Day 20

It's Friday, and I'm really looking forward to the weekend.

I started out the day working with my Appointment Coordinator on how to call the leads. She has a real friendly voice, and I can see that the prospects take to her very quickly. Though she has to leave a lot of messages, the ones she talks to are very accepting of her time. I'm a big fan of getting to the appointment stage as quickly as possible. That's Plan A. If she can't get the appointment because they're looking for more information first, she transfers them over to the Internet Manager and he strives for the appointment after providing whatever information is necessary.

Since phone-up training is one of my priorities, I try to listen to all the calls on Who's Calling to see what individual training needs to take place. Trying to be nice to salespeople by just asking them to answer the calls more productively doesn't always work. You sometimes need to let them know that the phone-up business is not a game and needs to be taken seriously. And even after you approach it that way, they still seem to do answer the call the way they want. It can be a frustrating business sometimes.

I got my weekly report from Used Cars for the week - 9 leads, 3 appointments, 3 sales. 100% closing ratio on appointments to sales, and 33% closing ratio on leads to sales. Still not bad. Now, if I can just increase the number of Used Car leads, which should happen once Autotrader gets on board next week, I should be able to increase those numbers dramatically.

A lot of time was spent on the phone with my Autobase rep. Since the major upgrade will take place over the weekend, which includes the new internet module, we had to plan on what stages (folders) we wanted to have to it can be setup before the upgrade. The stages we setup were:

New - the lead comes in
First Response - the call is made with no contact
Communicating - contact was made but no appointment set
Quoting - customer requests email quote
Unresponsive - continuous calls are made and emails sent with no response
Appointment Set - duh
Appointment Set/No Show - duh
Appointment Showed/No Sale - prices were given but couldn't get financed, etc.
No Purchase Decision - prices were given, but no decision was made yet

The weekend looks sunny and warm. It will be nice to get outside finally and enjoy the warm weather. Have a great weekend.