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Throughout my time here at Randall-Reilly we’ve been lucky enough to be welcomed into to various dealerships and fleets to see how they run from day-to-day. One continual thing we run into is this struggle of trying to get sales teams to actually use the data that’s available. And that can influence how effective your sales team is.
Effective salesmen are an important part of any business. If you have a product or merchandise you’re looking to move, you need someone with knowledge to get out there and keep potential customers engaged and interested. A good sales team can make a huge difference for you and your dealership or business. Often times their knowledge of equipment and relationships with customers or potential customers is what ends up tipping the scales in your favor.
With the speed at which the marketing landscape continues to change it’s becoming more important than ever to make sure that your salesmen are taking advantage of every tool available to them. One of the most effective tools out there right now is data.
Using your data and/or supplementing with 3rd party data can open brand new possibilities to help you find and connect with prospects you never even knew were there. But to fully take advantage of what data has to offer you have to be able to show salesmen just how valuable it is and actually get them to embrace it. Unfortunately that can sometimes be where you run into an issue.
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Change can be Intimidating
If it’s not broke don’t fix it right? That’s the kind of attitude a lot of salesmen tend to have. And if you think about it, it’s not that hard to see where they’re coming from. The best salespeople have generally been in the game for quite some time. They’ve built up their knowledge and a rapport with a customer base. So, when you come in and start talking about changing up the way they do things it can be frustrating or even intimidating for them. How can you possibly get them to embrace something that many of them don’t think can help and want nothing to do with?
Listen, we’re not talking about reinventing the wheel here. The rub is that most salesmen, especially those that have been around for a while, tend to think they have it all figured out. They may even think it’s insulting for you to force data on them. The real key is to show them just how much it can help them build on and expand what they know and do.
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Opening Their Eyes to Data
Many of the dealerships we’ve visited have a number of their sales staff in and out of the office and they spend a lot of their time on the road working leads and maintaining relationships with current clients. This is a great place to start when highlighting just what data can do for them. Some prospects are more responsive than others and some meetings wrap up sooner than you had anticipated, which leads to a lot of down time in between scheduled stops on the road.
Instead of just twiddling their thumbs or heading out of a territory prematurely, an efficient sales rep can use a database tailored for them such as EDA’s mobile app. It gives you the option to search for prospects within a geographical radius you choose. Meaning based off location it’s possible to find a prospect that would be attractive to your business. Now your sales team can maximize every moment they spend out on the road.
Location is just one of any number of variables that can be used to find and target the type of customer you (and your sales team) are after. In addition to geographical location, business size, fleet size, credit risk, even purchasing cycles and brand affinities can all be used as factors in narrowing down who you’d like target.
When you put it in terms like that most salesman’s eyes begin to light up when they think of all the possibilities. It becomes less about changing what they do and how they do it, to helping them build on what they already do.
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Embracing Data Leads to Success
Every sale matters. You need to do everything you can to open up more opportunities for your sales team to meet, interact with, and establish relationships with prospective customers. Data does just that.
You know what kind of customers you’re after and what’s valuable to you in a prospective buyer. Harness that information by using a database like EDA to find more prospects that meet your criteria. Set your team up for success and give them the tools they need to not only maintain but grow your business. There’s only one catch. Before you can you reap the benefits of data you have to be able to get your team to actually see the benefit and use it.
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