Tire Season is Coming-- Use it to Steal Market Share!

When I grew up in the business in the early to mid-90s, we would see our customers four times a year. We'd put the oil sticker on us three months, 3,000 miles. And now some cars may only need one service per year. So I love the spring and fall seasons to get the customer back into the shop. And one of the questions that always, you know, clients ask me is, hey, how do we get more business? How do we make calls? And I, for me, I'm not a fan of just making outbound, just sales calls. Like, customers hate those. So I want to have a reason. I want to have a purpose behind it. So this is a great reason to drum up the old database. Customers that haven't been in in 12 months to 24 months, to get a campaign going out on that, which is, you know, get ready for fall or winter driving. It's great.

Okay, so we'll. Let's talk about the north first, and then we'll talk about the south. So if you're anywhere that experiences a snow season where customers have their winter tires and their summer tires, basically. Right. Non winter tires, like, say, in Illinois or anywhere north, I would be. I would be storing their rims. Now we've set up with clients where we charge for that. So we charge a storage. And there's. There's different ways to do that. You can charge for it or you can make it a part of the benefit of buying the car. So. But either way, it's a retention tool. And oftentimes two things happen. Two objections come to light when we talk about doing this with a client. One is, oh, we tried that, and we lost their wheels or whatever. So you do have to be organized with it. You need to wrap them in plastic and put the customer's RO or information or something inside the plastic. So if it leaks, it rains, whatever, we still know who those belong to. And you. You have to be proactive and tell. Tell the customers ahead of time, book them ahead of time, control the input. So call customers a month out and plan it. Don't let them all just show up at one time.

Right.

That's the other mistake that they make is like, whoa, we just get too much and, you know, June or whatever. So you want to plan that out months ahead of time to swap it. But you're gonna sell more tires and you're gonna sell more alignments, and then they're gonna come in for the other stuff. The other thing is, is when you do change the rims in that scenario, inspect the car truck. I Don't know how many clients we've had that will do the storage part, but they just have a kid for $8 an hour doing it and nobody's expecting. So they're just letting all this opportunity because they don't control the input. They don't control how many are coming in and how often. And they're leaving it to chance. Customers wait until the very last minute and then they panic. So you got to call them and be ahead of that. Right. The other thing that happens with that is like, oh, we have nowhere to store them.

I've never had, I've never had that be the case. I, I can find wherever your shop or your dealership is, if I draw a three mile radius around it, I can find warehouse space cheap.

Right.

The, the retention is worth renting a warehouse for a couple thousand dollars a month.

It's, it's your advertising budget almost.

Right.

By the way your parts manager has time to do this, Jeremy will tell.

You.

I'm speechless to that one. Not going to say anything about it. I have a question.

Parts one, you've, you've submitted to parts?

No, I have not submitted to parts. I will fight that battle till the end.

Well, I, and all joking aside, I find that parts managers, once they accept this task are pretty good at figuring it out.

Well, I was going to say that.

The, they fight it at first.

The people that complain about losing tires, they probably put the parts manager in charge of that system the first year.

They just don't have a system to wrap them. You got to wrap them in plastic so they're all together. You have to commit to it.

So grab them and tag them.

Yeah.

Kind of like a dead body.

Yeah.

And get a place that, that, you know, we'll have clients, they'll have one container. Like you know, the containers on the back of assembly, they'll have one overflowing with them. You can't get in and out of it. You, you gotta, you gotta put them somewhere where they're inventoried and you can easily get to them. And then if you call months out and schedule it, then you have them brought over and you're ready to go. It's really easy. I've, I've yet to find the limit of how much you can charge to store and Mountain Balance. The, the, the Most we've charged is 399 and it wasn't a deterrent.

Yeah, I feel like 100 bucks is probably the thing I hear the most somewhere around that zone.

But that is not the top of the market.

No, it's not. But the thing.

And when customers say, like, oh, we don't have anywhere to store them, I'm always like, just charge more.

Right.

Like if you're storing 200 of them every season, we probably could store 400 if you weren't the anti storing them machine. But if we charge 250, it pays.

For itself, hands down. I think that that's the big thing too, is that you recognize in your market, if it's urban, there's way more of a demand for that than somebody that might be out in a rural area and they have more storage area. But I just want. It's that dehorsing thing that we used to talk about when I was in sales. Get the customer out of whatever it is that they have, and then they're a captive audience, but they're always going to be coming back. The other thing that I noticed too, to your point about scheduling things, is with my clients up north, when do they get the big rush of tires? Right. They call after the first snowfall, and then all of a sudden it's panic. It's crazy, and it's chaos and everything like that. And that's the big thing is with that tire stuff, if you have all their tires, you know, the 200 or 400 people that you've got that have them, you start kind of planning that out five a day for, you know, every. From the. From the middle of September to the end of October is what you're doing. Everything like that, you schedule it out and it's nice and easy, and then it's guaranteed revenue. I think that that is just. It's the glue.

Also, you can call them and tell them like, hey, your tire measurements at this. We should put new rubber on these rims.

Yeah.

So you can be ahead of it. I love how Jeremy is agreeing. Like he knows what we're talking about, but he's never experienced tire season in Chicago.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot. You haven't really been up in the cold area now.

I've been coaching for a lot of years and I've had clients, I've been in New Hampshire when they've gone through this. So I understand one of the interesting things about down, you know, in the States, at least I know north of the border is like, very consistent. But a lot of times, like in New England, they do wait for that big first snowfall to trigger it. And some customers may not want to schedule it because they're like, well, if it's still 60 degrees outside, I'm going To, you know, burn the tires up. I'm going to wait till we get snow on the ground. So stuff like that.

But that's easy to overcome. You just say, hey, we need to get ahead of this. Because when it does happen, everybody wants to come in at one time and you don't want to be stuck. And we, you know, might have to have you wait a couple days. So you just tell the customer the truth.

Do you like how I let him into that role play? Just.

He loves the role playing. Dirty dog.

Yeah, see right there. Now, the other thing is package. So you mentioned selling more alignments. I would have a package that has all that pre built into it, which is maybe an annual service package with the alignment and everything built into one so you're not having to make a lot of different presentations.

Yeah. And also, if you're a dealership, every time you sell a new or used car, you could give them a coupon for half off the first storage or even do it for free the first year. Once they get hooked in and you have one set, you got them.

All you need is the wheels, man.

Yeah.

So it's over after that.

If you sell, like, it's always funny to me is I'll be like, okay, how many do you guys store? And they're like, oh, 50. And I'm like, well, how many new cars do you sell a month? They're like 150. I'm like, so in a year you.

Don'T have a 5% capture.

You're like 1500 cars. And you're like, what? No, it starts in F and I, it starts at the sale. And then how many used cars? Like, why can't, you know, why can't you storm on those two? So it starts up front. You have home field advantage. Act like it.

Yeah, I think from the time of the sale, like, the dealers that we see do it the best are the ones that during the sales process, they're actually selling the winter tires and wheels right on the thing. And the customer never even sees it. It's like, oh, we'll let you know when it's getting close to time to put on. We've already got them stored and your names on it and everything like that. Like, they're yours in service forever. And they haven't even left the dealership from the sale.

And now's the time to think about it. We're talking about it early to give you a head start. Now let's. Oh, go ahead.

Well, independence. This can be a competitive advantage to where if you want to break into this market, come up with a very unique marketing campaign to start to take some of this market share away. So if you're not storing tires, think outside the box and find a place to do it and create that as another revenue stream. Because if you can add three or four hundred sets of tires that you're storing, I mean, that's a golden opportunity to do a full inspection on the car and meet a customer, really build a great relationship with them, pull that car out of the dealership. Maybe the independents can get to a 95% attrition rate where we take in 95% of the cars out of the dealership.

Instead of 80.

Instead of 80, yeah.

Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode on YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins, and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram @ChrisBulldog Collins. And I'll see you again on the next episode.