The best car salespeople are always moving. They walk the lot checking foot traffic, drop by the service department to say hello to a former customer, or accompany customers on a test drive.
To mobilize sales teams, a lot of dealerships let employees use their personal cell phones and numbers for work. While this makes car salespeople more mobile, the practice also decreases professionalism and leadership. Today, there’s a better solution for your dealership.
The best way to empower your auto sales team with professional and well-managed mobility is to invest in a cloud-based phone system.
Why it’s good for car salespeople
#1. Mobile App
Let’s be honest, it’s uncomfortable for a car salesperson to hand over their personal number to a stranger. In this age of identity theft, data breaches, and phone scams, handing out any private data would give anyone pause.
That’s why your auto sales team will appreciate a cloud-based phone system, specifically ones that offer a Hosted VoIP mobile app. With a Hosted VoIP mobile app, your car salespeople can answer and make calls (on their cell phone) from their business number. So when they hand out business cards, they can simply say, “Call my business number—anytime or from anywhere—and I’ll answer your questions.”
Your salespeople can also offer customers to “text my business number—anytime or from anywhere.” Thank the heavens for the capability to send texts from professional numbers! What’s the most popular form of communication in 2018? It’s still texting.
To heap on more professional credibility, your car salespeople can assure their customers—granted, using the right Hosted VoIP provider—of secure calling and texting. The words” encrypted” just make all of us feel warm, safe, and fuzzy inside.
Not only does a Hosted VoIP mobile app provide more customer-facing professionalism, but it also benefits the work/life balance of your employees. If your employees don’t want to answer work calls when they’re at home with the family, they can make that happen. Many Hosted VoIP mobile apps offer geofencing, in which each employee can create location-based rules that automatically turn on/off Do Not Disturb and other call rules.
#2. Hot Desking
Your salespeople need a mobile app to stay connected and move about the dealership, but they also need mobility with traditional desk phones. That’s because dealers often maximize office space for their salespeople by having employees share desks. It makes sense because sales teams already stratify shifts and they only rarely need a desk for when they’re actually “desking” a deal.
So as sales people play musical chairs, it makes traditional, personalized office phones difficult. For example, let’s say a customer calls your business number, but all the desks are occupied so you fill out paperwork at another desk. Either you miss the call, or the phone is answered by another salesperson. Both make for unprofessional customer experiences.
With a cloud-based phone system, you can enjoy mobility and a traditional desk phone. Hosted VoIP offers dozens of state-of-the-art features, like hot desking. With a hot desking feature, your sales people can commandeer any desk at the dealership. All they need to do is punch in their code into a hot-desking enabled phone, and it populates their directory, speed dials, etc. It’s smooth and professional office/desk mobility for your auto sales team.
Why it’s good for car sales managers
#1. Analytics
As a sales manager, do you ask employees to check-in with clients a few months after buying a car, and wonder if they really do it? This is especially difficult because personal cell phone use makes it impossible for managers to evaluate their salespeoples’ phone usage and performance. Well with a Hosted VoIP provider, an employee’s business number analytics are easy for you to look at no matter what phone they used As the phone continues to be an important tool of communication at dealerships, use phone metrics to make better business decisions.
#2. Protect customer info
If a salesperson stores customer contact information in their personal cell phone, this can be a liability when or if the employee leaves your dealership for another job. Hosted VoIP provides an additional layer of protection to your contact information. You can direct the system to route calls to the outgoing salesperson’s number to another phone entirely. This makes you less vulnerable and more in control of your leads and customer information.
Many salespeople like to access leads and customer information through your dealership’s customer relationship management (CRM) software. (If there’s one thing salespeople are good at, it’s placing dibbs on a lead by entering it into your dealership’s CRM.) So as a manager, it’s best to find a Hosted VoIP provider with an existing integration with your CRM, or a provider that’s at least willing to build an integration with your dealership’s CRM. An integration makes Hosted VoIP that much easier for your employees to adopt and utilize into their daily work routine.
Best Phone System for Dealerships
By updating your outdated on-premises phone system to the Cloud, you empower your car salespeople to become professionally mobile, and enable sales managers to better evaluate and coordinate their employees. (Not to mention saving your dealership money!)
Just make sure your sales people know how to use their phones. After all, how you handle customers’ questions and concerns over the phone will determine whether you’ll ever meet them in person on the lot. If you need some help with this, check out The 15 Essential Phone Tips for Car Salespeople.
