Sales Advice By Market

Selling to Auto Starting Services Businesses

As the dust clears, auto services businesses are gradually bouncing back from the Great Recession and are starting to reinvest. Here's what you'll need to sell to auto services businesses in this business climate.

Initiative and perseverance are excellent personality traits for sales professionals. But selling to auto services businesses requires more than an impeccable work ethic.

A strong value proposition and a great strategy are requirements for companies who sell to auto services businesses. Although there are market challenges, emerging companies can gain traction by applying a handful of proven sales principles.

Sales Strategy Tips

Effective auto services business sales strategies focus on selling fundamentals and ROI. Some sales techniques are more capable than others and the ones that maximize ROI need to be prioritized.

Also, it's important to avoid a silo approach to auto services business sales. Companies that isolate their sales units fall behind in the marketplace, especially when they face companies that encourage collaborative processes between sales, marketing and other units.

Market Aggressively

Ambitious marketing directly impacts auto services business sales success. A combination of tight competition, multichannel approaches and emerging marketing technologies mean that you'll need to flawlessly execute your strategy to capture the attention of decision makers.

A large portion of your marketing efforts should focus on gathering leads and contacts for your sales force. Lead lists are a legitimate and important resource in lead generation and can be purchased cost-effectively from Experian and other reliable third-party providers.

How to Evaluate Sales Staff

Periodic staff assessment is essential for companies that sell in this industry. Businesses that achieve significant market share recruit the cream of the crop and routinely evaluate them against performance goals and benchmarks.

Although annual reviews may be enough for other business units, sales units should be evaluated quarterly with monthly or weekly reviews of sales totals. Training, coaching and sales incentives can be useful for improving performance and revenues. In some instances, it may be appropriate to team underperforming sales reps with reps that have more experience selling to auto services businesses.

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