Price is #1! Or Is It?
If price is the #1 reason a car buyer picks one dealership over another, and your strategy isn’t to be the lowest priced vehicles in town, how do you overcome that?
Urban Science surveyed over 3,000 US consumers who said the price is the # 1 reason they’d choose one dealership over another. Reputation, trade-in value, and desired vehicle configuration are 2, 3, and 4 respectively.
What the study fails to take into account are the many modern day frustrations of the car buyer, that when alleviated, make price less important.
Even if you’ve got the cheapest price, your buyers will abandon you if:
It takes 30 minutes on your website to get a trade-in value or a monthly payment estimate, a process initially should just take seconds
Your follow-up is canned, pushy, and impersonal
They can’t find all of the information they’re looking for about their vehicle of interest, and have to visit 10 other websites to piece it all together
So what should you do instead?
Make the initial trade-in valuation and payment estimate process quick and painless. There’s time later to send them into the full “buy a car online” experience.
Make sure the buttons on your website do what they say they do. Don’t mislabel your buttons to say “Get a trade-in value” only to drop someone unexpectedly into a chat
Send personalized video follow-up to your leads and customers. Our customers routinely tell us that buyers drive past other dealerships to visit their location, simply because they built that human connection early in the sales process with video.
Make it easy for your customers to do all of their vehicle research in place: with you on your website. Everytime a buyer has to visit other dealerships or 3rd party websites to piece together all the information they want about a car, you risk losing that business.
Sure, price may be #1, but overcoming that objection before you even have to discuss it is always possible with the right people, process, and products.