Dear Toyota: Here’s $108 Million to Spend in Your Fight for Share Against Ford As the Toyota brand works to replace Ford in the top spot for US vehicle sales in 2018 (as of this writing, the Ford brand holds roughly a 14% share of the US Market to Toyota’s 12.4%; source here), you have […]
Has the Time Come for You and Your OEM to Find New Digital Marketing Partners? I spoke with a marketing manager for a good-sized group the other day and he lamented that many of their current digital marketing “partners” were wasting tens of thousands of dollars every month with no regard to actual dealership results. […]
Do Your Carfax.com Leads Close at Relatively Low Rates? Let me level set right from the start: I like Carfax. I have friends who work at Carfax. I think Carfax has (ultimately) been good for the industry. Additionally, this post is not intended to encourage dealers to cancel their Carfax.com listing agreements, only to drive […]
How to Spot and Stop SEO Fraud! Last week, we published some guidelines to help you uncover and stop the SEM theft we’re seeing in nearly every dealership visit. Today, I wanted to tackle the potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fraud that also appears to be fairly ubiquitous. SEO, as a quick reminder, refers […]
How to Solve 99% of Customer Service Issues: Empower your Front Lines If you’re in the service business, there’s a simple way to solve nearly every customer issue that you’ll ever create: Empower your front lines. Many of the issues, in fact, are created specifically because your front line is not (or does not feel) […]
There’s an SOS message being broadcast from parents and employers that seems to be getting louder every day: SAVE OUR SNOWFLAKES! Snowflakes, for the uninitiated, is a term thrown about by members of both major political parties in America to describe humans on the other side of the political extreme who seem easily offended. […]
Got Millennials? Then you need Sh*t Sandwich. Bar none, Sh*t Sandwich is the must-have book if you’ve got people in your life (children, coworkers, employees) who think the world owes them everything and/or that life should be fair. I know, I wrote it. The advice in Sh*t Sandwich is simple to follow and easy […]
There’s a strangely popular and wholly inaccurate post going around LinkedIn and other social media that generates tons of likes and shares – this, despite the post’s complete break from reality. I suppose it’s liked so much because it attempts to equate the demise of every industry to bad customer service and not technology; even when […]
Quick… make a list of the top five issues that are negatively impacting your dealership’s profitability that also have little to do with sales team turnover. If you’re like many of the dealers I’ve spoken with over the last year, your list probably contains items like these: Mediocre Online Reputation/CSI Higher Discounting/Lower Grosses Flattening […]
(This is an updated and edited version of my two-part series originally posted on the 3 Birds Marketing blog.) Before we dive into why Carvana will fail (and how it might succeed), I want to make sure we’re all up to speed on the used car market, in general. Unless you just don’t pay […]
As I’ve written before, your website has just two goals: Attract and Convert. Your site should be constructed in a way that is search-friendly so as to attract visitors; and then once they’re on your website, your only goal is to convert those visitors into buyers. That’s it; the only two goals. Unfortunately, while […]
The Solution to the Never-Ending Car Dealer Staffing Problem So much has been written about the decades-long issues of turnover and staffing in automotive retail that I continue to be amazed when I read headlines like this one from Automotive News recently: Dealership turnover squeezing profits – NADA study spotlights struggles in recruitment and retention How […]
How To Design Your Website to Convert More Visitors into Buyers! Little-known baseball great and minor league manager Rocky Bridges once said “There are three things the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else: build a fire, run a hotel and manage a baseball team.” If Rocky were alive today he might […]
As I wrote in 2015’s Self-Driving Cars: the Winners and the Losers, new car dealers will be among the “Obvious Losers” when, not if, self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous. However, I also predicted that this evolution wouldn’t likely begin impacting new car dealers before 2025. My timeline has actually contracted a little in the last […]
More than a few years ago, we compiled a list of the Ten Best Decision-Making Books Ever. And while there have been plenty of other books written on the subject since then, none have been able to crack the list… until now. A few weeks ago, an author contacted us and asked that we […]
As my friend Jeff Kershner so eloquently Tweeted last week: “A few years ago everyone was going BONKERS over ZMOT and now going BONKERS over Micro-moments. It’s like breaking up a turd into pellets.” A few years ago everyone was going BONKERS over ZMOT and now going BONKERS over Micro-moments. It’s like breaking […]
In a transparent, information-rich world where showrooming is commonplace, a pricing tactic used by many retailers seems strangely shortsighted. For lack of a better term, let’s call this shortsighted pricing practice “Duplicitous Pricing” or DP for short. Simply put, DP occurs when a retailer posts one price in their store while maintaining a different price […]
Dear Car Dealer: Congratulations on a record 2015! Yippee! Now, get the slings, because you’ve likely broken your arm patting yourself on the back. If you’re an average dealership – whether privately-owned or publicly-held – you had a record year in 2015. Heck, if you’re a below average dealer you had a record 2015. […]
The Great BDC Robbery: How Reconciliation Allows Your Business Development Center to Steal from You Do you have any idea what your BDC is doing right now? A few weeks ago a general manager I’ve known for some time was bragging about the performance of his group’s Centralized BDC. He was almost gushing about how […]
Previously, I wrote about how I Will Never Own a Self-Driving Car (and Neither will You). In that post, I discussed why self-driving cars would not only become a reality, but how the leaders in this industry (folks like Google and Apple) will likely capitalize on this revolution. At the end of that article, […]