If you’re in auto sales, you likely have a singular goal: sell more cars.
Sure, there are other metrics that car dealers track. Identifying the failure points in the sales process is important. But at the end of the day, every member of the sales team wants and needs to sell more cars.
But knowing the goal is one thing. Figuring out how to achieve it is another.
Better digital marketing strategies, warmer car sales leads, more sales training, a more comfortable showroom—all of these can help, but none are an instant guarantee.
To sell more cars, first, you need to reach more customers to create a larger customer base.
So, to get your sales engine running faster, here are eight proven strategies to reach more customers as a car salesperson.
In this article:
1. Build a strong personal brand
2. Create a robust online presence
3. Build lasting relationship with car buyers
4. Open a customer referral program
5. Implement a brick-and-mortar marketing strategy
6. Always a provide excellent customer service
7. Collaborate with industry partners
8. Provide new car buyers with incentives
1. Build a strong personal brand
The best place to start is with yourself: Take some time to think about your personal brand. That’s the essence of what you want others to view you as.
To one degree or another, we all naturally tend to our personal brand. It shows up in ways like these:
- If you’re like most car salespeople, you wear shoes that look really professional—even if they aren’t the best for wearing all day and walking all over an asphalt lot.
- You tend to wear clothes just a bit nicer than what’s required (or even makes sense) for what you actually do, day in and day out.
- You keep your office the way you do.
Each of these is about more than reputation: it’s about portraying the right personal brand to your customers.
Even though we all naturally tend to our personal brand (at least to a degree), it’s worth taking some time to evaluate what you’re doing in this realm:
- Do your choices for how you operate and present yourself in the world properly support the personal brand you want to convey?
- What small steps can you take to strengthen your personal brand in a way that might attract more customers?
- Does your social media presence reflect your personal brand, or does it weaken your brand?
2. Create a robust online presence
Next, make sure you’re the kind of car salesperson that people can easily find online.
Why? Because if the only place people can find you is inside your dealership, you’ve instantly reduced your reach to a relatively small audience. You’re probably cutting your audience size in half—or worse.
We know that people research everything online these days, and this includes the car-buying process.
So it just makes sense to create a robust online presence. You want to make your face the one people already know when they walk in the door. Even better, your online presence can draw people to you and your dealership who might not have otherwise stopped in.
Bitly can help you craft your online presence through several of our features:
- Bitly branded links are easy to share, and you can make them “look like” you and your dealership.
- QR Codes take mobile users directly to whatever destination you want: your social profiles, a mobile-friendly landing page, you name it.
Not sure where to start with boosting your online presence? That’s okay: It’s something we’re pretty passionate about, so we have plenty of resources to help. Start with these 12 free marketing ideas to boost your brand and drive growth.
See how Bitly can help you grow your online presence with branded links and QR Codes.
3. Build lasting relationships with car buyers
Most people don’t buy multiple cars in a month or even a year, so it’s easy to overlook the idea of repeat customers. But if you’re in car sales for the long term, you do want to give attention to building long-term relationships.
They might not do it quickly, but people do buy more than one car. People also buy vehicles for their children, or to replace a totaled vehicle (maybe even the one they bought just last year).
People also talk to their friends and colleagues who need vehicles (more on this in the next section).
You can’t predict exactly when or how often a customer will buy. But you can position yourself as the first person they call, email, or text when they reenter the market.
So, how do you build lasting relationships? Being friendly and personable is a big start. Connect with customers over any shared characteristics or life experiences. Follow up after a purchase, maybe even with a handwritten thank-you note. Personal SMS text messages during the sales journey can help (for example, letting the customer know that a vehicle has been serviced or that you just got a used car in that meets their criteria).
You’ll also want to build trust with potential buyers: If a potential customer doesn’t feel like they can trust you, you’re much less likely to sell them a new vehicle now, much less multiple vehicles over the years.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: You want the customer to have a fantastic, memorable customer experience with you, and you need to remember (or store away) some details about that customer.
4. Open a customer referral program
Speaking of those long-term customers that you’re working hard to build relationships with: turns out they have networks, too. With a little creativity, you can turn your satisfied customers into lead generators.
We’re talking about a customer referral program, of course. Admittedly, this idea might take some convincing and buy-in from the sales manager at your dealership. But it can be a powerful tactic—one that even reinforces the previous tip.
There’s plenty of room for creativity here, but the basic approach looks like this: You offer your existing customers a small discount on a future purchase (or on vehicle service, perhaps) in exchange for new customer referrals that leads to a sale.
In exchange for a small hit to profit margin, you get multiple benefits:
- Access to leads, usually in a similar socioeconomic status to customers who’ve already purchased from you.
- Additional incentive for past customers to come back to you/your dealership the next time they’re in the market.
5. Implement a brick-and-mortar marketing strategy
We said up above that you don’t want to rely solely on foot traffic. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push for more foot traffic—you definitely still should.
A brick-and-mortar marketing strategy can increase foot traffic to your dealership using various marketing techniques, from geo-fenced retargeting campaigns to weather targeting to traditional out-of-home advertising.
Some of these tactics are really dealership marketing: they go beyond what individual salespeople can do on their own. But others are easier to execute day to day. “Old-fashioned” approaches like targeted mailings and flyers may feel less cutting-edge, but they’re still effective!
Learn how to improve your brick-and-mortar marketing with Bitly.
6. Always provide excellent customer service
Providing the best possible customer service is a key element of several of these tips: You can’t build a strong online presence (at least not the good kind) or nurture long-term, repeat customers without it.
Car sales have all sorts of inherent challenges around customer service. For example, the negotiating or haggling process can leave a bad taste in customers’ mouths. Or, in the used market, a mechanical issue could show up shortly after the sale such that even though you were operating in good faith, the customer suspects something shady or underhanded.
Providing good customer service wherever you can is all the more important given the challenges that are natural to the industry.
7. Collaborate with industry partners
You are not the only kind of professional that your customers interact with. For that matter, you’re not even the only one in the automotive field.
Earlier we talked about how you want your name to be first in your loyal customers’ minds when their friends ask for a recommendation. Well, you want the same thing with the right industry partners.
Network and collaborate with professionals adjacent to the car-buying process: insurance providers, auto repair shops, body shops—even key personnel at major employers in your area.
When their customers, employees, or coworkers need a recommendation on where to source their next vehicle, you want those professional contacts to funnel people your way.
Be prepared to return the favor, too: It’s a universal law of networking that giving referrals often leads to getting them.
Looking for the right mix of marketing tools to improve your individual or dealership-level marketing performance? These are eight of the best marketing tools and techniques we’ve found.
8. Provide new car buyers with incentives
No matter what you’re selling, it never hurts to sweeten the pot.
Incentives attract buyers who don’t have loyalty to a particular brand, dealership, or salesperson, which means they work on the people you’ve not yet fully convinced via other means.
New car dealerships have access to incentive programs from the automakers themselves, with well over 24,000 programs on offer every year for at least the past five. But to differentiate yourself from other dealers, you’ll need to explore options outside the manufacturer’s programs.
What these incentives look like depends on the types of vehicles you’re selling (new or used, luxury or budget) as well as what your dealership will approve. But any incentive is better than no incentive, because as strange as it might be for customers to make five-figure decisions over relatively small incentives, that’s exactly what they do.
Unleashing the power of Bitly: Revolutionizing lead generation for car salespeople
As an individual salesperson, reaching more people and selling more cars will require a powerful modern approach to lead generation. Bitly delivers across multiple fronts: Bitly helps you polish and curate your personal brand and grow your online presence using branded short links, QR Codes, and Bitly Link-in-bios.
Bitly even supercharges your brick-and-mortar marketing efforts, giving customers and prospects easy ways to access your digital spaces from advertisements of all kinds.
Ready to transform the way customers find you online? Bitly delivers powerful lead-generation tools that give car salespeople a competitive edge. See what Bitly can do for you: Get started for free today!