Recently, I have been playing around with various tools in order to increase how BDC departments connect with their internet leads.  It has been painful to watch BDC coordinators solely rely on the telephone that the dealership provides.  At one dealership I asked for an investment of a mobile phone and the dealer did not want to do that.  I had to come up with something fresh and exciting.  This particular BDC had older gentlemen working and they did not mind using their own cell phones to make additional calls from their phones.  We noticed our connections with customers increase, literally double just by calling these leads off of a different phone number.  Even still I felt uncomfortable with them using their personal cell phone numbers.  I decided to try to using google voice.  The internet lead management process had increased with phone calls going out 3x per day.  Once in the morning, once around lunch and once at night.

Why do we extend this process?  Since most of the time we are making phone calls we are leaving voice messages 85-90% of the time we become counter productive.  An effective processes will tell you to make more then one call to the lead on any given day.  Why not call from a phone number that is unrecognizable?  We were the only dealership in the area trying this out and it worked.  Days where we averaged 5 appointments set grew to 8-10 and 10 appointment Saturdays grew to an average of 18.

I am including a graphic detailing what happens when you mix google voice calling with traditional dealership telephone calling.  The connection rate increases by 2-3X allowing the BDC to create more appointments through relationship selling.

Just a quick tip for all Internet and BDC departments out there.  When you cannot reach your prospects, try free tools like Google Voice.

by Stan Sher
www.dealeretraining.com
Practices and viewpoints expressed on this blog are my own