It takes more than hiring the right people to build a successful sales team. You also need to equip those people with the information, guidance, and training needed to understand the product and successfully introduce it to buyers in an engaging way. Sales enablement refers to the strategic process of aligning sales with operations and marketing so that salespeople have all the resources they need to effectively close deals¹.
An effective sales enablement strategy is tailored to an organization's unique needs. What works for a consulting firm will be different from what works for an automotive dealership, for instance. Discover how sales enablement can improve modern car sales below.
The Sales Enablement Strategy
Sales enablement is a means of strategically equipping your sales team with the knowledge and tools they need to successfully engage with customers. This often means aligning sales more tightly with other departments, like product management, marketing, and customer care.
Done right, sales enablement empowers your sales team to achieve optimal results. For example, better-aligning marketing and sales alone can reap positive rewards. Research suggests that when marketing and sales are aligned, conversion rates improve, as do sales win rates and customer retention².
More generally, an effective sales enablement strategy can help your automotive dealership to:
- Create more knowledgeable, confident sales teams: With the right resources and strategy, your salespeople can work more confidently. For example, a sales enablement tool like ACV Max provides detailed information about your product inventory, which sales pros can access via tablet. They'll have all the info needed to answer potential buyers' questions, even if those queries arise spontaneously on the lot.
- Improve the customer experience: More capable salespeople are able to create a more positive and personalized consumer experience. In-the-know automotive sales pros can offer tailored advice at relevant touchpoints in the consumer journey, moving potential car buyers toward a deal.
- Generate sales and build brand loyalty: By better-serving customers' needs, empowered salespeople can generate sales and boost consumer loyalty. A big part of sales enablement is about ensuring consistent brand messaging. For example, the information posted on your automotive dealership website should be the same as the information shared in person by sales teams.
Developing a Sales Enablement Strategy for Your Automotive Dealership
An effective sales enablement strategy helps sales teams understand the customer journey and address common buyer pain points so that they can better nurture leads and close deals. If you've never created an automotive sales enablement strategy before, you may be wondering where to begin. Follow the steps below to get started.
1. Evaluate Your Current Approach
Start by looking at your current marketing and sales processes. What's working and what isn't? Are there areas where you could expand or where you should scale back? Consider your ideal target customer and whether there are ways you could serve them better¹.
2. Create a Customer Journey Map
Consider all the touchpoints your customer experiences when shopping for a vehicle, from your website to email lists and the dealership itself. Chart out each step of the process. Are there touchpoints you're missing? For example, if you sell a vehicle to a customer, are you following up with them to check that they're satisfied? That kind of post-sales touchpoint can build loyalty that leads to future sales or word-of-mouth references.
3. Find Ways to Add Value at Every Step of the Journey
Now that you've mapped out the consumer journey in full, consider where you can enhance it. Take your website, for example. Is the design user-friendly? Is the content clear? Does it provide information about your inventory? A powerful website can make a big difference these days, as online car buying is becoming more common.
4. Invest in Sales Enablement Tools
An inventory management system provides essential data about your dealership's offerings, so salespeople can remain well-informed and answer consumer queries. Other useful sales enablement tools for car dealerships include vehicle pricing and digital marketing technologies.
5. Train Your People
It's important to train your salespeople on any new tools you introduce to the dealership. More broadly, you also want to educate them on sales strategies. Establishing a playbook for sellers to use helps get everyone on the same page, promotes best practices, and supports brand consistency³.
Tips for Implementing Your Automotive Sales Enablement Strategy
When training teams on your sales enablement strategy, focus on addressing gaps. Where are you losing customers in the buyer's journey? Are they not even making it past the website to the dealership lot? Is it on-site that they're stepping out of the sales funnel? Do they express interest and return a second time, only to then not close a deal?
Before implementing the sales enablement strategy, take the time to set benchmarks that address these gaps. Then think about what success looks like for your dealership and consider how you will measure it.
Examples of key performance indicators for car dealerships include⁴:
- Cost to market: Compare the car's retail price to how much money the dealership invested in the vehicle's acquisition, transportation, reconditioning, and packing.
- Price to market: How does the cost of the vehicles you sell compare to other models on the market?
- Inventory turn rate: This refers to the ratio of inventory you currently have compared to your monthly sales.
- Sales per person: You can also set team-specific KPIs, like how many deals each salesperson closes in a given timeframe.
With these benchmarks in place, you'll be able to see how effective your sales enablement strategy really is. ACV Max is one tool that can help you succeed. This automotive sales solution allows your entire sales team to become product experts, providing up-to-date information about your offerings that they can access at their fingertips.
Learn more about our software and how it can help transform your sales team.
Sources
- The Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement. HighSpot. Retrieved May 20, 2024, from https://www.highspot.com/sales-enablement/
- Adobe Experience Cloud Team. (17 November 2017). The Key to Successful ABM: Marketing and Sales Alignment. Adobe Experience Cloud Blog. Retrieved May 20, 2024, from https://business.adobe.com/blog/the-latest/key-successful-abm-marketing-sales-alignment
- 10 tips for building your sales enablement strategy. Seismic. Retrieved May 20, 2024, from https://seismic.com/blog/10-tips-for-building-your-sales-enablement-strategy/
- Why Benchmarking for Auto Dealers is Crucial to Compete. Affinitiv. Retrieved May 20, 2024, from https://www.affinitiv.com/why-benchmarking-for-auto-dealers-is-crucial-to-compete/
