How To Sell Cars Online or Offline (PART 15)

How To Sell Cars Online or Offline (PART 15)

TRANSCRIPT: “All right, Steve. How do we do this?” If you’re ready to create a great online buying experience, let’s go through the steps. First, we’re going to start with your inventory display. Most people forget when they add the shopping cart or these other tools, this is about buying a car. You’ve got to ensure that your virtual lot is nearly as robust as your real lot with lots of pictures, with a great visual display, with actual photos of new cars like this 2017 Edge. Plus, we need to tell them what to do.

When customers come to your website, they don’t know what we want them to do, so we have to have highly descriptive and easy to find calls to action like check out online or buy now. Not structure your deal or create your deal or even shop click drive. Those are meaningless to some customers. Check out online. Buy now. Sounds like I’m buying on Amazon.

We want to do all of this while displaying market-based pricing on our website. Again, “Steve, does this make us a one-price store?” No but we need to transform into an our-price store just as we did to attract the 61% of offline buyers. An our-price store prices all your units competitively and you defend the price at the first human interaction. That means as soon as I talk to someone on the phone, as soon as someone emails me. “Is that your best price,” or as soon as they walk on the lot, I defend my price.

Let’s address the issues with the customer. Look at this. This is AutoFi. We’re addressing the issues as soon as we click through to check out online. It’s fast. It’s 10 minutes in your home. Can save you hours at the dealership. It’s transparent. No pressure to commit and clear explanations of your options. It’s flexible. Online or at the dealership, you’re in the driver seat. Then, we just need to take control. Enter email to start. Very simple. We’re going to walk them through this process. This is what your tools should look like. It should walk them through the process in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s asking them for too much information before we can start getting them to commit to buy but it should feel like a buying process.

Keep it simple. Things like, “Do you need financing, yes or no?” That’s it. “Do you need financing? Yes or no?” By the way, we’re not going to ask them to estimate payments with online toys like with payment calculator. We’re not going to ask them to estimate their credit score at this point or to start to talk interest rates right away. “Do you need financing? Yes or no.” We’re going to keep it simple. We’re going to keep it in order. Right after do you need financing? “Do you have a trade in? Yes or no.”

When they say they do have a trade in, we’re not going to ask them to estimate their trade values somewhere else. We’re going to take them through a real trade evaluation, the real great partner like KBB or Black Book. That’s going to be part of the process. Oh, by the way. People are surprisingly honest here. If you have done a buy-it-now button on your website where you have trade right now, you know that they’re surprisingly honest with this.