What Automotive Brands Can Do Better Online- Sell

Our favourite web news source eConsultancy carried a piece on its blog this week about what automotive brands can do better on their websites. Having had some experience in this area - and done a lot of research around it - in the recent past, I thought we ought to craft a response.

One of the issues the editor Graham Charlton pointed out was that some brands are poor at following up online leads - as he himself experienced. From what we have seen, there are three issues here:

• The quality of the information captured by the website
• The decision-making ability of the sales manager/dealer principal based on this information
• The quality of the salespeople in the showroom

The last point is not for us to address. Suffice to say we have met some very sharp people working with the automotive sector. But almost all of them have bemoaned the quality of some sales staff they have experienced in their own pasts - and sometimes in the present.

However the other two issues are very much in CANDDi’s sweet spot. Let’s take them in order:

Poor quality information capture

We know that more than one of the major car brands in the UK passes leads in the following email format to its dealers:

• Enquiry Name: Fred Bloggs
• Telephone Number: 0123456789

…and that’s it. That’s all the information they get. Not even what car they were enquiring about. How embarrassing must it be to have to pick up the phone to these ‘leads’ (and I use the term loosely) and have to ask them what car it is they were actually interested in?

We’re working with dealerships today to overcome this issue, enabling their websites to capture rich information about prospects. Not just which car they enquired about, but which others they looked at and where they devoted the most time; even what search terms they entered when looking for their desired vehicle. Beyond the person’s name we can tell them a little bit about the enquirer - information from their public social profile that might help them to understand the prospect better.

Information-based filtering

Say a dealer has two salespeople. One might be a young guy great at shifting basic hatchbacks to first time buyers. The other might be a little more senior and have a good affinity with professionals seeking a smart saloon. Each one might have a lower hit rate when they deal with people outside their comfort zone. How does the sales manager choose which sales person to allocate each lead to? Based on the information in the lead above, it’s impossible.

This is clearly a very simplified example but it represents a situation we have had described to us in multiple dealerships.

CANDDi not only presents the sales manager with all of the information described above, it allows them to filter and allocate leads to the relevant salespeople. It can even apply an automatic score to leads based on defined criteria, allowing the lower quality leads (‘mickey.mouse@disney.com’) to be ignored, or filtered out to a call centre.

As we have stated many times before, the web is a great marketer but a terrible salesperson. With CANDDi and the features and benefits described above, we hope to change that.