How to Run a Successful Auto Repair Shop

Running a Successful Automotive Repair Shop

Automotive repair works is a highly competitive field and if you want success in it, you need to make sure your shop is managed well and attracts a good number of customers. The right planning and execution can help you stay ahead of the game and establish a good reputation in your local area and provide you with a consistent customer base. Here are some tips that will help you run a successful automotive repair shop.

  1. Customer service matters

 

Modern customers place a lot of importance on customer experience and will shun businesses that don’t provide good quality customer service. That’s why it’s essential to focus on customer service in all aspects of your interactions with vehicle owners. Your customers should have a good experience from the moment they walk into your shop till the time they walk out of your shop. Train your repair technicians to communicate with clients in a friendly and professional manner. You should also have a dedicated customer service phone line so clients can contact you in case of emergencies.

 

  1. Offline marketing

 

The auto repair industry still relies on word of mouth so it’s a good idea to spend some time on offline marketing. Distribute pamphlets, place ads on your local publications, send newsletters to your existing clients and include promotional offers in them. All these small marketing strategies will help you establish a local reputation and presence. Without offline marketing, you’ll be a relatively unknown entity in your local area and won’t get as many customers as you otherwise could.

 

  1. Focus on quality

 

Modern customers don’t hesitate to criticize businesses if they don’t live up to expectations; and they have a big platform that allows them to publish their opinion. They can post reviews on websites like Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. They can also comment on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This criticism can have an impact on your reputation, which is why it’s important to focus on the quality of service. Make sure you have a well-trained staff and use good quality spare parts in your service.

 

  1. Relationship with your customer

 

Most auto repair businesses will have regular customers that seek out their services every time there’s car trouble. It’s a good idea to develop a good relationship with these customers and keep them engaged. You can send them emails, engage them on social media, and provide them special offers on different occasions. These strategies will help you develop a steady customer base that can help keep your business afloat even during slow periods.

 

  1. Online marketing

 

While offline word-of-mouth is a powerful tool, you need to market your business online as well. Online marketing will help prospective customers find you and learn more about your business. You can use strategies like paid ads, SEO, and social media marketing in order to establish an online presence and gain more visibility.

These factors will help you establish your auto repair shop and develop a steady customer base. Your business will last for a long time and have a steady stream of customers.

Three Clever Sales Lead Generation Ideas for Your Auto Shop

auto repair shop lead generation

Three Clever Sales Lead Generation Ideas for Your Auto Shop

Cold Calling

It may seem old fashioned, but cold calling still works! When you make a cold call, do not read off of a script. Keep in the forefront of your mind what your offer is and why it is valuable to the customer. Don’t be shy about telling them why your cars are great, fantastic value, and why they need them in their life! Brush up on all facets of your knowledge related to the cars and offers you are proffering.

Have a script, but don’t stick to it mechanically. Be prepared for the potential customer to say something that deviates from what you had in mind. Know it is fine for any polite exchange to happen, just attempt to make all exchanges with the goal of gaining a new customer, even if that person ends up remembering the call and coming back to you in the future. If you are going to have multiple people working on a cold call team, make sure they are well prepared. Rotate those employees you use for cold calls and those you use in other sales. All employees should be learning the flip sides of the skills they already utilise on a daily basis.

Videos

Videos on your website are great. They should always be informative about your product and geared towards making more sales, but after that you can get creative. For example, they could be humorous (videos about a large family travelling far squashed in a tiny car and needing a bigger one, as an example) or educational (videos about how a specific part of the car on offer is manufactured, for example), amongst other things.

Taking the time to make a video with your team can be a rewarding and enriching activity in itself, which draws the team closer together, which also helps to generate more sales. You may also post your videos on YouTube or another video sharing site like Vimeo. We are largely a species of visual learners, and people usually want what they can see. A good quality video that gives a good impression of the cars you sell can be invaluable.

Family Days

Family Days at your dealership are a fantastic way to generate business. By allowing people to come to your dealership in a more relaxed and causal setting than they may otherwise, you are effectively priming them to associate good times with buying from you. It can also be immensely useful in helping to firm up the plans of the casual buyer. If they have come in for food, music, fireworks, facepainting, or the like at your dealership, they will be more likely to come back to you rather than someone else when their purchasing plans start to solidify.

Visuals are powerful stimulators of desire; once you have potential customers in a place where they are surrounded by your cars, they are more likely to buy. You have to see it to believe it, as the saying goes.

Work Smarter, Not Harder: How to Become A More Efficient Business

grow auto repair shop business

Work Smarter, Not Harder: How to Become A More Efficient Business

In the workplace, we all have our own way of doing things. We streamline our business processes to the best of our abilities and we try to make them work for us. Sometimes this goes well, but other times businesses still suffer from frustrated employees, overlooked mistakes and wasted man-hours. In this article, we’re going to walk you through one of the ways we help our clients get on the right track and avoid pitfalls. If you’re suffering from missed deadlines, wasted resources, frustrated colleagues or incomplete work, read on. These valuable tips and tricks can be used to improve your informal processes and make your business more productive.

grow auto repair shop businessProcess Mapping

We encourage businesses to start by looking at some of the informal processes that consume the majority of their time. These could be simple tasks, such as data entry for a website, inputting sales information to a CRM or communicating meeting notes within departments. Map out the current method used to accomplish the task, and clearly identify the end goal (we recommend a visual flowchart method that all of your employees can easily resonate with). It’s important to include each step, and identify where there’s departmental crossover or collaboration. Be as detailed as possible with the steps and include other employees if you feel comfortable. Their input may add requirements that you weren’t aware of.

Critical Analysis

The second step in this process requires taking an analytical approach to the flowchart you’ve just created. If possible, meet with the members of your team who contribute to the specific process you’re evaluating and discuss where there are frustrations throughout the procedure. Ask which steps take the longest to complete and find out which feel the most essential to your staff. In addition to that, this is a good time to ask what the collaborators feel is wrong with the current method, and receive front-lines feedback for how it can improve. Make notes of the conversations with your staff, because you’ll reference it again at a later step.

strategies increase car countBecome an Architect

This is where you need to get creative and think outside of the box. Take your visual flowchart from step 1 and combine it with the feedback you’ve received from your team. Sit down and brainstorm different ways of accomplishing the same end goal, without being too concerned about the logistics (yet). Really rely on the input that your staff has suggested, since they’re the ones handling these tasks on a regular basis. Make sure that your end goal remains clearly identified as the top priority. During this time it’s good to evaluate how much time this task takes your workforce and consider how essential it is to the core function or your company.

Get Critical

Now that you have several new ideas laid out, take a critical approach to them and identify the potential pitfalls with each new plan. Again, it’s always great to include more perspectives if you’re comfortable leaning on your workforce for input. They’ll likely be able to aid your analysis and take a deeper approach to things you may not have considered. Weigh the pros and cons of each plan in order to clarify a “winner”. You’ll need to evaluate things like cost, timeliness, number of employees involved and potential training needs. Once you’ve decided which new process has the lowest risk factor and greatest level of compatibility, you’ll put it into place.

Note: Keep in mind that some employees are extremely resistant to change. Be sensitive to this and deploy strategies to keep everyone on-board and comfortable.

review shop dataReview your Data

After deploying the new strategy, follow up with your employees after one day, one week, two weeks and one month (if things are still going well after one month, you can continue to check-in on a monthly basis). During this time, it’s essential to weigh the pros and cons of user feedback, ease of use, cost of the new strategy (if software is involved), the time required to complete the task and the impact to your customers, if applicable. If there’s an impact to your customer base, try to run a survey or reach out to several affected clients in order to gauge user feedback. Keep in mind that things rarely go perfectly smoothly the first time, so you may find that you need to do further adjustments in order to continue to improve. As long as the cost, ease of use and timeliness of the new strategy have improved, you’ll know that you’ve made a great choice for your workplace.

As time goes on, the business processes that you use will need to be improved upon again and again. Customer needs change, demographics adjust, technology rapidly shifts and marketing techniques progress. If you find yourself becoming too overwhelmed by the rapid changes of the automotive industry, the experts are ShopPulse are ready to help. ShopPulse offers full-service marketing solutions that allow you to keep your eyes focused on the bigger picture. We stay current with digital trends and do the research required in order to dissect your demographic. While you streamline internal processes, you can count on us to be your most effective marketing solution.