How many times have we asked our sales team or BDC if they’ve made all of their calls?  It’s practically impossible to reach everyone you are supposed to in a timely and professional manner.  We were all taught in AutoSales 101 to contact our customers 3-4 times a year to build loyalty and look for other opportunities.  Sadly, these calls are typically ignored and it’s costing you sales and service revenue.  How can you identify which calls are supposed to be made from your store and how many?

Your dealership’s Sales Development Index (SDI) is the number of impressions (outgoing phone calls, emails, etc.) you need to make to your customers each month.

Use the following equations to determine the number of phone calls your store should be making monthly:

Calls to Unsold Floor Traffic                 Monthly Sold Units (MSU) MSU x 4
Renewal Opportunity Calls                   MSU x 1
Save-a-Deal Customer Calls                MSU x 2
Owner Follow-up Calls                        MSU x 9
Repair Order (ROs) Marketing               Monthly ROs x 1
Appointment Confirmation Calls            (MSU x .5) + (ROs x .5)
Service Merchandising                        MSU x 9

Get a quick estimate by taking the number of units sold monthly and multiply it by 36 – example: 150 units per month = 5,400 calls.

It may take 6-7 attempts just to reach a potential buyer; perhaps that is why 68% of all scheduled dealership phone contacts are not made.

Now consider the quality of the calls your team is currently making.  Do you listen to your people make their outbound calls?  Make it habit of listening at least once a week.  Every call type should have a purpose behind it and a call to action for the customer.

Do you have a database with thousands of customers that have yet to be contacted, who need a reason to return to your store for sales or service?  How do you attack a large number of customers and quickly identify the hottest opportunities?

Consider outsourcing a portion of your calls to a virtual BDC provider.  The service you choose should pull data directly from your CRM database and push back the results in real time so you can quickly attack the hot opportunities.  Be sure you have the ability to listen to all of the calls made on your behalf as well.

Using a virtual BDC provider will quickly show the results of their efforts.  All calls should be tracked and monitored, the appointments accounted for, and the resulting sales and associated gross easily accessible.  It should be easy to measure the ROI.

Your CRM provider or one of your technology partners should be able to assist you with this effort.  Identify which calls are not getting made, or are not made professionally, and start there.  DO NOT outsource all of your calls to a third party call center.  With a lighter call volume, your sales team should still be held accountable to make their calls and make them well.  Don’t shortcut on training!  This is a battle that can be won.  Not everyone will go the extra mile and make the effort, but those who do will see significant results you can easily measure.