Move cars off the lot faster than you can drive them
In auto sales, scheduling your time can lead to increased productivity and more satisfied customers
When you work in sales, time management and sales scheduling is everything. You may be a whiz at closing deals, but if you’re missing scheduled appointments, forgetting to follow up with leads, and showing up late to sales meetings, it’s only a matter of time until your productivity and commissions start to suffer.
It’s easy to get sucked into an hour-long phone call with your favorite customer or spend too long trying to craft the perfect prospecting email, but it’s up to you to take control of every single minute you spend at work. If you fully commit to getting organized, scheduling can become your most important sales tool.
The secret to sales scheduling success (say that five times fast!)
Put away your giant, coffee-stained desk calendar. Stop using 100 Post-It notes every day. And please refrain from writing important reminders on your hand like you did in high school. You should already have a tool at your dealership that can help you master sales scheduling: your CRM.
A dealership CRM like AutoRaptor isn’t just a handy place to send email blasts from—it can be your calendar, personal assistant, and reminder service all-in-one. Here are some simple ways you can use your CRM to improve your sales scheduling:
1. Take control of appointments
Add any appointments, like test drives, in a customer’s up sheet, and they’ll also appear with all of your other scheduled appointments. If your dealership is like most, there tends to be a lot of overbooking, which can make everything take longer than it should. Seeing all your appointments in one place can give you some perspective on how much time you have to get things done—and whether it may be smarter to reschedule some of those back-to-back test drives before you get in the weeds.
2. Stay on top of tasks
You know all those random things you promise people? “Sure, I’ll check on the status of your vehicle’s title!” “I will give you a call back at 3 pm to let you know if the white CR-V comes in!” They’re all very easy to say, and even easier to forget. Once you commit to something, just add it to the CRM, and it will remind you when it’s time.
3. Get reminders
You have plenty of important dates to remember on a regular basis, and it’s not reasonable to think that you can remember them all without a little help. Get reminders about customer birthdays and other big dates through the CRM.
4. Add info on the go
Isn’t it amazing how long it can take to add drivers’ licenses and VINs to customer up sheets? With your CRM’s mobile app, you can use your smartphone to scan drivers’ licenses, VIN barcodes or collect trade info without having to type anything. By streamlining simple things you do every day, you make more time for other tasks and take control of your sales scheduling.
Once you’ve gotten used to adding tasks, reminders, and appointments into your CRM, you’re going to start reaping the benefits of scheduling your days. For example, AutoRaptor has daily work plans that appear on your CRM dashboard. So, when you get to work every day, you can get a visual of all your scheduled appointments, tasks that are due, new leads, follow-up reminders, and important dates. And, at the bottom, you’ll always have a snapshot of your personal sales statistics to let you quickly track your performance and remind you to stay on task.
Sales scheduling doesn’t have to be hard or complicated—once you have the right technology to support your efforts and you’re committed to managing your time, great things can happen.
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