Why Proactive Outbound Calls Win the Game for your BDC

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally. And today we have Scott on here to talk about outbound versus inbound. And one of the interesting things with this topic is we hear a lot of folks, especially before volley, before they're able to implement some of these strategies where they say, you know, I don't really have time to get to outbound. We're swamped with inbound. Scott, why is that not. Not a great strategy?

Yeah. Hello, Jake. We looked at, we've done this two straight years. So the first year we had a, we compared a control group who were due for service. We compared them to people who were enrolled and were spoken to. The lift on the database was over 52%. You know, we always wonder, gosh, what if we did nothing? So, but service is a guaranteed transaction, just not necessarily with our dealership. Right. So we needed to proactively reach out to customers because they don't think of us as much as we think of them. The math is pretty interesting though, Jake. So first of all, out of all the calls where an appointment was scheduled, on an inbound call, it was 4 minutes and 4 seconds end to end. If you take the outbound appointments, it was about 2 minutes and 50 seconds. If you take state inspection calls, it was about 2 minutes and 12 seconds. So think about the strategy of an outbound call. You've got a script, you've got a purpose. You're able to schedule the, the, the customer when it's convenient for you. When they're calling an inbound call, they generally want it done at a day. They want it brought in at the time that everyone else wants service. And, and they've generally got a problem. So they're controlling the narrative, they're controlling the, the, the tone of the call. Outbound appointment setting is pretty simple. If, if, as long as you make sure none of your numbers get flagged as potential spam, it generally works like this. For service retention. 100 calls leads to 35 conversations, which leads to seven to nine service appointments. And you know, if it were my BDC, I would always benchmark inbound and outbound separately and I would always try to shoot for an extra 100 outbound calls. E. As a team or as a person, you know, we like to coach our, our stores to make sure that people get 150 outbound attempts a day per agent besides their inbound calls they're taking. But it is just simple math. The great thing about an outbound call, besides what I've already mentioned, it's, it's a shorter time and you're able to be proactive is everyone who schedules an outbound call either wasn't going to come in to your dealership or they weren't going to come in as fast. So let's just even assume that every single person was going to come in anyway, but you got them to come in three or four weeks early because of this. It's harder math than I can do, Jake, but it doesn't take very long when you've got an extra month worth of service business. Speeding up velocity of your database. It's it's very important and you really can move the needle. Put a strategy in place, benchmark inbound and outbound separately and see your your needle move on your service business.

Awesome. It's definitely important for folks to be making sure they have an effective outbound strategy. And thank you for walking us through some of the data everyone tuning in. Have a fantastic day.