Spoke on Terry Lancaster about service sales and why “increasing service revenue today will increase sales tomorrow”.
Originally Posted on TerryLancaster.com:
Salespeople love new customers. The bosses love new customers. We spend a lot of time talking about prospecting and conquesting new customers.
But there’s an old saying in the car business: “The sales department sells a customer the first car; the service department sells the second… and everyone after that.”
Owen Moon, today’s guest on The Get Ya Some Radio Show and CEO of FixedOps Digital says that car dealers are going to have to change the way they do business and dig deeper with current customers to find future growth.
“The old days of shooting fish in a barrel; those days are over,” he says.
Dealerships have gotten used to declining foot traffic in the internet era, but now they are beginning to see declining internet traffic and fewer leads from their own sites and the third party lead generators.
Dealerships are letting dollars slip through their fingers in the service department, which should be the most profitable department in the store. Less than one in five people who buy from a dealership will return to that store to service their vehicle so that’s a huge chunk of potential revenue missing every month from the bottom line.
Now I can hear salespeople all across North America quoting the immortal words of George Thorogood: “That don’t confront me none.”
But I’m afraid it does.
85% of customers say that their experience in the service department directly affects whether they will return to a dealership to purchase another car. 85%. And the worst experience of all in no experience at all.
Owen says that taking steps to increase service revenue today will lead to increased sales revenue tomorrow.
And for a salesperson the simple step of introducing your customers to someone in the service department will double the odds of them returning for service work. Doubling your odds of retaining them as a customer down the line.
You can take it one step further by becoming their full service automotive concierge… Taking the time to schedule their first oil change in advance, staying in touch to make sure they have a ride to work on the day their vehicle is in service, being their first point of contact no matter what they need from your store.
40 years Joe Girard told his customers, don’t call service, call me. And the best selling car salespeople in the world today take extreme efforts to make sure their customer’s service experience is just as amazing as their sales experience.
That’s how you get more repeat business, more referrals and more reviews by giving your customers and experience so amazing that they just can’t help but tell everyone they know.
