Leveraging voice communications in your dealership

By Irv Shapiro

A prospect visits your company website and is greeted by a battery of content: images, videos, product specs, customer recommendations — everything needed to make an informed buying decision. Clearly impressed, the prospect likely takes the next step in the sales cycle and downloads or submits a request for more information.

And then the prospect waits…and waits…and waits for a response.

Sound familiar? This scenario is far too common for many outdoor power equipment dealerships. Prospects are often subjected to a delay in response time at the moment when they are most inclined to learn more about a dealership’s products and services.

According to a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study, sales leads are 22 times more likely to be converted when they are contacted within five minutes of submitting an inquiry. Businesses that fail to respond in this critical five-minute window, often lose the sale because the lead or prospect loses interest and moves on to a competitor.

To compete in today’s multichannel marketplace, your dealership needs a proven and cost-effective way to quickly respond to sales inquiries and other conversion actions. Without it, your business runs the risk of losing market share to competitors who are more capable of responding to prospect requests, during the time period when prospects are most eager to speak with a sales associate.

Shortening response times with voice communications

The value of establishing voice contact with prospects isn’t lost on marketers and sales professionals. An Ifbyphone survey of 350 marketers found that 90 percent of respondents speak with prospects as part of the sales cycle. However, nearly two-thirds don’t respond to inquiries within an hour, and a quarter fail to respond within a day, placing them far outside the all-important five-minute response time frame.

E-mail alerts and other digital tools can be helpful, but they offer limited effectiveness in reducing response times since they usually require the salesperson to be online — an unrealistic expectation for sales reps who spend much of their day in the field or on the showroom floor. So for dealers, the best way to shorten response times is through the implementation of voice-based marketing automation technology.

Voice-based marketing automation is designed to create near-instant voice communication between the prospect and a sales rep capable of addressing their questions or concerns. When a prospect performs a specific online action (e.g. submits a form request for more information), a call is instantly directed to the designated sales associate, before the prospect has navigated away from the dealer website.

Next, real-time “whisper” technology reads the information the prospect submitted online to the sales associate, giving the associate the opportunity to immediately understand what the prospect is looking for within minutes of the initial request.

The advantage of voice-based marketing automation is that it equips dealerships with a practical tool for connecting with Web-based prospects through their preferred communication medium. Research shows that two-thirds of businesses view calls as their most important source of leads (BIA/Kelsey), and 43 percent of search-based conversions occur over the phone (AdInsight).

Another benefit of voice-based marketing automation technology is that it’s extremely flexible and adaptable to each dealership’s unique needs and preferences. With the ability to support multiple sales associates, customized configurations and dynamic real-time reporting, the best voice-based marketing automation tools improve conversion rates without disrupting the dealership’s regular sales routines.

How voice communication benefits equipment dealers

The ability to establish seamless and instant connections with prospects is important, but it’s just one of the benefits that voice communication technology offers equipment dealers.

Recent Ifbyphone research revealed that 95 percent of users have experienced an increased ability to measure sales lead quality. Additionally, 63 percent of users report that voice-based marketing automation technology has improved their ability to measure effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) through the following:

Lead Scoring: Successful equipment dealers recognize the importance of matching prospects with the right person at the right time in the sales cycle. Using insights gleaned from search words, automated questions and other strategies, voice-based marketing automation solutions route incoming leads to an available sales associate, increasing the likelihood of an informed response and a closed sale.

Call Tracking: Implementing voice-based marketing automation solutions enables dealerships to better understand the effectiveness of their ads and marketing campaigns. By leveraging unique, local phone numbers for both online and offline ads, dealerships gain the ability to track the success of each marketing investment — regardless of how or where the lead originates.

Analytics: Accurate measurement is an important part of an optimized sales and marketing program. Voice-based marketing automation solutions offer real-time analytics that can be integrated with Google Analytics and other applications to provide 360-degree visibility to keywords, customer demographics and other data. In many instances, voice-based marketing automation users then utilize this information to create highly targeted and personalized marketing strategies.

Today’s equipment dealers face challenges that didn’t exist as recently as a decade ago. The rise and dominance of Web-based technology has forced dealers to navigate a marketplace in which multichannel marketing strategies and fierce competition are the norm.

The utilization of proven voice communication solutions will undoubtedly play a larger role in equipment sales as dealers attempt to capture and convert higher volumes of leads and prospects. At the same time, dealers will employ voice-based marketing automation technology to achieve granular insights about the effectiveness of online and offline marketing strategies, enabling them to increase ROI on marketing investments and create a more personalized sales environment.

 Irv Shapiro is responsible for overall business strategy and corporate leadership as the CEO of Ifbyphone. His business success has earned him several awards, including induction into the “Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame” and gold recognition in the Executive of the Year category for the Best in Biz Awards. Under Shapiro’s leadership, Ifbyphone was also named to the 2012 Inc. 500 ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. For more information on how to leverage voice communications in your dealership, call Ifbyphone at (877) 295-5100 or visit www.ifbyphone.com.