Finding BDC Success: The 3 Core Essentials

A Business Development Center (BDC) at it's heart, is about one-to-one interaction: People talking to people, connecting & interacting - sales, in all its stages and forms, is still a people business. So for a BDC to truly be successful - to add significant bottom line profits without significantly adding overhead - these 3 key essentials should be part of any new or existing BDC operation .

Key # 1: The BDC Agent

Finding the right agents really starts with defining an agent profile: Articulate, good reading and math skills, enthusiastic, great phone voice, reliable, ability to multi-task, energy, etc. Knowing the traits you want in an agent is vitally important to recruiting the right people. You'll reduce the time spent interviewing unqualified candidates and streamline the entire recruiting process, including agent 'time-to-readiness'.

Recruiting, initial training, ongoing training & quality control also play an important role in developing your agent base. Productivity can be directly linked to how prepared agents are BEFORE they get on the phones and the ongoing feedback received from their calls and overall performance. Creating an ongoing training and quality control process will help your agents understand how to handle objections & rebuttals and close more appointments (which is & should be their primary goal).

Key # 2: Management (and their full buy-in)

Equally important to the success of any BDC, is a management team that has fully bought-in to the integration of a BDC operation (whether in-house or outsourced/offsite). Assigning the right budget, supervisors and processes takes planning, money and time. From operations to administrative support, a BDC requires a management team that understand the functional components of a BDC and the relationship between the agent, dealership and customer. Recruiting, training and quality control processes in place? Check! Performance measurements (KPI), compensation plans, scripts, software and Internet in place? Check!

Key # 3: Technology

With the vast number of lead generation sources available, it's easier than ever to generate a high volume of sales leads for your BDC. Having the right technology to handle the volume is essential. Gone are the day's when a room full of agents manually dialed hand written lists (although many dealers still employ this method). Predictive dialing technology allows for thousands of daily dial attempts and allows for instant response to new leads by integrating with dealer ILM, CRM or other lead databases. Agents no longer have to listen to answering machines and busy signals and on average, will spend 80% of every hour on a live call.

While this is just a summary snapshot, with each of these 3 keys in place & fully operating, a BDC will provide the dealership with:

• Improved lead conversion rates
• Improved market penetration and share
• Higher level of customer service quality
• Profits!

There is obviously much more that goes into a BDC operation, but rarely will a BDC function at a high level without the '3 Core Essentials'.

The (Very Well Known) Secret to More Showroom Traffic: The Phone

Every day, thousands of dealerships across the country struggle with the same issue: "How do I get more people to walk into my showroom???"

Increasingly, dealerships are finding it harder to get traditional advertising and marketing to produce successful results. More money is being spent to generate more leads that convert into fewer UP's on your showroom floor. Does the problem lie in the advertising? The sales rep? Inventory? Competition?

The simplistic answer is that it's a combination of all those things. What many in the business will point to however, is that the benefits of the Internet also include some new challenges, primarily in the form of increased competition. Any dealer in your market can now not only get massive exposure, but they can compete on a car-by-car basis well before the customers ever steps out of their door.

So how are the dealerships that are continuously busy staying busy? How are they beating out the competition? How are they converting more leads into showroom traffic?

The answer is very simple: The phone.

The majority of dealerships that are successfully answering the above mentioned challenges are using the phone to pro-actively reach out to their leads. Revenue growth requires a strong dealership sales cycle, and the best way to add both revenues & profit is to spend the same or less while selling more. Improving your lead conversion rate does just that.

Current Response Rates:
Telephone (8.21%) once again ranks highest, ahead of oversized mail (1.44%), letter-sized direct mail (1.28%), postcard (1.12%) and catalog (0.94%). The median conversion rate for email is 0.03%, while the mean conversion rate is 0.21%. Conversion rates for paid search and display ads are 0.22% and 0.04%, respectively.

Utilizing a Business Development Center (BDC) to make pro-active contact with new and unsold leads is proven to result in higher lead conversion rates. A phone call helps build excitement, create a sense of urgency. A one-one conversation also helps built rapport, overcome objections and sell the appointment.

With a BDC, the dealership benefits from:

• Dedicated phone professionals
• Consistency in the handling of new leads and follow up with unsold leads/past customers
• Ability to handle any lead source and any volume
• A lead-to-buyer cycle that converts more leads into showroom traffic 

Whether you decide to implement a full fledged in-house BDC, a partial BDC or outsource it all together, a BDC and the phone calls they generate is a powerful source of new business, if done correctly. 

In our next article, we'll discuss:

• The 3 key essentials of a successful BDC