I like Make My Deal, and I never get tired of seeing the demo. I like Make My Deal because they have a novel solution to the key problem with selling cars online. The problem is that, while most of the process can be put online, everything is blocked until a price is negotiated. Make My Deal solves the problem by making price negotiation part of the online process.
My favorite part of the demo is the transcripts of online sales dialogues. I could study these for hours, analyzing the language and style of successful dialogues. Stop and think about that for a second. You could, if you were a motivated sales manager, use these transcripts as a training tool.
Instead of me and the sales manager eyeballing transcripts from a single dealership, we could collect statistics on the entire Make My Deal archive. We could set criteria such as closing ratio, or highest gross, and analyze the language most likely to produce those outcomes.
Responses were fed into Kessler’s Consumer Language Tool, which analyzed common language among the highest and lowest closers.
Jason Kessler of CDK Global has done exactly that, using data from email negotiations, and running them through his proprietary language analysis tool. This technique, sentiment analysis, is also used by stock traders to glean market insights from social media.
The other fun thing about online negotiation is that your ace closer doesn’t have to be onsite. She can work from home, handling leads from multiple stores. She could even be a robot, running talk tracks from a tool like Kessler’s.
I don’t really expect robots to replace salespeople anytime soon, but I do expect to see a selling platform that integrates email and chat, with live and virtual agents sharing the work. Many dealers already use chat systems, of which Make My Deal is a special case.
- Integrate email and chat
- Include virtual agents
- Sell protection products
Virtual agents like those from Help on Click and 247 could handle routine parts of the dialogue and even help coach the weaker salespeople. For those of you wary of sharing your desk with a robot, recall that the talk tracks came from human closers to begin with.
One process ripe for automation is selling protection products. As I wrote in an earlier post, the in-store menu presentation will be replaced by an online interview. Everyone knows the stock questions like, “how long will you keep the car?” and “how far do you commute?” Aspiring robots can hone their skills here.
Virag Consulting 