Why hasn't CRM sold me more cars?

[Brian Pasch]

@alex
In your dealerships, how many hours a week are invested in listening to the recorded calls that come in to the dealership? Are they graded or scored in any way?

I was interested in this because I come from a call center data management background. I know that dealers use CallSource and WhosCalling for tracking call volume from various ad sources. I was interested if dealers are using different scripts, A/B testing on improving phone skills and phone scripting processes.

 

[Eric Miltsch (blog)]

Alex,

This was an excellent break-down; its one of the "car-guy" areas I'm not really involved with...

I hear a lot of the same rumblings from afar - I've already passed this along to a couple of people as well.

Thanks.

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

Brian,

Sorry for the late reply. We have two phone monitoring systems: ADP/Cisco and iMagicLab. We use ADP/Cisco primarily as an incoming call tracking system and iMagicLab records specific outgoing calls. As a company, we probably spend more time listening to the outbound calls because most of the inbound calls go to our BDC and the BDC manager listens to those moreso than our sales managers.

With roughly 150 people making a minimum of 8 outbound sales calls per day, the majority of sales call volume is on outbound. Thanks to the BDC, the largest opportunity is on the outbound side, so that receives the bulk of our focus today.

I have no idea what the overall management team is spending, in time, on call monitoring. I do know that time is spent on one-on-one training based off of what was monitored. However, I can say that we suffer from the same issue most dealerships do: managers don't know how to use the phone appropriately either. Most of our managers are experts at working with a customer while they're physically in the showroom, but have trouble effectively transitioning to a world where the customer has all the control.* This is a focus for me in 2010. Hopefully another DealerRefresh contributor (Jerry Thibeau) will be along to help me in that endeavor soon!

Does that answer your question? It is probably worth its own article.

*I have to condition this statement by saying that our sales floor is far better at working in the new world than they were even in 2008. However, traditional dealership training was in place for many of our managers (myself included) when we were sales agents, and that was a time when the Internet either didn't exist or was not a place you spoke to customers directly. Due to the economy changes I've found our management team to be more eager and open to learning and I plan to help them learn a ton more in 2010!

 

[John Quinn]

Alex -- talk about hitting the nail on the head -- bravo! Love the part about too many systems... especially in this era where many of the most critical responsibilities seem to keep landing in the desk managers'lap -- definitely seeing some overload. Part of the "promise" of CRM was to take what the best long-time salespeople were doing, and make it "easy" for salespeople to do the same, and easy for managers to manage that process for everybody... My boss told me once, many years ago, to "make it easy" (whatever I was doing), and I'd get results. No different with CRM. Again -- nice job!

 

[steve (blog)]

I too like the post. People also need to remember its a team. So many times I see a customer called twice a week just came in and buy without warning. The owner said its a team,as long as the company gets the sale it does not matter who gets paid

 

[blogjockey]

It sure would be nice if this article had a "Print" and "Email to Friend" Feature.

 

[Mel]

Point #1 really rocks! It's true, it's not abt the technology, it's what you do with it!! And ditto on everyone seems to only focus on NOW! Hence, faces risk of losing their old customers as sales person go on a chase after new ones, and neglecting the old customers who bought from them, and probably would buy & refer...IF the sales person bothers to keep the connection going.

 

[heidiadele]

Thank you.