Dealerships own all of their client data and customers tend to be loyal to the store instead of the salespeople.
Is that great?
In our fathers’ era, the car salesman had his own book of clients. He would prospect and sell to them for years, while promoting himself all over town as the guy to buy the next car from.
Other industries like realtors, insurance agents and wealth managers still function this way, but the car salesman’s relationships have been gobbled up by the store’s CRM/DMS.
The benefit to the dealership is that the clients belong to them. It no longer matters when a salesperson leaves because you can still market to those clients through AI, Emails, Texts, whatever.
There is no lack of widgets claiming to automate a salesperson’s responsibilities.
This allows a dealership to operate more like a Best Buy than a relationship-driven industry. Salespeople just have to be there from the hours of nine to nine, six or seven days a week.
When you visit showrooms, many of them already look like Best Buys too.
Salespeople have never had so much time on their hands and often the phones are routed to a central BDC instead of the floor.
Customer service and professionalism almost never achieves Chick Fil A levels.
The staff on the showroom floor now behave more like grocery employees than sales professionals.
In fact, that kid at Publix today definitely knew more about scallops than my salesman knew about the 4Runner. He was more persuasive too — he told me they were local.
But are these guys stocking shelves and pointing to aisle 3, or are they selling f*cking cars?
While the dweebs in private equity and tech companies are betting against salespeople,
I want to go all in on them. I want to train them to be great and show them a way to do this that will make them important again.
What if salespeople were able to create their book of business, a dedicated following of people that grows every year, who they can communicate to and interact with?
If they were able to do this, perhaps they could work more normal hours, as their previous clients reach out to them with referrals.
Perhaps someone with a following of 30,000 people may never have to take walk-in customers, and could become the most valuable employee at the dealership again.
Previous customers, potential customers, local centers of influence — they all exist on social media.
This own-your-followers value prop may also attract a different profile of person to work in retail car sales.
The otherwise commercial real estate broker or software sales rep may decide to sell cars because the modern dealership opportunity is now better than it ever was.
I could imagine desk managers opting to stay on the floor because they are selling 3 cars/day and it’s all appointment based.
Social media is the way for salespeople to become valuable again.
However, dealerships need to figure out if they are looking to offer salespeople this sort of career, or if they would rather have retail drones wandering around the showroom playing Candy Crush as the phones ring elsewhere.
I would argue that if we are going to dumb this profession down, let’s go all the way.
Bring back cigs in the showroom, plaid suits, and as many balloons as we can inflate.
I was inspired to pen this manifesto on Tuesday this week when one of the largest dealership groups in the country wanted social media training, but decided against it because:
“We would love to do this but our average sales guy only lasts 6 months, and we are worried that if they become famous on social media, then they would leave us”
How do we eradicate this small-minded thinking from the retail car business forever?
Empower your employees. Root for them.
If not, sell your store and get out of the way so a strong entrepreneur can step in and kick some ass with a motivated sales team.