If you’ve been reading the QV blog, you would have noticed that we’ve been sharing some great tips for automotive brokers looking to generate more leads. We were even lucky enough to have Wessex Fleet Marketing Manager, Will Bullen, share with us his three top tips for lead generation.
By implementing a strategy, you should be well on your way to expanding your online reach and generating more leads.
But generating a lead is just the first step in turning a prospect into a customer. Great responsiveness, amazing customer service and a trusting relationship now have to be built to ensure you’re encouraging the lead to become a customer.
Here are 5 tips for turning that lead into a customer.
Automated Responses:
Once gathered, all lead data captured needs to flow to one central customer relationship management system (CRM) to ensure you don’t lose leads. 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first, so speed matters. Once a consumer submits an enquiry, you have the opportunity to retain and close that business by offering them the experience they expect.
By automating your response to the customer, you can ensure they have a reply to their enquiry straight away. This helps them to feel acknowledged, understood and have an awareness of the next steps.
With QV Systems’ Accelerate Platform, you can set up a series of workflows that will allow a quote to automatically be created from an enquiry. This, firstly, removes the risk of your salesperson being unable to produce the quote until the lead has lost interest, and eliminates the time-consuming task of manual quote creation.
By automatically sending your prospect a quote, your first interaction with them is one of speed and efficiency. This ensures they feel understood, valued and has answered the immediate, inevitable questions surrounding potential pricing and logistics.
Workflows:
When using a platform that has a workflow feature, you can further automate communication to stay in touch with your prospect throughout both their buying, and customer lifecycle. Setting up a task for your sales team when an enquiry comes in, for example, ensures your team knows to get in touch straight away, and provides management oversight as to how prospects are being treated.
If you’re using the Accelerate Platform, you can create workflows for every stage of your customers’ lifecycle. This includes communication like anniversary texts to your customers, or automated welcome emails when their vehicle is delivered. All this helps, not only turn the lead into a customer, but cements your relationship for renewals too.
People Focused Proposal:
When asked about their top frustrations with the vehicle leasing processes, the most common answer was filling out paperwork and contracts. By managing the process digitally, you can minimise time spent on forms and data entry.
In using a platform like Accelerate, centralised customer information also means you can cut down on repeated data entry with the ability to autofill contracts and applications with data already supplied by the customer or gathered by another team member. This removes any frustrating conversations with your prospect, having to ask them to repeat information or fill in yet another form.
The proposal process is also an important time to work closely with dealers to ensure you can secure the right vehicle. The level of interaction between Leasing Brokers and manufacturers has increased since the lockdown, moving from 39% staying frequently in contact to 54%. QV’s Vehicle Procurement Module allows you to communicate with the dealer on-system, for the most efficient communication.
Working digitally also enables you and your clients to see the same information in real time, streamlining communication and updating proposals and quotes instantly depending on their needs and market availability.
CRM:
Using a centralised CRM system you can create an automated experience for your customer lifecycle that also increases management efficiency. For example, with the Accelerate Platform you can automate:
- Email updates at each new stage of a deal
- A welcome email as soon as deal is done, delivering key information and documentation
- Regular customer check-ins, using both automated emails and reminders for human outreach at key stages of their lifecycle
- Periodic connections to update customer data and locate chances for potential upsell
- Re-engage with the customer at the end of their contract to renew
A centralised CRM also ensures the right people can always access the right data. If a prospect calls to enquire about a quote they recently received and the designated salesperson is away from their desk, it will cause a lot of frustration to have to wait until they’re back to answer that query. With a centralised CRM, any salesperson can pick up the call and provide great customer service!
Digital handshake:
Traditional leasing contracts were always closed in person, with a human-handshake to seal the deal. A modern sales process can emulate that trust with more flexibility, traceability and convenience for your customers by using e-signature technology to capture customer permissions for checks and closing the deal. Research shows that customers who can run the whole process digitally are more satisfied than those that need to come on-site, with digital experiences rated ten percentage-points higher. Not only does this make life easier for your customers, but it removes another obstacle between initial enquiry to finished deal to help you increase your rate of sales.
To turn a lead into a customer requires a mix of interpersonal skills and market-leading technologies. Accelerate is designed for broker, by experts, to help you adapt quickly, improve your sales process and create a seamless auto-leasing experience for your customers.
With this end-to-end solution you can:
- Easily engage, convert and manage business
- Automate manual task to help with and focus on customer experience
