Better Communication, Better Training

We know how it is. As a sales manager, it is your job to make sure your salespeople are doing their job properly and that new additions to the sales team are receiving the right level of training. Both are much easier said than done.

Given that an auto salesperson spends the majority of their time on the sales lot and they are constantly on the move as they help customers, keeping track of their actions during the workday is challenging. In fact, many work long hours and weekends, when you may not even be at the dealership.

Adequately training all new team members is also difficult due to the significant size of most automotive sales forces and the high rate of turnover. Getting every new team member in one place, at one time, can seem nearly impossible.

Fortunately, by adopting certain processes and features such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system and group chat, you can overcome these challenges.

Holding Sales Associates Accountable

A good CRM provides a central site for all external and internal communications. It also produces an indisputable “paper trail”. You may not be able to track your salespeople throughout the day on your own, but a CRM provides full transparency by giving you insight into the following:

• How much contact each individual is making with each customer; data in the CRM quantifies their outreach in a clear cut way
• The intent of your salespeople; the amount of effort they are truly exerting to make a sale
• The stage in the sales process at which an individual or team seems to consistently get bottlenecked
• The hours each team member is keeping
• How an individual and/or the team is performing as a whole
• Which sales tactics prove effective and which tactics fail
• Any upselling or cross-selling patterns

A well designed CRM holds a gold mine of information in it in the form of recorded phone calls, text message conversations, one-on-one chats between dealership employees, one-on-one chats between employees and customers, and internal group chats. All of this valuable data is available in the cloud, making it possible to literally monitor your sales force from anywhere so you can hold them accountable.

Additionally, having this centralized database available allows you to establish and maintain a standardized process of sales procedures. There is no mystery to the actions team members should take while working with a customer. This holds them accountable and helps ensure that customers receive the best overall experience when shopping for a vehicle at your dealership.

Providing Effective Training

High turnover and large sales staff become manageable when you can use your mobile CRM to standardize sales procedures.

Think about it. You could give the sales team access to playbooks and the best-performing templates in the CRM. That way, even if it is not possible to train them completely one-on-one, they have these resources in hand to further their development. The CRM also provides a centralized place for images, videos, voice and text that they can pull up and utilize during their selling process.

The information you have gathered from the CRM about the established sales team members’ successes and failures reveals which tactics and areas may require more attention in current and future training efforts. It will improve training as a whole.

And if getting the entire sales force together in one place, at one time proves impossible, why not use internal group chats to train new salespeople virtually, wherever they may be located in the dealership? This helps to get everyone on the same page and provides a point of reference later on.

Universities have made online courses and team chats available. They are obviously productive and effective. Using group chat rooms with video, pictures, voice and text to train within a dealership or sales department setting is the same concept.

Communicating via text messages is fast and convenient when a new salesperson has a question. The customer they are helping does not even have to know they had to ask. The result? When they proceed using the information they received via text, it reinforces their expertise to the customer.

The high turnover rate seen at most auto dealerships can cause hiccups in the selling process when a salesperson takes over for a team member who left. If the former employee failed to update the person now handling the sale, information gaps could adversely affect the outcome. However, when all of the information about the exchange is accessible via the CRM, they can seamlessly transition the transaction to themselves and save everyone involved a great deal of trouble.

The Best Full-Featured Platform for the Job

TEXT2DRIVE™ offers a simple yet power communications platform with our built-in, mobile CRM that interfaces with your Manufacturer Databases (MRF), Business Development Center (BDC) and Dealer Management System (DMS) securely.

It can perform all of the aforementioned functions for your sales department. Using our full-featured text messaging service and sales software, you can:

• Review a variety of daily reports to gain insight into your sales staff’s performance, communications and working hours
• Use recorded data to monitor each salesperson’s internal and external voice, text message and chat conversations
• Set up group chats with the entire sales department or a select group of individuals for training purposes
• Make playbooks and best-performing templates available as resources for new and established salespeople
• Gain insight from data on which sales tactics are strong and which tactics need more work across the team
• And much more

Gain control of your sales force and ensure they are adequately trained to sell more vehicles for your dealership. Request a demo of the TEXT2DRIVE platform today.