Justin Priddy came to Gaudin Ford to revamp an idle Internet department. Little did he know he’d end up revamping their entire sales process and creating new campaigns that would generate half a million dollars in annual revenue. When asked about the state of their CRM when he started in late 2010 he said, “They didn’t use DealerSocket much before I got here. When I arrived I started from scratch; deleted all campaigns, all business rules, and rebuilt everything the way I wanted. I taught our staff the new processes and defined our expectations.”
After rebuilding their entire sales process one area that stood out to Justin was the opportunity they routinely missed by moving customers to a “lost” status and ceasing follow-up. The mentality was one of only following up with customers still looking to buy a car and disregarding those who told them “no.” Justin describes the thought process behind creating the lost sale campaigns, “We thought about how we wanted to follow–up with a customer from a dealership standpoint without overwhelming them, yet keeping our name in front of them. I also sent test leads to other dealerships to see how I was responded to once I told them I couldn’t buy.”
The implementation took time and was not easy. As he can contest to, success from a new process takes patience and commitment. When asked whether the dealership saw any direct “big wins” because of the new process he replied, “Immediately, probably not. Initially there was a lot of pushback at the dealership level. We stuck with it and sales staff started to believe in it based on the results we saw. What results did they see? In 2012, their seven lost campaigns generated an average of $75,000 dollars and total revenue equaled $527,171. The following year saw an average of $65,000 and total revenue of $454,219.
“I like to think we have had success. The purpose is to get a response and re–engage the customer in a conversation. We have been able to accomplish that with both negative and positive responses. At the moment we also have the top CSI for Sales, Service, and Parts in our region.”