement? See, engagement is not a safe measurement of ROI. You need to be wary about those who are selling engagement. Engagement is basically sold by those who fail and generating leads and phone calls for you.

Now there are people who will talk both, and they’re not selling snake oil. The company that comes in and only wants to talk engagement, they only want to talk attribution but never leads, that’s because they’re failing at submitting leads and calls. See, it doesn’t make them bad or liars on the surface, but you got to ask yourself, why is Autobytel able to generate leads today? Why is Craigslist able to generate leads today? Why is CarGurus, others, why are they able to generate leads today? If this company is only selling engagement, I would look somewhere else to spend my money.

All right, let’s talk about the ROI of casting a wide net. Now when we talk about the ROI of casting a wide net, digital marketing effectiveness can be very make market and pricing dependent. Okay? What I mean by that is let’s use AutoTrader for example. When I was with the Asbury Automotive Group and we had 90 stores, the right make, the right market, the right pricing did better on AutoTrader than a different market or a different make or different pricing, and that’s true for all sources out there. What works for Ford here in our market may not work for your brand in your market.

Also, ROI measurements should be relative to the source and similar sources. When we get into these measurements, when we talk about these ROI measurements, I don’t want to compare, say, AutoTrader to my website. Okay? I want to be fair to AutoTrader. I’m going to measure AutoTrader relative to AutoTrader and to, say, Cars.com or CarGurus. That’s where I’m going to measure it, on other classifieds websites.