by Susan Burke, VP Product & Marketing, 700 Credit
Did you know that you can pre-screen your customers by soft pulling credit data, right from within many industry-leading CRM’s? The process is fast, easy and provides your dealership with valuable insight that will save your dealership time and money.
You know the old cat and mouse game, when a showroom up arrives and the salesperson is trying to qualify them with a series of questions? Many salespeople are trained to ask customers what kind of car they have, what their monthly payment is, how many payments are left, what the customer does (to get some insight into what their income might be), etc. All this information is helpful to the salesperson so they can work with the customer to help put them in the right car, right away.
The problem is, most customers find all these questions to be invasive and annoying. People don’t want to share their personal and financial information with anyone, let alone a car salesperson they just met.
Pre-screening or pre-qualifying eliminates the need to play this cat and mouse game, while increasing customer satisfaction and speeding up the sales process. So how does this all work?
When a showroom customer arrives, the first thing a salesperson typically does is to swipe their driver’s license or enter their name and address into the CRM. With a pre-screening tool integrated into the CRM, the General Sales Manager can instantly soft-pull credit data on that customer, with just a simple click of a button!
No social security number and no date-of-birth are required, and the customer doesn’t even know it’s happening. This type of “soft pull” does not register on the customer’s credit report as an official credit check, so there is no adverse affect on their score. However, to stay in compliance 700Credit will send that customer a letter informing them they have been pre-qualified for a loan.
Instantly the GSM has all kinds of valuable information about that customer, including their FICO score and auto credit profile. In addition to pre-qualifying in-store customers, pre-screening can be used to prequalify service lane customers and to prioritize Internet leads and phone leads. Additionally, salespeople can use the feature to mine for opportunities within your CRM.
Pre-screening helps you quickly and easily identify:
- The subprime customer so you can work them the right way from the start
- The equity customer with a high interest rate and good credit score
- The prime customer who can take delivery immediately
- The service customer who did not buy a car from you, but is in a good equity position
- The pre-approved customer – eliminating the intimidating process of waiting to hear if they are approved
- A motivated customer that has been recently shopping for a vehicle
- The credit history of your Internet leads before they even walk into the store
The ability to quickly identify the type of customer you’re working with delivers many benefits, including:
- Recognize opportunities to upsell in the service lane
- Minimize time spent with a customer by putting them in the right car, right away
- Helps to prioritize leads from all inbound sources by identifying your best opportunities based on credit profile
- Auto credit profile data is instantly appended to your CRM making it easy to access
- Improves closing ratios
- Helps hold deal gross
Pre-screening also gives the dealership information on a customer’s auto loan profile; including what their current monthly payment is, payoff amount, interest rate and more. This gives salespeople additional leverage to get that customer into a newer vehicle for a similar – or lower – payment.
Another advantage of having a pre-screening tool integrated with your CRM is the time it saves. No more jumping in and out of applications! Now you can perform the pre-screening right from within your CRM. This feature can be used for showroom customers, phone leads and Internet leads.
This additional insight helps to significantly speed up the sales process. If you’re trying to reduce your store’s purchase time from 4 to 2 hours, or even 1 hour, pre-screening is a must!
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