17 - Car Dealerships, Pool Builders and You: Solving the Universal "Follow-Up" Problem

All right. So I'm catching up with a buddy last weekend. He oversees financials for a big group of car dealerships locally. And I asked him how business was and he said, well, you know, it's a grind. I said, well, like, tell me more. What's like, what's your biggest challenge right now? And he said, you know, man, it's really just getting the salespeople to follow the processes. And of course, my ears perked up, right? Because we run sales coaching programs for elective practices all over the country. And so like, that's, that's my world. And I'm like, all right, well, that's interesting. Like, what, what part of the process are they not following? You know, and I'm thinking like car dealership, maybe they have a certain script or a certain order that they do things or way they present the price. I mean, we've all bought cars, right? And you sit down and it's, it's the let me go talk to my manager and then like, let's do some add-ons. And like, there's a whole You know, there's seemingly a whole system to that. And I was guessing, well, maybe it's that, or maybe it's something related to that, plus the fact that just the consumer is more aware and has more research available to them. And so maybe that system is breaking. So I'm like, yeah, like what part of the process are they not following? And it actually wasn't anywhere near as complex as I was sitting there thinking, right? I'm overanalyzing it. And he says, it's follow-up. He said, it's follow-up. My, our salespeople just aren't following up. They're not following up with leads. They're either like, we'll get a lead and it'll sit there, or they'll follow up one time and, and then like it'll go stale because we're just not following up with them and just trying to get them to do all their follow-up is really a pain. And I'm like, preach, I get it. I get it. Because we see the same thing on the elective surgery side. You get leads that come in, maybe they don't answer, maybe they don't respond at first. And all right, well, something else comes up, something more important, right? You got a patient in front of you, you've got the urgent task that you have to get done. And those leads that, that you never connect with, they get backburnered, they get buried. Like, it's not hard to generate leads right now. The leads are there to be had. The targeting, especially on social, is better than it's ever been. We're generating leads for clients for, you know, a fraction of what it cost to generate leads even 5 years ago. The lead's not the problem. It's connecting with the lead, educating the lead, you know, basically turning them into a quality lead. That's a whole nother topic. But I just thought it was so funny that, you know, it's easy for us to think like our challenges are unique to us, unique to this industry. And it's like, no, man, they're not. It's universal. We're all on our phones all day long. We're all supremely distracted. We're all getting spam calls that we ignore, right? We're all in positions where we must be followed up with multiple times, regardless of the industry, regardless of the product. Now, I will tell you that the one thing that is like you could say like, oh, these, these cars and elective surgery, they're different. But one aspect of that is very, very much the same. And that is every single lead they get is somebody who's reached out to the dealership in some form or fashion. They wanted a quote. They were looking for a certain model of vehicle. They were looking into payment options. Something, something led them to raise their hand and say, I'm interested on some level in getting into a new vehicle. They're not cold calling people. And it's the same thing with you. Like, anybody that you're reaching out to has clicked a social media ad, filled out a form, taken a self-test, requested more info. Downloaded a pricing guide, something. Like, and they didn't just do it because they were bored and decided to hang out on this website I stumbled across. Let me click around a little bit. Like, on some level, man, they want what you've got, just like they want the vehicles that my buddy's got over on his car lots. And so we got to keep that in mind. We're not bugging people. We're simply fulfilling the promise that we've made to our clients and our patients and ourselves to not just let them fall by the wayside after they've raised their hands for help. Now, is that easier said than done sometimes? Yeah. Like, you're busy. You've got a lot going on in your practice. Your people are pulled a lot of different directions. Doesn't mean that it can fall by the wayside. Yes, we've got to deal with the right here and the right now. Right. But we also have to build the runway. We've got to focus out. We've got to follow up with those folks so they turn into patients next week, next month, next quarter. So some practical input here that you can take, you know, like tactically put to use if you are having trouble with follow-up, your team is not following up with leads, right? I guess first of all, you need to know if they are or not. You need to have some kind of visibility some kind of a CRM with tasks and alerts and notes, not because you want to micromanage them, but so there's some built-in accountability. Like, hey, we got these leads, we spent money to get them, they needed our help. How soon did we call them? Needs to be very, very quick, right? Within 5 minutes. No, I did not stutter. Within 5 minutes. Okay, we can't be waiting 2 days to call a lead. And then we need to follow up with them relentlessly. So you need some accountability there. And then look and see what can you do from a technology standpoint to help supplement that follow-up. Do you have automated messages or message series going out to these leads? That's a great first step. Like, don't do it all manually. Yeah, you'll need to do some of it manually. And in fact, I recommend you do a portion of it manually. If you try to automate everything, it's going to all have to be so general that it just doesn't— there's no tip of the spear to actually cut through the noise and create the signal that you've got to put in front of the patient. So you can't automate all of it, but automate some of it to get the conversations going. If you don't have that or you can't do that or you're not comfortable doing that, there are companies out there who you can bring in to follow up with your leads. And we've got a couple of contacts at good companies for that. If you're interested, reach out. I will make the connection for you. Okay, I'll make you some recommendations. I'm happy to do that. That's another option. And then another aspect of this is just like making your people more equipped to do it. Part of the reason that people don't do follow-up, and we know this from coaching thousands of team members who've come through our programs, is like, it's hard. It's hard. It's frustrating. What do I say? I don't want to sound needy. I don't want to sound desperate. And so they're just constantly thinking of stuff to say and to do. And so part of what we do in our coaching program, we've got a couple of very specific plays that we run for follow-ups that we teach your team how to do depending on what kind of follow-up you're doing. Is it lead follow-up? Is it a consult that didn't convert? And so we teach them very specific plays that they can go and just simply execute. Makes it a lot easier for them. And then we also have a, a special AI tool that we have created, and we've built this around all of our, uh, all of our coaching components, all of our bootcamps, our masterclasses. We've poured into those, and it's specifically designed so that you can give it a couple of pieces of information, tell it where you are in the follow-up process, and then it'll give you a follow-up message to send to the patient. Not just like, hey, message them about so-and-so, like, here, send this.. And so it makes it dead simple and you know, it's good enough to get you like 90, 95% of the way there, which is 10x better than starting from zero for your team. And so way, way, way easier and even more enjoyable to do follow-up. And when something like sucks less and is more fun, people are gonna do it more. More follow-up equals more conversations. More conversations can lead to more conversions, and that's numbers on your surgery schedule. So. Those are a few different ways that you can tackle doing your follow-up, either through technology, external partners, or coaching. And it doesn't have to be exclusive to one of those. You can have a mix of those. If you're like, Troy, this sounds good. I don't really know which direction to go or what's going to be beneficial to me or what to do. Shoot me a message and ask me, and I will probably ask you a couple of questions and steer you in the right direction. All right. All right, so that's your note for today. You are not special, and that's a good thing. Okay, your problems are similar to problems of car dealerships and interior designers and pool builders and all, you know, it's all the same stuff, man. It's like follow up, cut through the distraction, be the last man standing. Or woman standing for your patients, and you will reap the rewards. And I've given you some very tactical ways that you can do that. Reach out if you want to chat more about it. I'm here for you. Talk to you soon. Bye.