How we re-engage with lost sales – a rich source of sales opportunity: Read Motor Group

Background

Making the most of every sale opportunity.

At Direct Affinity Europe we say we’re in the conversion business and we firmly believe that for many clients, their key issue is not with how many leads they generate but how many they’re able to convert. Conversion is a key battle ground when it comes to business success and that’s why we’re so grateful to clients like Anderlea Butters, Read Motor Group’s marketing Manager, who are prepared to work in partnership with us to road test new ideas and innovations; sharing learnings and results with us in the process. We’ve worked with Anderlea and Read Motor Group since 2019 on our Customer Re-engagement Programme, across all 8 of their sites and it’s fair to say that they have helped us shape and refine our lost sale proposition.

Challenges

The Customer Re-engagement Programme is focused on looking for areas of improvement and incremental sales from the cohort of prospects that have been seen but are not yet marked sold. As we explain to retailers – everyone fixates on the prospects that have been sold to (indeed there are KPIs and measurements galore for that group) but they are the minority of sales opportunities.

The majority of prospects (60-70%) are those that don’t buy and yet, typically there is no contact with them to find out what more could have been done to turn them into a customer. To that end we work as an impartial observer running an NPS programme covering all areas of that prospect’s interaction with the retailer.

 

Solution

The NPS process (as part of the Customer Re-engagement Programme)  not only provides some valuable insightful and actionable business intelligence on everything from training through to pricing and sales process, it also generates an immediate commercial return in the shape of incremental sales that would, in all probability have been missed. With this in mind we’re really pleased with our latest set of results from Read Motor Group (indeed we’re almost as pleased as they are!).

Results

In the first 6 months of 2022 we contacted 6,079 of Read’s prospects marked as “un-sold” at 7 days post enquiry.

From this we generated 721 call backs: “Yes I’m still in the market and yes I’d be happy for someone to give me a call” and in turn 89 units were then sold into this cohort. A group that had no on-going contact with the sales team.

All in all we saw a 12.3% conversion from call back to sale across the group.

So they generated a return on investment of 11:1 in 2022 Year To Date.

In summary Anderlea Butters said:

“We see Direct Affinity Europe’s role as being hugely important in helping us to re-engage with prospects who have been in contact but have not bought a car from us. They are an extension of our customer service team, who, by sitting apart from our sales function are able to ask the right questions to encourage customers and prospects that we might not see again, to re-engage with our sites. This not only generates incremental sales, it also fulfils an important longer-term role in that it hopefully shows that we at Read Motor Group are genuinely passionate about customer service and on-going contact.”