Selling to a new customer is much harder and more expensive than selling to an existing one. However, many dealers tend to focus their efforts on generating new customers.
The industry’s latest trends indicate that successful dealers have changed their focus towards working strategically on the sales potential of current customers, without neglecting their efforts to attract new customers.
“Each vehicle has a parts and service purchase potential that the dealer should aim to satisfy. A strong Service Marketing strategy helps leverage that potential for the duration of each vehicle’s lifecycle… both in the automotive as well as in equipment dealers.” Jorgelina Perez, Autologica Dealer Solution Specialist.
Generate More Business With Service Marketing
Service Marketing is a new concept in the automotive and equipment industry that proposes focusing not only on the vehicle being sold, but also on the services and sales opportunities that come with it. The vehicle and the services the vehicle needs are equally important.
A dealer that convinces a customer to bring their vehicle in for all of its services will achieve that customer`s loyalty, resulting in additional revenue and sales of future vehicles, each of which will also enter this virtuous cycle.
In other words, each vehicle must become part of the dealership’s revenue cycle. This is achieved by adopting marketing strategies that make the dealer’s workshop the first stop for these vehicles during their entire lifecycle.
Service Marketing Strategies
Modern dealer management systems (DMS) provide key information on each customer: vehicles they own, date and details of services performed, hours and mileage of each unit, etc. The dealer has this information but most of the times doesn’t use it strategically.
A DMS that includes Service Marketing features allows dealers to:
Call customers when they need a maintenance service
The DMS can calculate the date in which a customer should be contacted to perform their next service, taking into the date of the unit’s last visit to the workshop, mileage or hours of use, etc. With this data, the DMS automatically notifies the sales team that they should call the customer… i.e. salespeople won’t call customers to ask them if they need a service, they will call them already knowing that they need one. This helps dealers get ahead of customer needs and guarantees that they bring their vehicles in to their workshop.
Automated rescheduling of missed workshop appointments
Imagine a customer books an appointment and forgets about it… the dealer’s DMS should remind the Service Manager to call them and schedule a new appointment. Appointment rescheduling is one of the features emphasized by Service Marketing to avoid missing sure sales.
Don’t forget a single sales call
A DMS with Service Marketing features helps dealers generate a call schedule for your sales team, as well as reschedule calls that weren’t made because the salesperson couldn’t call or could not reach a customer. The DMS carries out this task automatically so that your sales team doesn’t miss a single sales opportunity.
“Service Marketing strategies generate new sales by working on the revenue potential of each and every customer, with a strong focus on each vehicle’s lifecycle.” Octavio Santisteban, Autologica Dealer Solution Specialist.
