Decision Maker 101: What’s Driving Your Conversions?

Sales process design. It’s all about the steps in your process, combined with the best practices in each step. Next thing, quality marketing creation. Branding, consistency, messaging, and budget. A complicated dance to be sure but what is really driving your conversions beyond structure? What else is there beyond a quality marketing plan, sales process and team? What are you missing?

This is one of those things that, when I talk about it, I often get that glossed-over look from the people I’m speaking to. That’s either because I’m full of shit, or they don’t get it. Either way, I’m ok with it.

I had this conversation with a co-worker the other day, and he really got it. He is in marketing, and relatively new to the car business, but what I was talking about really applied to almost any type of sales business. It is the way that sales, especially car sales, operates on multiple different levels and how that impacts all parts of your business plan. It’s a bit complicated and I can wander a little, but look at it this way. We can all agree that selling a car is way more complex than just parking a vehicle with a good price on the lot and then letting customers find you. It’s more than just product and price. Emotion is a core element of almost everything sold. We can start there.

Selling a car is way more complex than just parking a vehicle with a good price on the lot and then letting customers find you.

Outside of the sales process, the marketing, the product and other fixed items and costs associated with selling a car, there exist two elements that get introduced into the sales process at the very start. The salesperson and the customer.

The building, the marketing, the sales process, and in some cases even the management represent the structure of the business. The machine if you will. Once you’ve built that machine, customers and sales staff get fed into that machine and out pop deals. As predictably as possible. The question you have to ask is, what is pushing, or pulling, that transaction forward? The answer is obvious: it’s motivation.

Now, an entire industry has been built on self-motivation, mostly focused at sales and entrepreneurial types, but that’s not really what I’m getting at. I’m talking about you as a business understanding that the motivation of your staff, and the motivation of the prospect are key elements of your business. They need to be built on.

Let's start with the salesperson. You can design the best sales process on the planet to sell cars, but if a salesperson isn’t motivated to chase a dollar, you’re wasting your time. The person you’re looking for may “love dealing with people”, but it’s way more important that they are hungry because that’s what is going to push them forward every day, not that slick sales process. You can tell the hungry people when you hire them. They are busy. They ask questions. Seek help. Hate, I mean hate losing a deal. You could have the worst sales process on the planet, and a hungry salesperson will grind their way through it. You could have the best sales process in the world and a lazy-ass clock punching Einstein will never sell a car. That’s just the way it is.

The client’s desire to get a vehicle is far more important than whether they meet minimum income requirements or not.

Now the customer part. That’s the complicated part. But here goes. A motivated prospect will also push themselves through your sales process. The question is, how do you get a motivated prospect? Even more complicated, how do you motivate a prospect? The answer to that lies back in your marketing and sales process design. That’s the complicated part. Understanding that the prospect seeing or hearing your ad is having an emotional response. Understanding that the steps in your sales process should focus as much on the emotion of the client, as they do on moving them forward in the sale. The conversation I had with my co-worker centered around minimum income requirements for a credit lead. His statement was that if a prospect didn’t meet minimum income requirements, they were not a viable lead, and my response was, the client's need or desire to get a vehicle is far more important than simply whether they qualify or not.

Someone who really needs, or wants something, will do almost anything to get it. That’s the point. It applies to customers and sales staff alike. Yes, it seems obvious that a salesperson would need to be motivated in order to have success. What gets lost in the shuffle on occasion is how motivated a client is. What is motivational about the ad they are reacting to? What steps in your sales process relate to emotion and motivation? How can you improve on those? What are you saying to customers on the phone or in the showroom that motivates them to move ahead?

That’s the bottom line here, I don’t want to say it’s easy to design a successful sale process or create a brilliant marketing plan because it’s not. It’s friggin’ complicated. But don’t forget the one thing that pushed both the salesperson and the customer through the whole thing. It’s motivation. Hire and keep only motivated staff, and make sure you have built in emotional and motivational elements in your ads, your messaging, and your sales process. Good luck and good selling.