Is your sales team still texting from their individual phones? Learn how an SMS platform can solve the biggest communication challenges dealership sales teams face.
The rise of services like Carvana and expanded online car-buying options has a lot of people believing that dealerships are on the decline.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Dealerships are still an integral part of the auto sales industry, with more car buyers looking to return to in-person shopping. That said, it’s more important than ever for dealerships to step up the way their teams communicate with customers and drive sales in order to stand out in a crowded market.
If you run an auto dealership, you need smoother operations and communications so you can focus on your priority: helping your customers find the perfect vehicle and moving more inventory.
Texting can help you get there, but unfortunately, a lot of dealership salespeople still use their personal phones to connect with leads and customers.
That’s a problem for a number of reasons, and that’s where a great SMS marketing platform comes into play. Platforms like SimpleTexting offer dealerships a way to bring all their texting into a central hub for more transparency, efficiency, scalability, and cohesion.
Below, I’ll walk you through the issues that arise when sales teams use their personal phones for SMS marketing and how SimpleTexting’s tools can help.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
If your dealership doesn’t yet use an SMS marketing platform, it’s natural that your sales team members may still use their personal cell numbers to connect with leads. That said, this practice presents a multitude of problems.
It’s unsustainable to use personal phones for car sales, as each person on the team can only handle so many conversations from their own phone and can easily get overwhelmed.
Imagine trying to have thirty meaningful, intentional conversations within minutes from your personal device’s text inbox. There’s no ability to mark messages as unread, snooze conversations for later, or assign them to other team members. It just doesn’t work.
If each sales rep operates from their personal device, leadership has no way of knowing how each sales rep is interacting with customers.
Miscommunications may arise, or — in the worst-case scenario — your reps may be dealing dishonestly with customers without your knowledge.
Ultimately, when reps are communicating independently, leadership has very little say in the strategies and language they use to conduct business.
This could lead to an inconsistent tone of voice and brand image. Plus, leaders can’t be sure that their team members are following proven, effective communication strategies instead of going rogue in a way that hurts the business.
If a salesperson leaves the company, they may bring some of your customers with them.
When your sales reps have customers’ phone numbers and information on their own phones, they can easily keep up communications with those customers when they move on to another opportunity (potentially to a competing company) and cripple your overall sales.
By the same token, you can’t readily see how many deals your salespeople have closed and how much their commissions should be.
They may also be late with this information or miss crucial details, which can impact your ability to total commissions accurately.
If one team member goes out of town and another needs to follow up with their customer, the person filling in may not have all of the context needed to continue the conversation since most of their information is on the first team member’s phone.
This hurts personalization efforts and can seriously compromise your relationship with your customers and their trust in your dealership.
Using a personal cell phone to handle customer communications blurs the boundaries between work and personal time and can negatively impact work/life balance.
Over time, the stress and fatigue that come from this imbalance can hurt your team’s performance and lead to burnout.
It can be overwhelming to identify gaps in your dealership’s sales team communications. Fortunately, an SMS platform gives you an easy way to manage your sales team’s communications and avoid those pesky problems.
The best texting services offer unlimited contacts so you have room to add an ever-expanding customer base.
Not only that, but conversations with those contacts are housed in a central, organized hub which means you can sort and filter your conversations without getting lost or overwhelmed.
You also have the option to text your entire customer base, or specific sections of it, along with conducting one-on-one conversations.
With all those conversations in one piece of software, leaders with admin or manager status on the account can easily look into how the team is running their communications through the Team Performance tab.
You can view messages sent and received and conversations opened, closed, and initiated for each team member or the entire team for a customizable date range.
Last but not least, when all your team members are using one platform and you have insight into how they’re communicating with customers, you can ensure that your team is using proven, brand-approved strategies to make sales.
Everyone stays on track and on brand, which helps create a strong, consistent brand image in the eyes of your customers.
One of the best things about a solid SMS platform is that all your customer information is housed in the software, which means that if a team member leaves the company, you can simply take them off the account.
When it’s time to calculate commissions, you can see each and every time a sale was made and all the relevant details without needing to rely on individual team members to send their information in full and on time.
Got a team member out sick? No worries.
All the team members who have been given access to certain customer lists or phone numbers can see the conversations from those lists and numbers, along with all the customer details they need from either the Contacts tab or the sidebar within the inbox, so they never miss or forget an important piece of information.
Team members can also leave internal notes for others on their team in case someone has to take over the conversation.
Platforms like SimpleTexting still offer individual team members the flexibility to text anytime, anywhere from their phones (using the mobile app) or laptops, with the added benefit of allowing them to simply log out at the end of the day and resume the next morning.
Your sales team is the heart of your dealership. They’re responsible for bringing in customers and closing deals, which means they’re ultimately responsible for your revenue.
And if that’s true, it’s worth investing in a way to keep them efficient and accountable. SimpleTexting is a cost-effective tool to help keep your communications consistent and scalable.
Still evaluating all your options for the best SMS platform out there? We get it. Try ours free for 14 days (no credit card required) to see how easy it is to use. And if you don’t know where to start, Check out our on-demand webinar, 3 SMS Campaigns to Convert Prospects Into Customers, for ready-to-go campaigns that you can start using today.
Lily is a content marketing specialist at SimpleTexting. She specializes in making helpful, entertaining video content and writing blogs that help businesses take advantage of all that texting has to offer. When she’s not writing or making TikToks, you can find Lily at roller derby practice or in a yoga studio in the Seattle area.
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