ADAPTING TO CHANGE AND COACHING THE CUSTOMER CAN HELP BUILD CREDIBILITY AT THE DEALERSHIP
There are two major sides to what can be referred to as a learning culture. There is the aspect of always learning ourselves, and there is the aspect of educating others. Both are key in fostering good business practices.
Automotive customers have evolved immensely in the last decade, partly because they now have access to numerous tools. This enables them to educate themselves before even entering the showroom floor.
How can a dealership adapt itself to this new reality? That’s an area Josh Bailey, Vice-President, Research and Editorial at Canadian Black Book, is familiar with. Canadian Black Book produces tools for dealers and the automotive industry to educate them about the value of a vehicle.
In the mid-1990s, Bailey was involved in his family’s small town dealership, and this store had a novel way to discuss price and build trust with its customers.
“We essentially did one price selling before it was a trend,” says Bailey.
The practice at the dealership was to open the binder, show the customer what the dealership paid for the car and then add a profit on top to explain why the customer was getting a fair price.
“This straightforward approach often even allowed us to make more money by being fair and up-front rather than going the traditional way,” says Bailey. “We were able to build trust by educating the customer on the true dealership costs. Granted, some would still disbelieve, but overall educating the customer benefited the dealership immensely.”
Being open and transparent is just as important today, says Bailey.
“There is now so much information available to customers before they enter the dealership that we, the industry, as well as dealers need to adapt and change,” says Bailey. “Too often we try to steer the discussion in the direction we want it to go, but this is not needed. Customers have often decided before stepping into the dealership and are showing up to make it happen.”
This change in behavior involves a change in attitude on the dealership’s side.
“If staff doesn’t evolve in learning, sales will be out of the loop,” Bailey adds. “It will also create credibility issues, with the customer asking himself ‘why am I here?’ The way to handle people has evolved, including emails, leads and mobile… Staff needs to get in line with the times and see where the customer comes from.”
It’s clear there needs to be an evolution inside the dealership to keep up with the evolution on the customer side.
“Unfortunately, dealers often see the tree but not the forest,” says Gino Côté, President of Evolution Automobiles, a dealership training company.
Côté acknowledges it’s easy to get caught up in daily tasks but he recommends dealers take a step back every so often to see what is being done elsewhere in the industry.
“The dealer principal, or at least a few of the key decision makers inside the dealership, need to be aware of evolving best practices and keep up to speed with new trends. Not only do they need to learn, they need to be open to learning, to change, and at the same time open to inform the customer,” says Côté.
Coaching the customer can help build credibility. “Customers are always afraid to pay too much or be sold a bad vehicle and this is an unfortunate reality we, the industry, built over time. The best we can do to turn things around is build credibility — and this can only happen through learning,” he says.
Côté says that begins with the right tools from third parties, including vAuto, articles from publications and other visual supports. But learning is not a one shot deal, he adds.
“A major problem I see out there is accountability and follow-up, or rather lack thereof,” says Côté.
“It’s important to send someone for a training session, and most employees will come back with good, even great intentions. But such is human nature — they go back to their old habits after a few days.”
What he advocates for is some form of accountability and followup on site at the dealership.
Otherwise, Côté says, “It’s too easy to un-learn, to get back into our old ways of doing things.”
Data from Yahoo! shows that customers are not going back to the old way of doing things. Yahoo! released data from its study on Canadian car buying habits recently, revealing that intenders use mobile devices to access auto websites, get recommendations from family and friends, locate dealerships, conduct research, and more.
According to the data, luxury intenders spend 35 per cent of their time researching autos on mobile devices, while non-luxury intenders use their mobile devices 26 per cent of the time.
For Bailey, it always goes back to keeping up with the times and adapting your dealership accordingly.
“Staff needs to think about how life has changed and how this affects their lives. Do they buy a fridge the same way they did 10 years ago? Thinking of this and applying it to their reality inside the dealership will help your staff understand why they need to learn and change.”
