Category: Digital Retailing

It doesn’t take much digging to uncover what’s the big story in automotive retail these days: online car shopping. For the last two years, there’s been plenty of industry chatter about the digital solutions transforming the way vehicles are bought and sold. It’s not just a huge story, it’s THE story.

But when it comes to specific components of automotive retail’s existing infrastructure, the industry has been pretty quiet about providing best practices. Such is the case for business development centers (BDCs).

So let’s turn up the volume. Critics believe BDCs and digital transacting solutions aren’t compatible, that they’ll be replaced by online shopping tools, that they’ll become obsolete. That’s not the case.

As shopper behavior changes and potential customers submit fewer traditional automobile leads, Digital Retailing can elevate BDC performance and breathe new life into the conversations that representatives are having with clients. Online customer communication is central to a successful digital retailing strategy, which makes BDCs and this new approach to selling cars a natural fit.

Here are six digital retailing strategy tips BDC reps can apply to accelerate deals and deliver the buying experience shoppers have sought for a long time:

1. Direct calling customers to your website.

True, mobile’s tap-to-call feature might make it easier to call a car dealership than ever before. But a phone call isn’t the most efficient way to begin the fairly complicated process of buying a car. Digital Retailing is. All it takes is some guidance to get customers from point A, a phone call, to point B, your dealership websites where they can use digital retailing tools.

In the old days, the industry subscribed to a “get ‘em in the door” mentality. Today, it’s more like “get ‘em to your website because it offers the shopping experience customers are looking for anyway.” A little longer to say, sure, but accurate, honest, and far more effective.

2. Help shoppers “skip to the front of the line.”
Let shoppers know that with your digital retailing solution they can do much of the work that used to involve submitting paperwork and waiting at the dealership. It’s now all possible, and drastically quicker, from the comfort of home or wherever potential customers are shopping for cars. Bake this into your follow-up. Make it a part of your distinct competitive advantage.

3. Introduce Digital Retailing as a “Saturday visit alternative.”
Saturdays can be a tricky day of the week for car dealerships. It’s a weekend day, of course, which means most people will have it off of work, therefore having the time to come to the dealership. And for dealers in a blue-law state, the drive to get to the dealership on Saturdays is intensified as the window of buying is that much smaller on the weekends.

Let your BDC be a part of your strategy to maximize weekends by introducing a fast weekday evening purchase experience as an alternative to spending hours in your store on Saturdays. This demonstrates your commitment to customer convenience and allows your retail sales consultants to focus on new opportunities and fresh ups.

4. Ask for confirmation, not an appointment.

A traditional lead comprises a phone number and an email. It’s not much to go on to make an appointment with that customer.

Digital Retailing requires shoppers to provide you with more comprehensive personal information. Respect this and reflect it by using talk tracks that:

• Confirm you have shoppers’ secure information, and that you can submit it directly to lenders.

• Confirm that your dealership is set up to efficiently serve shoppers based on this time saved online.

• Ask for a time to confirm the car and sign paperwork.

5. Empathize with shoppers and make the conversation about experience.

As a BDC rep, you’re not directly in sales, and you’re not a customer – you’re somewhere in the middle.

Use this to your advantage. Based on your store and your level of empowerment, have a conversation with shoppers about your personal experience the last time you bought a car. What did you feel? How long did it take? Shoppers will connect with you through the car-buying experience, and you’ll begin to build a strong relationship.

In this conversation introduce that your dealership uses technology to streamline the car-buying process. Car shopping should be fun. Encourage your shoppers to do the busywork of car buying online, so they can come to the dealership ready for the really fun part: the test drive!

6. Share your customers’ Digital Retailing stories on social media.

Everyone loves a great story, and there’s no place better to share your car-buyers’ success stories than on social media. It’s easy, engaging, and far-reaching. It’s also advertising for your dealership without feeling like advertising.

BDCs and online transacting tools like Digital Retailing can do more than just co-exist. Uses strategically, the two can thrive in an automotive retail symbiosis – a powerful two-pronged approach to connecting with customers and enabling them to shop the way they would prefer, all while earning greater profits for your business in both the short and long term.

Questions or comments about Digital Retailing, either for your BDC or dealership? Check out our other Digital Retailing material in the Dealer.com Insights Center, or connect with us in the comments section below.

The summer selling season is here and so, too, is the pressure to hit sales goals and capture as much margin as is possible in this changing automotive marketplace.  During crunch time, it’s natural to seek the comfort and familiarity of the way business used to be done. That could look like emphasizing print, displaying only MSRPs on vehicle details pages, reverting to the old “get ‘em into the dealership” sales mentality, or the urge to load first pencils up with a few grand in product.

Unfortunately, many of these outdated tactics will probably cause you more stress and pressure in the long run. To combat this, look to the future of digital marketing as you finalize your summer sales strategy by considering these three steps – part of a larger digital retailing strategy – to start moving inventory off your lot in the coming weeks.

1. Confirm that your team is working deals, not leads.

Ask your internet manager to see what deal information potential car buyers have pushed across your dealership’s virtual desk using Digital Retailing in the last week.  Can you see customers’ trade details, desired payment terms, and the status of finance applications? You’ll need to determine how deep customers dove into the digital buying process to have an effective sales conversation with them.

Do you think customers using Digital Retailing might be hearing, reading or getting any sense of, “When can you come in?” undertones from your dealership – the kind used in traditional form leads? Hopefully not. Customers have given you their personal information and by engaging with Digital Retailing tools are expecting a more efficient car-buying process. Language that confirms the work they have done online and positions your in-store experience as fast and convenient will resonate with these customers and set your communications apart from any of the other email and phone follow-ups that they’re receiving.

Do your managers review new Digital Retailing clients and opportunities daily? If a customer comes into the showroom, walks around your inventory, points to one that he or she likes, and then fills out a credit app, you and your team are going to work together to see what you can collectively do to sell that deal. The same teamwork applies to Digital Retailing. Your customers are walking through those exact steps in your virtual showroom, and it’s up to your whole team to work together to make deals happen.  

2. Ensure that your entire sales team is using this powerful sales solution.

Digital Retailing is not a lead generator or a digital widget. People are shopping for cars just like they shop for almost anything else: by weaving digital and physical experiences together. Your sales team should approach selling with these experiences in mind.

Have your F&I manager and internet manager presented the power of Digital Retailing to your sales team? Make sure these parties are connected and can conceptualize the capability of Digital Retailing. Create in-store point of sale material that drives awareness of the time savings and convenience of Digital Retailing. Show customers that your dealership is working hard to satisfy and exceed today’s digital shopping expectations and is delivering a car-buying experience for the 21^st century car shopper.  Encourage your sales team to weave Digital Retailing into their follow-up conversations with unsold visitors and even traditional leads. If you’re starting to say, “But that will impact my conversion metrics,” remember that Digital Retailing is a sales solution, not a lead-generating tool. Let it help you sell cars.

3. Create a truly different experience for your clients, and then market it.

According to the Autotrader Car Buyer of the Future Study, the vast majority of people still prefer to buy their cars in-person. After all, there’s no online substitute for a walk-around the very vehicle a shopper will purchase. What’s interesting, however, is that 72 percent of all shoppers, regardless of generation, find online paperwork appealing.

Position your dealership’s customer experience as a better way to buy a car by illuminating Digital Retailing. On the digital front, market it on your website, and bridge the gap at the dealership with similar promotional material on display on the showroom floor. As your entire team gets more comfortable with the Digital Retailing process, aim toward a goal of reduced total time your customers spend in your showroom. You know your store and your team best, so that goal is yours alone. But if you can deliver on the promise of significantly reduced in-store time for your customers, you’ve gained a tremendous competitive advantage.

Summer is clearly a busy season at any car dealership. But with business-wide adoption of a digital retailing strategy, your dealership can increase sales efficiency, enable greater throughput, and position you and your staff as innovative, different, and, ultimately, preferable when it comes to choosing a dealership from which to buy a car.

Patrick Wyld is a Digital Retailing enterprise performance manager at Dealer.com

An institutional shift toward a Digital Retailing sales model won’t arrive overnight. Neither will it happen without dealers embracing a progressive digital strategy that rewards proactive adaptation and open-mindedness toward the new digital model. While the industry is currently poised for such transformation at a high level, the reality is that the traditional car-buying and car-selling model is something deeply engrained in our culture, and will take some deconstructing if dealers are to realize digital’s true potential.

Which is why we’re here, with four tips to set up your Digital Retailing tools and adopt a strategy that will ensure your dealership isn’t caught operating under the confines of an outdated sales model.

1. Integrate Digital Retailing into your sales process.

Your sales department will need to be trained not only on how to use Digital Retailing, but on how to promote and message the product. In conjunction, there are several steps you can take within your various sales processes to ensure a smooth transition and profitable results to the new tools:

-Create a source in your CRM for your various Digital Retailing channels. Ensure that your teams are able to attribute floor traffic or phone calls to your Digital Retailing tools.

-Update any scripts or talk tracks at your BDC, at reception, and dealership-wide. You are making a serious investment into the future – ensure that anyone who speaks to, emails with, or connects with your customers is comfortable speaking with them about this new process.

-Create distribution rules for the various types of inbound Digital Retailing leads. Your CRM can automate routing of the critical info to the proper departments in your dealership.

-Establish a standard for ‘ownership’ of customers. Create clarity on who owns dialogue with customers – whether they have submitted a finance application, or a trade appraisal – and what is expected for all communication, when and how to provide updates to customers, and how those updates are documented in your CRM.

-Identify any opportunity for in-showroom point of sale. Your customers have taken control of their car buying and used tools that help alleviate anxiety. Don’t resurrect it with confusion about where to go when they arrive at the dealership.

-Hold a brainstorming session with your sales team to connect Digital Retailing to any process steps or informal process steps. This will help you get buy-in from your sales team on this change, as well as identify opportunities to weave these new tools into the day-to-day selling.

-Make clear that F&I is a growth area with Digital Retailing. These tools drive more awareness and opportunity to F&I. In fact, during a study of hundreds of dealers, 30.84 percent of Digital Retailing finance applications were closed, and those closed sales returned 36 percent higher back-end gross than the deals that followed the traditional in-dealership application process.

2. Position Digital Retailing from your customers’ perspective and promote it.

If Digital Retailing is a new product and concept to dealers, then it’s a sure bet that car shoppers have never heard of it, nor its enormous benefits to the shopping experience. Which is why your dealership needs to look at things from your customers’ point of view, specifically the elements most lacking from the traditional car shopping experience: transparency, efficiency, and convenience.

–Advertise the functionality and benefits of Digital Retailing as part of your dealership’s brand. Convey that your website will save customers time by allowing them to submit financial, credit, and trade information, decreasing their stay in your showroom. It’s less of what customers don’t want and more of what they do.

-If you work with an agency, create a video that illustrates the process.

–Build a custom page explaining how your dealership delivers shopping convenience and transparency through these new tools. Add testimonials to the page as you receive customer feedback.

–Create in-dealership signage and displays to reinforce the product and process.

-If you use traditional media, spotlight the functionality and benefits of Digital Retailing to a TV, radio, and print audience.

3. Prepare your team to interact smoothly with deals.

Instead of receiving leads that often require back and forth, you will be acquiring pieces of a deal that help you get incrementally closer to a purchase. This will require a tight partnership and solid communication between sales and the teams that manage inventory, finance, and appraisals.

Spread the stoke. Our industry has been gushing lately over Digital Retailing’s ability to bring convenience and trust to the sales process. Find articles or postings about this and share with all of your teams, and communicate with them about these desired goals.

4. Prepare for the next generation of analytics and interactions.

Our industry has come around to looking beyond leads by focusing on drivers of indirect demand as the importance of traditional form leads gradually decline and sales and website visits continue to rise.

Customers may partially use Digital Retailing’s finance or trade tools and then call or visit, just as they would when calling from a vehicle details page (VDP), or visit your dealership with three VDPs printed out. This is all “Webrooming” (the opposite of Showrooming), and it’s critical to understand and communicate with your team how this is drawing convenience-based trust and indirect demand, even from customers that only partially interact with Digital Retailing.

With Digital Retailing up and running, there are additional tasks required. But don’t think of it as work. Think of it as making the most out of the investment and establishing your dealership as an early adopter of technology that is changing the way shoppers buy cars and dealers sell them.

Patrick Wyld is a Digital Retailing Performance Manager at Dealer.com

Expect to hear a lot about online transaction software at this year’s NADA convention. And for good reason: research shows that digital improvements to the car-buying process produce increases in shoppers’ likelihood to buy, visit frequency, and vehicle purchase frequency.

Translation: online transacting tools have the potential to provide shoppers with the streamlined car-buying process they’re looking for, and dealers with the increased sales, business stability, and edge over the competition they need.

With so many of these “tools” seemingly available to the auto retail industry, online transacting must be the sales panacea that will take dealers into the 21^st century and beyond, right?

If you’re considering building your sales strategy around an online to in-store experience to generate automobile leads, you must first understand that success requires more than just new software. Success is contingent upon a holistic solution that enables quality engagement with shoppers, a shift in sales philosophy, the support to help your sales staff to make this shift, and online transacting tools designed to create operational efficiencies. This comes together to help you sell more cars in a way that satisfies shoppers, and provides you with what keeps our industry going: car deals.

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As you speak with vendors at NADA this year, reference the following checklist to make sure you’re being presented with a solution that can help you sell cars, is optimized for your needs, and is more than just software:

1. Does the solution have flexible configurations to keep you in control?

Do you have an empowered sales staff, or do you have a desking process? Does your rate or lender selection alter from month to month? Flexible configurations allow you to build a strategy that takes your dealership processes into account while optimizing your client experience, providing you with the control to advance your business as your dealership undertakes this journey.

2. How nicely does the solution play with your in-store F&I?

Online transaction success is driven by integration. Is the finance tool connected to your F&I process? Do the tools truly save time for your dealership and your clients, or do they collect information that you have to then manually input into other systems? You want this software to endear your clients to your brand, and that means integrations at every customer touchpoint, from the outset of every car-buying journey.

3. Does the solution’s breadth of products match the needs of your business?

We are all in different places in the transition from online to in-store and one tool will not fit the needs of all dealers. Ensure that you are demoing a flexible solution that allows you to select the features or functionality levels that align with where you are in the transition.

4. Does the solution have a substantial install base?

Who wants to run their business on vaporware? As you’re getting a demo, ask whether the software has been stress-tested with thousands of dealers, dozens of lenders, multiple integrations, and groups of all sizes. Look for a stable, configurable solution that emphasizes secure, reliable operation to connect commerce with your sales department.

5. How supportive is the solution’s client service?

Remember, online transacting means looking at selling cars in an entirely new way. You want experts in the field helping your business adopt the right strategy. Look for a technology partner that brings software together with service to help you at every step of the process – from initial setup, to optimizing performance digitally and among staff, to ensuring performance sustainment.

Ask vendors if their support model includes training and dedicated eCommerce performance support? Is there extensive material available that describes how to take online transaction strategy to the next level? Does the organization continuously look toward the future of online deal-starting and deal-making?

6. Does the solution empower your customers to submit deals rather than leads?

Remember the Autotrader’s Car Buyer of the Future Study? We benefit from online transaction solutions when our customers interact with them in a positive way that decreases anxiety and drives them toward a deal. Put yourself in a shopper’s shoes during the demo: can you see yourself saving time and turning into an empowered buyer or are you simply asked to submit a traditional lead?

There’s a lot to see and learn about at NADA. Navigate the booths and demos with these questions at hand to help you ascertain how best to bring your dealership sales process and your online shopping experience closer together with a solution that helps you work deals.

Patrick Wyld is the enterprise performance manager for Digital Retailing at Dealer.com

At the just-concluded NADA 2016 Trade Show, Cox Automotive Vice President of Digital Retailing Mike Burgiss spent much of the show discussing online sales concepts and trends with dealers and managers. He also hosted two detailed workshops about how dealers can maintain control of online retail – while at the same time providing the type of sales experience that customers expect. Needless to say, there was healthy dialogue about how to work in today’s online to in-store environment, especially regarding the best ways to maximize profit as well as customer satisfaction. It’s no longer whether or not it’s happening. Today’s reality is that dealerships are at a critical juncture where the choices they make will define their immediate and long term sales prospects. Making those right choices begins with understanding digital body language and its importance to success.

Digital Body Language

If you’ve ever sold anything, played a hand of poker or negotiated, you know how important understanding body language is to the process. A good salesperson knows when his or her customer is close to agreeing to a deal by being aware of unspoken signals; indeed, how your body reacts to information is often more accurate than the conversation that’s going on.

It’s the same for the digital experience. A person shopping for a car creates “digital” body language that a salesperson can use to assess his or her readiness to buy. It’s a trail of intentions and preferences made available with smart automobile leads tools and trained professionals who know what to look for – and how to engage. Just as a savvy salesperson takes in all the physical cues that create a picture of the sale, so too can a salesperson use digital body language to map the needs and wants of the customer.

The key, of course, is in building trust. While it’s true that most people today are very protective of their personal data, most would share at least one piece of information to improve content recommendations. And in terms of car shopping, Digital Retailing applications show that the more comfortable a person is – the more authentic the environment – the more likely he or she is to provide real information and create accurate digital body language.

It Happens on the VDP

The best place for that exchange is on vehicle details pages (VDP), because it’s these pages that are at the center of virtually every sale. By providing valuable information first, dealerships create an environment of trust and credibility for shoppers. As buyers self-pencil their deals, the digital body language they create becomes a vital part of the showroom discussion. With the initial deal structure, buyers reveal their financial state, their priorities, and how much they want the car. It’s a road map to building a fair deal. Each part of the digital conversation helps to build out the intent of the buyer – insights that a salesperson can use to build trust, gain credibility, and make the sale.

For example, shoppers’ location to the dealership might tell you how loyal they are to the vehicle brand. How they self-edit their credit rating or down payment might tell the salesperson how confident they are and how much they want the deal.

Just remember that digital body language goes both ways. The salesperson’s timing, interest and nuances – such as the use of pronouns and inclusive language – can either make the buyer feel important, or a nuisance.

It’s important to come from a position of authority, in terms of decision-making ability and in terms of expertise.  As with just about everything, timing is critical: learning when to add in a small perk or benefit such as a tank of gas can make the sale and create a sense of over-delivery to the customer.

The process creates a true interpretation of the customer’s wishes, one that seamlessly transitions to an in-person experience at the showroom. It’s what Burgiss calls Connection Commerce – the act of putting the relationship between dealer and buyer first, and empowering the deal-structuring process to take place online. That gives shoppers the platform to create the type of experience they want, in a trusted and authentic environment. As a result, they share legitimate intentions via digital body language that a salesperson can use to craft a fair deal for all.