BDC- How BHPH is Different than Retail

"Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change."
Tom Peters

"An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."
Jack Welch

Hey, this is Jay Rose from Total Dealer Training. If you want to “Live your Lifestyle Guaranteed”, here's some great tips about the BDC or Business Development Process. If you're looking to increase sales or your income, this is going to be a discussion on the biggest differences between Buy Here, Pay Here and Retail purchase process. We will also discuss the “old school” way of doing it and the better way that'll get you proven results. First of all, let's just look at business development process. BDCs have been around since the 1990’s although technically we've always had them because business development or prospecting was done verbally in person. It wasn't really given that name or acronym BDC (business development center) until about the early nineties. I know I went through a professional phone training probably for the first time in 1988. A lot of those techniques that were trained back then, unfortunately, hasn't changed even though the customers have changed. Your team needs to be trained with better techniques whether or not you have a BDC room or just have your Finance / Product Specialists (Salesperson) handling the Business Development process.

What you need is just utilize the technology that we have available in order to communicate more effectively with customers, whether it's prospecting or follow up, it's building your business within a business. Let's just take a look at some biggest differences between buy here, pay here and Retail dealership processes and why the training you need has to be different. You know, I'm have been very blessed. I've actually mastered six different new car sales & Business Development training scripts, and every one of those is completely different than what you need to be successful with Sub-Prime or BHPH customers. Yes, you still need to do, prospecting, letting people know who you are, what you do and where you work, but it's different. You're not prospecting for customers looking to buy a car. You're prospecting for customers who need a car and who basically need an affordable transportation solution that can't get approved at traditional retail stores. If you're fishing for anything else, you're just going to just create bad customer lead pollution for yourself and waste your time.

I just came back from the Texas Independent Auto Dealer convention and there was a couple times where I was answering questions from dealers about which lead generation system is best and how should I best track that? I told them that there are too many times people get caught up with how many SVPs & VDPs they have (how many looks, likes, loves, impressions, whatever you want to call it) instead of how many of those leads led to a Delivery (Sale). It doesn't matter what you have for a number of leads. I would never pay for a lead. I wouldn't pay for a lead unless you track it all the way down to deliveries. Number one, have a tracking system is the start. We cover this topic a lot in our TDT Online training, but you need to have a tracking system for all leads you pay for and those you grow organically. So if you can figure out how many, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Offer up or other lead sources your have, you can trace it all the way through to how many people do we connect with, have a contact with, set an appointment with, Appointment show, and why did they purchase or if they didn't purchase. You also need to have notes in your CRM about why did we Approve them and why we didn’t approve the customer. These are areas for a training opportunity to approve on our skills with customers or a better process. If you have customers that constantly asking you, Hey, what's your price? What's your price, what's a discount, what can you give me for my trade value? That is not a BHPH customer, that is a Retail customer. A BHPH customer says, “Hey, I don't want to drive all the way down there. If you can approve me, how much down payment do I need, or What's my payments?” Now, I'm not saying that some BHPH customers won’t ask Retail questions, I’m just saying that they will make their decision to purchase on Down Payment and Payments. Your team just needs to be trained on the right BHPH scripts. A Retail vs BHPH Customer is literally as backwards as Spanish and English. Obviously somewhere up in the Latin language, there are similarities to these languages, but that's about where it ends. So if you've worked in a business development center or use new car training scripts in the past from an old school training company that primarily trains new car dealers, you need to look at our custom training. Total Dealer Training is completely different and we get results, guaranteed. So if you are looking to close deliver 70 to 80% of all the leads that come in call us today.

After training with TDT, you will have customers that will pay you on time because we are going to show you how to weed and filter out non BHPH customers without having to underwrite them financially. We're going to effectively filter the right customers so when they do show up at your branch location, they're the right customers and you can deliver without them getting mad or feel like they were lied to. Don’t be that person who just brought them in even if you were told to do whatever it took to get them in to “show up”. You also need to be prospecting for other people's turndowns from retail dealerships. Most dealerships have an average 10% turndown rate which mean that a minimum of 40-50 customers per dealership per month are having to go find a BHPH source to get vehicle financing. You can also Post your BHPH program on Social Media to prospect for more customers but our BHPH program messages for our advertising needs to be completely different than advertising for a Retail customer. Your website should also be completely different than a Retail used car dealership as well. Check out our proven techniques on successful BHPH websites and Social Media posting. Your posts should be different in retail. You're posting about your inventory, your dealership, your service department, it's all about the car. You know, you want to have 16 pictures, every single little detail about the car. If you're posting and retail, if you're by your payer, you should have one picture, maybe three. Otherwise you're making the content of the message too much about the car, your message has to be about the finance program. Oh, by the way, here's a really sexy picture of an F-150, here's an Impala, here's an SUV, that's it? It's about the value of your Finance Program and your unique dealership experience, such as: “Since 1980, we've been helping customers with quality vehicles and financing and with our Buy Here Pay Here financing. We are opposite of a traditional dealership. We don't do Cash transactions, all we do is short term financing for those customers that when other dealers say, no, we say YES! Bad credit, no credit, bankruptcy, no problem” should be your message, not Price and mileage.

Those are the type of messages that should be received. Bullet points only about financing program, not listing every Feature on the car. So again, BDC is really marketing. It's advertising. It's what are you putting out there to fish with. You can get lots of leads, but if they're the wrong leads, you have to look at how much does it cost me? Not just dollars spent, you could develop lots of leads from Facebook that don’t turn into 1 delivery. I've seen that happen when I first went into a store and they delivered 2 deals from a lead source that created 550 leads for the dealership. The dealer thought because he didn’t pay much upfront for those leads that his cost per lead, per sale was low. What the dealer hadn’t considered was the 2 employees who had spent 100 hours handling those leads that ended up as bad leads, how much in payroll he had to add to his Advertising ROI formula to realize his low cost per click leads were no worth it. Plus it's de-motivating when you get people that keep calling. If you get a buffet and all you have is a buffet, they keep going from, Hey, what's your cheapest hamburger. What's your cheapest taco. It's not above a customer. So why didn't you just put “Buffet or BHPH”, on your signs & advertising? What are you afraid of? We can't be everything to everyone anymore. You need to pick a side for your business model, Retail or BHPH and make sure that you're doing it properly. Customer referrals, customer referrals are, are absolutely critical and they are very inexpensive. I don't know what you pay but I pay $200 for customer referrals,. I've had dealers that pay $50 for customer referrals and they tell me they don't get many of them. You pay $200 bucks. Guess what? It gets their attention. They start letting everyone know and they phone their friends and their family at work!

They have the best BHPH program out there, plus that extra $200 a customer could go towards paying for their next bi-weekly payment. You want to get customer referrals from retail dealerships as well. In either case focus, if you're going to make 20, 30 calls a day, just make them to current customers and get them to refer people to us. The old adage is “birds of a feather flock together”. Bad credit follows bad credit, good credit follows good credit. Either way, everyone knows someone with bad credit so focus on customer referrals. I would do that way before I go post a hundred posts on social media to get a 5%, 10% closing ratio, customer referrals close about 60 to 70% percent. So just something to think about. Knowing what your statistics are is important, business referrals, visit just referrals, not as much a new cars you could, you know, I've always had alliances.

When I ran new car stores where, you know, if I was in a Toyota store, I had the, the top Honda salespeople, a product specialist, sending us their customers who considered Toyota. The customer is going to come here anyway. Might as well have them send it to us and I'll pay him a referral, you know, or not. BHPH dealers need to make this their bread and butter. Since 2005, I've used Business Referrals to help literally blow the lid off of lead generation and good quality customers with my BHPH stores. Give me a call. If you want specific information about it, this very detailed, very important. If you don't do it right, it's going to blow up in your face, but it is can literally double your success with my proven techniques.

So really important. Yeah. Great way to double your business. But then once you have the right customers, the BDC team has to handle them properly. If you don't handle them properly, you're not going to get a customer to show up that will actually buy your car. Just tell them the truth about your program upfront. Give the potential customer all the information about your program upfront except for price. And we'll talk about that in future training, but you want to make sure that you filter the customer. They know who you are and it's for a BHPH vehicle financing program. Tell your customers that If you have great credit, we recommend people go to CarMax, Texas direct, Carvana, or your local dealership. The goal is we're rehabilitation center. We're not 24 hour fitness. Customers get confused and that's why it's important to make sure when you do your merchandising and your signs out front, make sure people know like, current dealership I'm working with. They just have a sign. It just has a basic name like auto sales or motor company, nothing in there says easy credit, or buy here pay here. The dealership I am at now had to get banners and flags that say, thBHPH, Bad credit, Easy credit, etc. This let the retail customers with an 800 credit score that our program wasn’t for them, which we're not bringing them in our program, they know upfront who we are and who we're not. It's like having the restaurant who’s sign says “Seafood Buffett Only”. The example, if you only have a buffett, put the sign out there that says buffet, it means better value, higher prices. And then going back to once you handle the customers properly, that means handling them on the phone, Email leads, texts, leads, posting responses, make sure that you use the right messages on your texting, on your emails, using video. That's why I only use CRM that is made for BHPH with texting and video all inside the call. You should be on this CRM to follow-up in new cars. You're pretty much, you know, the old adage is follow-up until they buy or die. Well, the difference with a BHPH customer, if we say no, like there's no way we're approving this customer, don't follow up. Those notes need to be in the CRM, until it is delivered. That means if you've followed up a sold or delivered customer, only talk about the referral program. If you have a “Not Approved” customer, don't try to bring them back in to buy a car. The notes need to say that if it's not approved that make $900 bucks a month, good person, but can't afford our, $550 a month program. Don't follow them up to keep coming back in, only follow up the customers that we approve. But for whatever reason that customer hasn't said yes to us, maybe they're still thinking about the price or the interest rate or the type of car that they qualify for or their down payment or that the payment's higher than they want because it's three years instead of eight years, whatever, the reason the key is communicate effectively, BDC needs to make sure that you have your training book, just like our TDT 82 page workbook on how to actually handle any scenario you'll ever need. The biggest thing is to know the difference between BHPH and Retail and know the difference between old school techniques that work some of the time versus the TDT techniques that work all the time. If you liked this blog, please forward it to someone else in the business that may be struggling or once to improve their business development process so they can sell more and make more. We'll see on the next blog.