Do You Want To Increase Your RO Count? (Service Drive Revolution Drive By)
Chris Collins and Christian Lafferty argue service managers waste money chasing new customers when they should squeeze more value from existing repair orders. Customer acquisition costs $25 to $150 per car, and half of new customers never come back. Better inspections, pricing, and advisor training on current customers beats spending to drive traffic.
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome, everybody, to your Friday drive by on service Drive Revolution. I'm Chris Collins, and this is Christian Lafferty. How you doing, Christian?
I'm doing great. Happy Friday.
Happy Friday to you. So I want to talk today about something that comes up over and over again, and I just want to break it down. I want you to think about it a little bit different. I want to. I want to turn it around and upside down. And I. I want to analyze the logic. Because a lot of times we ask a question, but we're asking the wrong question, right?
Definitely.
Okay, so what's the number one thing that service managers and dealers say when they call us? They want training so they can.
Get more traffic. Increase auto account. Good job there. For a second I was like, oh, maybe he doesn't know what we're talking about today.
That was called suspension.
Suspense. Works on me for sure. I don't know about our friends out there in the world, but speaking of.
Suspense, before we get too far into this again today, what is the difference between roast beef and pea soup?
What is the difference besides the clear? One's a vegetable, One's.
Yeah, meat. That's a good point.
So besides, that one tastes terrible. One tastes great.
Yeah.
One could not be made into a soup. The other one clearly is meant to be in a soup.
There's a lot of differences there. You might have blown this whole thing.
But the real difference between the two items of roast beef and pea soup is that everyone can roast beef.
I like that. You have to think about it.
I don't get it, honestly.
What does that mean?
Could you pee soup right now?
Oh, man, I love it. Okay.
Increase your RO account. So why do. Why? Let's go into the psychology of a service manager. He's got a department.
His taxer, 70% efficient. His average sales are, you know, not that great. His net to gross isn't that great. And now he wants more traffic. Why?
What.
What does. In his head. Not. Not what we know, but in his.
Or her head.
Why they equate cars to dollars.
Right. Okay, so let's talk about that for a second. Moving cars through the shop is expensive. Getting new customers that don't know about you usually. You know, in my experience, it costs about 50 bucks to get a new customer. And then, you know, half of those customers come back after you spend the 50 bucks. So really, it costs maybe 100 bucks.
So you're gonna spend $100 for every one customer that stays with you for a couple years.
And that payoff's not immediate. All the time.
How much does it cost you to increase your efficiency in your shop?
Exactly. No money.
How much does it cost you to do better inspections on every car that's there or truck?
It is free.
How much does it cost you to check history and sell? More maintenance.
Let me get my calculator.
Nothing.
So with the exception of when we've been hired to go in and help a dealership, that's a brand new point. So let's say a Volkswagen goes into a brand new market or Honda store goes into a new market or.
Something brand new that has no built in traffic with that exception. And that is the only exception. I have never had traffic.
Be the answer, in fact, because people are so stuck on traffic. What do I do? Do you know what I do? No, I, I tell them, I'm like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get your traffic up, but first we're gonna do this and this and guess what never comes up again?
The traffic. Because.
Because once we get going, once we start selling more with what we have, like, it doesn't cost anything to have a pricing strategy that works. It doesn't. I mean, I don't know, you can train your advisors on our platform for a couple hundred bucks a month, role play with them and do all that. So for a couple hundred dollars, you can pretty much do all of this stuff that we're talking about. You don't need. Like just, if you don't have our on demand stuff, get that, that's better than getting traffic. There's oddly tools in there to build traffic, but you'll never get to those modules. You don't, you won't need it. So just understand that the most important thing is to maximize the opportunity you have in front of you before you get more opportunity. And just like we were talking about the question that we had the other day about, oh, you know, should I jump around or should I stay where I'm at? It is always better to.
Blow up what you have in a positive way to maximize the opportunity in front of you. And then you won't have to look for new opportunity. It'll fall in your lap. And it's the same thing with this is if you start doing better inspections, you improve the customer experience, you start maximizing your dollars per ro, you will lose less customers and you won't need to build traffic. You're probably losing more customers than we'd be able to replace with having bad systems and, you know, a bad customer experience. So just think about that. But 100% of the time, with the exception of doing that weird thing where I say you tell fact, but it's not a fact. Yeah, but 100% of the time that it isn't a new point. The answer is to get better with what we have, not. Not to chase traffic. You can get traffic, but it's expensive, and you got to get good at marketing. And it takes. It takes a lot of work. It's not easy.
Yeah, I would. I would suggest, too, I think that the costs are way more than we think it is. Like, we. We usually say 50 bucks, but I bet it's 100. I bet it's 150. Just.
I mean, I've done it quite a few times, and it. I've done it for as little as 25 and 55, I think, is the top. And there's some strategies you can do to do it. But.
When I go back in later and I look, a lot of those customers never came back again, it's like 50%. So you gotta, you know, if you're really doing the numbers.
It'S a lot of effort for little return, ton of energy.
For sure.
We can do that same amount of effort and get a huge return with what we have in front of us. And I don't understand why managers don't look at their reports and they're like, we could do better with what we have. We're like, we want more to do worse with. Because the other thing is, let's say you do get a bunch of traffic, and you're just gonna underperform with that traffic. The busier you get, the more shortcuts you take, too.
Yeah, for sure.
It's not scalable.
You know what this reminds me of a lot, and this isn't a joke, actually, believe it or not, is it reminds me of cable companies when you think about, like, how much the cable company will spend to try to, like, Conquest and get other people. Whereas what would happen if they just took some of that money and put it towards their existing customers that are loyal instead of trying to get these people that are just essentially flipping from deal to deal? Like, they put more energy and effort into trying to get Conquest than to take care of their client base? Like, we don't want to do that model. And that's what it almost sounds like people want to do. Like, they want to put everything into getting new people instead of focusing on what they've got right in their backyard.
So what we just learned is you have cable.
I don't have cable.
No, I don't either. Yeah, yeah.
But you know the good point?
No, totally. It's a great point. So let's do more with what we have instead of, instead of chasing traffic. Think about that going into the weekend. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.
Next week on Service Drive Revolution, we have a Christmas show for you today. I am in an ugly Christmas sweater and Christian is in an even uglier Christmas sweater.
I'm always thinking about naughty.
Well, the industry is in peril. We're all tumbling off of a cliff. You know my opinion about consultants. I hate consultants. And I certainly didn't think in the car business we would be lying to people to this degree. Like, you're the worst parents ever. Like, eat all the candy you want. Come and go as you please. Get pregnant when you're 13.
This is driving me crazy. We're going 110 miles an hour off of a cliff.
Cliff.
Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333, ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.
