How to Create the Best Automotive Internet Sales Process Ever! – PART 6

How to Create the Best Automotive Internet Sales Process Ever! (PART 6)

Should You Include Alternate Vehicle Choices in Your Email Responses?

TRANSCRIPT: Let’s talk alternate vehicles, right? You know, there’s lots of debate on the alternate vehicles. Let’s be clear though, they’ve placed an order with us and we want to limit their choices. So why would I send them alternate vehicles, say in that first personal email response? Here’s why.

If you’re not the low price leader … okay, this is not the auto response, by the way. This is that first personal response, the only email that we actually touch. If you’re not the low price leader in your market and you get a new vehicle lead, you have to assume that others in your market are getting the same lead, including the guy or gal who’s the low price leader in the market. And so you’ve got to take time to get them off of price and to build a little trust. So here’s how you do it.

You offer two alternate vehicles, when you have a specific new car lead, but you limit it okay, to two alternates, because we want to limit their choice. Both alternates much be priced lower than the vehicle of interest. So here’s the vehicle they’re interested in. Here is the base model new and here is a better equipped used or CPO model. That’s going to do two things. It’s going to help us build a little trust, because look we’re down selling them, we’re not upselling them. And it’s going to get the customer off price, because now your price range is here instead of just here.

Now, good CRMs make it easy to build those alternate vehicle emails. Well, Steve wait, what about an ebrochure. Listen, if your CRM can easily do this and your ebrochure is attractive, informative, and compelling, then definitely send an ebrochure that first personal email response, as well. Here’s what I mean by that.

So Web Control you can grab all the vehicles of interest and put them in their in a nice way. Now a lot of CRMs can do that, but what some people don’t understand about their CRM is that theirs is not the only one that can do it. There’s lots of bells and whistles in every CRM. It’s got to be able to put the alternate vehicles in there, not automatically, because when that happens, I always see alternate vehicles that are priced too high. But rather, you just take a couple of minutes and put the email together.

In all of our templates, in all of our voicemail scripts, we want to speak like a human. We don’t want to talk like a car guy in these templates. So avoid dealer phrases like, ‘I’ll do anything to earn your business’. And replace those with human phrases like, ‘I’m here to help you schedule your no hassle test drive’ or ‘My only job is to help you buy your next car with no hassles’. That’s what we want to do. That’s the way that we want to communicate with them. And it’s really hard. It’s hard for me not to say, on the phone, ‘We really want to earn your business’. We’ve got to get away from that. We’ve got to stop being regular car guys and car gals.

Now finally, you need to test all of your email templates and all of your voicemail scripts. And the ultimate test is the DIR test, did I reconnect? But when writing these templates, you can’t be sure if something’s going to drive a reconnection, right? So let’s create a different test first. The first test we want to look at, is we want to make sure that the templates that we write format properly. So look at your newly written templates and ask, “Is it FUSSE?”. That is, does my template, does it create a sense of fear or urgency or scarcity, shame, or excitement, FUSSE, F-U-S-S-E. Fear in my template, is there some fear of loss for that customer, is there a fear of missing a good deal. Urgency, sort of a buy now kind of urgency. Scarcity, like used cars, lots of buyers, but only one car. And then the shame part’s really easy. It’s funny, the shame emails I love, but it’s why aren’t you returning my calls, did I offend you somehow kind of shame.