Car Dealers and Information Gathering

Car dealerships rely a great deal on customer information. They’ve almost become cliché – where a car dealer always goes through the same basic process to sell you a car: They get your name and phone number when you come on the lot. They try to push you into buying a car you have only a small amount of interest in.

They give you a price and that price is higher than it should be. Once you refuse, they call in the manager. The manager gives you another price and pretends that they can’t go lower.

If you don’t buy the car, you leave, and then you get a phone call a week later with a better price. It’s a process that is annoying to many consumers, but all too common in today’s car dealership business model.

But it works, and that’s why car dealers use it. The problem for car dealerships is that first part – finding the people to hassle through this process. Most rely on people coming to their lots.

Others may respond to phone calls, but if you don’t find someone with interest, you don’t make sales. That’s why some car dealerships rely on surveys as their way of gathering more information on potential customers and using it to help them make a sale.

We’ve mentioned this before, but surveys don’t have to simply be for data collection and analysis. They can also be used as a marketing tool – a way of tricking potential customers into giving you their information. Many people happen upon car dealership websites because they’re looking for information to help them decide on what cars to buy, including price, quality, value, etc.

Car dealership websites rarely answer that question – often because the answer is subjective. But that’s why you can use surveys to offer a “service” to your potential customers. Create a survey that asks important questions about buying a car: What type of car are you interested in? What is your price range? What kinds of features are you looking for? What do you value in a car? What was your previous car and how closely do you want it to match? You can have someone on your sales staff recommend cars to the person, thus providing them with a service.

You can then get their information and use it to try to move them down the sales funnel. Any business can benefit from surveys in some way. This car dealership example is yet another strategy that uses surveys in a way that could benefit your company.