CBT News welcomes Max Zanan, bestselling author of The Perfect Dealership. Max discusses sales strategy and giving your customers the best possible online experience in order to keep up with the shift in consumer purchasing.
Max shares that one of the more common occurrences that could put your dealerships in danger is your own lack of professional training throughout each department and role. Since most people learn on the job, both the good and bad habits carry over from one generation to the next.
When you properly train your employees, you are empowering them to be more effective, and therefore thrive in their competitive environment. Max believes the reason dealers don’t provide this training for employees stems from a lack of complacency, and in one way or another dealers are going to have to be snapped out of this habit.
Max continues to describe how he personally sees the new reality of retail car sales which he says somewhat involves companies like Amazon and Uber. Amazon has re-trained consumers when it comes to online shopping and Uber has shifted our expectations. Both of these companies have a strong emphasis on transparency: you know exactly how much you are paying when it is going to be delivered, and who your driver is; rating included.
Consumers have all of this information and more at their fingertips, and transparency is something that the retail automotive industry has always been lacking. So, if consumers now have transparency when shopping 99% of the time, they are not going to be willing to make that exception when shopping for a car. Max says if dealerships are unwilling to adapt and figure out a way to better incorporate transparency in their stores then they are practically asking companies like Amazon to step in and show them how it’s done.
Max has learned a great deal of knowledge surrounding areas where dealerships can better themselves through the development of his new company, Rideshare Knight.