As an Automotive Sales Manager, it is not your responsibility to be the best sales person but to make sure your team delivers a fantastic customer experience alongside great results.
High performing luxury sales teams view sales as much more than just a transaction. They seek to understand their customers, establish long lasting relationships and seek opportunities to delight their customers that go way beyond simply delivering a flawless customer journey.
The way customers buy cars, even in luxury, has changed. The majority of their research is done online, removing a lot of the interactions and therefore opportunities for sales people to build relationships that would have historically taken place in the showroom.
In this new environment, customers demand a higher level of service from your sales team when they eventually contact you in person. They don’t want to waste their time, so they’ll expect a seamless transition from the online to the physical environment. In particular they want your team to be able to guide and advise them on areas such as how the car will fit into their lifestyle, colour selection, and options choices that even the best online experiences are currently unable to achieve.
As an Automotive Sales Manager, it’s your job to ensure your team take a more holistic view of the customer experience across all touchpoints.
This means there’s a lot on your shoulders (and you are almost certainly operating with a much smaller team than in other areas of automotive), but that’s why this blog is dedicated to providing 9 ways to help you drive the performance of your team so that you can meet these elevated customer demands.
Create a Motivating Work Environment
The way you treat your team will have a direct impact on how they treat your customers. Creating a motivating work environment not only enhances employee satisfaction but also directly impacts the level of service and commitment the sales team provides to customers. If you listen to what motivates your team, remove obstacles that get in their way and look for opportunities to surprise and delight them they will do the same for your customers.
When your sales team feels motivated and engaged, you are more likely to keep them, which in turn provides the platform for the consistency of relationship that your customers are looking for. A positive work environment also helps foster a sense of collaboration where team members can exchange ideas and best practices.
Recruiting carefully and focusing on attitude is critical for creating this type of environment. After that think about your reward and recognition schemes. Whilst financial incentives need to be aligned to focus attention on customer experience as well as sales results, non-financial incentives such as awards, personalised prizes and experience based gifts have a much longer lasting impact on motivation.
Coach to Improve Performance
Especially in small teams it is too easy to become focused on operational challenges and forget about managing the people. All great coaches know that you coach the person, not the player.
Conducting regular performance coaching sessions with your team will not only reinforce an open, supportive and creative culture, it will help your team to become more independent.
This is because the key skill of a coach is getting your team to identify their own strengths and opportunities for improvement as well as considering how they can overcome challenges for themselves.
Your role as a coach is to not provide all the answers but insightful questions and constructive feedback that hold the mirror up to the other person. Where there are common challenges within your team you can then complement the coaching with targetted training to help team members overcome common obstacles.
Empowering your team in this way will not only create a culture of continuous growth and development, it will also provide a role model for being curious and the importance of asking questions to understand another person’s perspective that is crucial to delivering high value customer experiences.
Train Your Team to Listen
The key to being able to surprise and delight customers is having the ability to identify the small details that are important to them, their motivations, and their decision making criteria, including what motivates them and what concerns they have.
Furthermore, training your team skills such as maintaining good eye contact and refraining from interrupting the customer is key, and are things that you can encourage your team to practice.
Emphasise the importance of letting customers express themselves fully, without rushing them or assuming you know what they want. Encourage your team to ask open-ended questions and dig deeper into customers’ requirements by putting themselves in the customers’ shoes. Making customers feel heard is crucial to establishing long term relationships, positive perceptions of your dealership, and ultimately, leads to a higher likelihood of them making a purchase.
Getting your team to role-play what it is like to be a customer is a useful technique for this as it helps team members experience the importance of effective listening firsthand and reinforces the techniques they’ve learned.
This customer-centric approach helps create a positive and memorable buying experience for customers.
Provide Opportunities
No one wants to go to work and follow the same mundane routine, day in, day out. The same concept applies to your sales team, as one key way to drive their performance is to provide them with new opportunities.
Instead of them feeling stagnant in their progression, this gives them the chance to take on something exciting to push their capabilities further.
As an Automotive Sales Manager, it’s your job to learn about your team to identify what opportunities would work for different individuals. Using this information, you can provide opportunities that not only motivate your team but excite them to go the extra mile.
Whether that’s giving a sales representative the chance to work with challenging prospects, or letting them handle a large order, make sure your team can grow and develop.
A motivated team is more likely to exceed expectations and deliver an exceptional customer experience as a result.
Create Individual Closing Plans
With the relatively small number of leads and the general cost of generating enquiries in luxury automotive, your sales teams cannot afford to waste a single one.
Think pipeline rather than funnel!
Effective Sales Managers keep priority leads visible at all times to keep the team focused. Not only that but they work with their team to ensure there is a plan in place to get every single lead from where they are now, through to making a purchase.
Whilst these plans may include some of the traditional automotive customer journey steps such as a test drive, they will go well beyond this and be much more focused on the individual customer’s motivations.
For example, a good individual closing plan might include a plan for winning over those people who the lead is most influenced by (e.g. their family members or partners) so that they get the ‘permission to own’ from them.
Equally it might include ways of demonstrating to the lead how your car will enhance their life by providing curated experiences that enable the customer to see the reactions they will get when arriving at places in your car.
Each plan should be tailored to the motivations and psychology of each of the customers as identified by the Sales Person. In short, the more you know about the customer the more effective you will be in being able to convert them into a buyer and advocate.
This visibility also streamlines your team’s workflow and helps them stay focused on the most important tasks. By starting their day with a clear understanding of their priorities, they can be more proactive in their approach.
Embrace Technology to Humanise Your Approach
However good your sales team are, they cannot possibly remember all of the information they gather on customers, their motivations, and the people around them.
Equally, different people within your Dealership may know different things about each customer. For example, your hospitality team may know how they like to take their coffee, whereas your Service Advisers may know which days they visit the office and which they work from home.
This is where having a CRM system gives you the flexibility to not only gather the traditional customer contact (e.g. interaction and transaction data, but also these nuggets of ‘small data’ which is crucial.
If you want your Dealership to feel like a ‘home from home’, as we often hear, then you need to pay attention to the small details. At home you would not expect to be asked how you take your coffee or when is the most suitable time to speak. These are just things that those around you just know so why should entering your Dealership be any different?
A good CRM system will serve as a centralised platform to manage all the information you have and will provide the foundation for the tailored client experiences you deliver. Most importantly, it will also facilitate the personalised closing plans that move your leads to being buyers and brand advocates.
A crucial element of this small data is to know how the customer likes to be communicated with. An increasing number of luxury shoppers are looking to interact on the latest social platforms. This omnichannel approach bridges the gap between online and offline interactions, improving the overall experience for the customer.
A good CRM should be flexible enough to cater for this complexity. Essentially, the technology is there to support rather than to replace human interaction.
Use the Data Science
If you were having dinner with your partner in a restaurant would you be able to predict what they would choose from on the menu?
Of course you could because of how well you know their likes, dislikes, and their habits. In the same way, if you know your customers well enough, then maybe their buying behaviours are also predictable.
As an Automotive Sales Manager, you need to provide your team with visibility into customers’ shopping behaviours, enabling them to make the right call at the right time. This is where sales intelligence tools come into play as you can leverage data analytics and customer insights to deliver real-time notifications and alerts to your sales team.
By tracking and analysing customer interactions, your team has immediate visibility into when potential customers are actively researching or showing interest in your dealership’s offerings.
These alerts can be triggered when a prospect visits the website, engages with social media posts, submits a contact form, or interacts with specific marketing materials. Armed with this timely information, your sales team can reach out promptly to engage with prospects when their interest is at its peak, increasing the chances of conversion.
Moreover, sales intelligence tools can provide valuable insights into behavior patterns, for instance, if a customer has repeatedly researched a particular car model. The sales team can then tailor their recommendations accordingly, creating a more customer-centric experience.
To take customer service to an even higher level, equipping your sales team with personalised knowledge about individual customers’ needs and preferences is invaluable. This means that even before a potential buyer sets foot in the foot, your team should already be aware of their preferences.
Using technology and data analytics, your team can track a prospect’s online activity to identify details about what makes, models, and features are important to them.
By having access to this information, your team can make each customer interaction more tailored and meaningful.
Create a Relationship That Goes Beyond the Sale
Car buyers invest a lot of time researching potential vehicles before they even step foot in your dealership. As they enter the showroom, they have expectations of receiving a high level of service and expertise from your team; they have an expectation that they can get the personalised advice that they were unable to find online.
Given this expectation, and to establish trust straight away, your team needs to be knowledgeable and up-to-date not just on your product, but also on the other cars the client is considering.
They need to be able to answer any questions that might arise and offer clients a balanced view on what will suit their needs and their lifestyle the best. That way the relationship immediately goes beyond the sale and the salesperson is elevated to that of trusted adviser.
Equally when you think about your Dealership marketing activity then think about how you can create experiences that go beyond the sale. Perhaps you have a group of customers who are all interested in a certain business? This means you could host a thought leadership event that discusses that particular topic. Or maybe rather than focusing all of the time on the owners, you could host an event for their personal assistants.
And whatever you do, do not forget the families. These are the people that give your customers their permission to own. It doesn’t matter what you are buying, the person that looks after the people who are most important to you, will always have a special place in your mind.
8 Ways to Improve Performance as an Automotive Sales Manager
As a luxury Automotive Sales Manager you have a lot on your plate, from ensuring the dealership prioritises digitisation, to fostering active listening skills within your team to deliver the ultimate customer experience. The focus on quality interactions over mere sales numbers is crucial, as customers want to feel valued and understood.
This places a great deal of pressure on your team to truly understand customers’ needs so that they can tailor their support. Creating a motivating and engaging work environment is equally vital to drive peak performance and excitement among your team.
At JBA, we understand the unique challenges you face, and that’s why our approach goes beyond standard automotive sales training. Our bespoke solutions address your specific needs, from enhancing product knowledge to devising strategies that push your employees towards success.
Get in touch to find out more about how we can help.
