CONCORD, N.C. -

On a Thursday afternoon at a hotel in the Charlotte suburbs, a crowd of auto journalists — flanked to the left by a deep blue 2015 Toyota Camry XSE reflecting overhead ballroom lights — listened to a presentation on the Camry’s redesign by Darlene Morgan of Southeast Toyota Distributors.

Southeast Toyota was hosting a media event in Concord, N.C., to introduce the completely redesigned 2015 Camry, so Auto Remarketing made the short trip from our Cary, N.C., offices and caught up with the Southeast Toyota team. 

The Deerfield, Fla.-based company — which is part of JM Family Enterprises — indicates on its website that it is the largest independent distributor of Toyota and Scion vehicles in the world, and its dealers represent about a fifth of all U.S. Toyota vehicle sales.

There are 176 stores throughout the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and Alabama that are within the regional reach of Southeast Toyota, which is responsible for distributing new-vehicle inventory, parts and accessories to these dealerships.

Additionally, SET’s duties also include providing training to these stores, which it does at no charge, Morgan said during an interview with Auto Remarketing. And that’s where the mission for these product-launch events comes into play.

“We feel the more knowledgeable the field consultants are, understanding the product, getting hands-on the product, the better they’ll be with the customer,” said Morgan, sales training manager with SET.

“So, we do events like this when we launch new vehicles. We bring them out; we give them the opportunity to drive the competitor product and our product, right behind each other, side by side, so they can feel those differences and have those key stories (to share) with some of the customers,” she added. “We’re big on training.”

As Morgan put it, “there’s only so much you can get from taking an online test.” While technology certainly has its benefits in the training process, getting the five-senses experience with the vehicle can make for a more meaningful discussion with the customer.

By going through this hands-on training with new-vehicle launches, dealers can tell shoppers, “I felt exactly what you were talking about; here’s what you’re going to feel when we go out there,” Morgan said.

“It’s more relatable,” she added.

Having that relatability and achieving that personal-experience understanding with a customer, Morgan agreed, can be just as important as the marketing piece.

“It’s just as important,” she said, “just as the online side is important to a customer to get all their research. At the end of the day, they’re still going to want to touch that car. It’s a very small percent that probably, actually, just buys a car sight-unseen. And we feel the same way with our sales consultants. We want to give them that experience.

“So, we think it resonates and it makes a difference to give them all of those touch-points, to give them those stories,” Morgan continued. “And also, they’re networking with other sales consultants in other dealerships that are in the same territory and asking them questions.”

By doing that, dealers are getting to share stories and learning from one another about working with customers.

And that, as she put, is “priceless.”

Editor's Note: Stay tuned for the Nov. 1 digital edition of Auto Remarketing, where we include an online slideshow with more photos of the 2015 Camry.