As we learned in the last lesson in this series, there are essentially three primary things you can control that will influence those vehicle buyers who make no contact with you before they buy; those are pricing, reputation and messaging. (As DrivingSales tells us, those unwilling to connect in advance of purchase comprise 61% […]
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;” […]
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 […]
The Worst Boss Ever, Yoda Would Be I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. People worship Yoda as some Svengali or Jedi Master or something; but in all honesty, a pretty crappy boss he’d make, if at your job, he was in charge. If you’re a Star Wars fanboy, you’re going to have […]
Have you noticed what I’ve noticed about the American workforce over the years? I’ve worked closely with literally hundreds of people since leaving the Marine Corps in 1985, and an overwhelming majority of my coworkers simply hated their jobs. It’s not that any one of them had a particularly lousy job, per se; it’s just […]
Sales are flat – we need more training! Turnover is up – we need more training! Grosses are down – we need more training! We just got a bad review – we need more training! Salespeople aren’t making their calls – we need more training! I can almost hear Jan Brady now: “Training, training, […]
Cheat Sheet for Free Car Dealer Training Resources About once a week I get asked if there is a place where someone can go to see all of my free training resources cataloged in an easily digestible format. For car dealers looking for just video training, we created a Suggested Training Curriculum for Car […]
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 […]
I hate to break it to you, but if you run a for-profit business – like a car dealership – then your website has just two important goals: Goal #1 – Attract Visitors Goal #2 – Convert Visitors Sorry, that’s it. Attracting and converting visitors are the only real value your website provides and […]