With the insurance industry looking like it’s on the road to recovery, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from our dealers on how to prepare for this recovery. Is there a way to best position yourself as a dealership leader to benefit from what we hope will be a resurgence?
As a former dealer development professional, my immediate response is always: start with the team.
After all, your sales team represents your dealership’s brand and has a huge impact on your customers’ experience. In this respect, ensuring that your team is enhancing the customer experience by introducing insurance shows that you are truly managing and owning every piece of the customer journey. Your team’s efforts on this front can also help maximize the dealership’s profitability.
If you know that your car buyers might be able to save money on insurance while they are shopping for their car, it stands to reason that you’d want to encourage your customers to do that. After all, those savings can be put toward the car your salesperson is selling to them or to the F&I products your F&I manager is presenting. But unless it’s a core part of the process, they may not be apt to introduce the idea of insurance.
Before I give my recommendations for how to get your team prepared, I also want to address another question that is often asked: why put insurance into your process, rather than just using an integration that sends the customer a text message or email? The main reason is because using that approach alone, it’s easy for customers to ignore the message and not see it as the value add that it is. The best approach is two-fold: use an integration, but also encourage your team to make the referral.
When you have a customer sitting in the chair with a salesperson who understands the value of an insurance marketplace, you’re more likely to see consumers engage with the text or email. And that’s a win for you and the customer. It is also far more likely to demonstrate to the customer that you are looking out for them and providing them the best possible service.
So, what can you do to get your team ready for next year? If you’re using the Polly platform, here’s where I would start:
Outside of preparing your team, you may also want to consider moving from a referral-based program to a licensed program, where you can benefit from insurance sales. Whatever you choose, make sure you’re getting ready now. Because if you and your team aren’t prepared in 2024 when the insurance industry begins to recover, you’ll be missing out on an expanding revenue opportunity.