"The have time..."

By: Alan Ram

I speak at a lot of dealer 20 Group meetings and one of the questions I ask of the Dealers at every meeting is, “do your managers listen to every sales call on call monitoring?” A reasonable question, right? The overwhelming majority of the time, here’s what I get:

“I wish my managers listened to sales calls, we probably listen to 20% of them or some other lame answer along those lines.”

I’ve actually had General Managers tell me that they canceled their call monitoring because they couldn’t get their managers to listen to it. Are you kidding me? If you’ve ever said that, then you’re the problem! Let’s put that to the “say it out loud test”. The say it out loud test is a great thing to do when you’re thinking about doing something really stupid. Let’s say it out loud!

“I canceled the service that allowed me to listen to real customers that want to buy cars TODAY, talk to my salespeople because my managers didn’t think that listening to those calls and quickly resolving missed opportunities to do business was important enough…”

I think you get my point. There is no activity for your managers to be engaged in that is more productive or more relevant when it comes to selling cars today, than listening to sales calls and quickly resolving missed opportunities to do business. How easy is it for a manager to have call monitoring open on their desk throughout the day and listen to just the sales calls as they come in? Let’s face it, how many sales calls do you really get daily? 10, 20 maybe 30? How many managers do have on staff throughout the day? So, it’s not like they’re going to each have to listen to 100 calls. Don’t tell me they don’t have time either. They have time. I’ve seen them! As long as you’re phone numbers are tied to the right departments, it’s not a problem. Dial one for service and two for sales, can also help make sure that calls are going into the right call monitoring bucket if you will.

Here’s why it’s important to do it throughout the day versus letting them pile up until “we have a chance”. Call monitoring should not be thought of as primarily an accountability tool. More than that, it’s a save a deal tool! That customer that’s calling you at 10:00 AM is going to be out somewhere buying a car at 4:00 PM. If we listen to that call at 8:00 PM, it’s too late!

Here’s another benefit to your managers listening to calls; when sales people know that you know, in other words when they know they are being held accountable, the effort level naturally rises. It all goes hand-in-hand with training. If you don’t train them and then you just hold them accountable, all you’re going to hear is crap and missed opportunities. Train your people and then hold your managers and sales staff accountable. Simple stuff.

One more thing, outsourcing your call monitoring is a bad idea. Here’s why. That 19-year-old kid monitoring your calls three time zones away in his mom’s basement or, more frequently these days, an agent in a third world country, is not nearly as qualified to make a determination on when a call was maximized versus when it wasn’t as your managers. The fact of the matter is, that many people will set up an appointment simply to get off the phone, even though they have no intention of coming in. I can listen to a call myself and even though the customer may have set up an appointment, just to get off the phone, know that this lady isn’t really coming in. I can gauge whether it’s a real appointment or smoke and then make a determination on whether to call the customer and tighten things up.

So you make the decision on whether your highly compensated sales manager is more qualified to listen to and ensure opportunities are maximized, or some kid in Mumbai. Apparently, that’s a really a thing. Make SURE your managers listen to your sales calls every day, throughout the day. That has to be a priority if you did in fact come to work to sell cars today.