2019 Car Sales Tips: Target Female Car Buyers

Women are a growing audience for dealerships. According to this year reports, women’s share of car purchases has reached 45%. The number of women that are coming to service departments is also growing year by year.

Moreover, around 53% of those women aren’t accompanied by a man as you might have though. They bravely come to a dealership on their own, expecting the best and getting ready for the type of questions that will make them feel like storming out of a showroom. We are referring to ‘when can your husband visit us’ or ‘will the down payment come from your father’ kind of questions.

Make sure to avoid those under any circumstances unless you have just spoken with her husband or a father.

Remember not to forget

While it’s well-known that women and men buy differently, the automotive industry tends to forget it. More often than not, male dealers don’t have car sales skills needed to approach female car buyers and make them feel valued and heard, without getting condescending looks.

The tricky part is to actually treat female car buyers respectfully keeping in mind they are still women. What does it mean?

A woman’s right to talk

To build good communication and provide excellent car buying experience to female customers who came for a test-drive or in seek of vehicle maintenance, you need to apply your best listening skills, doubled.

BBC says that a woman speaks on average 20,000 words daily which is 2.8 times more than an average man. Women are more inclined to speak out their fears and concerns than men. It has a lot to do with higher levels of the language-associated protein found in a woman’s brain.

When at a dealership, a woman has a lot of concerns that she wants to express. She’d want to describe what her previous vehicle lacked and what she wants to have in her next one or how come her current car requires maintenance.

Make sure your salespeople listen as carefully as possible. Keep in mind that women are usually very sensitive to body language as well as facial expressions (someone calls it an intuition), so make sure your representatives don’t interrupt her story either verbally or non-verbally.

Prepare yourself online

It’s not only your physical showroom sales process that needs to be adapted accordingly, but your website should also take female car buyers into serious consideration.

We’re not only referring to those ‘he’s’ that you can often stumble upon here and there: ‘When a buyer comes to our dealership, he…’. This little negligence can cost you a bunch of customers and some damage to your reputation.

To cater to female car buyers online, your website forms should be spruced up as well. Make sure you have open-ended question fields rather than closed-ended ones. Especially when it comes to vehicle maintenance.

Let women use their own language to describe mechanical failures and explain what have happened and when instead of offering them to tickle dull yes/no boxes.

Add more details

Asking female car buyers for more details is just as important as providing more of them. Women spend more time online researching for vehicles as they want to arm themselves with as much information as they can before heading to a dealership. Make sure your inventory is neatly-presented and there are enough details about each vehicle, or specify easy ways to request for additional photos, specs, etc.

Beware of reviews

The fact that women use more words to express themselves inevitably leads us to another important finding: female car buyers are more likely to actually go online and leave a review whether good or bad.

If you create a welcoming dealership environment for female buyers where they will feel neither disadvantaged nor ignored, you can expect them to recommend your sales consultants to others, building up your reputation.

The last word

To avoid leaving money on the table, improve your car sales skills and tailor your sales process to both genders would it be online or in person.