By Jeff Silverman
Marketing new cars to your service customers may seem
an obvious way to extend the customer life cycle and keep profits flowing. Then why do so few dealerships actually do it? The concept is simple, but leveraging existing service customer relationships takes planning, tenacity, well-established processes, and ongoing management buy-in.
The suggestions in this piece can help you start planning and establishing these processes,
so marketing vehicles to your service customers becomes routine and profitable.
Encourage Sales and Service to Work Together
If you want to target your service customers, why not enlist the help of your service employees? This process involves two basic steps:
- Sales shares lease end/note maturity information with service.
- Periodically give service advisors a list of customers who are within six months of lease or note maturity. Then they can compare the list to customers they see on the drive or who have upcoming appointments.
- Advisors should also engage customers who didn't buy from your dealership. They can identify these customers easily by asking questions like, "I don't see your sales date in my database...when did you buy your vehicle?" They may then be able to engage the customer in a more in-depth conversation that turns into a sales lead.
- Service informs sales of new opportunities.
- Create an incentive program to motivate advisors to refer these customers back to sales. "Pay plan equals performance" is a cliché for a reason - it's true.
- Break out of the old-school approach of only rewarding leads that end in sales. You'll have more success by paying incentives for every legitimate lead to the showroom - period.
- Prevent bogus referrals by setting specific criteria: referral must be within six months of lease/note maturity, signed by sales management, etc.
Motivate your departments to work together and
watch your cross-departmental referrals skyrocket!
Jeff Silverman has been in the automotive business for over 13 years - 8 in retail and over 5 with Reynolds Consulting.
