The company’s internal technology and data science team have developed technology that includes an algorithm which can surgically identify the quality of the highest propensity-to-buy customers the dealership has on its books.
Steve Zanlunghi, director of operations – Asia Pacific Region, told GoAutoNews Premium: “We have invested millions of dollars in our technology which, when it gets into the data within a dealership database, identifies the customers with the highest propensity to buy.
All that allows us to be very surgical about the customers we are going to be reaching out to,” he said. “These are either previous sales customers or people who did not buy from the dealers but are service customers.
“The algorithm in our proprietary software looks at customer loyalty, warranty expiration date, distance to the dealership, type and duration of purchase (fleet, user-chooser, retail loan), vehicle type, current or previous model and so on. We can also see if the age of the vehicle to be traded hits the sweet spot for that special brand (in that market).”
The company selects 150 names per sales executive to call and their job is to make 15 appointments each for the sales event.
Absolute Results trains the sales staff to make the calls and shows them the best techniques for setting appointments. Trainers are also on hand throughout the one-day event.
Typically the one-day event generates the sort of sales numbers the dealership would make in a week.
Asked if dealers worried the events would pull sales forward, Mr Zanlunghi said: “We are not pulling forward a dealer’s customers because, when we analyse a dealer’s database, we know that only eight percent of the dealer’s customers are currently shopping at any given time.
“This has been established in studies done in North America and backed up by our corporate data scientist in Canada. We are very careful not to burn out the customer base,” he said.
The number of events a year depends on the size of the dealer’s database, he said.
“Some dealers in Canada do these events twice a month but they have databases of 20,000 to 25,000.”
Using a Melbourne luxury car dealer as an example, he said the dealer has a database of 9000 customers. It has five sales staff and each sales person is given 150 names to approach for an appointment.
“That means they are only touching 750 of those 9000 customers for that one sales event. But, on that basis, that dealership has the capacity of doing 12 of these events in a year. So they could do an event once a month without talking to the same customer twice.”
The events also generate new customers for the dealership. Sales staff are trained on their calls to offer an invitation to the event to a customer’s family, friends and work colleagues. Walk-ins are also invited to participate in the sales event and the data shows they are actually more likely to buy.
“We keep stats on non-appointment sales, and this is where it gets really interesting. In May and June, for every five appointments that showed during an event, we saw one non-appointment. Walk-ins without an appointment closed at a 65 percent sale rate vs our average appointment close rate 51 per cent for that period.”
He said that in some recent events walk-ins have been known to wait an hour because they get swept up in what is happening in the showroom.
“Such a high closing ratio shows the urgency that we are able to create during an event.”
Mr Zanlunghi said that the appointment culture training that sales staff receive for an event subsequently spills over into the way they handle their online leads, for example, because sales staff retain their focus on making an appointment for the leads customer to come in. This means less digital leakage.
“That then sets the stage for an exceptional customer experience because the dealership is ready for the appointment.
“It’s Murphy’s Law. If the customer just turns up, the car they want is inevitably without plates or out of fuel or stuck in the back behind other cars and you can’t find the keys.
“Now, if you have an appointment culture, you pull the file the day before to prepare for when the customer comes in, you know how many vehicles they bought before, how many times they have been in for service and you have the vehicle they want to drive cleaned inside, washed and fueled and sitting out the front as they walk into the showroom.”
But, he said, it is not just about setting the appointments for an event.
Mr Zanlunghi said that following the appointment-setting training from Absolute Results, sales staff should actually become be a lot more comfortable ringing the dealership’s established customers to make appointments than they are dealing with someone walking-in off the street.
By Neil Dowling
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