Leaving Your Prospect Out in Left Field

This blog is all about the real world of experential marketing i.e. what sales and marketing opps or miss-opps I run into on a daily basis. The good, bad and the truly ugly. Yesterday comes to mind. Having lost my vehicle to a recent auto accident, my husband and I went car shopping. We had an idea on the vehicle we wanted, but thought -- heh, let's give the US manufacturers a chance. So we headed to a Buick lot in our local area. Being Motown-born I was onboard with checking out the options. It was around 10:45 a.m. and the sun was shining, pavement dry, all systems go for checking out cars. Would you, could you believe that Dave and I literally walked up and down two rows of vehicles. During this 15-20 minutes, no one, as in "no person" came out to talk with us. I briefly caught a glimpse of a man about 75-100 yards away, and he generally looked in our direction, but did not budge. The moral of the story is simple. If you want to do business, you have to make yourself present.

After leaving the "yawn, Buick" dealership without a whisper of attention, we drove two blocks to Toyota Carlsbad dealership and sales professional, Scott Busby, took care of us immediately. He stayed with us from looking at cars through driving our new pre-owned certified car off the lot at 2:30 p.m. the same day.

BTW the words "Pre-owned Certified" is fodder for another blog post.