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You’re not perfect — you make mistakes, just like the rest of us. Unless, of course, you’re a divine being. In which case, what are you doing reading this? Don’t you have a planet to save?
The rest of us mere mortals make blunders from time to time. If you’re a salesperson, you know this for a fact. Sales is a numbers game and it’s impossible to close 100% of your deals — you’d have a better chance of parting the seas.
For automotive dealerships and service centers, lost sales are inevitable. That doesn’t mean you should just write them off as the cost of doing business, however. In addition to costing your organization bottom-line revenue, missed opportunities can drain budget from your marketing team that’s paying top-dollar for quality leads.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to recoup lost sales revenue is by reducing and following up on missed phone calls. Keep reading to learn why phone calls are a critical part of the automotive buyer journey, how much your missed calls could be costing you, and the steps you can take to recoup revenue from your missed phone calls.
Buying a new car is a highly considered decision. For many consumers, it’s the second-most expensive purchase they’ll ever make, aside from their home. And, once they have their shiny new ride, they don’t trust just anyone to tune it up — they do a lot of research to find a reputable service center who can give their baby all the TLC it needs.
When people make a considered purchase like buying or servicing a car, phone calls play a critical role in the buyer journey. Consumers want the reassurance of speaking to a real person who can answer their detailed questions. That’s why 67% of people call during the automotive buying journey.
It sounds obvious, but the first and most important step to capturing revenue from your inbound calls is to answer them. But this can be easier said than done, since large dealer and service centers receive thousands of sales calls per day. Before you scoff and say, “I know MY dealership answers all of its sales calls,” you may want to think twice — our research found that the average automotive business misses 23% of inbound phone calls.
When you miss sales calls, your team doesn’t even get an attempt to convert them. This not only wastes all the campaign dollars your marketing team spent driving those phone leads, but it also lowers your bottom-line revenue.
Below, I’ll share how much your missed calls could be costing your marketing team and how they could be impacting your company’s revenue.
Do you know how much your missed calls could be costing your dealership network’s marketing team? According to the latest industry statistics and Invoca platform data, that figure could be upwards of $53,300 per month! And that’s just the wasted spend on paid search.
Just how much are your missed calls impacting your dealership network’s bottom-line revenue? Industry statistics and Invoca platform data show that your missed calls could be costing millions in revenue each month!
To reduce missed calls, leading automotive businesses use Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery feature. This tool gives automotive teams complete transparency into how many calls their locations are missing. You can then use this data to diagnose issues and determine the best next steps to increase call answer rates.
With Invoca’s real-time reports, teams can make the right changes to decrease missed calls. Some common pivots include:
Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery feature also prioritizes your missed sales calls using intent data. For example, it can flag high-intent callers who called from an online shopping cart or an ad for a limited-time 0% APR financing promotion. It can also sort callers based on the IVR keypresses they entered (for instance, press “1” to speak to sales or “2” for service.) This helps you determine who you need to follow up with first, and if the follow-up should be done by a sales or service agent.
We have a customer that’s a large automotive repair and tire retailer with over 1,200 locations across North America. They get over 670,000 calls per month with a healthy 40% sales opportunity conversion rate, so they’re doing a huge amount of volume and there’s a lot of potential in every one of the calls they get.
Like most businesses, they were unaware of the volume of calls that were going unanswered across all their locations. Using Invoca, they found that they were missing over 8,000 calls per month. With an average $220 ticket value per call, that was a huge leak in the funnel. Actually, it was a $16 million a year leak in the funnel.
They were then able to use Invoca’s missed call reporting to fix the issue. They created the right sales incentives, improved training, and updated their phone system to reduce unanswered calls. As a result, they added $1.3 million in monthly revenue, added 6,000 calls per month, and reduced missed calls by 75%.
Want to learn more about how Invoca conversation intelligence can help your automotive organization drive more revenue? Check out these resources:
