We’ve seen an evolution of consumers favoring platforms that provide transparency, like Facebook Marketplace, and it speaks to a dealer needing to evolve his or her process and continue to get better and be more optimized with consumers.
As a precursor to evolving your process, let’s first talk about the importance of documenting your process. As VAN Co-Founder Tom Gregg explains in the video below, there are a number benefits for doing this.
“Number one,” he says, is that you can “review your processes, you can analyze, and then you can update.”
“Also when you’re training a team to execute on a specific process,” Tom explains that, “if it's only spoken and not written, it's hard to make sure the entire team is on the same page.”
Furthermore, to keep somebody accountable you can always refer back to the written document and confirm if in fact someone is following the process, but only if it is documented. “If it’s not,” states Tom, “then it becomes very challenging to make sure the whole team has clarity to what the intention is.”
Set Expectations with Price Ranges and Offers
When updating your documented process, a good next step would be to consider an older school way of making appointments where you just want everyone coming into the store and how that contrasts with providing some level of expectation.
“We’ve seen it very clear from consumers and people in general,” says Gregg in the video below, “that they want some level of expectation communicated before a dealership visit. We’ve seen an evolution of dealers who are now providing a range, either a $1-2k range.”
We’ve also seen dealers move to exact offers, says Tom.
“I think this communicates a lot of things,” he says. Number one, it communicates a level of respect for somebody’s time - yours and the seller’s. It’s good to evolve from just trying to set an appointment, to providing a range or an offer and then of course schedule an appointment from there as opposed to not having communicated a range or offer.
