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March 15, 2019
Art or Science? Part II: Sell More Cars with a Holistic Market View
A few months ago, we took a look at the art of selling cars versus the science of selling cars.
Sell More Cars With Data-Driven Marketing
There’s both an art and a science to leveraging data-driven marketing efforts to increase dealership sales. While Mastermind’s Market EyeQ sales platform provides the science with cutting-edge artificial intelligence analytics fueled by proprietary datasets, we also work with dealers to help them refresh their “art of the sale” and leverage new capabilities to create the most effective sales process ever.
In addition to unparalleled data analytics that work to evaluate every person in your marketplace on their potential as a customer, Market EyeQ also integrates time-tested sales and marketing best practices from real-world dealership experience to help you nurture a relationship and close a sale. This also is why Mastermind’s customer service team is structured to operate as a partner more than a vendor, putting experienced dealer industry professionals side-by-side with your team to help you develop a “battle plan” that delivers the best possible results for your business.
Mastermind’s Holistic Approach to Selling More Cars
Mastermind’s roots in the auto dealer industry show through in this combination of art and science. One of the factors that drove our founders to launch Mastermind was frustration with the artificial conflict between the art of traditional dealer best practices and the science of modern digital tools. The combination offers such amazing potential to bring dealers into the future while retaining the most important best practices of the past.
For instance, we may all spend more time than ever before on our smartphones and email and web browsers and Facebook, but that doesn’t change people’s need for human interactions. It’s simply challenging to build trust through those kinds of channels. Dealers will find it difficult to build loyalty-based relationships unless the consumer feels like there is a human interaction taking place with them.
That’s especially critical in an online-first landscape where price-shopping is increasingly automated. But the first step to creating loyal customers is to identify potential customers, which is where the science comes in.
Elevated Car Sales Prospecting with the Market EyeQ Sales Platform
Simply put, the information you need to identify your best prospects is out there. Your challenge is to access it, separate it from the noise and have a plan for how to leverage it into sales. That’s where Market EyeQ’s marketing automation comes into play.
Dealers don’t need to be told how critical it is to know their customers. That goes back more than a century to the very first dealers who invented the auto industry’s sales model. The Market EyeQ sales platform doesn’t change the fundamental art and best practices of this relationship-building process for dealers, but it adds an additional component of science by bringing in more facts and figures about the customer, more insights from the data surrounding them and more analytics-driven predictions and suggestions to help dealers move prospects down the sales funnel and sell more cars.
Our Data-Driven Dealership Marketing Targets Prospects at the Right Time
This includes delivering marketing communications at the right time with specific messaging most likely to motivate action and drive consumers to the store. It also builds on dealer best practices for the known challenges of the automotive sales cycle, generating and presenting messaging for traditional customer questions such as, “Which car is best?”, “Is it right for me?”, “Can I afford it?”, “Where should I buy it?” and “Am I getting a deal?”, all tied to the right time in the buyer’s individual journey through the sales cycle. It concludes with arming salespeople with data-driven dealsheets that calculate deals in real time – giving them all the information they need to close deals right on the spot.
This lets dealers communicate with potential customers in a highly-personalized, timely and actionable manner that shows a real understanding and appreciation of the customer as a unique individual. While it may seem ironic to some that it’s artificial intelligence and giant databases driving a deeper human relationship between dealers and their customers, the reality is that the science here supports and enhances the art of being an effective salesperson. It doesn’t replace it, and never could.
Dealership CX Drives Customer Loyalty
That relationship building doesn’t end at the sale. Great customer experience interactions can build relationships for life – but they don’t just happen. You need a plan for them, and it must continue to be based on the combination of the art of dealership best practices and the science of data analytics that give your entire organization the information they need to deliver great experiences for all of your customers that keep them coming back. This includes breaking down the barriers between sales, service and relationship marketing to leverage each in service of a total customer experience, resulting in a full understanding that turns prospects into the loyal and profitable backbone of a strong and sustainable dealership.
When it comes to auto sales, neither the art nor the science of turning prospects into sales can stand on their own. Schedule a VIP demo to find out how the two can be combined in your dealership to deliver more sales and better relationships than ever before through our Market EyeQ sales platform.