If you want your team to sell EVs you need to embrace them too
As someone who has lived it, I completely understand the roller coaster journey EVs have been for car dealerships. When customers wanted them, the manufacturers couldn’t get enough product into showrooms, and when supply normalized, consumers had flipped to bear-market behavior.
In spite of this bipolar market instability, EVs appear here to stay. The government and manufacturers say so, and ultimately consumers are starting to shift in greater numbers. In the meantime, it has become very easy for dealers to roll their eyes whenever EVs are discussed. This cynicism has many internal effects, including apathy, disengagement, and reluctance to learn what it takes to actually sell these cars and make money.
This past year, I was running a dealership where the EV models had started piling up and the turn rate was very low. Having attended a recent 20-group meeting of dealers who all had their heads in stormy clouds about the same EV inventory problems, I thought to myself: what would be the harm in forcing myself into a positive mindset about EVs for the rest of the year?
What are YOU driving?
I determined that I had to start with driving one, and I don’t mean for a weekend. Upon return from the meeting, I had my plate bolted on to one of our oldest in-stock EV units. After a few days I was smitten.
This was by far the quietest, and most comfortable vehicle I’d ever driven, with the best sound system to boot. Even though I didn’t have charging at home, I could easily charge up during the workday and it also compelled me to explore public charging opportunities in the region.
The near immediate effects? My enthusiasm for my new EV demo permeated the dealership staff. In every departmental meeting, I waxed poetic about my new “serenity pod” (as I had nicknamed it) and relayed my charging experiences and increasing range confidence.
Soon, I was being asked to insert myself into sales and service conversations with customers to speak about life with an EV.
Make the excitement contagious.
Now that I was talking to plenty of employees and customers about my EV experiences, I realized I could create a bigger shift if I helped more people become EV fans.
Before long, I had all the managers who had demos driving EVs and loving it. Once I had their buy-in, we decided to switch twenty-five percent of our service mobility fleet to EVs.
Now that we had a pool of plated and insured cars to use, the number of conversations about EVs with customers spiked. Service customers were being given the opportunity to experience an EV in a no pressure scenario. We also had many front-line service staff take an EV home for a few days with a challenge to explore public charging and real-world range.
Now that we had a pool of plated and insured cars to use, the number of conversations about EVs with customers spiked. Service customers were being given the opportunity to experience an EV in a no pressure scenario.
Normalize EVs in the dealership.
The next steps I took initially seemed counter-intuitive to the whole premise of EV awareness that we and the manufacturer had been trying to achieve.
What had been the status quo since the arrival of EVs at our store was that they had their own section of the showroom, highlighted by specific branded EV material.
Outside, all of the EVs in our inventory lived in one section of the lot. As the EV comfort-level increased with our staff, we dismantled the EV-specific areas of the lot and showroom and blended the vehicles in with their ICE counterparts.
For example, if we had an area with mid-size SUVs, both ICE and EV versions would be close together, illustrating the fantastic choice we were offering consumers.
This had the effect of creating more conversations about EVs with customers as they were shopping. Rather than wait for a prospect to ask about electric, and then whisk them away to another corner of the dealership, our staff could confidently show multiple ICE and EV vehicles together and guide the customer journey seamlessly.
Over the remainder of the year, these actions contributed to a noticeable increase in EV sales and propelled us to the brand’s top spot in our region for EV share.
As we have learned and even trained on many times in our industry: a positive mindset combined with action will always yield positive results.
