Leading The Way: 3 Tips to Help Your Team Find Quality Prospects

Customers have unlimited options in today’s market, so it’s important your team makes the most of every interaction. Failure to do so jeopardizes long-term customer retention as they explore alternatives. This makes your team’s ability to identify and pursue quality prospects even more important. But it can be challenging to know what prospects to pursue. Chasing down the wrong ones can cost valuable time and resources. Below are three tips to help your team with pursuing prospects.

Embrace Data

Utilizing your customer information is crucial to knowing who to pursue.  Looking at the different buying trends and behaviors of your customers will give your team better insights into when customers are more likely to buy a vehicle. Even small details can help your team make more informed decisions. A customer who just started a family will likely have different preferences for a vehicle than a customer who is single. Relying on a single factor like equity isn’t enough to give your team a clear idea of who’s a quality prospect. You risk missing out on customers ready to buy if you’re not taking advantage of all the information available to you.  For example, you notice a customer’s buying history consistently shows a new vehicle purchase every three years. You can acknowledge that pattern and approach them when the time is right. If you had a tool that accounted for transactional, behavioral, and demographic data, you could make more informed decisions quicker.

Proactive, Not Reactive

Waiting for customers to come to you isn’t always the best strategy. The more time between your last interaction with a customer, the more likely they’ve gone elsewhere. Adopting a more proactive approach will give your team better sales opportunities. For example, following up after your service customers have been in for an appointment is a good start, but what if your sales team approached them when they’re in for service? It’s a free at-bat to try and make a sale. At the very least it helps to build a connection and gets the customer thinking about their next vehicle sooner. You could even take this a step further by having a vehicle prepped and ready to test drive as soon as your salesperson is notified the customer has arrived for service.

Find The Right Medium

Understanding which medium your customers respond to can help make sure you connect with them in an impactful way they’ll respond to.  For instance, your customers may prefer to learn about your holiday sale through direct mail, while an email might work better for reminding them it’s time to get their oil changed with a direct link to schedule their appointment. So, by tracking what works and what doesn’t, you can adjust your next campaign for maximum effectiveness. Utilizing reporting can provide valuable insights to ensure your marketing efforts are focused in the right areas.

There will always be some nuance when determining what prospects to pursue. However, if your dealership can leverage your customer data, receive proactive prospect details, and get insight reports to adjust your strategy, then you’re empowering your team to maximize opportunities and uncover quality prospects.

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