People are so important to the automotive marketing mix that they have supplanted promotion as one of the 4Ps of Automotive Marketing™: product, price, place, and person. That’s why I am pleased to announce that DealerRater, a Cars.com brand, is launching a new suite of products that create stronger connections between the two most critical people in the automotive customer journey: the customer and the salesperson. In addition to DealerRater Connections, we are excited to announce DealerRater Connections Plus, and DealerRater Premier. All these solutions were created to build trust between salespeople and vehicle shoppers by making it easier for dealerships to publish and manage salesperson reviews online.

To refresh you, DealerRater is the world’s leading car dealership review website that helps connect consumers with the right person at the right dealership – so they can buy the right car. With DealerRater, dealerships publish employee profiles and reviews through one platform that syndicates reviews to an audience of more than 31 million unique shoppers each month.[i] Cars.com recently integrated DealerRater salesperson reviews with the Cars.com Vehicle Details Page (VDP) via our Salesperson Connect feature, which makes Cars.com the only third-party site connecting consumers directly to individual salespeople at the dealership.

Dealers can now benefit from three DealerRater solutions:

  • DealerRater Connections, through which dealerships publish employee profiles and reviews on one platform and syndicate those reviews to drive brand presence and create preference for their dealership and salespeople. Through DealerRater Connections, dealerships invest to build trust.
  • DealerRater Connections Plus, which includes all the benefits of DealerRater Connections – and adds the feature of automating review solicitation through texts and emails (rather than salespeople needing to manually ask customers to create reviews). DealerRater Connections Plus automates to drive growth.
  • DealerRater Connections Premier, which includes all the benefits of DealerRater Connections Plus – and provides a DealerRater Success Partner who will help you with everything from certifying your salespeople to managing the entire review publishing and updating process. DealerRater Connections Premier provides proactive, ongoing support. DealerRater Connections Premier is your partner to accelerate results.

These are the right products at the right time. As consumer behavior continues to evolve, one of the key advantages we have as an industry is the opportunity to invest in our people! Our research shows that 97 percent of car buyers would like to select the salesperson they’re going to work with before they come into the dealership[ii]. Our new DealerRater package offerings give our dealer partners the ability to shine a spotlight on their best people, automate the process of gathering more reviews, and save time by fully managing the process.

Our strength is our people, and the data is clear. If we invest in our people, it will provide yet another way to drive a higher number of shown appointments at your dealership.

For more information, talk with your DealerRater representative, or register for the upcoming DrivingSales webinar, How to WIN in 2018: Harness the Power of Your People. I’ll be joining Bart Wilson of DrivingSales and Jamie Oldershaw of DealerRater to discuss how dealerships can start turning their people into their greatest asset.

To grow your business more effectively with the power of customer reviews, contact your Cars.com representative.

 

 

[i] Unduplicated audience of Autotrader, KBB.com, Cars.com network, and DealerRater.com via comScore Media Metrix Multi-Platform, U.S., averaged over six months, October 2017.

[ii] DealerRater, Care Shoppers Are Judging You, January 2017.