In this highly competitive automotive market, training salespeople has become a necessity. Today’s auto sales industry is far more dynamic, demanding a skilled, knowledgeable professional who prioritizes building trust and understanding customer needs. In this blog, we will learn about the benefits of auto sales training and the tools that can transform your team into a high-performing, customer-centric force.
What is Auto Sales Training?
Auto sales training is an investment in your car dealership sales team. It is designed to improve the dealer’s ability to convert leads into satisfied customers and generate maximum revenue for the company. Salespeople should have the necessary skills and knowledge to sell most vehicles at dealerships. This training covers various topics, from understanding customer needs and building rapport to effectively presenting features and negotiating deals in the car sales pitch. An efficient and effective training program can help salespeople navigate their sales process and close deals efficiently.
How do you Train Car Salespeople?
Purchasing a car can be emotional for a buyer. They prefer salespeople offering a fair deal and the best customer service experience. However, rude or insensitive behavior can ruin a car deal. Salespeople should be taught detailed information about the vehicles they sell at the dealership. Additionally, follow-ups and feedback will help them improve their sales pitch.
Why is Sales Training Important for Dealerships Success?
Car buyer preferences and automotive marketing trends are changing significantly. Dealerships need to stay ahead in this competitive market, so a skilled sales team needs to stay updated on the ever-evolving auto trends. Therefore, conducting sales training for dealership salespeople is necessary. Dealerships must include strategic thinking skills, practices, and prompts in their training. This will allow salespeople to make the right decisions in their sales pitches. Additionally, routine car sales training will enable salespeople to to stay updated with the industry trends, drive more tremendous success, and maintain a competitive edge for their dealership.
Selling cars was challenging before the pandemic, and salespeople had to put more effort into it. However, there wasn’t any shortage of vehicles. There wasn’t a huge demand post-pandemic, but the vehicle inventory was filling up. Therefore, salespeople need training to tackle new sales bottlenecks. Additionally, practical new and used car sales training will help dealerships achieve desired goals and engage a broad audience.
Top 5 Benefits of Automotive Sales Training
Most dealerships prefer to refrain from investing in sales training. This could be due to a need for an understanding of how exercise can boost dealership sales. Additionally, sales training improves conversion rates, customer loyalty, positive ROI, and higher employee retention rates. Explore the top benefits of sales training to identify its potential to increase your dealership’s visibility.
1) Improves conversion rate: Auto sales training topics allow salespeople to generate more conversions and modify their sales pitch approach. Dealerships that conducted sales training saw a 17% increase in the conversion rate.
2) Increase ROI: Car dealership sales training is a cost-effective strategy for increasing sales. Dealerships that conduct sales training can increase revenue by 10-50%.
3) Employee retention: Research shows that more than 70% of employees decide to stay longer in the company. Auto sales training allows employees to polish their skills.
4) Improves customer loyalty: Trained salespeople are more likely to provide exceptional customer service by helping customers find the best car for the best deal. Therefore, they let customers leave a positive impression and win customer loyalty.
5) Better knowledge of products and services: Best automotive sales training allows salespeople to understand better the vehicles and services dealerships offer.
Types of Car Sales Training Programs
There are plenty of ways to train your car salespeople. However, it is essential to understand the best fit for your dealership. The programs you choose should fit your dealership and sales team. You can hire a trainee to educate the sales staff or present a creative video to keep your staff engaged. We have mentioned the different car sales training programs that should be implemented in sales training.
1) Compliance Awareness: Salespeople should be taught about the Can-Spam Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the TCPA, and other areas in which compliance is essential.
2) Telephone Training: Teach sales staff how to answer various incoming calls, create scripts for outgoing calls, and use cold calling techniques.
3) Email Training: Educate them on using customized CRM templates to share professional emails without grammatical mistakes.
4) CRM Training: Using CRM software to provide personalized interactions and improve customer experience.
5) Closing the Deal: Techniques and language to integrate into the sales pitch to seal the deal.
6) About the Dealership: Educate sales staff about the dealership’s history, how things work, who the current employees are, and the hierarchy.
7) Management Training: Run a car dealership training program to inform salespeople how to be sales managers in the future.
8) Study the needs and wants of different client demographics: Inform salespeople about the various demographics of buyers and how they go through their car-buying journey.
9) Bringing is business: Salespeople should be trained to market themselves and the dealership to bring more leads for the dealership.
10) Overcoming objections: Teach sales staff about common barriers and how they can overcome the obstacles to make a sale.
11) Product Knowledge: Provide them with detailed information about the vehicle’s makes and models and educate them about the recent and future automotive industry trends.
12) Negotiation: Train them to negotiate with customers to earn maximum dealership revenue.
Build a Winning Sales Team: New Hires vs. Continuing Education
To stay ahead in this competitive auto market, having a well-trained sales team is vital to dealership success. Dealerships can organize training sessions to educate and polish the sales team. However, there are always new hires and existing sales teams. Training them together won’t be an intelligent decision. Learn how to train different salespeople and what considerations should be included in the sessions.
New Hires
Organize sales training for every new hire sales representative to help them understand everything about the dealership. Regardless of experience, every new salesperson should undergo this sales training to ensure they have the same fundamental knowledge and approach. It will help them to understand the dealership’s regulations and customer approaches.
Continuing Education
Organize training sessions to keep your existing sales team updated on changes in automotive industry market trends. This will help them adapt to new skills and polish their existing ones. It will also allow them to modify their pitches and increase dealership conversions. Trainers can also add new companies to their sessions to help the salespeople take precautions.
Top 15 Tips to Train Car Salesman to Boost Dealership’s Revenue
Providing informative and valuable training to the salespeople will help them to engage a wider audience and bring revenue to the dealership. We have mentioned the best 15 tips one can consider when training salespeople.
1) Detailed Information About the Product
Before making any big purchase, like a car, customers look to get detailed information about the vehicle’s specifications and features. Salespeople should learn detailed information about cars and the additional products and services they sell at the dealership.
2) Be Friendly and Positive
Ensure you train the sales pitchers to treat every customer correctly. Dealers must resolve their customers’ queries positively and professionally. Therefore, providing an exceptional user-friendly experience will make customers revisit your dealership for future purchases.
3) Observe the Operation
Auto sales training should include the dealership’s operations. Salespeople should be aware of inventory stocks to update clients on vehicle availability. You can teach them tools like inventory management to track inventory.
4) Teach CRM
Salespeople should be trained to use automotive CRM software. This software can help them schedule appointments, communicate with car buyers, track sales calls, and do client research. Using CRM efficiently will allow salespeople to focus on selling cars and bringing maximum leads.
5) Train to be Professional
Being professional and knowledgeable will help you improve your brand reputation and increase customer relationships. Professionalism attracts a wider audience and allows you to build trust in your dealership.
6) Good Listener
Buyers have many questions during the car purchasing process, such as the car they want to purchase, their specific needs, and whether they are looking for finance or their budget. Sales professionals should be taught to listen to customers’ queries to give them a personalized experience.
7) Match Sales Pitch with Customer’s Style
To convert all the leads into potential customers, salespeople should match the customer’s purchasing style. It includes the speed of the purchasing process, speaking style, or mannerisms.
8) Be Patient, Not pushy
Buying a car is a significant decision for shoppers. Salespeople should be demanding or pushy to wrap the deals faster. Customer-centric approaches encourage buyers to purchase, revisit, and refer to their friends and family.
9) Dress for Success
Salespeople should know that first impressions can break or make a deal. They should follow the dealership’s dress code guidelines or wear professional business suits. This will leave a professional impact on the customers who walk into the dealership.
10) Get the Details Right
Make sure that salespeople get the details right. They should understand the customer’s request and showcase the vehicles as their choice. Remembering customers’ names and budgets and complimenting their choices can help to build long-term relations.
11) Be Honest
Dealers should never make false promises or lie to customers. Doing so will affect the dealership’s reputation and result in losing customers for life. Salespeople should not commit impossible things, like vehicle availability, car mileage, or hiding the defects in pre-owned vehicles.
12) Follow Up & Say Thank You
Salespeople should take a follow-up and say thank you after the purchase is complete. It will allow them to ask about the customer’s experience and bring their feedback. They can customize their sales pitch after analyzing it based on feedback. A positive review will allow customers to revisit and promote your dealership to their friends and family.
13) Do not Defame Competitors
Buyers often commit to getting a better deal at any other dealership. Avoid speaking trash about competitors. It is always better to convince customers that your dealership is the best. You can counter with your dealership’s extended warranties or excellent post-purchase services.
14) Online Marketing Initiatives
Salespeople should be taught how to promote the dealerships and themselves to get broader potential leads. To engage more customers, one can create a micro website and provide informative content via blogs or auto sales training videos.
15) Pitch at the Correct Time
Customers prefer to take their time before purchasing. Salespeople should know when to pitch a sale and observe when the car buyer is ready.
Top 10 Auto Sales Training Tools
Due to the increasing growth of automobile sales training tools, car sales training can be simple and inexpensive. We have mentioned some top automotive sales training companies and their tools you can integrate into your sales training.
1) SC Training (formerly EdApp)
SC training offers learning management systems, authoring tools, a template library, car dealer course creation services, analytics, and reporting. SC training (formerly EdApp) LMS includes innovative capabilities to help your automotive sales training. These training platforms have over 80 intuitively built micro-learning templates and a drag-and-drop authoring tool feature. To create a ready-made training course, you can add training content to the pre-built templates and explore quizzes to make the content engaging.
Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
2) Sales Hacker
Sales Hacker offers auto sales training online articles, podcasts, conferences, and discussions. It has created an online forum where salespeople can start a discussion topic, ask questions, share their experiences, and learn from their peers’ experiences. The forum also explains sales functions, introductions, techniques, and strategies.
Cost: Free
3) Customer Centric Selling
Customer-centric selling offers virtual seminars and online car dealership courses to help salespeople with suggestions and tactics for closing deals. It also provides a 3-day instruction-led virtual program for salespeople to learn new strategies and skills. For a registration fee of $95, users can attend live and recorded classes, skill development sessions, and online sales courses from any device.
Cost: Request for a quote
4) MTD Sales Training
MTD sales training offers e-learning solutions, online selling skills training, and virtual sales training seminars. MTD hosts online auto sales training programs that are typically modular and accessible from any device.
Cost: Request for a quote
5) Chorus
Chorus offers sales meeting analysis, analytics, and reporting. It functions as a conversational intelligence platform where users can talk and learn. Chorus analyzes the sales team’s performance and delivers the best methods and techniques salespeople can adopt. It allows salespeople to fine-tune their content in its sales coaching programs to raise team win sales and rates.
Cost: Request for a quote
6) Action Selling
Action Selling offers online car sales training courses and interactive quizzes. Salespeople are trained through eLearning modules, books, video demonstrations, and certificate examinations. Action Selling focuses on sales tactics, strategies, product knowledge, and a competitive attitude.
Cost: Request for a quote
7) ELearning Brothers
ELearning Brothers offers content creation tools, virtual reality training, and pre-built sales courses. Dealerships can design interactive sales coaching courses, integrate immersive live scenarios, and offer BR training to help salespeople enhance their sales and verbal skills. Additionally, this learning software offers numerous pre-built automotive sales courses ready for rapid course delivery. Additionally, these courses cover broad selling subjects such as negotiation abilities, sales presentations, closing sales, customer service, etc.
Cost: Request for a quote
8) Allego
Allego offers course creation, gamified quizzes, and mobile-friendly video material. It allows you to build, scale, and deliver training programs. Therefore, you can also reinforce best practices to promote sales success and increase sales team selling potential. Additionally, all the resources are accessible from any mobile device.
Cost: Request for a quote
9) Axonify
Axonify offers content creation, a content marketplace, and individualized learning journeys. It allows you to build training content, have instructional designers construct a custom course or import from its extensive content marketplace. Additionally, Axonify delivers actionable data to your staff and keeps them up to speed on their scores, milestones, compliance progress, and course completion rates.
Cost: Request for a quote
10) CenarioVR
CenarioVR offers authoring software for virtual reality and programs for risk free auto sales training. Therefore, their authoring tool allows you to launch VR training for better understanding by employees. CenarioVR also offers item timers, quizzes, and linked scenes to engage salespeople who are learning.
Cost: Starts at 46 USD per month
Conclusion
Automotive dealerships should invest in high-quality auto sales training. This will allow their salespeople to equip themselves with the essential skills and knowledge. Whether dealerships are looking to train new hires or provide continuing education for old employees, training programs can help them build a successful and fulfilling sales journey. Providing ongoing sales training can empower salespeople to become industry leaders and take their dealership’s success to new heights.
