First successful online, only then offline

Lately I keep seeing domestic and foreign reports on LinkedIn about the state of auto retail and the opportunities and threats. Chinese brands that think they have the sole rights to EVs, and consultants on the sidelines who think they know everything about how today’s customer buys, with the word AI of course hidden in every sentence. We mustn’t forget that either.

Online first, offline second!

Now, the fact is that as a car business you first have an online shop and only after that an offline shop. In other words: if you depend on car sales, you have to be successful online first before you can ever get the order, and thus the success, offline. Now, I regularly hear people — who, incidentally, don’t know the first thing about it — shouting that online selling is never going to work. But of course that’s not the case. More than 80%, or perhaps even 90%, of the used cars sold B2C have a very strong online component to them. And no, they didn’t pay for the car with iDEAL, because they still wanted to see the car in the showroom, have the trade-in inspected or something else. Who cares whether or not you want to call that an online sale?

The customer got in touch online, for example via the Marktplaats Messaging app, had an entire conversation there, exchanged photos of the trade-in, received a price, gave their agreement and then made an appointment for a viewing and bought there. And that’s not an online sale? This literally happened this past Saturday at our place in Doesburg.

A lead is not a form, but an opportunity!

An online lead is therefore the starting point of a dialogue. It’s someone who, out of all the online filter options, has picked out your car to gather more information. Whether this is by means of an online form or an incoming phone call, they’re both online leads and therefore both opportunities. Gold, in other words!

More marketing is not the solution

So if you want to do more, sell more, then all too often the obvious move is to do more marketing. But that’s by no means always necessary. An average dealer group receives hundreds, sometimes thousands of leads per month, but usually lags behind the basic conversion of 13% from the 60% rule. Simply meeting that standard alone yields dozens of extra sales, with almost the same effort you would have had to make anyway to follow up on the leads.

Excuses don’t sell cars

The sales managers responsible for following up on the leads are often no match for the excuses from salespeople about why those online leads supposedly aren’t of good quality. There was no phone number with it, the customer didn’t pick up after only being called two hours later, so if the lead is really serious they’ll call back, the customer is a fortune seeker, and so on. All excuses. But if you don’t see these real opportunities as the starting point of your basic process, then things go wrong.

Good lead follow-up works through everywhere

After all, good, high-quality lead follow-up that delivers results, with more than 13% conversion from lead to sale and where more than 60% of the leads are actually spoken to, has yet another advantage. The salespeople handle the follow-up of quotes better — quotes that were subsequently drawn up in the showroom and need to be followed up. These are just as much leads that are waiting for an answer. Perhaps not always from you, but certainly from the customer themselves, or from the bank, or otherwise.

AI doesn’t solve a management problem

What I’m getting at is the following. If you don’t treat online leads — in the form of forms, messages or incoming sales calls — as gold, so as very important, then you won’t properly make use of the opportunities in the showroom and the follow-up cycle that comes after it either.

The buyers who want to buy do get in touch. The buyers who need a bit of help buy from the neighbor. But then you can always deploy AI, of course, to solve a process problem. It’s just that this is and remains a band-aid on a wound called a management problem.