Service Sells the Next One

If you are like most salespeople, you don’t ever give your Service Department a second thought. I mean they just work on the cars, right? They don’t do anything for you, or do they? The fact is that if a customer services their vehicle with your service department they are more like to purchase their next vehicle from your dealership. Especially, if they receive exceptional service while they are getting their vehicle maintained.

Now, let’s look at this. If we know that your customer will most likely purchase their next vehicle from your dealership if the following things happen:

1. They bring their vehicle to your dealership for service & maintenance
2. They receive exceptional service for the dealership during these service & maintenance visits

What are you doing to make sure that your customers bring their vehicles back to your dealership for service and maintenance, and what are you doing to ensure they remember that you are their sales contact at the dealership? Once again if you are like most salespeople, you are not doing anything to help these customers. That’s right, almost every salesperson does nothing to harvest this low hanging fruit.

Now that we have identified the problem that you, and most salespeople have when it comes to ensuring that you and your dealership earn that ever valuable repeat and referral business out of your service department.

First Step:

Things you can do to ensure YOUR CUSTOMERS use your service department and they remember you:

• Book your customer’s first service appointment during time of sale
• Give this First Service away at no cost to the customer
• Tour the Service Department during your Sales Process
• Introduce your customer to members of the Service Department, including providing them a point of contact
• Review pricing for service & maintenance at your dealership compared to local oil changers and review the benefits of doing service with your dealership

• Offer to schedule these appointments from them
• Offer pick-up and delivery for these appointments

Next Level:

If you are new to the business or you are interested in upping your game and taking it to the next level, start working your service drive and orphaned service customers.

Things you can do to earn business from the SERVICE DRIVE:

• Greet and get to know customers who are waiting in the customer lounge
• Establish yourself with the next day’s service appointment customers as the point of contact for them
• Offer all of the service customers above an in “High Demand Vehicle” appraisal

Things you can do with ORPHANED Service Customers:

• Contact them through your CRM system and establish yourself as their new point of contact at the dealership
• Offer them an in “High Demand Vehicle” appraisal
• Offer to schedule future service appointments for them
• Contact your customer and remind them of upcoming service & maintenance intervals
• Offer pick-up and delivery for these appointments

If it is really that easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?

It is really this easy to begin building relationships with your dealerships service customers. However, this is a heavy lift to get started and it will take many swings and misses before you get that hit or even home run. The initial high failure rate causes most salespeople to give up after a few failed attempts. You need to ask yourself; do you want to struggle like everyone else, or do you want to let your Service Department help you sell the next one.