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 […]
More than a few years ago, we compiled a list of the Ten Best Decision-Making Books Ever. And while there have been plenty of other books written on the subject since then, none have been able to crack the list… until now. A few weeks ago, an author contacted us and asked that we […]
I’ve often heard top process people say something like “The first step to process improvement is understanding what needs to be improved.” Knowing, they say, is half the battle. We mystery shop hundreds of dealers each year and like to think we learn something new with each shop. Certainly, the shop reports can be eye-opening […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
(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 […]
I almost titled this post “Perfect Data Matters,” but because it is one of the most important blog posts I’ve made this year, and because that title is so stinking boring to you and your managers, it would guarantee the least amount of interaction. And that is sad. Perfect Data matters. As boring as […]
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 […]