5 Reasons It’s Not Your Breath

No doubt, things like bad breath can be a turn off. However, most of the time a customer walks without buying isn’t because of halitosis across the desk.

For sure, sales associates must attend to personal hygiene matters, dress appropriately for the market and clientele, and communicate in a respectful and gracious manner to everyone, especially customers.

So why then do customers leave without buying? Are the reasons they give to our sales staff for walking the real ones? It’s kinder to the ego to believe they left to check with a spouse or for other excuses than for the “Real Reason versus the False Excuse.”

While many believe the highest percentage of customers leave due to lack of time or that they need to speak with another decision maker, a recent study found that the real reason is that there was some problem in the sales process, commonly known as the “Road to the Sale”.

At 27%, Sales and Management Staff issues ranked as the highest single reason customers abandoned the sales process at dealerships. The Sales and Management Staff issues reported by the survey respondents broke down into the following top five reasons customers give for walking unsold:

1. Feeling disrespected
2. Sales person doesn’t know his or her product
3. Being handed off to another associate
4. Ignoring and therefore not recognizing the influence and power of the female partner in a buying duo
5. The TO becomes a confrontational and uncomfortable experience

By far, these types of fixable issues make up the single-largest group of reasons customers walk from the dealership sales process without buying. None of these reasons is unfixable. You can address them through training and by insisting managers hold staff accountable for following processes in place at the dealership.

According to the report by the Unsold Research Call Center, the top reasons customers walk (other than Sales and Management Issues) aren’t nearly as correctable or important:

1. Shopping another vehicle – 21%
2. Vehicle price – 12%
3. Finance issues – 12%
4. Inventory – 9%

Want to know more about improving sales, be-backs and decrease third-party leads, click for the report, “An Auto Dealer’s Guide to Outselling the Competition.”