Inside Automotive with Jim Fitzpatrick, powered by CBT News
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Inside Automotive with Jim Fitzpatrick, powered by CBT News
Stop Templating, Start Selling: The Human Touch Your Dealership Needs
April Simmons, Corporate Internet and Marketing Director at Horn Auto Group, reveals how dealerships are missing opportunities by failing to properly handle internet leads and phone calls. We explore why many dealerships have lost the fundamental communication skills needed to convert digital leads into sales.
• Most dealerships have recognized they drifted from sales fundamentals in showroom interactions during COVID but haven't applied the same realization to digital communications
• The industry benchmark for internet lead closing ratio is 15%, but most dealerships hover at 8-10%, with many falling to 5-6%
• Templated responses fail to address what customers are actually asking for and miss opportunities to build relationships
• April identifies nine different types of leads (chat, specific vehicle, third-party, OEM, etc.), each requiring a distinct response strategy
• Customers self-qualify through the CTAs they click on websites, revealing their "hot buttons" in the process
• The "Listen, Align, Persuade" approach applies to all sales channels, including digital communications
• AI and automation should serve as assistants to salespeople, not replacements for human connection
• April deleted all templates from her CRM to force personalized responses, resulting in increased closing rates
If you'd like to learn more about improving your internet sales process, reach out to April Simmons on LinkedIn where she's happy to share her training materials and playbook.
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Welcome to Inside Automotive with Jim Fitzpatrick. Hey everyone, Jim Fitzpatrick, thanks so much for joining me for another edition of Inside Automotive right here at CBT News. You're likely spending a large amount of marketing dollars for your dealership, so what happens once a lead comes into the store? Are those opportunities being maximized or completely missed? Joining us today to share how you can make sure that every single lead counts is April Simmons, corporate Internet and Marketing Director at Horn Auto Group. You've seen her here before on CBT News and she is nice enough to join us once again on our nice network. So thank you so much, April, for joining us on the show today.
April Simmons:Thank you, jim. I'm really excited to jump into this topic today. It's something I'm very, very passionate about. I think most people think of me as the marketer, but ultimately that's only about 15% of my job, so I'm very, very ingrained in our sales department, specifically our internet sales department, and so just have a lot to share today in regards to this.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That makes for a very good marketing person. When you are that much involved in what happens down in the trenches, as they say, because you get it, you understand that if we're gonna be spending money in the area of leads to bring them in, what happens to them next? So I commend you on handling those two different areas. So why are so many missing the mark? Right now, after the lead comes in, dealers are out there just pulling their hair out of their head saying, man, if the answer is to just spend more money to try to get more leads into a funnel and the funnel is broken, we got a problem Right. So where's the breakdown happening?
April Simmons:So the biggest issue I think we have is that we all recognize that we we kind of got off the quote unquote basics with COVID and I think everyone is starting to now realize once the customer's in the showroom, right, we've got to go back to blocking and tackling and we've got to go back to customer service. You know we can't just say take it or leave it right.
April Simmons:Like those kinds of things are kind of out the window. However, I feel that we really missed the mark in understanding that all of these Internet leads and phone calls that the same thing happened there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:So during COVID, the same exact thing, same thing that happened in the showroom, happened there. We lost all of our skills. We lost all of our ability to communicate with customers via the internet and the phone, and so what I saw happening is so many dealers now trying to find a solution that they can write a check for.
Speaker 3:That's right.
April Simmons:Meaning, you know, looking at these AI solutions and looking at, you know, is there some sort of outside provider I can just pay to handle these things? You know, this is what I see happening everywhere.
April Simmons:And my stores were not exempt for this. I really started to see the communication getting worse and worse and worse and general managers saying, well, have you looked at this AI thing or that AI thing? And while I will say I am pro-AI, the one thing that AI can't do, in the same way that I've always said chat can't do it your digital retailing can't do it and AI can't do it, at least not yet is they can't sell.
April Simmons:So selling comes still from the human and it's because I know you're selling if I hear two words what if? What if? Says to me, you're actually listening to a customer, you're providing back value and you're saying hey, I hear what your dreams are, what if I can make them happen? That's right.
April Simmons:Right, and that's where selling comes into into play. So fast forward. I look at a lot of leads, I read a lot of leads and for the longest time you'd hear you know BDC managers or internet sales director saying read the lead, read the lead, read the lead. And here we are in 2025. And guess what?
Jim Fitzpatrick:we still don't do Read the lead.
April Simmons:Okay, so when a customer walks into the showroom, if we first of all, if we just ignore the customer who walked in the showroom, right, just let them walk around for a while. How long before a GM is?
Jim Fitzpatrick:losing their mind. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:Who's listening?
April Simmons:to me.
Speaker 3:Yes.
April Simmons:Right, screaming and yelling. However, we don't have the same intensity with our internet leads or our phone calls. Yeah, that's a good point, we have to go. Oh, we'll get around to them when we get around to them. Very good point. Yeah, kind of an attitude.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's right.
April Simmons:Right, the other thing we do and this is where it gets so fun again if a sales rep were to walk into the showroom and said hey, I'm here to see stock number one, two, 3, 4, 5, and you're the sales rep, jim, and you said, oh, that's awesome. April 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is right out there on the lot, go take a look at it. And when you're ready to find out what the best price is, come on in.
Jim Fitzpatrick:Come on see me. I'll be in here smoking, yeah, okay.
April Simmons:If you did that to a person again, what would the general manager do? They'd lose their mind. They'd freak out. Yet this is how most internet leads are semi-responded to today.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's a very good point.
April Simmons:The customer goes so far as to give me their information, inquire on stock number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and what do we do? We send them a link right back to the car on our website that they just sent to us.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:And then we wonder why the customer didn't come in and see us or ask for us or want to do business with us.
Jim Fitzpatrick:You might as well send them, you know, some sort of their own Foursquare, and then say here, close yourself. And then here's a credit application, if you like, your own numbers. And then you know we'll have the contract typed up and send it to you through DocuSign. I mean, what are we doing here? It's crazy, right? Exactly, exactly.
April Simmons:We've lost the sales ability in COVID and the show when we knew that, but we also lost the sales ability in the back end of our house with regards to how we're answering internet leads and how we're answering phone calls.
Speaker 3:quite frankly, that's right, that's right.
April Simmons:I took a pretty dramatic approach at the beginning of May and I wrote down 100% of the templates out of our CRM, because what I realized was happening is, you know the reps, they would just they get a lead they would look at it and they just click and send a template, because that stops the clock and gets everyone off their back. And you know, this is something I think, mentality wise, we've got to wrap our heads around why? Do Internet reps do those things.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's right.
April Simmons:And it's really this.
Speaker 3:That's right.
April Simmons:If an Internet department is doing really, really well and I'm not just Internet leads right Like the benchmark is 15% close ratio. Most dealerships are in that 8 to 10%. Okay, are in that 8% to 10% Okay. Some right now and I would venture to believe that a lot of you are sitting more in that 5% to 6% closing ratio.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's crazy.
April Simmons:Crazy, all right, but hear me on this If 10% is decent good, you know decent okay, that means they're failing 90% of the time.
Speaker 3:That's right, that's right.
April Simmons:So you're asking them to do a whole lot of work and a whole lot of follow-up and at best case scenario they're failing 90, 85 to 90% of the time. So when you get to the core of why it is that they're not doing what they're doing, then we have to now say how do we combat that?
Speaker 3:How do?
April Simmons:we show that going after this and doing all the right things and listening to our customers which is what it is Reading the lead is listening. It's listening to what it is the customer is trying to do. It's looking at the whole picture before I respond.
Speaker 3:That's right.
April Simmons:Right, you don't say hey, welcome to you. Know, we're in Kia, uh, nice to meet you. You know my name's April and you are, and then just say, well, I don't care who you are, let me just talk over you and just. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3:We don't do that Right.
April Simmons:So why do we do that I?
Jim Fitzpatrick:know, april, if you had a, if you had a guess at a percentage of the number of people that you're talking about, these leads that are coming in, that you feel will buy a car within the next three to five days. Okay, what percentage of those leads do you think that would be, and on average, in your stores?
April Simmons:Okay, so this is going to be different, store by store.
Jim Fitzpatrick:Here's one.
April Simmons:So when I took and deleted all of the templates across the board, what I realized I was going to need to do is retrain all of my teams. So I put a lot of effort into okay if I'm going to have them manually typing. I also made sure they had video now because if they weren't doing video before, now video becomes the path of least resistance, that they don't have a template to just click and send right so.
April Simmons:I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone yeah but to answer your question, I also went through to train them and said look, there are nine types of leads that we get into our serum okay you have chat lead, you have a specific vehicle of interest.
Speaker 3:Yep.
April Simmons:You have third-party leads via the OEM. You have your website converting tools. You have your OEM tools. You have your digital retelling leads Yep, you have your trade leads. And then you have your actual third-party leads like Autotrader and Carscom, gargur gurus, car facts, all the normals right To answer your question. All of those are different. So if we don't understand that and we apply the same, hey, I'm going to answer every lead the same way and I'm going to follow up the same way.
Speaker 3:That's right.
April Simmons:That is where we miss. Yeah, for sure so if in one store I have 90% of my leads are OEM leads and only 10% of these other categories, they may actually close a lot higher and in a shorter window.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:However, if another store has a lot more of those mid-funnel or higher funnel leads as a total percentage, then their timeline is going to be longer than that three to five period. You know days to the south.
Speaker 3:Sure sure.
April Simmons:So how we answer these leads and then how we follow up with these leads are really important. And you mentioned something earlier, jen the four square right. Like filling out your own four square. Well, a lot of people who are watching this probably don't even know what a four square is. They haven't been doing this long enough.
Jim Fitzpatrick:It's a good point.
April Simmons:And it's hilarious, but I actually use this as part of my training for these leads. I literally wrote it on the board and I said okay those of you who have been doing this long enough to know what this is what went in the top left box?
Speaker 3:Price trade down payment payment.
April Simmons:Why did we do that, Jim? Why did we have a four square? Why did we use?
Jim Fitzpatrick:it. We wanted to zero that customer in on what their hot button was and alienate the others. Right. And why did we do that? To sell a car and to build gross.
April Simmons:Bingo. It's the gross profit. We knew that if I could isolate the hot button then I can make profit in all the other boxes. I just named nine different types of leads. Guess what? Based on what CTA a customer clicks on what do I know? Based?
Jim Fitzpatrick:on what CTA a customer clicks on? What do I know they're hopping?
April Simmons:No question. Look at what the CTAs on every website are. That's right. Get your trade, get a payment, get a price right. It's the hot buttons.
Jim Fitzpatrick:It's the force button. That's right. They're qualifying themselves as they move through your site. Without a doubt, 100% yeah.
April Simmons:They're telling me they're hot button.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:So if I get a trade lead, then why in the world am I talking about the price of my car?
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's exactly right.
April Simmons:I would challenge any dealer that's watching this to say before you go signing up for a bunch of new fancy tools or hoping you can just write a check, learn these things, learn about the different types of leads, learn at breaking those different types down so that you can actually train your teams on how to communicate. It's not about anything else other than listening. The first step of communication is to hear first. Yeah, that to speak.
April Simmons:so we need to learn how do I hear, when it's a lead that that you know somebody's not actually talking back to me? What does that look like? Right can I tell things in an email address, if your email address is email address is jim um.
Speaker 3:jim loves cats at gmailcom, right, what do I know?
April Simmons:about jim. I know that's right, so maybe I should say something in my response that's right about. Oh, I see you love cats, I do too. I have to. Whatever right, like we, we don't do all those fundamental sales things that we all learn how to do. That's right, they're all applicable, all learned how to do, that's right. And they're all applicable. We just have to do it in a little different way, yeah, and so that is my challenge for people on.
Jim Fitzpatrick:Well, and finish that, because you have a phrase that's listen, align and persuade right. Talk to us about that.
April Simmons:So you have to listen, and that's sales. Okay, the definition of sales is to listen, align and persuade. That's all it is. I cannot persuade if I don't know your perception first, that's right. I need to know what matters to you, not only your hot button, but also what matters to you. Are you buying a car for your daughter?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:Okay, if this is your daughter's first car and I'm listening to you I know that it's important that we talk about safety. I know that it's important, right. But then the second your daughter comes in, I'm pulling her aside and being like but this is the coolest car ever. Being like, but this is the coolest car ever. So I have to listen to. What are the differences between? Your goals and your perception is going to be different than your daughters, maybe your wives maybe they're all different, so I listen to all of those, then I align with you, right.
Speaker 3:So now.
April Simmons:I know what's important to you. I know what matters to you. I've aligned with you. Now I have every tool in my tool belt to persuade you to do the thing I want you to do. That's right.
April Simmons:Because now I can sell you on what's in your best interest, because I heard you first. And that still goes for internet leads as well. This is again where we miss. It is we don't listen, we don't ask enough questions, we don't align with the customer. We skip all of that and go straight to persuasion. You cannot persuade somebody if you didn't listen first and align something.
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's right. That's right. And often, and you'll see that sometimes, when a desk manager will get so low on the price of a vehicle, sometimes into the cost of the car, and the people still going no, no, no, no, not there yet that's because it's not about price at that point in time, it's about aligning that customer or that prospect with the right vehicle. They're saying no in many cases because you haven't sold them on the vehicle yet, you haven't sold them on yourself or the dealership, so they're just going to keep going. Hey, keep dishing up lower numbers, and the sales manager is pulling their hair out of their head thinking where do we work? What's the hot button here in terms of price? It's not about price.
Jim Fitzpatrick:There's been a big push towards automation, obviously, and I think NADA, for the last couple of years. Now, as you walk through there, everybody's got an AI answer and some of them are very, very good. I'm not to say that they're not, but it seems like the industry has said oh, let's turn this over to AI, let's turn it over to automation, let's let them do the heavy lifting. But where I mean in some areas, it really does start to hurt the sales process, right? I mean, you've just alluded to a few of them, but do you want to elaborate on that from your perspective?
April Simmons:Yeah, jim, I think that ultimately, at the end of the day, we need to look at AI as our assistant. They're not here to do the job, they're here to assist us in being more efficient. Think about the days when we first got one of these guys, when we first got a cell phone, we were like, oh, this is amazing, now I can get back to more people faster. Yeah, right, I can, I can call you back from my car.
April Simmons:I don't have to wait till I get back into the office tomorrow. It was about creating efficiency.
Jim Fitzpatrick:Right A tool.
April Simmons:It's a tool. That's right, and AI to me is the same thing. It is the cell phone of 2025. It is a new tool to help us create efficiencies, and I use AI all day.
Jim Fitzpatrick:Every day, I use you know, Redot AI, which I love.
April Simmons:It's one of my most favorite AI tools. I used AI to build my training platform that I trained all my teams on. When I took all these templates on, I said here's all my stuff. When I took all these templates on, I said here's all my stuff like help me build a, you know, a powerpoint for this. So there's a lot of amazing things AI can do to help give us time create efficiencies and allow us to do more with less, um, not forget things, etc.
April Simmons:But what AI cannot do is the human element, which is the, the real listening, empathy, right, emotion yep and all of those things matter to sales and and not just from a closing ratio standpoint to have more volume but also to have more gross gross comes from us being friends for the trust factor and if you only have AI doing that, you lose that whole aspect of it which is part of the selling. You have to have that listen, align, then persuade. Ai for the most part today is going to go straight to persuade. It doesn't have that rapport building that is necessary for us to be able to get to that finish line. So I'm a big AI believer. I just say it needs to have its human side. You know I'm on a clubhouse with a good amount of friends called the Human Side of AI. Every Wednesday morning we get together, we talk through some of these things.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
April Simmons:Because it's important that you have the humans. With the AI, you can't you know, having one or the other just isn't going to work, I think, at least not in the near future. I mean someday, yeah, I'm sure they're going to put a motion into AI, but today, as we sit here today, it doesn't have those assets.
Jim Fitzpatrick:So getting back before I let you go, getting back to taking out the templates that your people had, how is that going? I mean, that seems to be a huge undertaking for you, so I commend you in doing that, but how is it going so far?
April Simmons:You know, shockingly, really, really well. I caution that you have to take the time to give your team tools and training before you do something drastic like that I did not do it until I fully made sure that they knew it was happening why, it was happening.
April Simmons:The why is very important because I said guys, I want you to make more money. I know that the leads are a little bit less today. We all have said it. So how can I make more with less? I'll show you how, and we went through every type of lead. I gave them a playbook to work with. I gave them the video tools to be able to do video. I gave them everything they needed to be successful and then let them loose and, of course, there were some pain.
April Simmons:There's some pain moments, there's some stubbing of some toes, but I will say, for the first full month, every single one of my close rates and my internet permits were up month over month and year over year.
Speaker 3:That's fantastic.
April Simmons:Wow, I feel confident and good about you know making this transition and we just got to keep training. I think that's the part we need to understand what's happening back there in that department. So if you're a DP or a general manager or a desk guy and you don't even know that there's soft pulls on your digital storytelling tool, that on your own website.
April Simmons:right then there is a miss, there is a mishappening on, you know, making the most out of this. We spend a lot of money on marketing, so before you go to spend more, why don't we take a look at what we can do with what we already have?
Jim Fitzpatrick:That's exactly right, and no truer words have been spoken. So, april Simmons, Corporate Internet and Marketing Director at Horn Auto Group, thank you so much for coming in to CBT News. I know that our viewers are going to get a lot out of your appearance here today A great, really great conversation, great content. And I know you're probably going to get some people that will probably reach out to you and say, hey, how does this whole thing work? Because I'm ready to demolish all of our templates because we know they're getting in the way. You made a perfect point there.
April Simmons:I love it, so I'd love to do a follow-up with you to see how things are moving along. I would love that, and anyone is happy to reach out to me on my LinkedIn and I'm happy to share the PowerPoint or the playbook. I'm always here to help anybody that I can. There you go, folks Right there I really appreciate it, Jim, and look forward to that follow-up conversation and hopefully I've got great news and not going.
Jim Fitzpatrick:The hardest working woman in retail automotive. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. Appreciate you, thanks. Thanks for watching Inside Automotive with Jim Fitzpatrick.