Pub. 3 2013 Issue 3

19 DON BROWN Advertising Sales 813.423.1429 donfbrown@verizon.net is. If you spent $1,600 for 300 sales, the cost per sale is about $5.33 per lead; even at $300 per sale, you will spend $2,400 for 300 leads, and the cost per sale is $8. But there is another approach: you can improve the percentages between getting the lead and making the final sale. Believe it or not, selling successfully has a lot more to do with following sound business practices than it does with the economy. Let’s see what happens if you focus on the process instead of on the cost of the lead: • When you get a lead, can you improve on the personal contact? If your staff is only contacting half of the contacts, what happened to the other half? • When an appointment is made, can you increase the chances that the appointment will actually be kept? For example, what if you send out email messages with reminders? • If an appointment falls through, what about a second chance? Things happen, but until a sale has been made, the person who didn’t show up for an appointment still needs a car, at least for a little while. • How good is your sales staff? If you have the right people, you train them correctly, and you give them the tools they need, maybe they can do better than a 20 percent success rate. Your sales staff should really know about the cars in their inventory, the competition, and the needs of their potential customers. They should get phone numbers, hand out brochures, and follow up with thank you cards. In other words, excellent service always matters. You can also work on increasing the number of leads and making your Internet efforts more effective: • Are you putting effort into an Internet presence, or is it an afterthought? You can do better. Either plan and implement a strategy, or hire people who can do it for you. • Speaking of hiring people, Internet work is not an entry level job or a one-person department. Pay good wages and hire talent to match. Ideally, you want two experts so that if there is a problem and one expert isn’t available, you still have someone else. • Empower the people who are working to develop your business. If that still isn’t enough, examine some more possible problems: • Upper management needs to be supportive, in words and actions. • Management needs to work as a team, understand your strategy, and have the information to know whether that strategy is working so they can make improvements. • Be careful, be specific, and take the right measurements to determine whether performance is where you need it to be. • Keep an eye on the budget, and spend wisely. For example, more local people are likely to buy from you than people who are farther away, so focus your efforts most on the people who are geographically closest to the dealership. Broadening the geographical area is expensive, so you will spend money, but you will also get better results. • Make improvements as you go along. You aren’t going to get everything right immediately. Do the best you can for right now. You’ll be able to improve your performance, and the performance of your dealership, as you go along. Q More local people are likely to buy from you than people who are farther away, so focus your efforts most on the people who are geographically closest to the dealership. The newsLINK Group, LLC is a marketing agency that specializes in communication strategies for nonpro fi ts, trade associations and professional service fi rms. For more information, call 855.745.4003 | www.thenewslinkgroup.com.