I really enjoy being able to make provocative statements.
Seven years ago I sat in on a presentation detailing how to set up a Business Development Center (BDC). Got to admit, I was all in, it made a lot of sense. The industry was at the tipping point where more than half of sales began as a digital touch. An Email, a text, or a Facebook message had become the norm.
Having digitally shopped hundreds of dealers, when it came to responding to online leads, I knew that the average salesperson was bad. That’s probably giving credit where it’s not due. For years, dealers had trained sales staff on the steps to the sale. How to approach a customer and then guide them through the process. Those skills had been honed over decades. However, almost all this training began when the customer walked through the door.
The problem was that those skills didn’t translate to responding to digital leads, and many dealers failed to recognize that a 21st century sales department needed 21st century training. I can’t tell you how many times I submitted a detailed lead to a dealership, only to receive the standard response of “here’s my phone number, call me when you get a minute”. My response to many of those leads was the same, “If I had wanted to call you, I would have picked up a phone. There’s a reason I went to your website and submitted a lead.”
And, that’s when I received a response. About 1/3 of the leads I submitted to dealers never warranted a reply.
The concept behind the BDC was simple. Provide a quick and professional response to a customer, offer up basic details about the vehicle they were looking for, and work hard to get the customer to set an appointment to come and visit the dealership. A good BDC worked to refine the process and had canned responses, pictures, brochures, and other materials in easy to access locations. Every lead was loaded into the dealership’s CRM.
Once an appointment was set with a customer, the BDC would stay in contact. Checking to see if they needed anything else, communicating with the sales team about the upcoming visit, and confirming that the date and time of the appointment still worked with the customer. At the point where the customer came into the dealership and met with a salesperson, the BDC signed off.
While the BDC had worked well in the auto industry, in the powersports industry it failed quite miserably. Most dealers who set up a BDC disbanded the operation within 6-12 months (if they lasted that long). For the dealerships that kept the BDC on long term, the sales data didn’t show those dealers to outperform traditional dealers.
Why did they fail? Here are some of the issues I saw.
- Dealers weren’t fully committed. They wanted the BDC to handle most of the incoming leads for the sales staff, but they also wanted to carve out a portion of them for a few of the old-school members of the team who were not bought in.
- The technology didn’t support the process. Antiquated phone systems, CRMs that were not designed to support group efforts, and the use of communication systems that didn’t feed into a “single source of truth”.
- Sales Managers were unwilling to change pay plans. While the BDC became a “resource” for the sales team, the BDC usually became an additional cost for the department that was not offset by modifying the sales pay plans. Payroll ballooned.
- A lack of communication. A common denominator in many dealership problems, the process of handing the customer over from the BDC to the sales team was clunky.
- Many dealers didn’t think through all the nuances of how the BDC would work. What should have been a 6-month process of planning and training was often implemented in a matter of weeks. Chaos ensued.
- Powersports vehicles are not commodities. This was really the big one that separated PS from auto. Powersports appeal to a small percentage of the population, and relationships matter. Attempting to treat a customer like they were a product on an assembly line rubbed a lot of consumers in the wrong way, and they would move on to find another dealer that they felt comfortable working with.
For those dealers who had first or second-hand experience of how BDCs functioned, I’m sure there are other reasons why they didn’t work out. However, just because the BDC concept has been unable to prove itself in driving sales, that doesn’t mean that the need still doesn’t exist. A recent analysis by the folks over at PSXDigital revealed that 30% of dealership leads continue to go unanswered.
What’s the answer to the problem? At this point, I’m leaning towards what I refer to as the IST (Internet Sales Team). The IST is comprised of a group of well-trained employees who take the customer through the entire sales journey, from greet to close. Instead of handing a customer off from one person to another, the client has the opportunity to construct a relationship with an individual salesperson. The IST team responds quickly and professionally, and they build trust.
The IST still requires a lot of planning, and a dealership must be willing to go all in on the process. You can’t carve out “Joe” just because he’s been working at the dealership for the last 13 years and he doesn’t like change. If you aren’t willing to go all in, then stay out.
In a future article, I’ll go into more depth about how an IST should be structured. Stay tuned.
#Powersports #BDC #Sales #DigitalLeads #Internet #IST #Motorcycle #ATV