Gate Crowding: The Zombie Apocalypse – How Delta’s Passengers Are Blocking Even More Gates Since I first wrote about Delta’s Boarding Zones and the Ubiquitous Gate Crowders, I’ve left Delta for Southwest and returned. In my absence, Delta took an already confusing zone boarding system (one that caused most of the gate crowding) and made […]
The Customer Experience: Southwest Airlines Didn’t Even Try For context, I gave up Delta Diamond Medallion status a few years ago because I was tired of being treated like a king when I was lucky enough to receive an upgrade, while being treated worse than baggage when I was not. This was (and likely is) […]
Carvana is Worth Every Bit of $2 Billion I have to admit it, Carvana (NYSE: CVNA) has captured the imagination of Wall Street investors, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the early days of Pets.com. They are, in my opinion, clearly a $2 billion company. Unfortunately for those who remain in the stock, […]
The Best Car Selling Book Ever! Whether you’re brand new to car sales or been around for a couple of decades, today’s prospects pose a unique challenge to those using traditional vehicle-selling methods. Specifically, the buyers have evolved… but, unfortunately, the average road-to-the-sale has not. Ten years ago, actual new car prices were near impossible […]
How to Sell Cars to Today’s Connected Customers (Edited excerpt from Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers – available for $49.99 on Amazon.com.) Either during the initial job interview or your first week in the car business, you were probably told (as I was) that […]
Stop Memorizing Word Tracks & Start Setting Real Appointments that Show and Buy If you’ve watched my free sales training videos, then you know my advice for you is to be very direct with today’s prospects – especially when it comes to setting appointments. The inspiration behind this approach rests solely with the realities […]
Pigs get Fed and Hogs get Slaughtered I’ve written a few times about the adage ‘pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered.’ The meaning (as it applies to business) is simply that it’s okay to make a profit, but when that profit is the result of price gouging and/or taking advantage of people, you’ll […]
The Coming Automotive Retail Disruption Explained on a Cocktail Napkin As I’ve written previously, the real disruption to the automotive retail model in America will not come from the Carvana’s (NYSE: CVNA) of the world. That is, “a better customer experience” won’t matter if there’s no price and convenience advantage. (And, Carvana won’t be […]
Buckets and Your Internet Sales Processes For most automotive sales managers, the internet sales and other CRM follow-up processes their store employs can seem confusing on the surface. Some “computer guy” manages the whole “CRM thing” and creates these “complicated algorithms” that keep the processes firing as designed. Except that CRM processes – especially those […]
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) […]
In a recent CBT News interview (that aired this week), Joe Gumm asked me the following question: “We’re about two months from wrapping up 2017; and some dealers are already thinking about 2018. So, if you had a top five list of things dealerships need in order to be successful from this point on, what […]
How to Always Respond First to Your Internet Leads There’s a great study I like to quote from a company called CraftJack that shows contractors who connect with a prospect lead first convert those leads into customers 238% more often than those who connect second. 238% more often! Just like it does for contractors, connecting […]
The Coming Automotive Retail Disruption? It’ll be about Price and Convenience (and Nothing Else) (This is a follow-up to an article I posted on DealerRefresh a couple of weeks ago that focused on the myth that dealers are behind other industries in terms of tech, marketing and the customer experience.) Can we please stop talking […]
Okay, so you know you need to employ a conversion button strategy on your websites, but did you know you can have too many buttons? You can. It comes down to choices for your site visitor; and research shows that when consumers are presented with too many choices, they punt. They make no choice. […]
Can we all agree that if we doubled our demo drive percentage, we could double our write up percentage? Great. Now, can we agree that if we doubled our write up percentage, we could double our closing percentage? Outstanding. Since we all agree on this, let’s shift our primary focus in the dealership away […]
Digital Dealer – Why It Pays to Shop Around the Perimeter Most of us know that the healthiest way to shop in the supermarket is to stay around the perimeter (where the food is generally the freshest and most natural) and avoid the “Frankenfood” in the center. Can the same be true for vendor expos […]
As I wrote in the previous post in this series, a button strategy that drives leads is one of the simplest changes you can make to your website that will immediately drive more sales leads. So simple to get right… and so simple to get wrong. Buttons? Really? Buttons are so important to the […]
Changing the Culture at the DMV A regular reader of my writing asked me the following question via email recently: “According to state workers, the Department of Motor Vehicles is trying to change their reputation of rude customer service. With long lines, rude customers, customers who don’t want to deal with bureaucracy, how could […]
Newsflash: Car buyers hate the typical car buying process. Today, in their mind, they’ve already completed their own needs analysis. They’ve made their product selection. They know the car’s features. Everyone who submits a lead, calls you, or walks onto your lot is ready to test drive. In fact, because they’ve already come equipped […]
Whether addressing a 20 Group or consulting in a dealership, I am constantly asked questions like this: “So, Steve, what cool, new digital marketing sources are you seeing out there and what do you recommend?” The answer to this question always contains two parts: First, I tell them about the cool, new stuff I’m seeing; […]