It’s so easy to do, if only more salespeople knew about it.
One day I was talking to Greg, a client of mine who is the general manager of a dealership in the Orlando, Florida area. He told me about how long he had volunteered for the annual Disney World marathon. His job had been to offer runners candy bars at the 22-mile “candy stop”, which was toward the end of the marathon. He did this with a small group of other volunteers.
Greg said that initially about 2 in 10 runners accepted his candy bar offer. Then Greg noticed that each runner had their name on their jersey. So he decided to start calling them by name when he offered them a bar of chocolate. “Tyler, would you like a chocolate bar … Martha wants a chocolate bar …”
To her surprise, once she started saying their names, her acceptance rate for the candy bar jumped into the 90% range.
The other volunteers at the candy bar began to realize what was happening with Greg, so they also began to say the name of each runner. Suddenly, they had roughly 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, they agreed and they all stopped. Still, they made a nice offer, but said, “Here’s a chocolate bar … would you like a chocolate bar …?” Not mentioning any names. As soon as they stopped doing this, their acceptance rates dropped back to around the 20% range again.
The reason Greg told me this story was because we just completed a dealership-wide telephone sales audit at his store.
One of the tests that we did that motivated his story was the study of two groups of calls.
In Group A: We made random calls where the salesperson used the potential customer’s name one or more times during the phone conversation.
In Group B: We made random calls where the salesperson did not use the potential customer’s name during the phone conversation. In general, with this group, the salespeople were just as friendly and some even said “Madam” or “Sir” while speaking. They just didn’t say the prospects’ names like “Mr. Jones” or “Bill.”
At Greg’s dealership, the vehicle sales department had a 36% higher appointment rate when they used the potential customer’s name on the phone compared to the group that did not. In the service department, they had a 19% higher appointment rate when they used the potential customer’s name on the phone.
The first time we did this test at a dealership, Group A had a 26% higher conversion rate from leads to appointments than Group B. We have been doing these audits for a few years and the results have fluctuated from a low 12%. higher citation rate up to 44% higher citation rate.
We have conducted these dealership telephone audits with dealers of different sizes, in different markets, from different franchises. We even went back a year later and re-audited current calls from a dealership. We found that the only consistent result is that when salespeople use a lead’s name one or more times in a phone conversation, their average conversion rate from leads to appointments increases dramatically.
Our most recent statistical audit results show that 41% of the time on incoming sales calls, salespeople don’t use the caller’s name during the conversation even once. But if I had to guess, I’d say that 90% more salespeople think they use the caller’s name. The use of the caller’s name by service consultants is significantly less than that of salespeople.
Next time you’re hesitant to talk on the phone, try this tip to increase your phone appointments by 12% to 44% …
… and use the potential customer’s name in conversation. Some of you probably know from experience that sales quotes have a much higher closing rate than regular uploads, so it’s a very lucrative thing to be good at.
Please note that our audits have found that it is important not to go overboard with this advice and say their names too many times where it seems artificial.
When talking to a friend, you would probably use their name naturally a couple of times in conversation. That number is consistent with the best number of times to obtain citations according to our statistical sampling.