Live By 4 Simple Rules, Sell More Vehicles

The automotive retail market has swiftly moved from one where vehicles sold based on availability to one based on control. That is, we are back to a “normal” market where your sales team’s ability to grab and maintain control of your prospects can make the difference between profitably growing market share or barely treading water.

The “availability market” we just experienced created some bad habits, including turning top sellers into order-takers. Moreover, anyone who started selling cars after March 2020 is especially prone to being in permanent order-taker mode. Those teams still in order-taker mode are being punished by the market. They’re losing share and starting to give up gross as their inventory ages before their eyes.

It’s time to break your team out of this; and the best place to start is with your Fresh Ups.

Garbage In/Garbage Out

I’m fascinated when I meet sales managers today enamored by their team’s “stellar” closing percentage of Fresh Ups. Forty percent! Fifty percent! Sixty percent!

When asked what percentage of the Fresh Ups their team is logging, the answer is invariably between 80 and 90 percent. Impressive! (If only it were true.) Anyone reading this knows these high reported closing percentages are the result of garbage in/garbage out.

Want to close an even larger percentage of your Fresh Ups? Don’t log non-buyers, and you’ll be at 100% overnight!

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to log every Up, and the two biggest ones are that you’ll sell more vehicles today and you’ll sell more vehicles tomorrow. This begs the question: How can I stop my team from brooming so many otherwise qualified buyers?

The 4 Rules

I didn’t create these four rules. In fact, they’ve been around for decades, and the salespeople who live by these sell more vehicles today and more vehicles tomorrow; they’re also more likely to hold gross and less likely to lose deals in the write-up.

If you’ve read my book, Ridiculously Simple Car Selling, then you know that selling cars isn’t hard, it just takes work. To help make that point, there are just four ridiculously simple rules your salespeople need to live by with every Fresh Up to begin selling more vehicles immediately. These are:

No one leaves the lot unless they’re in the CRM.
No one leaves the lot unless we have their contact information.
No one leaves the lot unless they’ve been presented with numbers.
No one leaves the lot unless they’ve met a manager.

Done properly, your Meet & Greet can achieve the first two rules, and always focusing on the next step in the road-to-the-sale moves the prospect toward the last two. My Meet & Greet is called the Assumptive Selling Meet & Greet and it goes like this:

“Welcome to ABC Motors, my name is Steve. Which vehicle did you come to test drive today?”

Fully 80% of Fresh Ups will volunteer a specific vehicle, body style, type, or price range. For these 80%, your team simply follows with:

“Great. Let me get your driver’s license, I’ll get you registered, and we’ll grab some keys for the test drive.”

Your team has now scanned the driver’s licenses for four out of five Fresh Ups, and simply asking a couple of follow-up questions (What’s a good email address for you? What’s a good number?) gets them everything they need to satisfy the first two rules.

The Road-to-the-Sale

Once your salespeople have the customer’s vehicle of interest and contact information in the CRM, the rest is ridiculously simple: They just need to follow your road-to-the-sale as they build value in themselves, the dealership, and the vehicle. Properly following the road-to-the-sale most often means saving the answers to certain questions for the appropriate step (as in the write-up) and staying in control as they move the prospect through these.

I highlight these four rules because most Five-Car Freddies make zero effort to achieve these unless they feel they have a “real” buyer on their hands. They think the CRM is slowing them down; they only want contact information from “real” buyers; they’re happy to vomit their version of payments, etc. on anyone at any time; and they’re certain their manager doesn’t really need to meet these tire-kickers.

Hint: If your team’s closing percentage of Fresh Ups is anywhere north of 35%, you’ve probably got a few Five-Car Freddies deciding who is a buyer and who is not long before “wasting” their time on the demo drive or write-up.

They’re still in order-taker mode; and today’s market will punish you for it.

Good Selling!

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Automotive Sales, Management, and Customer Service Books by the author:

Live By 4 Simple Rules, Sell More Vehicles