Get Creative With Your Follow Up

Part of my job as a sales trainer for Reaching Your Potential is to do mystery shops to identify key performance gaps within the dealership, as a customer not as a sales trainer.

I love doing this to see salespeople in the real world natural environment, but I also hate doing this because I see the way they do follow up! 

9 times out of 10, this is done extremely poorly, if done at all. In fact, I’m lucky to get 1 or 2 calls from a 10 test drives I go on. 

My key observation, you need to be far more creative with the way you follow up! 

People don’t like being harassed… The majority of calls I’m getting, “Hi Phil, You came into my dealership last Saturday. You test drive X. How are you going?” “Great!” “When are you coming in?” And literally that’s it… 

We need to be far more creative with what we’re doing. We need to show people far more respect. People aren’t silly. People hate being sold to and I’m sure you do as well.

People want to be treated with a dignity. If you’re going to phone someone, please come up with a plan. 

1. What are you going to say? 
2. How are you going to say it? 
3. And what’s the desired outcome?

Is it just to pester them and ask them to come in? Because I can guarantee you if that person is ready to buy and walk through the door, they’ll be standing in front of your desk with a pen in hand ready to sign. They don’t actually need your call. 

What they need is information! This is the information age and we need to be better at information selling. If we are going to follow up, do it correctly. Like I said, show them the common courtesy to plan that phone call and attack it from many different ways. 

Part of that creativity is thinking what angles we can follow up through. Ideas such as, 

• Sending them a text message an hour or two after they leave the dealership. Just simply to thank them for coming in and choosing you as a shop. 
• Contact them through social media with LinkedIn 
• Blogs, reviews, specs on the vehicle of choice 
• If they’re really into safety, find out some articles that you can email them. “Hey, John! I thought this might really be some interest of you and thought I might send it out to you.” 
• Send them a Hand written thank you card 
• Customer testimonies

These are creative ways, we have a swag of them. We want to be contacting our customers with useful information, not pestering them. Remember only 40 percent of customers buy within the first month. That means there’s a lot of follow up to ensure the success of the business. It costs a heap of money to get a customer in the door, so let’s make sure we are doing everything we can to get them back by attracting them, not harassing them!

Great selling!

Phil Batterham

www.reachingyourpotential.com.au