The 5 Car Dealer Sales Call Situations (and why a BDC is best) With today’s connected customer, there really are only a few types of phone calls your team will find themselves involved with. Gone are the days of a customer phoning and saying, “I need something good on gas for under $8,000; what do […]
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 […]
As some of you may know, I give away 100% of my online video training for free. I started this because I had more dealers, dealer groups and OEMs asking for my time than I had time to give. Since most managers in automotive (no offense) pay for training that they never bother to implement or reinforce, I decided […]
I recently received an email from a colleague asking about a pay plan for an automotive BDC that I describe as a “Hot Mess.” Why a Hot Mess, you ask? Plainly stated, a dealership’s sales structure and associated process flows should be simple and straightforward. When these flows have multiple forks upon multiple forks […]
We recently received the comment below on our Young Managers – How Do They Lead Older Subordinates post: Hi, I am a female, 28 year older manager leading a mix team of 8 people who are 15-25 years older than me in finance operations. I have slightly different situation. I am an EXPAT from […]
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. […]
Let me start this post by stating unequivocally that I am big fan of online service scheduling applications for car dealers. When set up correctly, these little tools can save you and your customers the headaches and hassles of numerous service phone calls. When set up correctly. Without getting into the weeds, suffice it […]
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, […]
Self-Driving Cars: Why you will NEVER buy one… There’s been a lot of talk and press lately about the coming revolution known as the autonomous drive vehicle (a.k.a. self-driving car). It’s coming. You cannot stop it. Despite your personal feelings, we will have more than a few self-driving cars on the road in the next […]
(Here’s another quick, helpful excerpt from the free 2015 Car Dealer Mystery Shop Study of more than 400 dealers.) What is the Goal of Your Team’s Lead Response? What should be your dealership’s goal when responding to e-leads? If the prospect is inquiring about a specific vehicle, should your goal be to have them reconsider […]
(This is an excerpt from the 2015 Automotive Dealer Mystery Shop Study completed by pladoogle.com; and the best practices shared below relate to the email and voicemail messages that car dealers should be using when responding to an internet sales lead.) Voicemail & Email Responses – Best Practices It’s important to remember the goal of this […]
Six months ago I watched a service manager struggle with the amount of customer complaints he had to deal with on a daily basis. Most of the complaints were just silly, and almost all of them should have been solved at the advisor level. Unfortunately for this manager, he was really, really good at […]
[With the on-again/off-again debate about Third Party Providers currently on (again), it seems appropriate to present this excerpt from our 2015 Online Automotive Leads mystery shop study.] A high percentage of dealership desk managers still look at the Internet and their own internet sales teams as the enemy. For these shortsighted managers, the […]
NEWSFLASH: Consumers are tired of wasting 3-5 hours of their lives buying a car. The average prospect today has done more than 19 hours of research before they ever set foot on your lot; so they know what they want to buy, they just don’t want to spend an entire day buying it from […]
I left my job in March 2013 (my boss was the king of all a-holes and I just couldn’t take it anymore). Since then I’ve been looking for a job (except for a three-month period where I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had the surgery; which was completely successful and recuperated). Now that […]
I had a fun exchange with Walmart on Twitter last month that I believe deserves sharing here – especially given that the exchange can (I’m hopeful) remind corporations to separate my duties as a customer and their duties as an employer when it comes to training their managers. First, a little background: I was […]
It’s All About the ROI Every now and then I find the automotive digital marketing controversies and handwringing on sites like LinkedIn, DealerElite.net and others to be both humorous and disturbing. Humorous, because it’s really not all that complicated (yet some people insist on adding drama to everything); and disturbing, because no matter what the […]
5 Simple Rules… for Eliminating Skating Forever If the only place you’ve ever worked is for one of America’s car dealerships, then you may not be aware that other industries don’t reward those who steal from their coworkers. Only dealership employees enjoy the added perk of being rewarded for cheating each other at will. We […]
Perception is reality. I wish I was the first person who ever uttered this unbelievably accurate view of the world. I guess I almost could have been the first, since the quote is most often attributed to political consultant Lee Atwater (who is only twelve years older than me). I find that odd, of course, […]