The Appointment Culture Light – PART 4

The Appointment Culture Light – PART 4

TRANSCRIPT: Simply put – great organizations don’t share these fears. Great organizations, those who rise above their peers and succeed in the face of mounting competition, are inherently dissatisfied with where they are and, sometimes, where they’re headed. They make constant, meaningful, course corrections that help them become number one. And once they reach the top, they are dissatisfied with where they are.

So, let’s get back to appointment culture light. Remember, back in the ‘creating an appointment culture’ session, we talked about how you get appointments, right? Well the top three drivers of appointments are managers, managers and managers.

The problem is most middle managers don’t like change. They don’t like things that sound like work. The fact of the matter is, the appointment culture IS work but, ultimately, it’s less work than the managers are doing today.

There are a lot of reasons dealers fail at the appointment culture, but let me tell you why you are going to fail at the appointment culture. If you allow your managers to just check boxes, you’re going to fail. If you just go half-in to the appointment culture, you’re going to fail.

Another reason I see them fail all the time is they give lip service to their internet sales efforts. They don’t manage lead counts or activity counts; or one manager tries to do it all.

I saw one dealership fail at the appointment culture because they put artificial targets in place. The general manager walked around the dealership screaming,”I want two appointments a day, two appointments a day, two appointments a day. No one leaves unless they give me two appointments a day.” So, what did everyone on his sales team give him every single day? Two appointments. Were they real appointments? No, they were fake, and, once you fake one appointment, you can fake them all. It’s easy to set appointments. I can set appointments all day long. That’s why people fail.

They also fail because they only push this appointment culture on their top people. Or they let the CRM or other technology issues become excuses. Another reason they fail is they are okay with their current customer data collection efforts. See, in the appointment culture, every Up gets in the CRM and we get all this great information.

Another reason they fail is that they protect the soft prospect, right? They have the 72 hour rule in place. It’s terrible. The 72 hour rule basically says if I had an Up two days ago and I put them in the CRM and they show up today and buy a car, I get half that deal even if it’s my day off. The fact of the matter is, I deserve zero of that deal. If you have a true appointment culture, you’re only protecting prospects within 45 minutes of the appointment time.

The final reason we see lots of dealers fail with the appointment culture is they treat it as watching their team sink or swim. They put it into place and then just stand back and let people do whatever they need to do. See, changing a culture, especially putting in the appointment culture, is like training a puppy. You can’t just take a brand new puppy and put it in a room at your house and come back a month later and see how it did. It’s going to be a very messy room.

You need to have constant course corrections and that’s how people succeed.