Top 10 (Easy!) Tasks To Improve Your Sales Pipeline Experience

The end of the year is a great opportunity to review what you've been doing for the last 12 months to make sure you make the most of the AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  Check out the top 10 easiest tasks you can do to take your Sales Pipeline usage to the next level.

1.  Update your Lead Sources
​With the 17.4 release it is now possible to hide the Lead Sources you don't want your team to see when creating new leads.  Having a long list of Lead Sources can be detrimental to capturing accurate data as there will always be salespeople who cannot be bothered hunting for the right source and either leave it blank, or even worse - they add the wrong source.  With the ability to hide brand sources or AutoPlay's standard list without affecting reporting you can keep this list lean and easy to use.

2.  Update your Lead Campaigns
​A lot of customers will set up Campaigns for tracking activity against certain marketing actions.   Unfortunately many dealerships are also guilty of leaving these Campaigns active forever.  Just like Lead Sources, you don't want your Lead Campaign list to grow out of control.  You can untick old campaigns as not 'Active' which will remove them from the list - but you will not lose any historical reporting.

3.  Add Monthly Costs to your Lead Sources and Campaigns
​Who doesn't want to know ROI on their marketing activity?  By adding Monthly Costs to your Lead Sources and Campaigns, and capturing this source when loading leads the Sales Pipeline will automatically calculate monthly cost per lead generated.  Setting up costs is easy - just click on Settings>Sales Pipeline Settings>Lead Sources/Campaigns and enter a $ figure in the Monthly Cost field.

​4.  Review your Mandatory fields
​It's possible to customise which fields are compulsory when loading a lead in the Sales Pipeline.  AutoPlay sets a default of one of First Name or Company, and one of Mobile, Phone or Email.  However it's best practice to check your Data Quality report and work out which fields are getting missed.  Similarly check your Lead Source Report and see how many leads get captured without a Lead Source.  Although it's important to not make it too hard for your salespeople to load a lead, a balance must be achieved.  This field is not yet visible to customers so if you need this tweaked, contact support@autoplay.co.nz.

5.  Add Targets at the Dealer, Yard and Salesperson levels
​The Daily Activity Performance Report lets users view how they are tracking towards a target against the 3 key KPI's of Leads, Test Drives and Sales.  Setting targets is easy - just go to Settings>Sales Pipeline Settings then select either Dealership, Yard or Salesperson KPI's.  This will add the green target line to your reports.

6.  Check you are capturing all website leads
In this day and age no one should be manually loading leads from websites.  The end of the year represents a good opportunity to not only review your digital channels for effectiveness, but to double check that all of your digital leads are getting automatically captured to AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  If you discover you are not capturing from Trade Me/Autotrader or your website then contact AutoPlay Support on support@autoplay.co.nz.  We'll supply you with a capture email address to provide to your website provider/Trade Me/Autotrader.

7.  Review how many of your Closed Lost leads have a reason added
You can learn as much (if not more) from the leads you don't win, as the leads you do.  Whilst brands will do a good job of engaging with their customers, very little is done to assess why leads were lost in the first place.  The feedback from your Sales Team should be valued as it will reveal exactly where the process is failing.

​8.  Clean up any Overdue or Stalled Leads for the new year
​It does a dealership no good to have hundreds of leads sitting in Overdue or Stalled.  There seems to be a perception that these leads are as valuable as gold, but the fact is if nothing is done with them they are not going to ever help the dealership achieve it's sales goals.  If you do have a lot of leads Overdue/Stalled it will help make your Sales Pipeline more effective to close these leads as Lost.  With the new Live Leads process you can easily retarget these leads (see 10.) so you are not losing any potential sales opportunity - you are merely making your dashboards more cleaner and easier to manage.  The process is easy - just filter your Dashboard to Stalled or Overdue leads and use the 'Bulk Manage' option to bulk Close Lost.

9.  Clean up your User List
​The automotive sales market has a pretty high staff turnover as salespeople move from dealership to dealership.  What can happen is that Dealerships forget to remove the users access to AutoPlay.  This not only clutters the screen when allocating leads, but it is also a security risk.  With the Sales Pipeline when you change a User to 'No Access' it's possible to bulk allocate their leads to a new user.  This helps keep your Dashboard tidy and up to date and ensures that these customers continue to get looked after.

10.  Set up a plan for retargeting "lost" leads
​With only 20% of leads being closed as sold there is a huge pool of potential sales just sitting in your Dashboard right now.  The best AutoPlay dealerships have set up a plan to retarget their lost leads using AutoPlay's Live Leads process.  The key to this process is the ease with which you can build a list of recipients from your pool of captured leads.  This makes these emails more targeted and also allows follow up to be created automatically against the original leads and/or customers.  AutoPlay Live Leads does not cost anything additional for all customers on the Sales Pipeline package - send as many Live Leads emails as you want!

​From everyone here at AutoPlay we'd like to wish you a merry xmas and happy new year.  If you have any Support issues over the xmas break you can email support@autoplay.co.nz for assistance.