Selling Cars The Old-Fashioned Way: How Over-The-Phone Sales Have Become Harder
ShareSeventy years ago, if you worked in any kind of sales, you did it in one of two ways—you sold over the phone, or in person. If you sold in person, you either did it on a lot, like a car lot, or door to door.
Enter the modern era, with its cellphones, call waiting, and call blocking features, and selling cars over the phone just became intensely more difficult. If you are about to embark on a career selling cars on the phone, and you know you need car sales phone training, you should be aware of all the reasons why this is going to be quite the challenge.
Hanging Up and Holding Onto Customers
You will still have lots of people hang up on you when you start your sales pitch. However, with cellphones, it is much harder to get telephone numbers and make the calls. When you do, you will need all of the training you have learned on how to get people to stay on the phone and listen to your pitch. If you cannot get them to stay on the phone, you know you cannot make a sale.
Cold-calling is much harder than using hot leads. Still, you have to know what grabs people's attention and keeps it there. Short sentences in the form of open-ended questions often initiate a better give-and-take conversation that prevents people from hanging up. Even if you can get your proverbial foot in the door,and keep it there for a few seconds without a consumer hanging up, that is progress.
The "Send to Voicemail" Feature
Now that people can send callers to voicemail, your call will end up in the inbox of all of those callers who do not pick up or who send you to their inbox. The trouble with that is that if you attempt to introduce yourself as a salesperson, your call will often be deleted. To grab customer attention, you have to make it short and sweet. Usually, a first name, last name, and a one-liner hook as your reason for calling or just leaving your contact number is enough to get a return call. If played correctly, you'll get more return calls than deleted messages.
The Caller ID
Again, back when cold-calling customers to make a sales pitch was the thing, there was no such thing as "caller ID." People would pick up the phone all the time, not knowing who was on the other end. Now, when customers see a number that they do not recognize, they will usually ignore the call, refuse it, or send it to voicemail.
If you are lucky, it will be voicemail, because at least the customer might call you back. About the best thing you can do in this situation is use a program that just tells the customers' phones, "No Call ID." They may still send you away, but you might get a few intrigued customers to pick up.
The "Call Waiting" Game
Oh, boy! In this case, customers will choose to answer your line in a little bit by pressing the call waiting option on their cellphones. The problem is, in the business of car sales, time is money. If you sit and wait more than five minutes to try and make a sale and it does not work, you may have lost the next caller to a competitor.
It is so difficult to figure out what you should do. Do you wait and hope for the opportunity to pitch without a hang-up, or do you drop that call and move to the next? There are so many unknowns here, but at least with car dealership phone training, you may feel your way through these calls to success.