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2 Industry Trainers - 2 Opposing Views - Which do you agree with?

skeetle

Bone King
Apr 4, 2011
64
29
First Name
Megan
I was on Elise Kephart's DealerOn webinar today.
I've also seen David Kain do live training.
Both are industry trainers who have a great deal of knowledge. But they disagree on one point & I'm curious what everyone's opinion in here is --

When calling an internet prospect who has submitted an inquiry (lead)
  • Elise says with your second phone call - you should call from your cell phone & hang up without leaving a message.
  • David says you should not hangup without leaving a voice mail.
Which school of thought do you follow?
Me, personally? I always leave a message - I don't want to be that person who calls & then hangs up.
 
If you are calling every day or twice a day, I would only leave a message every other call. I don't want to be that person that fills up their voice mail.

But if you have a voice-mail strategy and give your customers a reason to call you back - don't you think that would work better? Instead of just leaving "Hey I have great news regarding the Ford Pinto you e-mailed me about." 17 times?
 
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But if you have a voice-mail strategy and give your customers a reason to call you back - don't you think that would work better? Instead of just leaving "Hey I have great news regarding the Ford Pinto you e-mailed me about." 17 times?

I believe a Voice mail strategy its crucial for success in today's business and the "I have great news" approach its way outdated.

About 4 years ago Cobalt and Lexus put out a study and actually gave out an outline for what their research showed to be an effective voice mail:

VM1.jpgVM2.jpg
 
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Can we just follow up anyway anyhow please. I find dealers across the country that never follow up.
Dealers need a 100% follow process, there's to many leads that get ignored without any follow up.

  • Elise says with your second phone call - you should call from your cell phone & hang up without leaving a message. This depends on the type of customer and lead, Yes it works:)
  • David says you should not hangup without leaving a voice mail. This depends on the type of customer and lead, Yes it works:)
The key to calling a customer is to have the best reason to give them, without reasons for them to get excited you will struggle a bit.

How do I know what works? I was a phone fanatic freak and that's all I did. Sold 50 cars a month working the phones. Ran the best numbers in the nation for carloan.com and help my departments sell 300 to 500 cars a month.
Here some great free training, this guy is a beast!
http://stevestauning.com/appointment-driven-communications/
 
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I believe a Voice mail strategy its crucial for success in today's business and the "I have great news" approach its way outdated.

About 4 years ago Cobalt and Lexus put out a study and actually gave out an outline for what their research showed to be an effective voice mail:

View attachment 2252View attachment 2253

Lexus dealerships and their salespeople are some of the best trained in the county, It's very hard to find a bad one.
 
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But if you have a voice-mail strategy and give your customers a reason to call you back - don't you think that would work better? Instead of just leaving "Hey I have great news regarding the Ford Pinto you e-mailed me about." 17 times?
Agree Megan, and like Manny said, just call !!! leaving messages is not the issue with most dealers, its picking up the phone enough to even worry about if they should leave a message or not. But good topic because between calls and emails, too many salespeople worry that they are being too pushy and don't want to bug the customer too much. You need to earn their business by continually following up and when they are ready to pull the trigger you are the first person they think of, no matter how you got to the top of their list
 
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Every year, they come out with studies that outline how poorly dealership Internet departments follow up.

If they even answer the initial inquiry they are usually one and done. Most of the time, they don't address the customer's questions and there is no emphasis on response time. Obviously, there are dealerships that do an excellent job but they are few and far between.

I was in a store a few days ago. The Internet Director now has an assistant. I watched them making call after call. Rather than hold the Internet Managers responsible, they were doing the job for them.

This store has a BDC also. They were offering a $100 gift certificate for test driving a car while the BDC people were given a bonus for a shown appointment. They were setting appointments for people that they couldn't get financed, in the past.
 
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It isn't a direct correlation, but how many voicemails do dealers listen to from vendors? How much of a voicemail do you actually listen to? 5 seconds, 15 seconds, all 3 and a half minutes of incoherent rambling? I'm not being mean, I've left that message before ;) I dialed the number before I dialed-in my message!

Remember the now defunct Google Cars product? One of the tenets that unnecessarily worried a lot of people in the industry was the proxy that only allowed a certain number of attempts to contact the intender by phone before the proxy timed out. Many savvy shoppers figured out how to screen calls well before that by securing a Google Voice number. They'd hand it out to dealers that refused to give any information over the phone without a "callback number in case we get disconnected" or a "need to put their hands on it because there have been SO MANY OTHER people interested in that car today." Once they had the information they wanted, they never answered that number again. The 17 voicemails singing the praises of Ford Pintos could have been worthy of top honors from the script writer's guild, but they still went unheard.

I think we can say this definitively, if you do leave a message, it better be short, sweet and to the point... and it better represent something of value to the consumer. You are always one "just checking-in to see if you've purchased" call away from being permanently screened.
 
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