Grow New Customers and Increase Retention with FOCUS
Rod Stuckey | 02/01/2019
I once read of a grizzled veteran salesman on a flight home from 2 days of sales training complaining that he’d just been forced to listen to 365 different ways to close a sale, when all he needed was one – that worked.
With the New Year upon us, as is normal and customary, my wife and I are dabbling with a multitude of diet and exercise choices. Nowadays you can get an app for everything imaginable. Jump Rope, Boxing, Cycling, Running on a Treadmill, just to name a few. Our Comcast cable provider has on demand videos where you can talk into the remote: “Weight Training,” “Pilates,” “Cardio,” “Yoga,” etc. and you immediately have workouts playing right in your living room.
If you’re looking to diet you can go Paleo, Atkins, South Beach, Vegan, Weight Watchers, Nutri-Systems and more. You can track your calories with Lose It! or a dozen other calorie and nutrition counters. Heck, you wanna be like Tom Brady you can do the TB12 method.
Whether you’re trying to close a deal, or get fit, the choices can be overwhelming. I kinda feel like that old salesmen, if I’m ever going to get back below 200 pounds, I just need one program that’s going to work for me. And an app isn’t going to help me get my ass out of bed at 5:30am.
So much of success and productivity, personally and in business, is about focus. It’s about narrowing and eliminating choices, not adding more and more bright shiny objects.
Water, when focused enough can cut through steel. If you put a piece of paper on hot asphalt, nothing will happen. But if you put a magnifying glass in between the sun and that paper it will burn a hole through it. That’s the energy and power of focus.
Unfortunately, in the absence of focus we often become loyal to activity masquerading as accomplishment.
Your dealership’s marketing is very similar. With the never-ending and ever-growing plethora of media choices it’s easy to get overwhelmed and confused. And if you listen to your sales people, you should be doing it all. But that’s just flat wrong.
You can dabble in a little bit of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and so on and get zero traction, or you can focus on the fundamentals and have the discipline to stick with your plan, and you’ll get game changing results.
I should know, I made every expensive marketing mistake in the book in my Dealership days. And while I may have grappled with my fitness discipline in recent years, I have not wavered on my commitment to disciplined and focused marketing, which is why here at PSM we’ve experienced growth every year since our founding in 2004.
The first lesson I learned is that my CPA has no idea what my number one asset is because it doesn’t show up on my balance sheet. It’s our customer list. If we can grow our number of active customers each year, we can experience Predictable Growth.
And your dealership is no different. That’s why for 112 straight months of producing this newsletter our goal has remained the same. To educate dealers on proven marketing best practices so they can sell more units and make more money.
Your goal is not only to grow your customer list each year, it’s to increase the frequency of visits from past and present customers. The most likely person to give you money in the future is someone who has given you money in the past.
This is why capturing accurate customer data is so important. When you get their first name, last name, email, phone number and snail mail address, you have the most reliable way to communicate compelling and relevant messages in a 1-to-1 manner to your most receptive target audience via the most affordable media. Yet so many dealers take their past customers for granted, don’t market to them, and waste all of their budget on the latest greatest digital wizardry going after new blood. Wide and shallow, rather than narrow and deep. Meanwhile, your customers haven’t heard from you in months, or years, and get a feeling of indifference. They think, “Might as well order my next leather jacket online rather than ride over to my local dealer on my lunch break. Those guys don’t really notice my business anyway. Maybe shop around for a few prices on my next new bike rather than go to my favorite trusted dealer.”
Once you’ve allocated the proper resources to your existing customers to increase their annual value, NOW it’s time to develop a plan to go after new customers to grow your list.
First things first is your online reputation. Do you have a pro-active solution in place to consistently acquire positive reviews so you are boosting your online presence and burying those few negative reviews written by unreasonable customers?
If not, every penny you spend going after new customers can be undermined because new customers are going to always research you online prior to buying.
Our Sharp Shooter program includes Direct Mail to your house list for retention, and an optional sourced list for new blood. It also includes email, Facebook, and the telephone.
Our Local Web Dominator product has produced over 150,000 verified reviews from real customers for Powersports dealers. It also provides you with a kick ass Firestorm email platform to increase the frequency of visits from your regular customers. Want new customers, we can bolt on Google Ads and Facebook Advertising.
Our “Done for You” products have been built with a FOCUS for Predictable Growth for your dealership without all the clutter and without breaking the bank.
To quote Jim Rohn: “Massive Action on a few initiatives beats diluted action on too many.”
Contact us today at 877-242-4472.
