It’s so easy to do, if only more sellers knew about it.
One day I was talking with Greg, a client of mine who is the general manager of a dealership in the Orlando, Florida area. He told me about the time he had volunteered at the annual Disney World marathon. His job was to offer chocolate bars to runners at the “candy stop” at the 22-mile mark, which was toward the end of the marathon. He did it with a small group of other volunteers.
Greg said that initially about 2 out of 10 runners accepted his offer of a candy bar. Then Greg noticed that each runner had his name on his jersey. So he decided to start calling them by his name when he offered them a chocolate bar. “Tyler, do you want a candy bar… Martha wants a candy bar…”
To his surprise, once he started calling out their names, his acceptance rate for chocolate bars jumped into the 90% range.
The other candy bar volunteers started to notice what was going on with Greg, so they started calling out each runner’s name as well. All of a sudden, they had about the same increase in acceptance rate.
The change was so dramatic that Greg wanted to try an experiment…
Greg asked the other volunteers to stop using the names of the runners to see what would happen, and they agreed and they all stopped. They still made a nice offer, but they said, “Here’s a candy bar…would you like a candy bar…” without mentioning any names. As soon as they stopped doing this, their acceptance rates dropped back to around the 20% range.
The reason Greg told me this story was because we just completed a phone sales audit of the entire dealership at his store.
One of the tests we did that led to his story was the study of two groups of calls.
In Group A: We pulled random calls where the salesperson used the lead’s name one or more times during the phone conversation.
In Group B: We randomly extracted calls where the salesperson did not use the lead’s name during the phone conversation. In general, with this group, the vendors were just as friendly and some even said “Ma’am” or “Sir” while talking. They just didn’t say the prospect’s name like “Mr. Jones” or “Bill.”
At Greg’s dealership, the auto sales department had 36% more appointments when they used the lead’s name on the phone compared to the group that didn’t. In the service department, they had a 19% higher citation rate when using the lead’s name on the phone.
When we first ran this test at a dealership, Group A had a 26% higher lead-to-appointment conversion rate than Group B. We’ve been doing these audits for a few years now and results have ranged from as low as a 12% higher citation rate to a 44% higher citation rate.
We’ve done these phone dealer audits with dealers of different sizes, in different markets, of different franchises. We even went back a year later and re-audited a dealer’s current calls. We found that the only consistent result is that when salespeople use a prospect’s name one or more times in a phone conversation, their average lead-to-appointment conversion rate increases dramatically.
Our most recent statistical audit results show that 41% of the time on inbound sales calls, salespeople don’t use the caller’s name even once during the conversation. But if I had to guess, I’d say that over 90% of salespeople believe they use the caller’s name. Caller name use by service advisors is significantly lower than by salespeople.
The next time you’re hesitating to get on the phone, try this tip to increase your phone appointments by 12-44%…
…and use the lead’s name in the conversation. Some of you probably know from experience that sales appointments have a much higher close rate than regular ones, so it’s very lucrative to be good at this.
Please note that our audits have found it important not to overdo this advice and say their names too many times to the point where it seems contrived.
When talking to a friend, you would probably naturally use their name a couple of times in conversation. That number is consistent with the best number of times to get citations based on our statistical sampling.