The Goals of Your Internet Sales Process

The Goals of Your Internet Sales Process

I read some posts from a well-meaning internet sales trainer in automotive recently that gave me pause. Basically, this trainer appears to be taking old-school phone-up cards and reconfiguring these for dealers to use as their strategy for their lead response processes.

The trainer is telling clients and prospective clients to use their lead response emails (in my words) to “check the boxes” from some outdated phone training manual. Stressing, for example, the need to build rapport and sell the dealership and uncover needs and discuss alternative choices and …

You get the idea.

Unfortunately for those dealers subscribing to this advice, today’s leads don’t want to be addressed as if this is 1988. They’re not “doing research;” they’re ready to buy – and, they’ll buy today if you just help them do it. Moreover, this barrage of “car salesman 101” was always best suited for times the customer was in front of us; never on the phone and especially never via an automated email to a non-responsive internet sales prospect.

The Basic Internet Sales Process

To be clear, the basic internet sales process takes place during the time between “lead received” and “contact made.”

That’s it.

Once you make contact with an internet prospect you move to the next process: The Appointment Setting Process. This is what confuses many internet teams (when they’re building their templates and voicemail scripts) and what must be confusing the well-meaning internet sales trainer.

Your Goal is a Reconnection

When you receive an internet lead you have one primary goal: to reconnect with that prospect. This means making some contact with them (preferably by phone) so that you can set an appointment that shows (the goal of the next process).

(By the way, I addressed the best way to ensure you’re the first dealer to reconnect by phone with an internet prospect when I wrote about Dominion’s super-easy-to-use CRM Web Control and their integration with CallDrip.)





It’s important to understand this primary goal so that you can write email templates that drive that contact; that encourage the prospect to pick up a phone and call you. Additionally, knowing the goal is a reconnection, you will leave better voicemails that ask the prospect to call you back (instead of trying to build some phony rapport or sell the car over voicemail).

Is That the Only Goal?

While the reconnection is the primary goal, certainly there are secondary goals to consider when crafting your templates and scripts. For example, you should hope to create some excitement (as this will help the prospect confirm their choice).

Another secondary goal would be to build trust; because if you can build trust early in the process, there is a better chance that the prospect will choose to do business with you first.

Finally, having a secondary goal of creating urgency will help the prospect choose quickly – instead of sitting on the sidelines for weeks until they lose their new car fever.

It’s Not Complicated

Like most everything we do in sales, the internet sales process is not complicated. Some people (and vendors) make it complicated by overthinking the goals or creating tools that make it hard to implement simple processes. Your processes should be simple, and they should be easy to create and manage in your CRM. (If your processes are not simple, it’s time to rewrite them. If your CRM is the problem, it’s time to research what’s out there and find one that makes it easy to create and manage all of your sales processes.)

Once you understand the goals of a process, making it effective is easy.

Good selling!