Mystery Shopping Your Website

• By: Guest Blogger
• On: 12/19/2016 17:20:36
• In: Federal / National Posts
• Comments: 0

When you spend a significant amount of money on Marketing/Advertising/Lead generation from any source – one of the online vehicle classified sites like Cars.com or Autotrader.com or a general classified site like Craigslist, or if you are working hard to generate general Brand recognition or actual leads from Facebook – you want to do everything you can to nurture your leads and get them into your dealership.
 
Customers/leads that you receive will be in different parts of the car buying process or funnel when they contact you.  Some will be TOF (top of funnel), some MOF (middle of funnel), some BOF (bottom of funnel).  The pace at which they move through the funnel will vary at different times of the year and based on the customer's situation.  We need corresponding offers at each step of the process. TOFOs, MOFOs, BOFOs! 
 
Certainly, we all know that we want to try to get a customer to visit us at our dealership in person and we need to create urgency, and some of that we do with people - salespeople who can use the phone, perhaps a text tool, social media messaging, emails, etc. 
 
Also, we should be using Sales Automation Auto Responder sequences that you can dictate or write and “set and forget”.  It is possible to nurture people along, gain their trust, and differentiate yourself from your competition, using Lead nurture message sequences that work in concert with your CRM and with your people.  The nice thing about an Auto Responder sequence is that you know people will not fall through the cracks, they will be reached out to. 
 
So here is the practical tip that we implemented at Skook Auto Sales – Have a New Employee Mystery Shop Your Auto Responder / Lead Nurture System.
 
In this own words, this is what Gerry implemented with his new employee Julie:
 
"We're going to have Julie go into our dealership's website as a customer, enter her “lead information” in various spots, wait for the email follow-up and then tell us a little bit about her experience from the customer's perspective so that we can make sure that we're doing the right thing for any customers out there and to maximize the Conversion of leads to customers."
 
This is what is going to happen and you should do this also.
 
Gerry has a new employee who is detail oriented and process oriented and she has “beginner's mind”, she has not yet drunk the Kool Aid at the dealership. 

Julie is going to mystery shop and she's going to report to him what happened, how she felt about it, record her observations. Gerry will make improvements to the system and emails based on her feedback. 

If you haven't had somebody mystery shop your website for a while to see what the experience would be like as they submitted a credit app or any other form of lead generation you have, you should do that. You should have them check all potential ways that a customer can submit their information via your website. 
 
What you can do now: have somebody mystery shop your dealership website, record it for you, in terms of their observations, feelings, and what it's like to be a shopper, and make the necessary changes.
 
I hope that helps, I would love to hear the results of your mystery shopping.  Drop me a line at wayne.herring@strongersalespeople.com
 
By the way – I will be doing one-day seminar near you in January – the Sales Team and Sales Process Growth Intensive.  This will be an interactive workshop where we will work hard so that you leave with a plan to implement immediately to grow revenue, freedom and reduce frustration by developing your Sales Automation and your Sales Team!  Register today!