Optimize Your RV Dealership During Peak Season

Peak season is here, and your dealership may follow the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy. But what if heightened traffic in sales and service reveals your operations are broken?

Now isn’t the best time for a process overhaul, but a few strategic adjustments can improve your operations and profits during this busy season.

Let’s start with your dealership’s front end.

Process Leads Effectively

Leads come in different forms. You can have a hot lead: someone who’s ready to buy, knows which unit they want and is interested in buying from your dealership. On the other hand, you may have a cold lead: someone who’s not quite sure what they’re looking for, isn’t set on purchasing and hasn’t engaged with your business much — if at all.

During the peak season, it’s essential your team knows how to manage both customer types to avoid missing out on deals and profits. But sometimes, lead processing systems fall short, making it difficult to track leads all the way through the sales process or prioritize hot leads over cold. Here are a few ways to optimize your lead management strategy:

• Clearly label each customer inquiry, identifying whether they’re ready to buy or just starting to browse.
• Avoid repeating questions to customers or asking them to complete the same forms multiple times.
• Keep a central customer profile to track preferences and interactions.
• Take detailed notes in your DMS and pass them along immediately to whomever will help work the deal, including F&I.
• Connect your systems and employees, making it easier to communicate customer details and transfer information.

Move Inventory Strategically

Consumers have different tastes, and it can be difficult to maintain the right selection of vehicles and avoid high holding costs across your lot. Throughout the next few months, periodically ask yourself:

• Are there any old vehicles on the lot that need to move? Can we adjust our sales or marketing strategies to prioritize these?
• Do I have a lot of used inventory to offload?
• Is my lot well-organized, or can we create specific zones to operate more efficiently?

Work with your sales team to refocus their efforts and refine their pitches to create a sense of urgency surrounding the units you need to move. For example, shift the emphasis from specific features to the rarity of the vehicle. This strategy encourages faster buying decisions. You can also add value to the deal elsewhere. Instead of vehicle discounts, offer add-on accessories or special warranty or service packages.

Track & Improve Customer Interactions

Timely and clear communication is critical. Consumers expect fast responses that address their needs, which means unanswered inquiries can make them lose interest.

Throughout the sale, track where communication falls apart and survey your team for solutions. Ask them:

• Do you have an established process for handling inquiries online, over the phone and in-person?
• What information aren’t you getting or recording that stalls the deal?
• When do you hear or notice customers express their frustrations about how long it takes to complete the process?
• Has anyone found a successful way to navigate these pain points?

When possible, leverage automation to streamline communications. If you use a DMS or CRM, explore automated email or text message options. Pre-scheduled replies help customers move through the sales funnel outside business hours. At the same time, automatic internal notifications will save your team time and effort, helping them stay ahead of the game.

If your team doesn’t use an automated tool, make sure you keep track of when customers reach out and what they ask about. Create email, text and phone scripts to efficiently follow up with customers before they arrive. When buyers come in to the dealership, reference back to any previous interactions to ensure a faster, smoother transition for the customer and your team.

Anticipate the Handoff to F&I

Buying an RV takes time. Many customers may settle on terms and forget they still have to get through F&I. Customers often express frustration about this handoff. They’ve likely spent most of their day at your business, and they want to close the deal and go home.

Train your team to provide customers transparent, relevant updates throughout the process. Let them know when you’re running credit checks or when F&I is comparing lenders for the best terms and rates. While they wait, give them resources about F&I products, or promote additional accessories and customer loyalty programs.

Behind the scenes, inform F&I about the customer’s preferences, concerns and limitations to help with the transition. Consider:

• Is the customer value-driven? F&I can share stories that relate products to real-life scenarios.
• Are they skeptical about add-ons? Price transparency and a lighter sales pitch will go a long way.

Being open about next steps keeps customers engaged, leading to a more positive, satisfactory experience.

Prepare Digital & Print Documentation Correctly

Printing — and reprinting — documents throughout the sales and F&I workflow is costly. You complete and sign dozens of forms for each deal; even one mistake, like transposing the VIN or misspelling the buyer’s name, could mean reprinting every form.

To avoid time-consuming errors, triple-check the information you receive from sales, including customer details, trade-in, model, VIN and anything needed for lender, federal, state or local forms.

Then, confirm which paperwork you can complete digitally and which requires a wet-ink signature before printing. Collecting digital signatures can help you easily catch any missed fields or nullify inaccurate forms before printing.

As a final check, review every form the customer returns to you to ensure it’s completed correctly. It’s expensive to constantly reprint documents, but it’s more expensive to submit errors to the lender, resulting in callbacks when they reject the existing deal paperwork.

Pass Deal Jackets Off to Lenders Quickly

Once you have a complete deal jacket, don’t let it sit. Send the paperwork to lenders immediately — with tracking if mailing it.

Keep a record of the deals you send off and follow up if you haven’t received funding in a timely manner. Lenders get busy too, but quick funding might determine which lenders you decide to use for future deals.

Service Under Pressure

Now let’s take a look at the service department, which can quickly become one of the busiest areas of the dealership under the pressure of peak season.

Reduce Service Lane Bottlenecks

This time of year, your service department is likely booked with maintenance, dewinterization or repair appointments. To ease your team’s load and minimize customer wait time, identify any bottlenecks.

If you have a DMS, use its digital scheduling capability to allocate technicians. This feature helps minimize downtime and ensures techs know what’s on their plate.

Frequently check in with your team members to discuss what’s working and what changes could streamline workflows. These check-ins will also set clear expectations. You’ll be able to organize jobs by urgency and complexity to address high-priority items first.

Anticipate High-Demand Parts Needs

You may already be seeing demand for common RV parts. Encourage your team to proactively place orders when they notice inventory of major parts is running low.

To maintain customer satisfaction, be transparent about repairs that need custom parts or may be delayed by supply chain issues. Customers value honesty and want to be informed through every step of the repair. By openly communicating, you can minimize customer frustration and avoid setting inaccurate expectations.

Optimize Your Techs’ Skills & Time

Your technicians are the most valuable part of your service drive. Assign your techs based on their strength and expertise, batching jobs to maximize efficiency. As you monitor daily activities, keep an eye out for costly disruptions such as last-minute schedule changes, overbooked appointments, inaccurate information and broken or missing parts.

By getting ahead of these interruptions, you can limit the time techs spend waiting for logistical issues to be fixed. This proactive approach keeps repairs moving and your repair event cycle time (RECT) lower.

When your team runs into obstacles during the busy season, meaningful and quick fixes will temporarily sustain your bottom line, employee efficiency and customer satisfaction.

But these changes aren’t perfect, so note what you need to adjust and the impact on your business. Once sales and service demand slows, look for ways to automate and standardize your processes to perfect your operations.