Four times a year, successful dealers from across the United States and Canada travel to sunny Orlando, Florida to discuss business-accelerating strategies that drive additional traffic, leads and sales.
And last month’s Rich Dealers® Find Your Mojo Mastermind Meeting was no different. For three action-packed days our members came together at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport to discuss the best ways to grow their businesses in the next quarter. Here are 7 BIG takeaways from sessions and conversations that took place at the meeting.
Active Listening For Your Sales Team
You can’t accomplish anything if you don’t know the mission. The same is true for selling. How can your sales team reasonably sell anything if they don’t know and understand the customer? Active listening isn’t just about hearing what a person is saying to you. It’s a dance of listening, asking questions, and interpreting what the customer means. It’s finding a way to understand what the customer wants, even if they don’t, through engaged questions.
What should you be asking in order to achieve active listener status? We’re glad you asked, we have a full blog post dedicated to the 10 questions every sales person should be asking HERE.
The Art Of Being Unreasonable
Reasonable people get reasonable success. But if you want to experience unreasonable success, the kind of success that most people only dream about, then you need to practice the art of being unreasonable.
Being unreasonable means doing things nobody else does or in a way that nobody else does. It’s pursuing the untried and revising expectations upward. It’s not being scared to stand out and be different.
As Earl Nightingale once said, “If you want to be successful, look at what everyone else is doing and do the opposite.” You must be a risk-taker because status quo thinking and common sense action deliver common results.
Developing (And Diagnosing) Your Dealership Scorecard
There are lots of ways to run a business. One way is on the ground, in the heat of the battle, putting out fires and resolving problems on the fly. But there is a better way.
We’ve found that the most effective and efficient way to run a business is by using a control panel that gives you at-a-glance feedback on how your business is doing. That way you can identify constraints and streamline processes before the fires even happen.
We help dealers do this by using a tool called a Scorecard. The Rich Dealers Scorecard takes into account all the vital aspects of the business and tracks trends over time to let you know when an area of your business needs attention, from your marketing to your BDC to your sales team. We recommend that dealers assign a trustworthy employee to fill out their Scorecard weekly, so they can track the trends. When it’s done right, it only takes a few minutes to review and asses, but it can save you countless hours in the long run.
Work Once, Reuse Many Times
Creating an effective system within your dealership isn’t easy. But it’s the first step in achieving ESP®. An ESP® business model is enjoyable, simple, and prosperous, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. ESP comes when you build effective and efficient systems in your business that allow you to reduce the amount of work you do in the long wrong. Developing an effective marketing system that regularly generates leads, establishing a process for desking deals that simplifies the process for your staff and customers and organizing your BDC’s operations so they achieve the utmost efficiency and results will all result in more ESP® for you.
The best part?
While all of these tasks require work upfront and regular check-ins, they can be reused many times without additional work.
How To Create A Winning Culture In Your Dealership
Creating a powerful, winning culture in your dealership can have a huge impact on your business. When you have a great culture, you become known as a great place to work. Becoming a top place to work means that you’ll be able to more easily attract and retain top performers in your field. Also, positivity is contagious. When your employees love what they do and enjoy coming to work, they’ll spread those feelings to your customers.
But how do you do it?
Here are three easy steps to get you started:
- Start With Why – When you create a powerful mission, you inspire your people to think differently, be better and achieve more.
- Tie Everything Back To Your Mission – When employees understand how their daily tasks and responsibilities contribute to the overall mission of the business, it makes the work they have to do worthwhile.
- Provide Feedback – Recognize employees who are upholding the mission and working hard to create a wonderful place to work. Recognition makes those people feel appreciated and reinforces what appropriate behavior is for their coworkers.
How To Increase Down Payment
Increasing down payment seems to be a consistent challenge for dealerships across the country, both big and small. At the Rich Dealers Find Your Mojo Mastermind Meeting, dealers shared some of their best practices for increasing the down payment. Most of the top strategies involved getting the customer involved in the conversation and creating a real human-to-human connection and conversation around what a bigger down payment could do for them. It’s important that these conversations remain solutions-oriented. Remember, if you want to help your customers, you have to join their team.
Use Email To Cultivate Lists
Email can be a powerful marketing tool. Our members are experiencing great results with email remarketing campaigns to their existing lists, including cost per lead (CPL) as low as $3.72 with open rates at 9.25% and click rates of 19%. Paired with an effective landing page that converts at 40% or higher, and you’ve got a recipe for success.
But they aren’t stopping there. Rich Dealers® members are also using email to maintain relationships with past customers, so that they return for service, refer repeatedly and remain customers for life.
These are just some of the strategies dealers shared at the Rich Dealers® Find Your Mojo Mastermind Meeting. If you want to know more about any of these techniques or if you’re interested in attending our next session, request an appointment with an advisor and a FREE Traffic Scale Report now.
Check Out Some More Highlights From Past Rich Dealers® Mastermind Meetings