Cars.com's Salesperson Connect: Dating Service For Car Shoppers

If you can find your future spouse online, you certainly should be able to choose your car salesperson that way. That’s the thinking behind Cars.com’s Salesperson Connect, a recently expanded and enhanced service that gives car shoppers snapshot looks at dealer salespeople. Instead of being paired up with a salesperson the old-fashioned way — by sheer happenstance — the third-party shopping site’s initiative enables shoppers to choose the salesperson they want to do business with based on that salesperson’s reviews and personal information. The object is to create a bond between customer and salesperson that changes the nature of the entire process. Early indications are it’s working.

“What we’re seeing across the board is a higher closing rate,” said Dave Domm, chief product officer of Chicago-based Cars.com. “The rate is 89% for those that are leveraging Salesperson Connect the way they should be, and they are closing 15 percent faster. Those are really compelling statistics.”

Those stats more than hint at the idea that if a bond of trust can be established between customer and salesperson, the entire car-buying process is enhanced. (See “Tesla Motors Tumbles In Key Trust Measure”) Domm says Salesperson Connect is designed to answer one of the typical car-buyer’s key questions.

“Once I’ve decided on my make [and] model, I still have to find the right dealer, and then negotiate the right price. And finally who will I be dealing with on that?” he told forbes.com. “And that’s one of the biggest friction points that we’ve uncovered in all of our research and decades of experience. Even if we point them to the right dealership, 90% of buyers still would prefer to select a salesperson before they step foot on the dealership lot.”

According to Pat Grooms, general manager of Longmont Ford in Longmont, Colorado, the Salesperson Connect system works quite well.  It helps the dealership build a bank of positive reviews and it enables customers to choose a salesperson with whom they might have great rapport.

“I’ve had the pleasure of coming across customers on the showroom floor that I interact with who said I’m coming to your dealership because your prices are great, your reviews are phenomenal, and I picked out one of our top producers because he had some of the highest reviews on the Web site,” he said.

Anthony Williams, sales consultant from Morrie’s Hyundai, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, agrees that the Salesperson Connect initiative has helped him sell cars while building his personal brand. The veteran car salesperson was an early adopter of technology, using video and social media to develop leads as early as 2004.

“I go all the way back to 2004 doing video e-mail or using video on my web sites and sending individual videos with a picture of my face in the car information to my clients to separate myself from those other people in the market,” he told us. “And I was able to surpass them by using technology.”

Williams, a musician and the member of a well-known Minneapolis-area musical family, uses that avocation to fuel his vocation.  Often a conversation that results in a car sale actually begins with a discussion of music.

“I have customers who read my profile through the [Salesperson] Connect system, and those people then get excited because that’s what they’re looking for  — somebody that they can relate to,” Williams said. “This platform just gives us another venue to be able to really kind of show our wares, show what makes us different. We’ve only got that one shot.”

The desire to change the narrative — the common conception that buying a car will be an excruciating experience — is what prompted Cars.com to purchase DealerRater in the summer of 2016.

“The reason we purchased DealerRater was how do we point them [car buyers] to the right dealership?” he said. “DealerRater was the first in the space to really map the area that there are high-profile dealers that have high star ratings and have great reviews.”

Salesperson Connect was designed to extend that level of trust one step farther, not just to the dealership level but right to the salesperson who will help you purchase the car. Again, the desire is to flip the script from the notion that the salesperson is an irritant and obstruction to a valued counselor and helper. Exposing the salespeople for what they are, real human beings with genuine human interests goes a long way toward making that happen. Buyers are responding to the new way of viewing their salesperson.

“By the time they do step on that lot they’ve got conviction that it’s gonna be a great experience,” Domm said. “At the end of the day we’re trying to dispel this distrust with the car buying process, you know that quote-unquote sleazy salesman commercial that you’d see back in the day. We want to do everything we can to be that trusted unbiased third-party objective opinion when it comes to this big decision.”

Using Salesperson Connect is straightforward. Once the car shopper has identified a specific vehicle that she or he is interested in at a particular dealership using Cars.com listings, the shopper is presented with the opportunity to view the personality profiles of several of that dealership’s top salespeople. The salespeople have to reach a high level of customer satisfaction simply to qualify to have their names listed. The customer can then review the profiles and ask to be contacted by the salesperson they choose.

“The prevalence of reviews as a core component of how we shop and how we communicate with each other whether it’s social networking or shopping online — reviews are foundational,” Domm said. “It’s surprising to me that no one in our space fully embraces that as a core component of the shopping experience. We’re leveraging over six million reviews and that’s significant.”

The Salesperson Connect initiative has had positive effects that reach beyond facilitating vehicle purchases as well.

“It helps to take off some of the negative connotations or stigmas that people have about car salespeople,” Williams said. “It does give you that human connection with people and it even, in my particular case, it creates friendships. And so that’s a beautiful thing when not only is a person buying a car from you but that person becomes a friend.”