New Vision Sales Automobile Dealer Sales Training – Article Series

Database Mining for All

Departments

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Database mining, or organic business development, is maximizing
the opportunities that are sitting in a dealer’s database
uncultivated or, to be frank, being ignored.

These people are not being called; they’re not getting letters.
They’re being left for the competition to call. Sure, the sales
staff or BDC will call a customer in the days or weeks after they
come in, but what about months or years later?

A lot of the same people that you’re paying to advertise to are

already at your disposal. Cross-reference a recent direct mailer
manifest with your database and look for overlap. You already
have this customer information. Why pay for something you can do
on your own? I do recommend purchasing leads and dropping direct
mail, but please make sure every new opportunity gets entered
into your CRM and scheduled for follow-up going forward. This not
only makes for quality marketing campaigns and lead conversion,
but also provides future business.

Dealers should make database mining a part of daily work or

action plans. Salespeople should make a minimum of 30 dials a day
and hand in their appointment logs, and the pattern will become
abundantly clear. Those selling the most cars
set the most appointments.

Here are a few examples of data mining campaigns designed to

drive traffic to the sales department:

• Invite sold customers who are in an equity position in for a

sales event.

• Call all customers—sold,unsold and service—to enroll them in a

friends-and-family,or referral, program.

• Assign orphan owners to sales staff or BDRs for follow-up.It’s

important to mine a database for more than sales leads. We may
not get 10 percent out of every area we look at, but we’ll get
one percent from each of 10 different areas. When we’re getting
one percent from each of 10 different areas inside the database,
that’s a good return, so look at all past customers to determine
how to drive traffic to sales, service and F&I. Here are some
examples of data mining campaigns that could generate service
revenue:

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• Market a promotion for a free oil change (or free oil and
charge for the labor) to sold customers who have never been in
the service department.

• Let service customers know about any upcoming recommended

maintenance.

• Contact people who only visited the service department once, to

find out why they haven’t come back. Learning why people didn’t
come back can help sell them on why they need to come back.

• Call once-regular service customers who haven’t been back to

the service department in a while. Their absence could point
towards an expensive repair coming
up that they’ve been putting off. The call could lead to a
service appointment, or it could lead to a sale because now may
be the time for the customer to consider trading up.

Remember, you don’t have to sell a car to sell a service

contract. From your database, you can develop campaigns to drive
traffic to the F&I office too. Here are a couple examples:

• Follow-up with sold customers whose warranties have expired,

and offer them your specials on extended service contracts.

• Contact sold customers who barely needed cosigners when they

purchased. Perhaps they don’t need one now. The customer might
not realize he or she is now in a better position, and the
cosigner would probably like to get off the loan.

All these campaigns have the ability to lead to cross-promotion

as well. For example, you may be calling someone about
recommended maintenance, but the customer may be in the market
for a new vehicle or know someone else who is. Similarly, you
could turn your orphan owners into service customers. No harm in
asking. It just shows customers you care, which is likely to be a
different experience for them.

The old saying, “People don’t care how much we know until they
know how much we care,” applies. Nothing shows we care more than
a follow-up call. Following up with customers – sold and unsold –
also keeps your dealership fresh in their minds. Showing you care

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really provides an opportunity for a dealership to differentiate
itself from any other experience that their customers have had.

Also, remember to leave effective voicemails. Many voicemails

will be left during data mining campaigns, and they really need
to create some curiosity and sizzle so that they are quite
different from any messages your competitors might be leaving.
When sending a mailer to customers in the database, I suggest
calling the person in advance to let them know to expect
“something special” from you in the mail. That way, they are more
likely to read the mailer when they receive it.

More and more dealers are cultivating the leads that are already
in their database, and more are likely to join in. It’s almost
like having a cellar that needs to be cleaned out. There’s a lot
of good stuff down there that’s worth good money. You could be
sitting on a gold mine.

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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/grodean

New Vision Sales Inc.

1670 Hwy 160 West Suite 206
Fort Mill, South Carolina 29708
803-802-2124
Toll Free: 866-532-2827
Info@NewVisionSales.com

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