One of my close dealer friends told me something interesting the other day. He closely monitors what his nearest competing dealership does in terms of advertising and how they structure their deals. Many of our dealers do this, but this guy really pays attention to the details of what they are doing all the time.
He was questioning his decision to close his store on Christmas Eve so that his staff could have three consecutive days off – which was well deserved after a very good year for the store. While he was off shopping for Christmas presents on Christmas Eve he called his competing dealer a couple times just to make sure that they were closed. His decision to close his store for the day paid off because his competition was also closed so no business was missed that day.
What shocked him though was the day after Christmas when he opened back up for business he received three different phone calls from the dealer he had called. Curious why the dealership was calling he answered to find salespeople from the other dealership calling to say, “We saw that we missed your call and wanted to call you back and see how we could help you?”
WHAT! A dealership had a standard practice of scrolling through the missed call logs and having sales people call all customers who were not helped? When my buddy told me the story we both admitted we had never heard anything like that being done by a dealership. Come to find out it was not done just because of the holiday it was done at his competition on a daily basis.
Needless to say my friend now has his people monitoring and assigning missed calls at the dealership to be followed up on by his sales people. Missed calls really do equal missed business.
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John Paul Strong
John Paul Strong combines his two decades of automotive marketing experience with a team of more than 150 professionals as owner and CEO of Strong Automotive.
