The Perfect Appointment – PART 7

The Perfect Appointment (PART 7)

TRANSCRIPT:

How about the appointment’s three weeks away. How do we confirm that?

Wait a minute Steve, you said appointments for today or tomorrow only. Okay, here’s the scenario. You’re a Los Angeles dealer. You’re a Dodge dealer. Someone who’s called you from Fort Bragg, North Carolina because he is going to get out of the service in three weeks. He’s a soldier, he’s in the army now. He lives in Los Angeles. He wants to buy a brand new Charger. He’s got lots of money from his time overseas. He’s going to be home in three weeks. You’ve got the perfect Charger, right now at your dealership. He wants to get more information about it.

I’m going to go ahead and set that appointment for three weeks from now. I’m going to send him an email with the boarding pass. All that confirmation. I’m going to get permission to text him, so that I can send him a couple of texts over the three weeks to make sure he’s going to make it. We’re going to make that call the day before to make sure that he’s going to be on time. Our goal is an appointment that shows.

He’s going to be here in three weeks. What if I get his address at Fort Bragg, and say, “Hey, Soldier, listen. I want to send you a brochure about the 2017 Charger. Can you do me a favor? Can you give me your mailing address. We’ll get that brochure in the mail today.” Listen, I was in the marine corp. We love getting snail mail. He’s going to love to get that. He’s going to give you his mailing address at Fort Bragg.

I’m not just going to send him a brochure. I’m going to go into the parts department, and I’m going to get a Charger hat, and I’m going to get a Charger t-shirt. Right? Extra large, everybody can wear those. I’m going to send him a personal letter from the owner, thanking him for his service. Telling him how excited we are to see him in three weeks. Giving him that information about our appointment right in the body of that letter. Asking him if he would happily wear our hat and t-shirt when he shows up for his appointment.

Do you think he’s going to keep his appointment in three weeks? Absolutely. That’s called appropriate appointment confirmation. We have one goal, and that’s appointment that shows. Some of these things you’re going to have to use your head on. You’re going to have to try to figure out, listen, what do we do?

All right. We got a no-show, Steve. No-show. Listen, no problem. Okay? We’re going to investigate no-shows at the scheduled appointment time. That means if our customer had a 5:15 appointment, guess what? At 5:15 they are late. We’re going to do a quick call. The call is simply this. “Hey Mrs. Jones, this is Steve calling from Steve’s Ford, just want to make sure that you’re able to find our facility.” That’s it. That’s the call. Nothing more than that. We are going to make that call, because we’re going to find out that she’s down the street. We’re going to find out that she’s stuck in traffic. We’re going to find out she forgot. Right? In which case she’ll reschedule. We’ll maybe push it out 45 minutes. Whatever it is.

If we don’t make that call, remember, we made her feel guilty she no-showed. If we wait until tomorrow to make that call, even if she just forgot, it’s too late. Guess what? When we make that call, there’s a good chance she could be sitting in the box at another dealership. This is our only chance to pull her out of the box and into our dealership. We’re going to make that no-show call at the scheduled appointment time. When you do that, you’ll get more reschedules and you’ll know exactly when your customers are going to show up for the ones that are running a little bit late.