Sales training for dealerships is ongoing, even monthly group sessions don’t seem to get your appointment numbers to budge. Worse, half the time your team is bored to tears covering generic sales tactics they already know.
Bringing training entirely in-house would be ideal, but it’s resource-heavy and doesn’t give you a broad look at the industry. And while it would provide the long-term, individualized coaching relationship that makes sales teams excel, you still won’t know what you don’t know.
What’s the training solution top dealerships are leveraging to stay on top of changing industry trends while providing the feedback and skills it takes to get appointment rates to 60%+?
By bringing in a dedicated training consultant who specializes in auto sales, you can keep your business lean and streamlined without compromising on the powerful benefits of in-house phone sales training. Dealership coaches can evaluate every aspect of your inbound and outbound phone sales strategy while providing powerful one-on-one training for your team. Here’s how it works.
1. Business Evaluation
Any dealership consultant will have to evaluate your current phone sales game, but many of them either go too broad or stay narrowly focused on fine details. A great partner will examine all paths from call to cash, connect the dots, and then produce a rigorous strategy for filling in the gaps.
To create the perfect phone sales training strategy, they’ll need to evaluate the following:
- Market and regional competition
- Current phone strategy and training processes
- Phone scripts and other materials
- Individual skill sets
- Data infrastructure and CRM
- Baseline metrics and dealership goals
- Mystery shops to establish areas of improvement
Once they understand how your business works inside and out, they’ll be able to start nailing down the details on phone strategy and customizing your phone scripts.
2. Initial Group Training
Getting appointment rates to double or triple takes a lot of one-on-one work, but your team will need to start with a solid strategic foundation. An initial group training brings everyone up to speed on the fundamentals and lays out an end-to-end path for converting calls into appointments.
This session should cover:
- Phone script best practices. This includes tone, when and how to go off script, and key word tracks in the call process.
- Appointment setting. What critical information should be gathered, what’s the best moment to ask, and how will appointments be confirmed?
- Handling objections. How do you avoid getting pushback, and what are the best strategies for managing common scenarios?
- Outline of training strategy. Employees will need to know what to expect to meet goals and elevate their performance.
- Feedback. If your sales team doesn’t understand when and how they will be evaluated, it will be difficult to get buy-in.
3. Active Coaching
Once initial training is complete, a dedicated phone sales coach can begin working with your team on individual and group coaching sessions. These short, high-intensity interactions are where team members get the specific training and feedback they need to boost your dealership’s appointment rates one call at a time.
Many training firms offer coaching, but here’s what you should expect from an elite partner:
- Efficiency. You might think that training takes hours, but the best coaches can break down areas of improvement into bite-sized teaching points that can be drilled and put into practice in as little as 15 minutes.
- Autonomy. Coaches can operate completely behind the scenes without needing to involve busy owners or GMs unless it’s absolutely necessary.
- Real calls. Hypothetical training examples are neither powerful nor memorable. Your training partner should be pulling coaching points from actual calls that happened within the last 48 hours.
- Specifics. Sales reps need to know exactly what to do differently to get a better outcome on a call. For instance, saying “When would you like to come in?” sounds polite, but what’s a more assertive question that will get more appointments on the books?
4. Feedback and Mystery Shops
Mystery shops are the best way of evaluating your team’s live performance on the phone. Professional mystery callers are trained to sound like real callers while interrogating specific aspects of your sales strategy. They can also provide feedback for individual improvement on things like language, tone, script use, and sales tactics.
Phone sales consultants often outsource mystery shopping to third-party vendors who don’t know your business, and that limits the value these evaluations can deliver. Owners and GMs should consider training partners with dedicated mystery shoppers who deliver the feel of true in-house phone sales training.
Dealership strategy that isn’t fully integrated across the entire process will inevitably offer generic or watered-down advice—and that cuts into your return on the training investment.
Feedback should also be delivered to your sales team in a timely fashion by a trusted coach. When reports filter through sales managers, they often feel critical rather than constructive. Plus, managers aren’t necessarily effective teachers—after all, it’s not their job!
A great coach can identify what information should go to individuals and what would be instructive for the team as a whole to produce the best possible results.
5. Reporting
Finally, your training partner should deliver detailed reporting that links your investment to concrete results. In many cases, this is the only guidepost that owners and GMs need to understand the value of their in-house phone sales training. Dealership operations can’t be put on hold once a week to manage training operations, and the top coaching firms back up their performance with month-to-month contracts that prioritize results.
In-House Training to Crush Appointment Rates
At Phone Ninjas, we’ve spent decades in the auto industry, and we know what it takes to outperform the competition. We offer our clients complete in-house phone training, dealership sales strategy consulting, and detailed active coaching that regularly boosts their appointment rates to 3-4 times the industry average.
And the best part is, we take care of everything so you can focus on what you do best—running your business. Ready to revolutionize your phone sales strategy? Get your free demo and two mystery shops to find out what our Phone Ninjas can do for your bottom line.
