Work the service drive. That’s grist for the weekly sales meeting. The General Sales Manager wants his sales team talking to the service customers. This is smart for a number of reasons:

a) The service customer is familiar with service team and presumably comfortable with the dealership as a whole.

b) The service customer is statistically more likely to buy a car at the dealership where they service their car.

c) There is more information about the service customer and the sales team member has more ways to approach and ultimately sell to this customer.

Selling vs Stalking

Most customers don’t want to talk to a salesman except during a sale. Many customers find the entire process of buying a car time consuming and irritating. No one likes to lose — most of all money — and having to find, negotiate, and then wait to sign the contract unpleasant. No matter how much they may be excited by the car most customers hate coming to a dealership under any circumstances.

Intelligent Sales

Given the antipathy most customers feel towards the sales process it can be said that the service customer is used to waiting and the dealership. Familiarity should always be leveraged for more sales. Why? Because there is less anxiety, less confusion, and more customer satisfaction the second or even third time around.

Identification Breeds Content

Station a salesman in the Service Lounge and the customer has flashbacks to every bad experience they have ever had at a dealership: the sales pitch, the haggling and having to say “no” three different times in three different ways. Even if this didn’t happen, customer associations, particularly negative ones last.

The sales process has to start the minute the customer buys the first car and it has to be tailored to each individual. It can not be stressed enough: the contacts with a customer should be related to making their life easier. No talk of payments, value of their trade in; money should be kept out of it. A dealership earns repeat business through service, literally and figuratively. The first contact and the majority thereafter should be done by a service representative.

One of the structural problems most dealerships have is that service and sales databases aren’t integrated. Separate systems mean lost sales because the sales team doesn’t know the history of the car in service and that familiarity is a huge positive for the customer.

Data Mining Segmentation

Understanding the buying patterns of Service customers is the key to repeat business. What are the characteristics of repeat customers and what makes a happy life-long buyer? How does the repeat customer differ from other customers and what similarities do repeat customers share with each other? Understanding these characteristics allows for an accurate behavioral model that can be tracked and defined empirically.

Empirically Determined

Your sales team and Business Intelligence vendor have defined repeat customers by age, sex, income, and how they use Google. The model has a positive correlation of .78 in terms of predictive efficacy. There are three marketing programs that the dealership wants to try and they hope to get another .05 in terms of predictive accuracy. That is they want to see if a marketing plan can get the model to .83 of positive correlation. What they find is that free maintenance does not increase positive correlation at all. But keeping the Service Department open an extra two hours per weeknight and four extra hours on Sunday bumps positive correlation to .87! Convenience trumps dollar value specials. Even better more cars are sold on Sundays and late weeknights.

More and More and More…

The great thing about using numerical tools is that there is much less ambiguity in terms of outcomes. Measuring outcomes with accurate metrics means better decisions and approximations. In the above example it was found that customers respond to convenience more than perceived dollar savings. The General Manager decides to launch a “Convenient Service Special” and finds he can spend less money and satisfy more customers. Business Intelligence promises better decisions, money better spent, happier customers, and more profits.