You’ve sold a customer a car. Now decide if you want them to be your customeror the dealership’s customer. If you’re planning to make this a career, recognize every customer you sell is an opportunity to grow your business. How you stay memorable is just as much a process as how you got them to say yes in the first place.
So you sold them. Now what? Is your process to call them tomorrow? Maybe send an email or text with a hearty ‘I appreciate ya’ and congratulations. Will you be asking them for a referral and offering them a redelivery in the near future? Maybe you take it a step further (as you should) as send them a handwritten thank you card or a dealership postcard. Heck, a video thanking them couldn’t hurt, right? These actions are the bare minimums in my book.
Service will be reaching out as well and all of their actions will be focused on retaining that person as the dealership’s customer. For you, there will be scheduled calls, automated emails, and a couple other action items you’ll be required to make in your CRM over the upcoming years, but is that all? Is that the most effort you can give? And you think they’ll still come back to you specifically because of a few kind words during a few long hours in a showroom, and then a handful of impersonal voice messages and emails? Maybe a “Happy Birthday” thrown in? Is that the best you can do in hopes of them making you “their car salesperson”? What are you doing to make yourself memorable?
If you want to grow your business, you must learn the art of reciprocation. You aren’t the only person that works in a place of business. You aren’t the only person that benefits from people returning to your store. Nor are you the only person that seeks to have a book of loyal customers visiting their place of employment. You must reciprocate.
Whenever any customer I sold worked at a place I could frequent or one that I remotely could do business with myself, I made sure to do so. That reciprocation goes a long way toward staying front and center in their mind. Proving your appreciation. Building rapport takes place when meeting a customer and selling them their next vehicle. Building a relationship takes place after the sale through excellent communication and, in my opinion, beyond the four walls of a dealership.
So many of your previously sold customers also work in an organization (or for themselves) and could benefit from your patronage. Give back to that customer by giving them your business in turn, and you will truly become their “go-to salesperson” for all future purchases. This isn’t done with the goal of making a friend, rather to create a partnership where the age-old saying of “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” exists. Want to grow your business and make more money? Get your customers coming back to you for every vehicle purchase after their first. Want to make sure that happens? Learn to reciprocate. Your (now loyal) customers will appreciate it.
