Training Automotive Sellers Isn’t Always a Smooth Ride (But it Can Be)
Many consumers are in the market for a new vehicle at any given time. A recent poll found that more than a quarter of consumers across 48 international markets intend to purchase a vehicle this year.
A recent poll found that
Even when auto sellers are up-to-date on training and certification, it’s hard to know if this translates to better purchasing experiences for buyers. A recent report found around a quarter of automotive buyers aren’t satisfied with their interactions with sales.
Whether you’re an automaker or parts manufacturer, you likely face many challenges when ensuring your network of sellers is always prepared. In this post, we’ll explore how a modern approach to revenue enablement can help you overcome these challenges and ensure all of your automotive sellers have what it takes to engage and convert more automotive shoppers effectively.
Top challenges of automotive sales training
Businesses face many challenges when it comes to training automotive sellers. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest hurdles in automotive sales training.
1. Low adoption
Often, the dealer network you are tasked with training is distributed, and manufacturers do not own dealerships. This proves challenging when requiring training and certification for dealer sellers. In addition, dealerships often experience a high turnover of sales and service staff and use various technologies to manage their salesforce.
Traditional approaches to learning, like a push-based training approach where courses are assigned to reps, can make it difficult to achieve adoption goals across your dealers. If training is completed, it is not transferred to long-term knowledge or forgotten quickly afterward. We see this across industries, with 80% of training being forgotten after completion.
2. High turnover
Turnover is often high in the world of automotive sales. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, automotive dealerships face an annualized turnover of 41% for sales consultants.
That means you’re likely investing ample time and resources into training new sellers – and then having to do it all again shortly after.
3. Ever-evolving product offerings
Automotive offerings always evolve to keep pace with consumers’ needs and preferences. Keeping a distributed dealership network up to speed on your new models can feel near impossible. After all, automotive sales training material must be continuously updated to reflect these changes.
4. Distributed network using out-of-date and off-brand content
Automotive sales content isn’t something you can create once – never to be revisited. Instead, sales content must be updated as product offerings, market conditions, and consumer needs evolve. But it can be challenging to ensure your distributed workforce is always using the latest, approved automotive sales content.
5. One-and-done consumer engagements
We often hear dealers struggle to engage buyers beyond the showroom, with seemingly hot leads going dark once they leave the dealership. Those brochures are thrown away, the sellers’ emails get ignored, and the deal is lost.
Modern revenue enablement for automotive manufacturers
Leading automotive manufacturers deliver modern revenue enablement, rethinking how to train and certify their dealer networks and delight customers.
Certify a network of top-notch product specialists
Training and certifications have historically been approached as static and one-size-fits-all. This is what typical Learning Management Systems (LMS) deliver. Think of a new automotive seller sitting at a computer for the first few weeks of their job, completing onboarding videos and assessments. They are disengaged, and eager to hit the floor and start selling.
To ramp new dealer sellers quickly, you don’t need just to onboard them, but everboard sellers. But do it in a way that is engaging and just as mobile as they are. Our top tips for certifying a network of distributed dealership sellers are:
Ensure sellers can access automobile training across devices and platforms. If they have iPads on the show floor, they can complete the required training before a prospect walks in.
Dealership training will depend on the role and tenure of a salesperson; make your training personalized and create options for testing out of programs
Deliver various modes of reinforcing knowledge, like using short videos followed by a quiz instead of long-form text-heavy documents.
Don’t wait for a customer to walk into the dealership for reps to practice their pitch; use AI for realistic pitch practice.
Hear from International (formerly Navistar) on why they plan to use AI to prep their network of sellers for every consumer interaction.
Keep your dealer network up-to-date and on-brand
You have a brand to uphold, and with a network of dealerships, new sellers continually being hired, and new products and services launched, it can feel like you have little control over what is being pitched out in the field. With a centralized approach to automotive sales training and content in a single platform, you can ensure your dealer network uses approved and up-to-date collateral. Our top tips are:
Make sure you have a single source for approved auto collateral so your entire network of sellers is using the most up-to-date content and have one place to find it.
It’s important for dealer sellers to be able to customize certain content based on consumer needs, but put guardrails on the content you allow to be customized to maintain brand standards and consistency across dealerships.
When sending digital content to consumers, ensure it is trackable so you can measure the impact this content is having on your car and service sales.
Deliver personalized buyer engagement to accelerate auto deal cycles
While most deals originate on the show floor, continuing the engagement and excitement past that initial interaction is often hard.
The top automakers personalize the buying experience and engage with consumers digitally to accelerate deal cycles and get to a final signature faster. To do this, we suggest:
Centralize your buyer engagements with a persistent digital room that includes vehicle collateral, services information, and a single location to collaborate with the dealer seller
Create a clear and concise action plan on how to buy a vehicle, including financing information.
See how Ford launched Ford University to train their dealer network and create a transparent and simple buying experience.
Shift your automotive sales training into high gear
Modern automotive buyers have high expectations. Of course, offering great products is important. But so too is delivering outstanding, personalized experiences and advice throughout the purchase journey.
Automotive brands must ensure the entire network of sellers is prepared to expertly guide buyers and empower them to make informed purchase decisions. Given the number of challenges involved with training and certifying a network of dealership sellers, this can seem impossible.
But it’s certainly not impossible. By reimagining your approach to training dealership sellers, you can transform auto sales for your network of dealers and deliver a transparent and personalized buying experience for your consumers.
The right revenue enablement technology is foundational to preparing automotive sales teams for success.
Train Auto Sales Reps with Mindtickle
Deliver modern revenue enablement by rethinking how to train and certify your dealer networks.
Get A DemoThis post was originally published in June 2024 and updated in September 2024.
