Digital car sale success relies on collaboration

The post-COVID-19 environment “when cars were selling themselves” created “a lot of bad habits” in the dealerships, Frehsee said.

“A lot of the after-sale, delivery, going over the features and benefits of the vehicle, some of those steps were getting skipped,” he said. “This is a major challenge in our industry when it comes to the retraining and the transformation of EV in the dealerships, because there’s a lack of knowledge and experience and training that exists on our end that frankly, here’s one of the things that we need to lean on the OEM for, and that’s training.”

Veteran salespeople at Tamaroff may have large clienteles but cannot adapt in communicating with customers digitally, he said. In response to that, Tamaroff in May launched a newly built 12-seat business development center to field incoming Internet and phone leads.

Another panelist, Matt VanDyke, a former FordDirect CEO who helped create the automaker’s digital retailing, said “dealers have the opportunity to control a lot of what’s happening by having a pulse on what’s happening in the market and adjusting their digital storefront, their websites.””

Having the right words on a dealer website is essential to optimize online traffic, he added.

“Because so many brands actually kind of have a full shelf of inventory, yet when you go on their websites, you see things like ‘check for availability’, search for if this car can still be found and customers are smart, they don’t know there’s a 90-days supply, but they know there’s plenty of certain models out there,” said VanDyke, now president of Shift Digital, a Birmingham, Mich., digital marketing company.