Inventory is back—and so is your competition. With sales once again
returning to normal, the car buying journey is also seeing a shift as shoppers
change the way they shop, research, and purchase their next car.
With new insights from the Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, which
surveyed nearly 3,000 respondents, we’ve gathered the top five takeaways
you need to know to make the best decisions for your business.
Download the infographic to stay on top of changing consumer buying
trends
Salespeople often change roles or rooftops. It’s simple to reassign customers in VinSolutions CRM, with just a few clicks. Watch this short video to learn how to reassign customers – and roll back these changes if the salesperson returns. You can also remove users from select or all stores in your group.
After a wild period of rapid change and shifting norms—both automotive retailers and buyers are beginning to catch their breath.
Despite some old trends becoming new again, there are a few ways the buying journey has changed for good. As dealers have implemented new tools and technologies in recent years to make the car buying experience more convenient, consumers have taken notice and indicated that these new trends are here to stay.
The 2023 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study surveyed nearly 3,000 respondents who purchased or leased a vehicle in 2023. This gives dealers a glimpse into the minds of modern car buyers and details the trends for the coming years of car sales.
The study uncovered several interesting findings for automotive retailers. To deliver exceptional experiences, attract more buyers, and stay ahead of the competition, dealers should consider the following five key insights.
1. The Buying Journey Has Been Streamlined
With an increase in available inventory at dealerships, it’s probably not a big surprise that consumers are spending less time on all aspects of the purchase process. According to the Study, consumers now spend nearly 7 fewer hours researching and shopping online, compared to 2022. Interestingly, they also spend nearly one less hour talking with others, almost 3 fewer hours visiting dealerships, and almost 3 fewer hours with the actual dealership seller.
This is true for both new and used vehicle purchases and more closely resembles the amount of time spent by consumers in 2020 and 2021. This reduced buying time can probably also be attributed to dealers refining the digital to in-store purchase process, making the car buyer journey more streamlined than ever before.
Take Action: Don’t Lose Your Leads to the Competition
With more inventory available, consumers who get “left on read” will get snatched up by the competition, fast. Your sales team needs to think fast on their feet to meet the needs of today’s buyers, which means you’d better have the right tools, training and technology to keep interested buyers at their fingertips.
Keep building on the gains and momentum you’ve already made to make the car buying journey more streamlined and efficient. No one wants to spend a lot of time in dealerships, and your online to in-store purchase process will be key in giving customers the experience they want.
2. More People Prefer a Mix of Online and In-Person Buying
Auto sales have changed for the better as consumers prefer to buy cars online. Dealers have adapted, and most buyers now prefer a mix of online and offline options.
When compared with their most recent purchase, more people (71%) are planning to buy their next car through a mix of online and offline methods. That’s changed from only 45% of buyers who preferred a mix of both options for their most recent purchase. Interestingly, only 8% of consumers want to purchase their next vehicle all in-person. That’s down considerably from 50% of study respondents for their last vehicle purchase.
Take Action: Be Proactive
Any step your team can take to save time will seal the deal for those car buyers who are looking to simplify the process. Since today’s consumers are accustomed to online purchase options, proactive technology can give you insights into buyers who are simply browsing—and buyers who are ready to come in and sign the paperwork.
Be ready to talk without wasting their time. With features such as Automated Offers from Automated Marketing Platform, dealers can proactively send an offer to a shopper based on their online shopping activity.
3. Consumers Are Keeping Their Cars Longer
An overwhelming majority (91%) of consumers plan to keep their cars as their primary source of transportation for the next five-plus years.
Your customers will still need to hear from you to keep them coming in for service opportunities. This motivation to keep cars as a primary means of transportation also gives you the perfect opportunity to keep building relationships with your customers until they’re ready to buy.
Take Action: Use Intelligent Marketing to Personalize Servicer Campaigns
Use an intelligent marketing tool to target vehicle owners to encourage them to come in for service. You can also deliver personalized messages and offers and convert service customers into new car buying leads. This will keep your customers engaged with personalized, helpful content, reminders, and offers that will help you stay top of mind when your customers are ready to service their existing vehicle or purchase a new one.
4. More Cars, More Competition
Inventory is back. While that’s good for the overall buying experience, it also means that consumers can pick and choose from a larger selection of vehicles and a wider range of dealerships. In other words, more competition for you.
As buyers search for the best deal, more are considering both used and new options (78%) and purchasing and leasing (31%).
Take Action: Work Smarter, Not Harder with Automotive Intelligence and a Robust CRM
Stay Competitive with technology that gives you all the insight, tools and data needed to run your dealership more efficiently &and effectively. VinSolutions CRM and Automotive Intelligence enables dealers to accelerate the path to purchase by leveraging Cox Automotive data insights to meet customers where they’re at in their car-buying journey.
5. Online Is the New In-Person Communication
Shoppers are more comfortable submitting leads online. In fact, as much as 60% of shoppers submitted a lead online before ever visiting a dealership in-person. Among these, 9% submitted a basic lead and 51% submitted an enhanced lead, meaning they also included trade, credit, financing or payment information.
Interestingly, this increased comfort level with communicating with dealerships online directly correlates with overall customer satisfaction. As much as 77% of those who submitted an enhanced lead online reported satisfaction with the dealership experience, compared with 65% of those who submitted a basic lead. And, 48% of those who submitted an enhanced lead online reported their experience was better than their last purchase, compared with just 27% who submitted a basic online lead.
Take Action: Provide Assistance 24/7 with Virtual Assistance
No matter where your leads come from or how much information they give, deliver the same personalized experience you’d give customers at your dealership. With a growing number of leads submitted after hours, many businesses utilize advanced digital communication offerings to bridge the gap. With VinSolutions Virtual Assistancet Vinessa, you can engage with interested buyers after hours, schedule appointments and answer questions without making people wait until you’re back on the clock.
The car buying journey has changed in several significant ways, and in other ways it’s returning to the old normal. No matter the state of the industry, understanding today’s consumers is key to targeting the right buyers, staying competitive, and delivering the next-level experiences they expect.
To learn how you can make every contact an opportunity, get started with a personalized VinSolutions CRM demo today. Get Started
The automotive industry has a data problem. Often, sales and service professionals have their work cut out for them untangling a web of customer lists, user info, and disconnected systems that limit their ability to make hardly any sense of your marketing efforts.
Campaigns then become a “spray and pray” type effort where you’re sending anyone who’ll listen (or open an email) your best offer, regardless of what stage of the buying funnel they’re in. No shame; we’ve all been there.
When you’re able to utilize the right data and glean insights at-a-glance, your sales and service staff are better able to overcome some of the most common challenges in retail automotive. When the team at Tynan’s Auto Group partnered with VinSolutions CRM and began using Automotive Marketing Platform to clean up their database, the results were measurable. And impressive.
Accurate Data Leads to Pin-point Messaging
When the Sales Manager and Internet Sales Director, KateLynn Bregar, partnered with VinSolutions CRM, she wasn’t new to the role. With over nine years of experience in retail automotive marketing, she knew just how important it was to overcome the deliverability challenges the auto group was facing.
By working with her Marketing Account Manager at VinSolutions, Jamie Panton, they used Automotive Marketing Platform to narrow and target their audience. They were able to resolve challenges with their database and marketing tactics that had negatively impacted their ability to email customers. The new, cleaner database helped the auto group develop campaigns that resonated with their local community in a way they had never been able to before.
Conclusion
Smart data is just the beginning. With VinSolutions CRM and AMP, the team at Tynan’s Auto Group was able to cut through the noise and address their community with smart messaging that returned real results.
Learn how Tynan’s Auto Group utilized VinSolutions CRM and VinSolutions Automotive Marketing Platform to get the data and insights that made a difference.
The right CRM partner should make life easier on your sales team. If you’re not moving more vehicles and reaching the right buyers, it may be time to reevaluate your partnership. When Tynan’s Auto Group, in Aurora, CO, partnered with VinSolutions CRM and VinSolutions Automotive Marketing Platform (AMP), they were quick to notice the workload shift from busywork to an increase in both sales and repair orders for the group. Here’s how VinSolutions CRM and VinSolutions AMP made life easier for the staff at Tynan’s Auto Group.
Straight-forward vs. Task-overload
According to recent research, most automotive salespeople only stay at their job between one and two years. Super-fast turnover can become an issue for both service managers and sales managers trying to get teams up-to-speed on marketing initiatives as well as appointment-setting and basic technology training.
For Tynan’s Auto Group, working with VinSolutions CRM help to streamline the workflows for their employees, keeping task-management to a more reasonable, straight-forward level. “VinSolutions helps our salespeople sell more cars via the automation with the customer base as well as the customized follow-up to be able to tailor the customer to where they’re at in the sales funnel,” explained KateLynn Bregar, Sales Manager and Internet Sales Director.
By not overwhelming the professionals working on lead follow-up and outreach, VinSolutions CRM better prioritized their workload. The result was a whopping 36% boost in year-over-year vehicle sales. On the service side, they saw a 50% jump in repair orders.* Read the Tynan’s case study.
Let Automation Take on the Busywork
When it comes right down to it, your employees may become less engaged and less satisfied with their job roles when burdened with too much busywork. The key is focusing salespeople on personal outreach to in-market customers while automating outreach to former and prospective customers.
Fortunately, when Tynan’s Auto Group partnered with VinSolutions Automotive Marketing Platform, they utilized Automated targeting and outreach to remove some of the workload from the sales team. “It doesn’t inundate the salesperson with a ton of tasks that make it challenging to get through their day,” explained Bregar. “We want them to come in and find the “hot list” – we want them to know their customers are ready to buy and the customers that are in their database are customers that actually want to be reached out to.”
Conclusion
According to the 2023 State of Automotive Hiring Report, sales professionals felt most loyal to their dealership when their work was considered fulfilling. (And this goes above and beyond salary.)
The right CRM partner can deliver a better experience for your staff. It can help them systematically sell more cars while reducing the tedious work that often leads to turnover and a poor experience for your customers.
Learn how VinSolutions CRM and VinSolutions Automotive Marketing Platform made life easier for the sales and service staff at Tynan’s Auto Group.
Sources:
https://www.zippia.com/automotive-sales-person-jobs/demographics/
https://hireology.com/guides/the-automotive-employee/
* Based on the experiences of one dealership, Tynan’s Auto Group, Automotive Marketing Platform data showed a year over year improvement in these key performance indicators when comparing Q4 2022 (Oct. 1–Dec. 31) and Q4 2023 (Oct. 1–Dec. 31).
Everything hinges on delivering a better customer experience, especially in a competitive market. Your dealership may have amassed a huge customer database, developed key marketing messages and strategies, and hired the top professionals you could find. Yet, 88% of consumers say their experience matters as much as your products or services.
Tynan’s Auto Group, based in Aurora, CO had worked hard to build a bigger customer database. But when engagement began to dwindle in their marketing campaigns, they knew they needed a flexible CRM partner who was willing to help them fine-tune the experience.
“Let’s be real: CRMs do basically the same thing, but what VinSolutions is able to do is customize to the Tynan’s way.” – KateLynn Bregar, Sales Manager and Internet Sales Director, Tynan’s Auto Group
Reach Your Database with VinSolutions CRM
Tynan Auto Group’s Sales Manager, KateLynn Bregar, needed a partner who could help their team navigate the changes and challenges they faced. She sought not only robust CRM technology but deep automotive expertise to help the team develop more targeted campaigns. With VinSolutions CRM and Automotive Marketing Platform, Tynan’s Auto Group was able to better address their customers’ unique vehicle needs. Tynan’s Marketing Account Manager provided data-driven insights to guide the Tynan’s communication strategy.
According to Bregar, it took VinSolutions’ collaboration to make that happen, “Let’s be real: CRMs do basically the same thing, but what VinSolutions is able to do is customize to the Tynan’s way.”
The New Reality: A Diverse and Dynamic Approach to Sales and Service
According to Bregar, one of the biggest shifts in recent years is the behavior of consumers who are either hesitant or unwilling to engage in person with the dealership. “People do not want to come into the dealership – they want to be emailed or texted or called,” explains Bregar. Knowing your customers’ specific preferences and being able to offer a more custom experience that addresses their vehicle and financing needs helps your sales and service professionals communicate more effectively. Rather than overcommunicating, VinSolutions helped her team send timely, targeted messages that addressed specific needs. “VinSolutions offers a diverse and dynamic way of doing that to provide information effectively and efficiently.”
Conclusion
The customer’s expectations of the automotive experience may already be biased. The good news? This experience is on the upswing—69% of consumers have reported being highly satisfied with the overall vehicle shopping and buying process. Even better is the fact that partnering with the right CRM provider can help dealers deliver more targeted, timely messages that reach consumers and overcome common deliverability challenges.
Learn how Tynan’s Auto Group fine-tuned the customer experience when they partnered with VinSolutions CRM by watching their story here.
Sources:
“State of the Connected Customer Report.” May 10, 2022. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/customer-engagement-research.
Managing your retail automotive sales professionals is a role that takes leadership, experience, and especially in today’s shifting environment, fast, flexible, and pinpoint accurate data from your CRM. When it comes right down to it, the simple formula for selling more cars and being a profitable sales team is simple: leverage the data within your CRM; sell more cars.
VinSolutions is backed by Cox Automotive’s powerful first-party data insights which help dealers reach more leads and set more appointments—which translates to more sales for you and your sales team. The data within your CRM can help you monitor specific KPIs and measure the metrics that lead to higher sales. So, we sat down with three of our top experts, Mario Scampoli, Sr. Performance Manager, Angie Miletich, Client Performance Manager, and Kevin Schmitt, Client Performance Manager for an in-depth, four-part round-table discussion to uncover the Metrics that Matter.
Read below to explore our experts’ shared tips, best practices, and the top four VinSolutions reports that help ensure your sales professionals are meeting targeted benchmarks and getting the coaching needed to thrive in today’s post-pandemic landscape.
Tip: Accountability without a plan is just wishing that things will get better. Put it in writing, whether it’s for your salesperson team, leadership, or BDC. And make sure everyone signs it.
The past several years presented unique and unexpected challenges with low inventory and a rapid shift to online digitization, with a silver lining of record profits. But the market is shifting yet again, and more inventory and incentives means a more competitive environment. And, as a leader, you will be expected to help your sales team keep up! According to the most recent Car Buyer Journey Study from Cox Automotive, both car-buyers and inventory are back. When surveyed, a whopping 71% of respondents suggested they would be shopping with an omnichannel approach, which combines both online and in-person activity. 1 It’s more important than ever to take a look at the data from within your CRM and ensure your sales team is actively engaging leads, completing tasks, and communicating with customers before your competitors beat you to it.
“It’s the math and science of the car business. Productivity equals contact equals appointments equals car deals.” – Mario Scampoli, Sr. Client Performance Manager
In the PM Review: Metrics that Matter Round-table, our team of experts identified Contact Info Capture as one of four crucial VinSolutions reports to assess and improve dealership performance. Simply put, if your sales professionals aren’t opting customers in, you can’t communicate with them.
To combat this potential loss, Client Performance Manager Angie Miletich recommends setting a benchmark for collecting crucial information such as email address and phone number. “I want to see 90% or above,” she explains. “I want to know that you are getting that customer contact information.” With lower capture of customer information, dealerships are selling less cars. Working one-on-one with your Performance Manager, you can customize this report to help identify and then coach underperforming team members. “I can promise you this, If the dealer has more emails and more texting opt-ins… they will sell more cars than they did previously,” explains Mario Scampoli, Sr. Client Performance Manager. “It’s the math and science of the car business. Productivity equals contact equals appointments equals car deals.”
Tip: Set a Contact Info Capture Benchmark for email addresses, phone numbers and text opt ins. Without a benchmark, you simply can’t measure performance.
Competition will ramp up as car buyers begin to return to the market again, this time incentivized with more options and greater availability. It’s up to you to coach your sales team on fundamentals like communications, appointment-setting, overcoming objections, etc. They need to know how to use timely, professional and effective communications to build connections with their customers. As Client Performance Manager Kevin Schmitt explains, “If you’re there as a manager, the owner has entrusted you as a manager to take his business and move it along the right path to manage your store. And it starts with connecting with the customer.” Whether you’re a sales manager or a Dealer Principal, the Enterprise Performance Report is a great way to check the overall health score of how your store is performing. It offers core metrics on your communications, appointments, visits, sales, and more. With over 150 data points available to add to this report, your Performance Manager can work with your dealership to get the information needed to identify the metrics you need. “This is one of the best reports that we have in our tool that is very versatile for any manager…” explains Kevin. “This report helps you put (everything) back on track.”
Tip: Schedule time with your Performance Manager to identify the data points specific and unique to your dealership to customize your dashboard.
“Managers manage things and keep things in order. Leaders Change things.” – Kevin Schmitt, Client Performance Manager
As a people leader, it’s up to you to inspect what you expect. It not only leads to higher profitability, as Angie Miletich explains, it can make or break the experience for potential customers. Most dealerships’ teams struggle with task completion. But good leaders will know that you don’t need to wait for a task to remind you to complete an action. As Angie points out, “Why are we (dealers) waiting until a ‘task’ pops up to talk to our active leads with engagement? Because if they’re talking to you, they’re talking to ABC Motors down the street.”
The Team Performance Dashboard shows how well your team is addressing the responsibilities of sales: lead follow-up, effective communications, appointments, visits, demos, deals, and tasks. It makes it easy to understand your business, by the numbers.
While displaying high-level dealership KPIs, this report lets you click into detail to understand what’s going on behind the data points. If it’s blue, it’s clickable to you. You can even click into the views of each salesperson and coach them on where to focus.
Another helpful feature, the hot lead icon helps flags the most likely buyers, identified by your sales team.
This dashboard helps you understand the output of your team and whether your headcount is enough to meet your business objectives. For example, it’s prudent to consider how many tasks are realistic to assign to salespeople, and where you want them to prioritize.
“’Tasks’ are the minimum amount of effort a dealer should expect a salesperson to put into following up with a customer,” explains Mario.
Dashboards and data insights like these grant managers the ability to step away from constant micromanaging and task-management and instead focus on coaching, training, and empowering teams to do better and level-up. “Managers manage things and keep things in order. Leaders Change things,” Kevin Schmitt, Client Performance Manager offers.
Tip: Once per week have your sales team provide their ‘Top Ten List’ of with their best opportunities. The hot icon will flag customers to highlight the best opportunities for your sales team.
“’Tasks’ are the minimum amount of effort a dealer should expect a salesperson to put into following up with a customer,” Mario
Mario Scampoli and other Performance Managers developed the 10-Day Review Report, a custom VinSolutions report featured in the round-table to give managers an at-a-glance view of the status of your most current active sales opportunities.
“Time kills car deals, right?” explains Mario. “So, this report gives you a one-stop shop to see everything that basically needs your attention.”
Color coding (red-yellow-green) highlights who on your team is engaged with customers and who might be falling behind. This report serves as an important management tool to keep everyone on track before it’s too late. It can also be used to create an incentive structure that promotes customer follow-up. Some dealerships have a policy where any leads that fall out of ‘green’ status are up for grabs for the next salesperson that contacts them.
Tip: Schedule time every day to stop working, stop managing and just walk the floor. Use this time to listen to how your sales professionals talk to customers.
The market conditions that existed during Covid produced abnormal sales dynamics. The demand for vehicles dramatically outpaced available inventory. Buyers waited months for vehicles. There was no need for the art and practice of selling. But conditions are very different now. As the panel in the Performance Manager Round-table explains, overcoming these issues today will take a new mindset to address them. Your contact percentage and your appointment percentage are clear indicators of how you’re communicating with your customers. It’s your job to come up with some way to change the culture from the Covid-mindset. Are you coaching your team on how to set appointments? Are they answering customer questions or just continuously asking for the customer to come in? Are they asking the right questions to get that customer into a test-drive? Do they know how to overcome objections? The average tenure of automotive sales professional is only one to two years, according to a recent survey.2 Based on this fact, you’re looking at an industry staffed by individuals who don’t remember (or who’ve never known) what the car-buying process looked like pre-Covid. “The salesperson who grew up in Covid doesn’t ask those questions,” explains Mario Scampoli. Your expertise, experience, and skills are more valuable than you know. It’s up to you to identify the areas of growth and potential for your sales team and coach them.
Tip: If training is important to your dealership, make sure it becomes part of your onboarding process.
Ready to learn more? Catch all four episodes of the PM Review: Metrics that Matter and discover best practices, practical tips and a greater deep dive into the top four VinSolutions reports that help ensure your sales professionals are meeting targeted benchmarks and getting the coaching needed to thrive in today’s post-pandemic landscape. Unlock My Insights >>
Sources:
12023 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Report
2 Based on 449 automotive sales people resumes in Zippia’s database. https://www.zippia.com/automotive-sales-person-jobs/demographics/
Tynan’s Auto Group has served the Aurora, Colorado community for more than 60 years, with Nissan and Volkswagen dealerships as well as their Pre-Owned Superstore. Changes in customer preferences and technology meant that communicating with their customer base had become increasingly challenging.
Within a year of implementing VinSolutions CRM and Automotive Marketing Platform, Tynan’s saw significant increases in both vehicle sales and repair orders. Improved targeting led to substantial increases in engagement with marketing messages and created warmer leads for the sales team.
Download this case study to learn how Tynan’s uses VinSolutions to reach its customers and grow its auto sales and service business.
Car buyers are willing to share more personal information than ever, but the 2023 Cox Automotive Digitization of Car Buying Study finds that most dealers don’t trust the data customers are providing online.
This ebook from VinSolutions provides research-backed guidance to help you learn:
• What information car buyers are willing to share with dealers and why
• Ways to close the trust gap and help your dealership become more efficient
• How a hybrid approach to retailing can increase profitability at your dealership.
