For better or worse, the market is always changing, and that means sales teams have to stay nimble and ready to adapt.
According to Harvard Business Review authors Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri and Sally E. Lorimer, adjustments to seeking leads and differentiating the sales approach have been necessary to keep B2B sales moving ahead through the market downturn of the last year. And their key advice for keeping sales teams successful? Maintaining relationships.
“Incumbents have an advantage. Incumbents also have excellent customer access,” they wrote. “By spending more time with customers, sellers can discover new opportunities.”
Eleni Egoville, director of field sales at CarGurus, agrees. “Our team regularly connects with customers to understand their specific challenges and marketplace dynamics,” she said.
In addition to learning the nitty-gritty details of what the customer needs, these connections allow Egoville and her team to build relationships with community partners — efforts that clients particularly appreciate.
“Car dealers are inherently entrepreneurial and community-driven,” she said. “Supporting local charities enables them to give back to the communities that have supported them — in some cases over several generations.”
By investing in these communities’ efforts, Egoville has seen benefits for both the business and opportunities for putting CarGurus’ values of collaboration and integrity into practice.
What are some ways your team stays on top of trends or market conditions that may impact your customers or your sales process?
Change is the only constant — especially when you work at the intersection of automotive and tech. We count more than 30,000 dealers as our customers, and they often update their strategies to keep pace with — if not stay ahead of — broader shifts. For example, their available inventory can change due to severe weather in one region and manufacturing challenges in another. We supplement our dialogue with customers with robust research and data on the market in general and insights into their specific business that are available through our tracking tools. Having field teams embedded in the very areas they support amplifies their understanding of the nuances behind what customers may be facing.
Change is the only constant — especially when you work at the intersection of automotive and tech.”
What are some ways your team has adapted its sales strategies recently in light of market shifts?
We collect a lot of data. In recent years, we’ve grown our efforts to leverage and share that data internally and with our customers to help them better navigate change and initiate change of their own. Our in-depth quarterly business reviews include stakeholders from several CarGurus and dealer teams and provide analysis meant to give customers true insight into their performance, a competitive edge and suggestions for improving efficiency. Having a range of perspectives in these sessions enables us to approach topics from different angles and bring unique solutions to the table. We try to ensure that every touchpoint with our dealers adds value; leaning into CarGurus’ core value of collaboration has helped us achieve this.
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your reps?
We empower our reps to help dealers make the most of these opportunities to partner with dealers’ philanthropic and community efforts through donations and participation in dealer-sponsored events and fundraisers. Recently, a dealer asked one of our reps to be part of a women in automotive group in their area. We were honored to help her and the local community, and view the fact that we were considered for this as testimony to the trusted partnership we’ve built over time.
