Why a BDC is indispensible for growth.
Leveraging your CRM to build business.
In the “good old days”, automotive dealerships could grow merely by waiting for the next customer to darken the doorway. Today, it’s nothing more than a quaint memory. Dealerships now understand the need to consistently engage target audiences to grow. Not just any audiences, mind you. They’re shifting focus to existing customers, rather than chasing new ones. It’s a job perfectly suited for a high performance business development center (BDC).
Shifting Growth Strategies
Did you know that acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing one? What’s more, the success rate of selling to that new customer is 5-20%. The success rate for an existing customer? 60-70%. The bottom line? Forward-thinking dealerships are focusing more on customers they already have…and using a high performance business development center solution to deliver on this strategy.
Mining your CRM for Gold.
Here’s the good news. Your dealership already has a prized store of data on existing customers – your CRM. And it’s most valuable when a BDC Manager leverages it to reach out effectively at every stage of the customer journey. Nurturing relationships within your CRM – data mining as it’s commonly referred to – is a huge opportunity to increase profitability and keep customer costs down. Plus, there’s an added bonus. The dealership can achieve better results from digital marketing efforts. Sure, data mining may sound complex, but you don’t have to be a data scientist to unlock nuggets of gold from your CRM. A properly trained and managed high performance business center team can determine where a customer stands in their vehicle ownership journey, then arm agents with sales or service messages that possess a greater chance of resulting in a sale.
The success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%. Conversely, the success rate for an existing customer is 60-70%!
“A high performance business development center armed with a simple data-driven strategy can prevent defection and strengthen any dealership’s customer base,” says Melissa Szekely, Sr. VP Operations at Blueprint, a division of Dealer-FX. “Better yet, when aligned with strong digital communications like our Total Service Marketing packages, a BDC can align their efforts with outbound campaigns that reach the right customer at exactly the right time.”
Customer Retention: Three Simple Ways to Make Automotive Customers Happy
Customers come and go. Hopefully, they come back. If not, we’ll send them a coupon! Does this sound like your customer retention program? It might. After all, when times are good it’s easy to let retention fall off the radar. Investing in programs designed to bring back existing customers just doesn’t seem very important when […]
Here are a Few Customer Experience Lessons from Apple’s Trillion-Dollar Journey
On August 2, Apple became the first U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market valuation. In doing so, it crossed an interesting threshold once thought unattainable, at least for anything other than a global energy company. But then again – was anyone really surprised? Probably not. Apple is unique, after all, a public showcase […]
Service Advisors: Tell the What, Sell the Why
What’s the fastest way to get a “no” from the customer? Ask them to buy a service they don’t understand. It seems like a pretty simple mistake to avoid, right? Yet often, service advisors fall into the trap, mostly because they’re busy or not armed with the latest vehicle information. And when it happens, they […]