It’s not just Car Dealers wasting money in Paid Search Dealers: Looking for a little good news? Well, automotive retail is not the only industry wasting hundreds of millions every year in paid search and display. I guess that’s good news… sort of… in a misery-loves-company kind of way. Retargeting Fail We’ve all noticed how […]
Playing Real Moneyball in Automotive Retail Carvana is playing Moneyball. CarMax is playing Moneyball. All the other publicly traded dealer groups are trying to play Moneyball (and a couple might actually figure it out). If your direct competitors start playing Moneyball, you’ll soon find yourself at a disadvantage you won’t even recognize. Besides stealing market […]
Call Me Crazy, but if it Was My Dealership, I’d Want the Tail Wagging the Dog The biggest problem nearly every dealership faces today (as they did yesterday, ten years ago, and five decades ago) is turnover. Virtually every dealership I work with asks me about recruiting, hiring, and training good salespeople, service writers, and […]
Texting While Selling? Even I Was Shocked by This Behavior! This one is hard to fathom. Sure, I’ve been in an Uber while the driver carried on an extensive (and dangerous) text conversation with his friends. Of course, he wasn’t trying to sell me anything (though, perhaps, he should’ve tried to sell me on leaving […]
Duh Customer Service – How Thinking Improves the Customer Experience I’ve been there… you’ve been there. You enter the restaurant. You spy as many as 50 empty table and 6 tables with guests. They have two servers working. Where do they seat the guests? In clusters right next to each other. No spacing. No private […]
You Don’t Have to Hire Asshole Employees: Your Culture Will Create Them There’s a disconnect among those sitting in top leadership positions in some organizations. They want to create a Disney-Like Culture or become the Chick-fil-A of their industry. They’ve read about the terrific returns a great customer experience creates, so they mandate a great […]
For the Love of all Things Holy! Keep Your Frickin’ Word! A great customer experience – the kind that Chick-fil-A or Ritz-Carlton provides – involves just four things: Make “it” easy Manage expectations Keep customers informed Keep your word This simply means: Make whatever the customer wants (a chicken sandwich; a room for the night) […]
Delta Boarding Zones, Gate Crowding, and How the New, New, New Boarding Zones Might Be the Dumbest Alternative Yet Delta knew they had a problem. Their Delta Boarding Zone System (DBZS) was confusing and caused massive gate crowding. Inferior rivals, faced with the same issue (think United), didn’t wrack their brains solving it, they just […]
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 […]