How much of your sales team’s day is spent actually selling cars?
In an ideal world, it would be 100 percent, but a recent Salesforce study shows it may be as low as 30 percent. So, where is all that time going? A lot of manual, time-consuming work goes into getting your prospects and your team ready for a sale. While this work can help set appointments or get a lead to the next step of buying a car, it often comes at the expense of time with the customers in front of them, ready to buy.
Let’s look at some of those things that take your team away from selling and how AI can help them get that time back.
Wasting Time on “Junk” Leads
Leads come into your store from a variety of places — phone calls, emails, walk-ins, and more. And now it’s easier than ever for a customer to submit an internet lead with the click of a button. While more leads can seem like a good problem to have, not all leads are worth the time to pursue. In fact, a
Forrester study found that sales reps waste 50 percent of their time on unqualified leads.
Now that expressing interest can happen on a whim, it’s easy to spend time engaging with a lead that isn’t serious about buying a car. Before your team can even begin turning these leads into sales, they need to make sure the leads are ready to buy, and that’s not a quick task. In fact, it’s estimated that a sales rep may lose as many as
1,393 hours a year contacting unqualified leads. That’s time that your team isn’t directly selling.
Agonizing Over the Right Message
Once you’ve decided which leads you’re going to pursue, you need an engaging message for your prospect. You want to make sure your outreach is engaging enough to get them to respond. You’re trying to get your leads to take the next step towards purchasing a car, but you have to act quickly. The odds of making successful contact with a lead increase
100 times if you respond in five minutes rather than 30.
And when leads come in at all hours of the day, any day of the week, the messages that need responses pile up. Devoting time to ensuring you have the right message for each lead can feel like an endless task. Relying on generic responses can make even the most motivated buyer want to shop elsewhere. The balance between what is worth the effort is tricky. You want to make sure you’re not wasting time, while also ensuring you’re not missing out on interested buyers.
Take Back Your Time to Start Selling
Having a tool that utilizes conversational language to engage your online leads — fast, means all that work doesn’t fall to your sales team. When AI can engage with customers to generate sales appointments, it frees up your team so they can focus on what really matters: taking care of the customers in front of them and making the sale.
It’s no secret you need to work with the leads that come into your store, but with new AI tools to lighten the load, you can set your team up with higher-quality leads and give them time back in their day to focus on selling.
