Today on CBT News, host Jim Fitzpatrick is joined by automotive sales consultant Jonathan Dawson. Dawson is the President and CEO of Sellchology and host of the CBT show Mind Your Own Business. He has made a tremendous impact on the automotive industry, working with dealers all across the country to improve their sales and digital retailing experience.
Dawson begins the conversation by discussing what lessons dealers learned throughout 2020. Last year, dealers were able to do a lot more with a lot less. This included a smaller staff, less hours of operation, and less advertising. Dealers were able to build efficiency and improve profitability
Digital retailing was a major aspect of the automotive retail industry in 2020. Dawson says that he honestly believes that technology will accelerate the way customers shop for cars. He foresees a gradual shift towards online retailing serving as the primary way to purchase a vehicle. Dealers can either capitalize on digital retailing or fight against it. Despite whether dealers believe digital retailing is beneficial for their business, customers are always going to pay a premium for sales processes that are easy, efficient, educated, exclusive, entertaining, executed with effort, and conducted by an expert.
“I would really encourage any dealer watching this or listening to this conversation to really examine the overall attention we are paying to the experience we are creating for our customers,” said Dawson. “We need to look intentionally at ways to ask the question of our teams, what are some things that are hard that should be easy, what are some things that are taking longer than they should that we can make efficient… We need to examine those things to retain those customers.”
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