New lead only internet sales rep

[Walt Kustra]

Something that has been on our minds a while at our store is dedicating a select sales rep to handle all new inbound leads on new vehicles only. To give you some background I work for an auto group where the store in question handles new Toyota, GMC, Buick, and Cadillac models as well as stocks over 100 pre owned vehicles. Our pre owned net sales due to our vast inventory, competitve vAuto pricing, and great special finance department have been outstanding, but new car sales are lack luster to say the least. The main reason we feel that we are underperforming in the new car department is due to the fact our green net sales reps lack the product knowledge and understanding of the new car customer to properly handle these leads. This combined with an abundance of "lowest hangnig fruit" pre owned leads makes it hard for them to follow up with the quality and regularity it takes to close new car leads. We have a few more expierenced net sales reps who we feel could handle these new leads best and by giving them all to a select one or few this would free them up to follow up better and more frequently. Obviously this is a band aid to help spur some growth in a net dept at a store where we are growing so rapidly that its hard to properly train ALL new sales reps with the product and process knowledge it takes to handle the new car customer, but hope it will produce some results once implemented till we can either train all reps better or completely seperate our net department to a new and used division. Has anyone tried a process like this? Any ideas or suggestions? Any insight would be appreciated and any questions you may have about us or our process are welcome as im sure more info could help everyone with your input. Thanks in advance! Im looking forward to everyones inisights and opinions!

 

[dwhitemd]

Walt, Interesting idea and hopefully a workable one. The big thing that always needs to be considered is how do you fairly compensate someone for this position. You agree that it takes a knowledgeable, articulate, professional to perform the job. How do you keep that person motivated in an environment where the grosses are usually very low, or non-existent, and the rejection level is very high. They may work twice as hard as their used car Internet counterparts, for a fraction of the sales and income. A reasonable base salary with stair step incentives on vehicles sold, with a possible bonus for CSI - with the understanding that you are paying for effort and results, instead of results only. Find the right person (people), measure what they do, and pay them a fair wage. Good luck and let us know how it progresses.

 

[Walt Kustra]

Great info, love your hat! Living on the east coast I have been deprived for the last few months of my golf game, but its sixty here today and the courses are all drying out...I can feel it right around the corner!

Glad to hear you think we are not going to off the grid with our concept here. We did take into consideration a pay plan when scheming this whole thing up and are working on something exactly like you suggested. Emphasis on the effort AND results, not so much results only. We have a more experienced guy in mind, very even keeled and patient. I will definitely let you know how this works out! We are planning on doing a test run on it starting at the beginning of April. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Running into this same issue at one of my dealers right now. Used car lead to close % is always in the high teens but new car lead to close never finds its way out of the low to mid single digits.

The sales team knows where the money is, and as you pointed out - they're going for the money making, low hanging fruit. Can't say I don't blame'm.

David is right - they're going to work the pay plan...

Typical scenario:
Near High Volume Competitive Domestic/Import Store (just about every dealer now)
$50.00 mini (if that)
No Volume Bonus until you sell X amount of cars with front end gross.
$400 Pack
Aggressive "Internet Pricing" under invoice (looser deal)

Selling only New cars -- how long are you going to stick around?

Then the managers wonder why new car sales are down or the turn on the floor is problematic or better yet - way can't we fill sales positions?

The new car sales "professional" and their compensation plans as they are today is GOING AWAY. Start thinking like a retailer and not the traditional car dealer.

 

[Walt Kustra]

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for the insights. We are going to implement this at the beginning of next month. Ill keep you posted as to how it works out. Another thing we are going to try is having dedicated coordinators to set appts for special finance, rather than just dump them on the internet guys as well. Obviously there is a little different way to handle these special leads VS traditional customers, and here at our store we do a GREAT JOB with special. By funneling these leads to dedicated personnel, rather than trying to teach EVERY net rep everything, we hope this will increase our close.