How to Sell Cars via Facebook – Real Social Selling
At this very instant, there are vehicle salespeople on Facebook enjoying 25 or more sales a month just by talking about their accomplishments and taking pictures of their lunch. Marketing themselves via Facebook has made a huge difference in their results; and all they’ve had to do is allow a huge intrusion into their lives, give up much of their privacy, and be ready to tell anyone and everyone that they love selling cars.
Welcome to new-school networking.
Social networking, just like old-fashioned networking, can help motivated salespeople deliver stellar results. But, just like old-fashioned networking, this takes work; and you must be proud of what you do and be ready to tell anyone and everyone online that:
- I sell cars;
- I’m honored to be selling cars; and
- I’m your friend in the car business.
When you do this (along with following some basic guidelines that I’ll share throughout this series), you’ll have people showing up at your dealership telling you, “I saw you on Facebook; can you help me buy a car?”
Beyond what social media can do for the hardest working salespeople in your organization, it’s an often overlooked, though extremely fruitful way to occupy a bored salesperson’s time, as well. Sales managers wanting to motivate those in the smoking circle could do much worse than encouraging them to begin driving their own Up Bus via Facebook Live (and other social media channels/tools). The industry calls this “social selling” (as will I); though it’s more a form of personal social media marketing and branding.
Quick disclaimer: This series is not The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Media Marketing or Facebook for Dummies. I’m going to assume you have some knowledge of this medium, so this will not be a step-by-step guide on how to upload photos or what time of day is best to post a video. In this series, we’re going to combine the social media best practices of some great social sellers with Assumptive Selling to show you how you can use (primarily) Facebook to drive Ups to your door.
Oh, and if you’re not already a convert to Assumptive Selling, you’re missing out on achieving higher closing percentages, quicker deals, better grosses, and great CSI. I strongly recommend you buy my 400+ page book: Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers available on Amazon.
Social Selling is Free
Done right, social selling shouldn’t cost you anything. While top social sellers may occasionally pay to have their posts seen in their market, this is not a requirement of social selling. There are plenty of social sellers today who use the tools they already own (their iPhone and a selfie stick), use their existing social media profile, and perhaps add a free tool or two (like Krutchit.com) to help them profitably sell to buyers they’ve never met. Buyers who show up to the dealership and ask for them by name, just because someone shared their post.
Why? Because before a consumer will buy something big (like a car, boat, major appliance), they need to find three things. They need to find Value, Relevancy and Authenticity. Simply put:
Value – “Is it a good price for what I’m receiving?”
Relevancy – “Does it fit my needs?”
Authenticity – “Can I trust the seller?”
It should go without saying that your presence on Facebook and other social channels is your chance to prove authenticity. That is, it’s critical that your Facebook “you” match the real you. However, when you’re social selling correctly, you will often have the chance to prove authenticity well in advance of the prospect discovering value and relevancy. Let me explain how this works and why this is great news for you.
The typical consumer today – one without a friend in the car business – finds a car they like online at a price they think is fair. They’ve discovered value and relevancy; now they need to try to buy that car. They might pick up the phone, send an email lead, or they might just walk on your lot. Regardless of how they came to you, they’ve already found what they want. Your job is to confirm value and relevancy while you prove authenticity. In these cases, your grosses are (for the most part) controlled by the market because you couldn’t build the value in the traditional sense.
When the consumer has a friend in the car business, they often go to that friend first with just a general idea about what they want. They trust their friend to find value and relevancy because the friend has already provided the authenticity. In these cases, the salesman-friend can make a fair profit on the vehicle because, well, they’re friends. When done right, social selling (just like old-fashioned networking) makes you their friend in the car business.
With social selling, you generate the buyers for yourself; keeping you in control of the process from beginning to end. Of course, you must remain authentic throughout the process because you want your newfound friends to recommend you to their friends after the purchase.
Social Selling and Facebook
Why Facebook?
There are literally scores of active social networks that someone could argue are important for you to consider if you’re going to try your hand at social selling. However, as of this writing, I recommend you initially focus solely on Facebook. I recommend this for many reasons, but not the least of which is that it’s the most popular. Moreover, your posts can go viral more readily there than on any other large social network.
Twitter, for example, just doesn’t deliver the same multiple-day lift that a great Facebook post can earn. When you Tweet something that’s pure genius – even if you’re properly using hashtags – your post can fall on deaf ears. That is, your post is missed by nearly all your followers and it gets buried in their stream. It’s gone.
Plus, Facebook rewards great posters. This basically means that if your last few posts were well-received (lots of likes, shares, and comments), your next post stands a better chance of being at the top of your friends’ and followers’ respective news feeds.
Finally, there are just too many social networks and places to share user-generated content to try to be everywhere all the time – it’s just not possible. Even though sharing content on nearly every social site is free, the time required to manage multiple profiles and posts ensures you receive a negative Return on Investment (ROI) on your efforts. Of course, if you’re already a member of and active on any other networks, be sure your profile clearly states:
- I sell cars;
- I’m honored to be selling cars; and
- I’m your friend in the car business.
ROI of Social Selling
Your investment with social selling is going to be measured in terms of time and effort. Your goal is to minimize both while you maximize the sales that great social selling can drive. The reason you want to minimize your time spent on social selling is because your time is not limitless. There are a finite number of work hours in the month, and if you dedicate nearly all of them to social selling, then you have little time for your other moneymakers.
You’ll want to measure your return on this time and effort investment in several ways. First, you’ll want to ensure you gain the necessary engagement to make this effort worthwhile. Engagement, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. That is, it’s up to you to determine if your efforts produce the engagement you’re looking for.
For example, if you post something to Facebook that produces no likes, no shares, and no comments, then you have no engagement; no interaction. Posts like these can hurt you (because Facebook’s algorithms begin to see your posts as irrelevant to your friends and followers) and these should either be avoided in the future or should be tailored to your audience in a way that generates engagement the next time. Without engagement, your posts cannot go viral.
Beyond the engagement, of course, your goal – and your ultimate ROI measurement – should be on the results these posts produce. That is, are you generating referrals, leads, calls, store visits, and especially sales from your activity on Facebook?
The most important rule on any sales efforts you make is to measure something… anything. Measuring allows you to improve your efforts. Without some form of measurement, you’re just throwing a bunch of crap against the wall and hoping that some of it sticks. Hope, as has been said again and again, is not a strategy – especially not in sales.
The Second Rule of Social Selling
The second rule on all your networking efforts (but, certainly with your social selling efforts) is to be patient. You might make a sale based on the first business card you hand out, for example, but you should expect to hand out 100 cards or more before the first referral roles in.
Likewise, with Facebook; your first post could generate a sale, but it’s more likely that it will take many hours of working on your Facebook posts before you start to see a return. Again, be patient, the sales will come.
Ultimately, any sales effort you make needs to pass the DISC Test. That is, Does It Sell Cars? With social selling it could take some time before you can honestly answer that question. Though, I can tell you there are vehicle salespeople selling cars today with relatively little effort on Facebook.
Social Selling is not for Everyone
Despite that there are social sellers today selling cars with relatively little effort on Facebook doesn’t mean they didn’t have to work hard to get to that point. They did. As I wrote earlier, social selling, like old-fashioned networking, takes work. This means that social selling will not be a fit for you if you look at it as some sort of dodge; some sort of way to avoid working.
If you can’t break away from the negative cliques and the smoking circles in your dealership, then social selling is probably not for you. It’s not a lazy man’s way to sell 30 cars a month. (Hint: There are no lazy man’s way to ever sell 30 cars in a month.) The top social sellers I know are the busiest people in their respective dealerships. Social selling requires work, but the rewards are great and the best part about social selling is that it’s fun. It really is.
There are a few common traits that the great social sellers of today share with the great salespeople of the past. The first one is activity. It doesn’t matter if they’re social sellers or they’re traditional salespeople, top sellers generate a lot of activity. They’re always doing something; they’re always working. What’s more is they’re always working towards their goal. In the world of social selling, they’re always generating content.
Another common trait among all top sellers is they follow a process. They are deliberate about what they do and how they do it; and they repeat the process over and over; improving it all the time. Because of this, their first week of the month is often as successful as their last week of the month.
Contrast that with the typical 12-car per month seller:
- Week One = 1 unit sold;
- Week Two = 2 units sold;
- Week Three = 3 units sold; and
- Week Four = 6 units sold.
You simply cannot sell 30 cars month in and month out if the first half of every month generates you just 3 units. The math just doesn’t work. In fact, for top social sellers, the only reason they would sell demonstrably more units during the last week of the month versus the earlier weeks is because management drove more traffic that week. If not for that, their month would be steady and predictable from beginning to end.
Top social sellers are never desperate. They know that by following their processes and sticking to these processes, they will reap the rewards. They know that for every five prospects in the funnel, they’re going to sell one. They just keep lots of prospects in the funnel. All top salespeople I’ve ever met, including top social sellers, approach every opportunity with confidence, because they know desperation will show; and no prospect wants to buy from a desperate salesperson.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but top social sellers, like all top sellers, are constantly dissatisfied. But this dissatisfaction is a good thing. They never beat themselves up; but, when they come off a 30-unit month, they don’t sit back and relish in the satisfaction for a week. No, they immediately start to plan how they can hit 31 this month. They know they can do better; they know they can work harder.
Top social sellers work for themselves, not the dealership. Again, this is a good thing – especially for the dealership! Dealers should want their salespeople to work for themselves; they should want them to be selfish. When salespeople are selfish, they sell more cars; they make more money and they satisfy more customers.
So, is social selling for you? It is if you’re willing to work; if you’ll follow a process; if you’re not prone to desperation; if you’re dissatisfied; and, especially, if you’re selfish!
Less is More with Automotive Social Selling
While I wrote that social selling takes work, this does not mean you should post 42 times a day. That is, unless you have something important to share with your audience 42 times a day. With proper social selling, less is often more.
There is certainly a value in being prolific on social media. You want to be productive and you want to be active, but you shouldn’t post for the sake of posting. You need to have something to say with each post. And, because you need your posts to gain interactions to go viral, posting crap no one wants to see is worse than not posting.
When I look at the mistakes new social sellers make – the ones I want to make sure you do not repeat – the biggest mistake I see is they get unfollowed because of their posts. (Hint: Just because someone is friends with you on Facebook doesn’t mean they’re seeing any of your posts. If a friend unfollows you, you remain friends, but they never see a thing you post.)
There are many reasons you might be unfollowed (or even snoozed), but the most prevalent reason for social sellers is they over-post. They basically vomit pictures of their inventory on Facebook – sometimes posting 15 or 20 cars a day, just because they can. When your friends see inventory post after inventory post, they get bored and they feel like their news feed is being spammed by you; therefore, limit your inventory postings! Less is more – especially when it comes to inventory posts.
The only inventory you should ever post to your Facebook profile (as opposed to Facebook Marketplace) are true deals and the Batmobile. If the car you’re ready to share doesn’t fit one of these two categories, then just don’t do it.
True deals are just that: true deals. A cash car priced $1,000 below KBB is a true deal. A brand-new $65,000 truck with a $2,500 rebate is not. Everything in between is up to you to determine if it’s a true deal or not. When you do post inventory you believe to be true deals on your social feeds, be sure to always include the price. Not including pricing online breaks trust with today’s consumers because it feels like old-school car sales; and you won’t appear to be anyone’s friend in the car business if you’re perceived to be an old-school car salesman.
The real Batmobile is unique; there’s (technically) only one and Batman drives it. Your lot, however, might be full of Batmobiles; you just need to look. Batmobiles on your lot are unique vehicles that may interest your friends. For example, if you’re a Dodge dealer and you have a Challenger SRT Demon in your showroom, congratulations, you have a Batmobile. Share photos and perhaps even conduct a Facebook Live event to show off this thing. This vehicle is unique and will be interesting to lots of your friends and followers.
Likewise, if you have a ten-year-old minivan with 53,000 miles on it sitting in your used car inventory, you have another Batmobile. Why is this old minivan a Batmobile? Because it’s unique! Limiting inventory posts to true deals and Batmobiles will keep your engagement up and reduce the number of friends who unfollow you.
No Politics!
As bad as over-posting can be to your follower count, a sure way to get unfollowed en masse is to post anything political – even if it’s funny – on your social media accounts. Social selling is about selling, and politics has no place there. When you dive into the political discussion, you’re bound to make someone angry. So, no matter how angry you are at the president, the congress, the governor, the mayor or even the local dog catcher, keep it to yourself! Politics and sales have never mixed, and they certainly don’t mix on social media.
Also, be clean. Keep your posts to G and PG rated material only. No one is ever going complain that you only post wholesome, fun, and interesting things. However, many will certainly object to foul language and posts in bad taste. So, for the sake of maximizing your sales from social, stay clean.
Stop Selling; Start Helping
Interesting fact, but social selling is not about selling at all. It’s about building relationships; it’s about letting people you’ve never even met know they have a friend in the car business. Friends in real life are helpful, not salesy; so, emulate this online.
Your job is to help people find the right vehicle at a fair price. They want your help and they’ll gladly pay for that privilege. They won’t, however, appreciate it if you appear to be selling them. This goes for your posts, as well. Before you post anything on Facebook, ask yourself, “Would my friends want to see this? Would my friends appreciate this post? Will this post help someone?”
You and your friends should be able to look back on your posts and agree that the content was compelling or funny or helpful. Social selling is about generating engagement that leads to a sale; and the more genuine you appear – that is, the more authentic you come across – the more likely someone is to contact you for help in buying their next car. More than that, they’re more likely to recommend you to a friend or family member.
Social selling is about transparency. You’re going to give outsiders an insider’s look at the car business. They’re going to see you’re a normal person with normal challenges. Your posts should be honest and full of mistakes; and, you should be ready to laugh at yourself as you make these mistakes. That’s authenticity; and we know once a prospect finds that first, you get the chance to build the value.
The typical Up fears sales pressure; they’re afraid of salespeople – especially car salespeople. Your honesty should come through in your Facebook posts (especially in your live videos) because this will reduce the fear someone has in dealing with you before they’ve ever even met you.
To carry out much of this, be sure to craft your overall message (and your online image) to convey the following:
- I’m your friend in the car business.
- My friends get good deals.
- I’m a humble expert when it comes to car buying.
- I’m not going to attack you when you get to the lot.
- I’m going to work hard for you.
- I’m going to be completely transparent and upfront with you throughout the entire process.
All sales activities, including social selling, have a cumulative effect over time. Plainly stated: What you do today matters today and tomorrow. Complete enough activities over a long enough period and you’ll grow your sales at a rate higher than you ever imagined. If you’re toiling at 10 cars per month right now, you likely won’t sell 20 next month if you just started social selling; but these efforts will eventually get you to 20, then 30, then 40, etc.
Think of it like this: What you sell today – so long as you gave the customer a great experience – will lead to at least two sales down the road. So, keep plugging away at those sales activities; keep plugging away at posting great content on Facebook. Eventually, you will become a true Social Selling Warrior.
Automotive Social Selling Warriors
Those who succeed at social selling – the true Social Selling Warriors – are often performers at heart. They don’t mind speaking up in public (which is different from public speaking), they’re passionate about their beliefs, and they’re especially passionate about selling cars.
Performers don’t mind looking silly if it’s for the good of the show – and putting on a show is often what you’re doing when you broadcast live video on Facebook. This means if you’re a little camera shy, you’ll need to cure yourself of this, work through it, or choose a different sales activity to get you to 30+ cars a month.
A great example of an online performer – at least as of this writing – is Ling Valentine from LINGsCARS.com. Her website is noisy, filled with distractions and (most of all) authentic. Ling’s willingness to put herself out in front and in comical situations is a big reason she is so successful.
I encourage you to visit LINGsCARS.com for yourself and check it out. When you do, you’ll find while Ling is wacky and zesty (my words), she’s also authentic and transparent. It’s the wacky and zesty that gets her noticed, but it’s the authenticity and transparency that sell her to the public.
By the way, for true Social Selling Warriors, social selling was not their goal. Their goal was and is to sell cars; they just found success going directly to their market to create their own Up Bus – rather than waiting for the regular Up Bus. (You know, the Up Bus that stops by far less often than it did in the past.)
Social Selling Warriors are skilled old-fashioned networkers. In fact, they spend more time handing out business cards and shaking hands than they do crafting Facebook posts. For them, social selling is merely an extension of their other networking activities. (If you’d like to learn the secrets to Old School Networking to today’s customers, or even just how to overcome more than 60 common sales objections, be sure to read my 400+ page book: Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers available on Amazon.)
Social Selling Warriors are marketers and they are self-promoters. But their self-promotion is not necessarily an outcropping of an overactive ego. In fact, most Social Selling Warriors I know are humble people. They truly care about others and would likely prefer that someone else was doing the promoting. However, they know that without their self-promotion, they would be selling fewer cars; helping fewer people. Self-promotion is just another job requirement to them. A job they love.
Social Selling Through Storytelling
One of the best ways to ensure you’re only posting compelling content to your social media channels is to focus on storytelling. With storytelling, your posts convey some message other than “buy this car” or “buy from me”.
Storytelling on social media, by the way, is not complicated and you don’t have to be a good writer. Storytelling on social media is simply talking to a friend. It’s explaining what happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It’s talking about the who, what, when, where, and why in authentic terms.
Let me give you two real world examples of social posts where one tells a story and the other does not. See if you can guess from my description which post is the one telling the story:
Post A: There is a picture of the inside of a car with the following text above it: “BMW has been recognized by J.D. Power for having the most user-friendly technology out of any other luxury brand. See which BMW models came out on top here.”
Post B: There is a picture of a snowplow on a snow-covered BMW lot with the following text above it: “Snow Day! We are open.”
Both updates were posted by the same dealership and yet only one of them tells a story. If you chose Post B as the storytelling post, you are correct. It was the only post of the two to have any engagement (one comment and eight likes), as Post A reads like a magazine ad. No one is interested in Post A – apparently not even the employees at this BMW dealer, since the post received zero interaction.
Post B tells a story by showing what happened (snow), what is happening (we’re plowing), and what will happen (we’re going to be open today). It doesn’t matter that it tells this story with one picture and five words, since the post is authentic; it’s genuine; it’s exactly what you’d post for your friends to see if you were the one running the snowplow that day. It doesn’t matter that there is no beginning, middle and end like a fairy tale; Post B tells a story. Post A just regurgitates some OEM ad.
Post A, to be very clear, is spam.
Post A is spam because their followers say it’s spam. They didn’t like it, share it, or comment on it. To the average follower of this BMW dealership, Post A is spam; and no one likes spam. Your spam test should be to answer the following question with a yes before you post: “Will my friends (or the friends of someone in the picture/video) like this post?”
If it was a salesperson who posted Post A on their personal Facebook profile, it might get a little interaction, but over the long term these types of posts would stop earning engagement. When you post spam, you’re costing yourself views because Facebook’s algorithms are going to assume your posts just aren’t popular enough to share at the top of everyone’s news feed. You cannot afford to have your posts ignored.
Let’s look at some quick examples of what is and what is not storytelling so that you’ll be able to begin with a guide on what and how to post:
Test: Is it storytelling?
- Three-year-old Honda Civic we got in trade. – NO
- Three-year-old Honda Civic we got in trade from a couple who’ve purchased 6 Honda Civics from our dealership over the last 15 years. – YES (and, try to get a photo with the couple, their trade-in, and their new Civic)
- Ford just announced 0% financing on some models. – NO
- Ford just announced 0% financing on these specific models and I can help determine who qualifies. – YES
- I pay $100 for referrals. – NO
- I pay $100 for referrals and here’s a picture of me handing a giant $100 bill to Barbara Jones who sent me a referral. – YES (and, be sure to tag Barbara Jones so her friends will see this in their news feeds, as well)
- We have doughnuts in the coffee area this morning. – NO
- We have doughnuts in the coffee area this morning and I need you to come get one now because I’ve been known to eat a whole box! – YES
The point of this brief exercise it to let you know that even boring posts can be fashioned into stories by just adding a little more detail (if it exists). Again, we need to answer the question, “Will my friends (or the friends of someone in the picture/video) like this post?”
Successful Social Selling
I’m going to assume you understand the need for storytelling (from Part 7), so now let’s look at some posts from Social Selling Warrior Joey Book of Lewis Automotive in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Joey is well-known to many in the car business because of his enthusiasm for the industry, his work ethic, and his mastery of social selling. A mastery, by the way, that he would likely disagree with. Joey, like most great social sellers, is humble and is always learning.
Although he’s now a sales manager, about four of every five vehicles Joey sold in his last year as a salesman were to people he met through Facebook. This wouldn’t have happened if his Facebook posts didn’t see lots of engagement. This engagement (likes, shares, and comments) multiplied Joey’s exposure and generated referrals because of the genuineness of the “stories” he told. Here’s a random sample of some of Joey’s social media activity:
As you can see in the screenshot above, Joey’s Facebook Live broadcast where he was joined by Shelby Lewis and fellow Social Selling Warrior (now fellow sales manager) Freddie Byerly taking his new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited through an automatic car wash with no doors or top enjoyed almost 8,000 views, 150 likes, 108 comments and 74 shares. That’s the hallmark of a Social Selling Warrior!
While cool stunts like driving your Jeep through a car wash are expected to garner attention, just telling a good story on Facebook (and asking for some likes and shares for a simple contest) is often enough, as Joey’s post below (with 8,100 views, 161 likes, 18 comments and a whopping 371 shares!) shows:
To become a Social Selling Warrior, I recommend following other Social Selling Warriors, like Joey, on Facebook. You don’t have to friend them, just follow them and you’ll see their public posts in your news feed. Watch their progress and note which posts generate the most engagement; then, emulate this (where you can remain genuine) in your feed.
Social Selling Guide for Automotive Sales Professionals
Let’s take what we’ve learned in this post and create a quick 15-Point Social Selling Guide for Automotive Sales Professionals:
- Facebook first. As of this writing, the return on your time investment is too miniscule to spend much effort on any social network besides Facebook. That said, if you have linked social accounts (for example, Instagram and Facebook), feel free to manage both profiles and allow a post on one site to populate the other.
- It’s your personal profile. Because of the way Facebook’s current algorithms work, social selling is just not practical with a business page. Page posts (as of this writing) receive little to no interaction because no one sees them. Facebook buries these (they say) to improve the user experience. Of course, Facebook would gladly let you pay to boost your page’s posts into anyone’s news feed. This means you’ll need to use your personal profile if you want to become a Social Selling Warrior. Using your personal profile means you’ll need to consider the next three points:
- No more drunk posts. When your personal profile is doubling as your business page, you’re basically always at the dealership. So, act like it on Facebook. If you go out for a few beers after work, refrain from posting anything until you’re sober. It doesn’t take much to outrage the online public today.
- Avoid controversy. There are a few issues (political or otherwise) where we can all agree. For example, I think we can all agree that childhood cancer sucks. Feel free to get involved with these types of issues but try to avoid anything controversial. Even showing your support for a controversial new road on your Facebook page stands the chance of alienating a potential future customer. Besides, no one is going to wonder “Why didn’t Steve speak up on his Facebook page about the new road?”
- Be sensitive. Gone are the days when you can publicly dress like a Native American and mimic their ceremonies. This extends to all cultures, colors, races, creeds, and religions. Understand this and find something else to dress as this year for Halloween.
- Make everything public. Since you’re often going to “friend” your customers, you’ll want to be sure that everything you post is intended to be posted for all to see. When you limit your posts by setting them to anything but the “Public” setting, you’re not only keeping those who follow you and friends of friends from seeing what you post, you’re also eliminating the chance for a post to go viral.
- There is a limit. As of this writing, Facebook has a 5,000-friend limit on personal profiles. While not a big deal when you’re just starting out, for Social Selling Warriors this can cause a problem. You’ll want to encourage other salespeople, vendors, and anyone outside your market to follow you so that you can friend as many locals as possible.
- No contests. When you use a personal profile, you’re not allowed to run contests on Facebook like you can with a business page. If you find the need to run contests, start a business page, then market the contest via your personal posts.
- Calls to action. Be sure to include calls to action in your posts, and especially on your Facebook Live events. This means you’ll want to tell your audience what you want them to do. (Some people need that before they’ll engage.) So, ask them to share, like, comment, call you, download your app, and send you referrals. Those are all good calls to action to include; of course, don’t overdo it, you’ll want to limit these to about one or two calls to action per post.
- Buy a good selfie stick. When posting pics with new buyers or doing a Facebook Live event, you can either have someone else hold your smartphone and film you, or you can use a selfie stick. Since you don’t want to have to always depend on others, invest a few dollars in a good selfie stick. If you’re serious about using live videos to drive your social selling, spend a few more bucks and buy a selfie stick that doubles as a video stabilizer (this is sometimes called a gimbal).
- Play to your audience. So, you have the Batmobile for sale at your dealership; but, it’s an $85,000 Demon and you know that 99.99% of your Facebook audience can’t afford something so expensive. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to see it; they do. However, you’ll want to include some content that will encourage them to buy what they can afford from you, so pan over to the used Challenger that’s $15,000 during your Facebook Live event about the Demon and tell them why the $15,000 version is also cool.
- Buy a drone? This one is up to you (and depends on the current laws), but drone footage of a super sale or offsite event can generate a lot of engagement. Additionally, offering to shoot drone footage for the clubs and organizations you joined in your old-fashioned networking will help you become more involved (which helps you generate more business from these activities).
- Celebrity status. A very strange thing will happen after you’ve done a few Facebook Live events that generate engagement: You’ll become a local celebrity! Be prepared. People will walk up to you in restaurants and ask, “Are you Joey? I just love your videos.” This is when you know you’ve reached the status of Social Selling Warrior. Be genuine and authentic (just as you are online) when asked these questions; and be sure to ask for their business (I mean, they already like you, right?).
- It’s about referrals. Never forget your goals when you’re engaged in social selling; it’s about generating sales, and sales from social will come mainly from referrals. So, ask for referrals; and if your state allows you to pay bird dog fees, then advertise and celebrate this in your posts, where appropriate. Without paying for referrals, your social audience will be much smaller, because people won’t be working for you. Your network will share more of your information if there are dollars involved.
- It’s your brand. Be friendly, be approachable, be funny, be self-deprecating, and be honest. Your social profile (who you are online) is your personal brand and only you get to decide what that is.
Good (Social) Selling!
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Don’t like to read? You can learn all about Real Social Selling in this free 49-minute recording of a live video webcast: Real Social Selling – How to Sell Cars on Facebook.
(This post is an edited excerpt from Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers, which is available on Amazon for $49.99.)
