9X More Outbound Appointments with a Smarter BDC Strategy

Good afternoon, everybody. I'm filling in for Jake again on a Volley Rally, and today I've got an oldie but a goodie. Not that oldie, but definitely a goodie. Kim Grubb back with a milestone that we wanted to talk about. Kim, how you doing today?

I'm doing great, Scott. Hope you are too.

Oh yeah. So just a little history here. We're very close with Kim and it started off a little rocky the first demo, wouldn't you say? Before we signed up with Volley?

Yeah, because Scott, I already knew everything. I didn't need anything else. I was already the best.

So, well, you're You, you still are in most things, but, um, almost 4 years in Valy, and, uh, and what we wanted to highlight today is, is consistency and great results. Um, Kim, you closed June 9 times more outbound appointments than you had your best time ever pre-Valy. Is that right?

9 times? Yep. So it's huge.

Over, uh, over, uh, um, 2,200 outbound appointments only in June by your team. Your record was 250 pre-Volley, uh, almost 4 years ago. Uh, I mean, and by the way, everyone, uh, Volley just organizes it. Uh, we have all people using this tool. Um, not everyone gets the same results as Kim. You all can, and, and that doesn't make— meant to make anyone feel bad. I'm just telling you Kim is a star.

Oh, thanks.

Yeah. So, so talk about June. How'd you do it?

Well, it was, it was just a combination of things we had. I've been narrowing down, Scott. I've been narrowing down my outbound leads. Those that are not productive, those go in the bottom for when we're out of all the other ones. And I don't prioritize certain leads anymore that I was prioritizing when I looked at the conversion rates of each campaign. Campaign, I put those high conversions up at the top and those are my number one go-tos. And we just focused on that. Plus I got— I focused real hard on the OEM telematics leads. Every day we were putting in the telematics for all online dealerships. And as long as, you know, you stay on top of those things and keep track of what your business is doing as far as those conversion rates on those campaigns and manage them correctly, You're set up for success.

So a little bit of science, also a little bit of focused effort too. You guys were way up in attempts, right?

Yes, way up. Yeah. Well, and I, you know, the way I compensate my agents is by tiers, and I don't stop at a certain number of outbound calls per month. They keep earning per call. And so they have figured that out. And I've got some rock stars that are, if they're not on an inbound, they're not messing around in any other, you know, queues or anything. They're making a call because they see the benefit of it. And I paid some big bonuses this month.

Well, we'll talk about the financial impact in a bit on outbound. But, you know, it's interesting when you, when you talk about prioritizing the, the the more higher converting ones. And everyone listening, remember, if a customer has skipped you, they are 3 times harder to convert than an active customer. So, if you want loyalty and consistency in your business and you want to keep growing, make sure you don't have any customer seepage. You've got to make them not skip you. And I know Kim and I spoke about that last fall, you know, some of these conversion rates and you really made it work.

I did, you know, and you guys have all helped so much because you know your program so well. You've seen what works. And I can't tell you how often you or Katie will say to me, hey, have you tried this? Or, hey, have you looked at this? And you guys have been fantastic to work with as far as helping me build this business. So I appreciate that.

And you still made 4,516 non-revenue calls in the BDC. Geez. I mean, that was maybe another 1,000 appointments, wasn't it? I guess not quite because of the shorter calls, but it might have been 600 appointments. There's still meat on the bone.

Yeah, I've still got some left. I'm still not getting through all my outbound queues in a month. Still not. And I've hired 2 more people. It's— we have gone so heavily focused on outbound. And, you know, I remember you told me you need to get to where— this was years ago— you need to get to where you're at least 50% inbound, 50% outbound. And I scoffed. I'm like, I'm never going to get there, Scott. Well, now, last month we made 16,000 outbound calls and took 12,000 inbound calls. And now those inbound calls were even more than the year over year last year. So we're not losing inbound. I think we're just catching a lot of our customers before they have a chance to call. We're being proactive with them, and that's leaving space for other customers to be able to actually get through to us. So it's worked great.

You know, and it's interesting, you said you paid big bonuses. The power law in tech is, is kind of a winner takes most concept. And you can apply this to most everything in business nowadays. The best restaurants get the best servers. Um, by having the best outbound crew, you'll keep more people because you're able to pay them for the revenue they generated. Uh, right. I mean, Desiree had 345 outbound appointments in a month.

In a month. And, you know, 4 years ago, that was our entire team. Almost double what we were averaging in a month. So one person's now making what I would have been thrilled with for the entire team 5 years ago.

Everyone listen, Desiree still took her fair share of inbound calls, made those customers happy. 345 outbound appointments at the average RO. They have domestic stores, they have BMW stores. So you can kind of blend that and know that, that she drove, I don't know, is it 400 times those 345, uh, uh, outbound appointments she made? It's, it's gigantic revenue.

Gigantic.

Enjoyed her paycheck for the month?

Um, when I released the bonus totals, uh, she had a grin from ear to ear on her face and she deserves every bit of it.

Yeah.

Everybody did well.

And really, one thing that you've really done a great job at is aligning motives with the service department, with your BDC, and it's good for the Joe Cooper organization, right? Yeah.

Finding out what we need at the dealership level and then incorporating that into what I specifically have them target through bonusing. Has, has just made everything flow so perfectly. You know, I'm not going to pay, you know, just by phone call because is it a productive phone call? I'm going to give them all these different layers that they can earn off of, and it, it seems to work great. And if the dealerships are slow, I put one up to the top. If they're saying, hey, you know, we need more traffic, we need more traffic, I'll put their priorities up higher, get them some traffic for a couple of days, have the team focus on those that store or those two stores and then go back to an even playing field for everybody else. But sometimes one dealership needs a little boost and I'm able to do that so easily. Just click of a button.

What you have done is, and most of our customers have, I mean, we've got a lot of really good customers, but the BDC is meant to be a profit center. So what's the impact been on the organization?

Um, well, I get a lot of raised eyebrows when I started reporting on just the revenue that the BDC was creating through outbound only. And I don't think any— and you're the one that told me to look at it. I had never looked at it, Scott. And when I looked at that and then started tracking it month over month, year over year, it was extremely surprising. For— and I know you already know these numbers, but, uh, last year in June, our revenue for Nine Rooftops was $1.2 million created just through outbound, which I love that. Well, this June it was $2.1 million for Nine Rooftops, just outbound.

So everyone, just get your arms around that. Uh, there isn't a single dealer in the country that their retention rate is, is 100%. And every outbound appointment— I have no idea how you do this math, by the way, to know what this is— but every outbound appointment you have, either they weren't coming in or they weren't coming in as quickly. So that $2.18 million of revenue you had, some of those people would have came in not as fast. That's also worth a ton of revenue to the dealership because if you can speed up your database, pretty soon you've got an extra month of revenue.

Pretty soon you do. And you know, it's not just— I, I've— my agents will dive a little bit deeper whenever they're doing that appointment. It's not just make the appointment and move on. It's, oh, I see you have declined or deferred services from a previous visit. Would you like to go over those with me now? And if somebody needs tires, they're recommending an alignment. They're, they're that first little step of setting up the appointment in a positive manner so that when that customer arrives at the dealership, they're already happy.

Yeah, I mean, just listening to you though, they couldn't do that from day one. That took you teaching and mentoring them, and the dealership had to buy in that this could be a profit center, right? I mean, absolutely right. So what's next for you guys?

Oh, wow. We are going to start focusing on a couple of areas that I never have focused on because I didn't have time. And so I'm actively hiring a couple more agents to put on the team and we're going to go after those. I've never gone after our no-show appointments. And so now I'm going to chase those really hard because we took all this time and all, all these things went into creating that original appointment. And for some reason the customer couldn't come. Well, I haven't been taking care of them. And so That's what we're gonna focus on moving forward is those no-show appointments, making sure that they know that we're gonna call 'em back and try to get 'em back in because that's already set up.

Yeah. How many people who have bought a car from Joe Cooper need to service their vehicle? What percentage?

All of 'em. 100%. Yeah. All of 'em.

So our job is to make it easy for 'em and you guys do a great job.

Thanks.

I'd like to take the credit Uh, um, I'm so proud of what this BDC is. I've, I've of course been in there and watched them work, and they're a great team. You guys are just awesome. So, um, thanks for taking the time today. And, uh, this was another volley rally. Kim, any, any closing thoughts?

Well, I just remember whenever you told me you're going to be making over 1,000 outbound appointments a month, and I laughed in your face. And now you can laugh in mine, Scott.

Well, you knew it could be enjoyable, but, uh, I think together. So thank you.

Thank you. See you guys.