Knowing your customers and their needs, and having tools to sell them exactly what they want, are the three key aspects dealers should take into account when looking to increase sales and grow.
In this article we’ll take a look at these 3 aspects and how to use them to design a strategy.
Step 1: Obtain the Right Information to Build a Sales Campaign
The first step to make the most of your customer portfolio is to look at your database. No CRM or DMS can be used successfully, nor its reports trusted, if the database is not nourished. If employees, (not just the sales team) don’t make a habit out of registering each customer and prospect interaction the system, the dealership will not have the right information to create successful campaigns
Step 2: Analyze the Parts and Service Sales Potential of Your Customer Portfolio
Is there a way to know my customers’ needs before they do? The answer is yes, by using the reports in your DMS, both in the Parts and Service departments.
This type of report helps to analyze the sales potential of the customer portfolio, allowing dealers to try to obtain 100% of potential sales to each existing customer, instead of having to search for new customers to increase revenue. Jorgelina Perez, Dealer Solution Specialist at Autologica.
How can dealers do this? Let’s take a look at a case of a fictitious dealer that has three customers with one vehicle each, all different models, which will probably require a series of services and parts replacements each year. This may seem obvious, but if this information is not translated into numbers, then it is impossible to know the true profit potential.
In order to calculate the profit potential dealers need to analyze a report similar to the following:
| Customer | Model | Parts sales potential | Actual sales | Services sales potential | Actual sales | TOTAL SALES POTENTIAL | TOTAL ACTUAL SALES | Difference |
| John Roberts | Buster Alinto | $5000 | $1500 | $7000 | $3500 | $12000 | $5000 | -$7000 |
| Julia Meyer | Buster Spark | $5000 | $5000 | $6000 | $3000 | $11000 | $8000 | -$3000 |
| Daniel Wright | Buster Thunder | $5000 | $5000 | $7000 | $7000 | $12000 | $12000 | $0 |
This report helps the dealer see that there are customers who are not consuming all the parts and services they could be. Based on this information dealers can analyze:
- Which customers have consumed their total parts and labor potential?
These customers are loyal and you should work on retaining them.
- Which customers haven’t consumed their total potential yet?
You can contact them to offer services they haven’t purchased yet.
- Which customers haven’t consumed any of their potential?
These may be taking their vehicle to another workshop, so it is essential that you contact and try to recover them.
- Which services might these customers need?
You can call them and offer them services before their vehicle deteriorates.
If you know the vehicles your customers has purchased in other dealerships, you can also offer them maintenance services for those.
This is a key report to make the most of the dealer’s sales portfolio and increase revenue, especially in times of low vehicle sales.
Step 3: Leverage Your Sales Potential With Service Marketing Tactics
Once you know who your customers are (by keeping your database updated) and what they need (with your DMS sales potential report), you can focus on strategies to turn that potential into profit.
Service Marketing is an innovative concept that successful dealers in the USA and other parts of the world are already using. It aims to focus not only on the vehicle sold, but also on the services and opportunities around it. Service Marketing features, included in modern dealer management systems such as Autologica DMS, allow you to:
- Contact the customer when it’s time for a maintenance service: The DMS system calculates when the customer should be contacted to perform their vehicle’s next maintenance service, taking into account information such as last visit to the workshop, usage hours and mileage. With this data, the system will automatically notify the salesperson so they can contact the customer, thus staying ahead of their needs and ensuring they don’t defect to a different workshop.
- Reschedule service appointments automatically: Imagine your customer books an appointment and then forgets about it… The dealer management system should notify the Service Manager so they can call the customer and reschedule.
- Don’t miss a single call: Service Marketing allows you to generate a call schedule for the sales team, as well as reschedule calls that haven’t been made because the salesperson was unable or couldn’t find the customer. The DMS automatically checks this schedule so that the sales team doesn’t lose a single sales opportunity.
It is essential that you study each one of these steps n order to ensure that you are making the most of your customer portfolio. If instead you remain passive and wait customers to approach you, then you are running the risk of losing your customers to competitors who do apply these strategies.
To learn more about Autologica DMS and its Services and Parts Sales Potential reports, contact us.
