CarFling Asks Richard Scott-Martin to detail the timeline of a customer's vehicle purchasing journey.
It's simple to summarise the consumer buying process into two steps; realisation and acquisition. However, in reality, the process is far less simple. When it comes to purchasing a car, the decision making journey runs a lot deeper than a desire, partnered with the action of purchase.
The process of car buying actually contains an entire customer journey that we don't necessarily see before the point of transacting. The dilemma is that there's a real discrepancy between how we set up our dealerships to sell cars, and the way in which customers go about buying cars.
The amount of information that is available at our fingertips has fundamentally changed the methods that we can use to buy cars, but the processes that we go through to make the decision has not changed that much at all.
There are tools that dealerships can use to look at the customer journey through their perspective. When we look at how the customer journey is built and at the various decision-making models, it helps us understand the situations and contexts that customers find themselves in at different stages of the journey.
No matter the industry you’re in, it is highly important to understand your customer and know how to empathise with them so that you can properly guide them through these big purchasing decisions.
To help dealerships guide their customer through their journey, we’re taking you on an adventure of our own to teach you about a tool that can be used to look at the buying process through your customers' eyes.
We call it, The Timeline.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done framework and timeline allows us to anchor the various sequence of events that happen in the life of an individual that leads them to 'hire' a product or service.
As a dealership, we have to ask the following question,
“What was the trigger event that happened which caused this person to start looking for a solution to their problem?”
There are different events that bring a person into the buying process.
In the context of cars, it could be a car that is showing severe signs of wear and tear or an expensive car part like the engine that may need to be replaced soon. A trigger event like this may cause the person to pause and realise the need for a solution to this problem, and often the solution lies in the buying process. Evidently, buying a new vehicle.
As consumers, there are so many things to consider when making this type of big purchase. We need to look at our day to day lives to be in a position to understand what our options may be. This in itself varies from person to person. There’s a variation of weighing up options for someone who is buying their first car as opposed to someone who has experienced the car buying process before.
On one end of this spectrum, the buyer may be weighing up what they can afford, sourcing finance options, going through a more thorough searching process, and the other may simply be leveraging their experience and knowledge to make the choice.
Within this spectrum, you can see that there are similar stages that consumers must go through but how fast they progress between the stages is wildly different from person to person.
This is what makes sales complex, all because of the different contexts someone might be in when they’re looking to buy a new vehicle.
Anyone in sales must have the skill to quickly calibrate, understand and relate to where the customer is at that point in their buying journey. Businesses tend to focus on a sliver of the interaction, being the dealership visit or phone call or online enquiry submission. They often forget that there are all these things that have happened in someone’s life to get them to the point of looking for a vehicle on the platform.
As a salesperson, you need to focus on getting the full story from the customer you’re dealing with. Ask these questions,
“What happened that caused you to start looking for a new vehicle?”
“What else have you looked at?”
“Where are you in the buying process?”
You need to engage and get to a point where you feel like you’ve got a good understanding of where that person is in their lives and understand the circumstances around the triggering event that led the person to this buying stage.
From the trigger event, the next point on the timeline is passive looking.
The phase of passive looking means that the customer isn’t putting much energy into looking for their buying options. It could simply be the customer seeing billboards around town or looking at a friend’s car. Nothing serious has happened yet for the customer to start actively looking for their next vehicle.
The transition from passive looking to active looking is instigated by a serious occurrence. For example, severe damage to the vehicle, a friend mentioning that availability of a vehicle or simply an advertisement.
These triggers cause us to move to the part of actively looking for the new vehicle that we’ve subconsciously been thinking about.
When we speak about active looking, it means that the customer is now making a point of putting in energy and carving out time from their day to actively look for a new vehicle. These include tasks like looking at AutoTrader or Cars.co.za or looking at pricing references to ensure they're paying a fair price on a private sale. It could also include enquiring at a dealership about your various vehicle and financing options so that a well-informed choice can be made.
Take note, the enquiry is usually where the dealership would first encounter a client. There’s enough energy for the customer to commit to engaging in the buying process.
From the point of actively looking, the customer moves into the phase of deciding.
In the deciding phase, the customer has now assembled their options, they understand what their trade-offs are, and they can now look at the various choices that are available to them.
With all the options laid out, this is often the point where people get stuck in their buying process.
Typically, we move away from active looking once we’ve assembled enough information to be in a position to understand what the options are. There’s a shift into deciding where we actually make the tradeoffs then there’s the actual purchasing moment where we decide to commit to the purchase.
At this stage, the concerns that we originally had are now resolved and we can move into the final phase: usage. This is where you assess the fitness of the solution you chose. You ask yourself the question, “Does it live up to my expectations?”.
This phase alone is where trust, loyalty and referrals are built. As the salesperson, did you handle the transaction in a manner that leaves the customer feeling like they can return to you in the future for more business?
All of this creates the timeline of the customer experience when in the process of buying a new vehicle.
It’s a huge amount of work to buy a car, but it is an equally tricky task as the salesperson, to sell a car. You have the biggest task on your hands. How do we as dealers lighten the load for our customers? How do we reduce the amount of decision making involved? How do we reduce the fear and anxiety our customers experience and instead increase the amount of trust they have in us and in the process?
Consumers have a lot of “What ifs” when making a vehicle purchasing decision. As a salesperson, we need to address the situation and be empathetic towards their concerns. We have to put ourselves in the customer’s situation to understand what they would be anxious about in the process.
Once you start to have those conversations in your mind and take on their concerns, only then can you fully understand where they are so you can accurately lead them on their vehicle buying journey.
