Hi brandon hardison president of champion strategies also spokesperson for shop, smart autos, as we give you the consumer, the best tips that we can find out about what’s going on in our retail automotive sales environment, if not the automotive industry as a whole.
So today we want to talk about uh nostalgia.
If you will, there are some customers who are being attracted like they were during the eisenhower administration versus the instagram age.
So i know we’ve just thrown a wrench into you going back 55 years or so, but uh you’ve heard old stories around car lots from automotive sales veterans.
Talking about how attracting car buyers to the dealership took some serious uh ingenuity, it had to be uh in the book the american car dealership by robert.
He had he talks about the way back machine and the explorers of the plight of clever dealers pass to get new customers into the showrooms to purchase the new vehicles.
The automotive market is brimming with intelligence and also some smart marketing tools that we have today.
They serve up data points needed to provide personalized deals that nudge buyers towards a good deal.
Data mining technologies.
Give you precise knowledge of what customers are looking for at that particular time, but this was not the case back in 1958, so we’re going to use the sales staff of hodges, auto sales frienddale michigan they developed a novel system of dumping up on intel.
They got a lot of drumming up on intel for potential car buyers.
How did they do this? Well, one of the leading sales people had a strategy and he called it reaching out each morning.
He would rush out to mail a number of postcards to prospective buyers.
Um, i’m talking about in the thousands would get mailed out each month and very well.
Many have had the birth of spray and prey if you will or term of either they’re going to get it or not.
These mailers announced that joe would be calling in three or four days to talk about their automotive purchase.
So, a few days later, the customer receives a call from the salesperson to reveal something about their disposition towards purchasing a fancy new vehicle back in the 50s to button up the call what the sales person would do was end it with.
Would you like your new vehicle this week or next now, in the 50s, some people trying to keep up with the joneses? If you remember hearing that uh, they would fall for some of that.
At this point, uh the hero, the salesperson, had two objectives back in the 50s, make an appointment, preferably at the prospect’s home.
So we can talk more about this vehicle or getting the house’s favorite color.
The challenge is to figure out the wife’s color preference without really getting the husband involved.
You can be sure that, unlike today, females had a lot to do with the buying process of a vehicle.
Even back in the 50s you see the old dealership in the 50 hodges auto realized that women tended to have the final say in automotive purchase, so they used that data that they had in the 50s to actually close deals.
The strategy did work, hodges, auto, sold 17 of all of chrysler sales in the detroit area.
At that time sounds a little ludicrous, a little strange yeah.
It was different for now, but not different than those times.
Many of the same pain points still are around today, but technology has found a way to remedy this.
According to the data and the ability to analyze buying behaviors, now we can pretty much pinpoint male or female colors preferences what you’ve done in the past.
So there’s no more filling out all of these postcards at random and calling people, but we have a more strategic way of doing it today with this that you’ll hear more about, if you haven’t heard it already about data mining, so back in the 50s hodges auto Sales, if you think about it, they did well for their time, but today, if you’re operating something like that, you would not be on the top of any consumers choices for purchasing a new vehicle, even without knowing the spouse’s favorite color.
All we’re trying to do is give you an understanding that how your father and his father purchase is a lot different than what’s going on.
Today.
We can pinpoint precisely your needs, wants and desires and with good knowledge of getting you in and shortening down your time and none of the old tricks just give you what you say you wanted and offer you that price we find out that we do a lot Better once again, brandon hardison for her shop, smart, autos and also for champion strategy, saying, as always in party, go out and make .
