The research team at Molloy Sales Development Group was asked to explore two types of customer phone interactions:
1. Price Shoppers – These are customers who start out the conversation by stating, “I’m just shopping around….”
2. Price Dumps – During this call, the salesperson when asked for a price simply ‘dumps’ the price to get off the phone.
To accomplish this task, they looked at 19,147 sales opportunities and found that 11.45% fell into those two categories.
The total price shoppers and price dumps in this study is 2194. The problem is that in this study, the appointment closing percentage is only 2% and 3% respectively. If a shop gets 2,000 calls monthly and 60% are sales opportunities (equaling 1,200 calls), then they would also see about 137 price dumps and price shoppers every month. This adds up to 1,648 calls on an annual basis, which translates to hundreds of opportunities lost.
If you look at this as a shop owner and us it to base a projection, you begin to see the impact of these types of recurrent calls. Run the math on this across multiple locations – especially when multiplied across 10 or 100 stores – and the lost opportunities are downright scary.
Worse, as customers continue to get more access to information, we can speculate that these calls are likely to increase in quantity. At the same time, because the teams are not converting them into sales, it’s a big waste of time and money all around. It’s also very frustrating for the sales staff to consistently “strike out” like this.
The situation isn’t hopeless, however.
Given the low closing rates for these types of calls, dealers can look at additional training and a consistent customer interaction strategy that specifically addresses these types of situations to benefit your business.
