Let’s quickly agree on two truths about the Internet and car sales: Everyone is online; and Not everyone is willing to submit a lead, call you or text you in advance of their visit. Can we agree on these two? Great! Now, DrivingSales puts the percentage of buyers who make no contact with your […]
Online chat. I know that when some of you hear that you’re thinking “Steve, we tried chat at our dealership, and it didn’t work.” Or, “We’re doing chat right now, but it doesn’t really move any metal.” To me, these thoughts sound like: “We tried having phones in the dealership, and they didn’t work;” […]
Hey Car Dealer: Stop Letting Carvana (and Everyone Else) Define You! If you believe the corporate manifestos and marketing pitches of every automotive retail-related startup for the last twenty years, then you’d think America’s car dealerships are staffed by a bunch of puppy-kicking thieves providing zero value as they work overtime to deliver the absolute […]
I can hear the Digital Marketing Snob in charge of your dealership’s or group’s websites now: “We don’t use pop-ups!” It’s so forceful – yet so completely naïve – that it makes me smile. What sort of precious little darling is making your marketing decisions today? If they’re shouting that “We don’t use pop-ups” […]
If we agree your website has just two primary goals (attract visitors and convert those visitors into buyers), then you need to ensure you’re giving every visitor lots of chances to convert with you. As we learned in an earlier part of this series, visitors don’t really know what you want them to do […]
You’ve told your site visitors “what” to do – that is, you need them to “complete this quick form,” “call now,” “click here,” etc., and this is good. Being direct with a website visitor will generate far more leads and calls than hoping they figure it all out on their own. Now you need […]
A major rule of website design is to understand that the website visitor is not you. They are not your team. They don’t visit your website multiple times a day. And unlike you, they never think your website is “stale.” Understanding this simple fact will keep you from making unnecessary changes that reduce conversions […]
While only a tiny percentage of your website visitors submit e-leads from your website, these leads are gold to dealerships with solid processes in place. In fact, for the average dealer, just 5 website leads equals 1 vehicle sold; making generating these leads a top priority for successful dealers. Unfortunately, many dealers are unintentionally […]
As we learned from two great studies produced recently by AutoTrader and DrivingSales, 39% of today’s buyers make some contact with the dealership prior to arriving. This means they submit an e-lead, pick up the phone, start a chat or complete some other connection activity before walking on your lot. In this part, we’re […]
Everywhere you turn in business today someone is squawking about ‘Millennial Buyers’ – as if Millennials were somehow that different or more important than the generations that preceded them. Certainly, 20-year-olds are different from 60-year-olds in many ways, but when it comes to website conversions, we need to agree that Millennial studies are stupid. […]
When you’re planning to make website changes to improve your conversion rate, it’s important to make sure everyone involved can answer the question: What is a conversion? There are a lot of opinions about what constitutes a website conversion – especially from the classified listing sites – and the problem for you is that […]
(This is the first part in a multi-part blog series that will explore virtually everything car dealers and other sales-focused businesses need to know to drive the maximum amount of leads, calls and sales from their existing website traffic.) Car dealers and other businesses looking to dramatically grow their e-leads, their phone calls and even […]
Wait, what’s a CSR again? CSR stands for Customer Service Representative. For some of you this might mean anyone who answers your phones. It might also mean everyone on your sales team. You see, any employee or manager on your frontlines should be solving customer service issues; and anyone who should be solving customer […]
Okay, you’ve got an empowered customer service team, but their average call times are still too high! What the heck? Average call times? You’re measuring average call times for a customer service team that’s supposed to be solving issues? Is this 2017 or 1967? If you’re like a lot of the call centers that […]
It’s time to stop escalating the customer service issues in your business. While good leaders allow their subordinates to escalate customer issues, great leaders don’t see many escalated issues at all. This is because great leaders not only allow those on the frontline to solve issues; they expect it. Would you like to solve […]
If you examine the average dealership’s sales from 2010 through 2016, you’ll notice that they steadily grew year-over-year. Of course, the average dealer grew because the market grew; and while everyone saw sales increases over that period, only a small percentage of dealers experienced an actual increase in their market share. Interestingly, during this same period, most dealers […]
In the last post from this series, we learned to picture the customer with the issue as someone’s slightly confused, 95-year-old great grandmother. We do this primarily so that we’re always on our best behavior; but this exercise will also help us handle the nastiest of irate customers by teaching us to kill them […]
Resolving customer issues is not actual customer service, it’s reactive customer service. Businesses that assume this is actual customer service completely miss the point of managing the customer experience. The goal, of course, is to eliminate issues before they occur. When you’re faced with resolving an issue – that is, practicing reactive customer service […]
I think readers of this series are fairly clear on my feeling that great customer means never having an issue in the first place, right? Well, okay, but what happens when we mess up? What happens when we screw the pooch? Responding to and solving a customer service issue is required whenever your team […]
There’s a great 2002 study on manipulating the customer experience that was published in The Journal of Applied Social Psychology detailing how something as small as an after dinner mint can be used to dramatically increase a waiter’s tips. For those of you not wanting to read the entire study (I don’t blame you), here […]