Turn Your Order-Takers Back Into Sales Pros Let’s be honest. Since about August or September 2020, your salespeople have had it pretty easy. Your cars, trucks, and SUVs have been selling themselves… often at prices above MSRP for new cars and at historically elevated prices for used. Most salespeople became order-takers. They quit making calls, […]
Digital Retailing: Lessons from the Winners Among my regular duties over the last several years, I’ve been working with OEMs and dealers to fine tune their digital retailing efforts. Throughout this time, I’ve seen everything from utter failures to smashing successes. The failures were most often due to a lack of buy-in and (believe it […]
It’s the Perfect Time to Start Leading Again Yesterday, I wrote about how the inventory shortages presented a perfect time to restart your sales processes. Because, of course, once inventories begin to normalize, you’ll want solid sales processes in place if you plan to grow market share and hold more gross than your neighboring dealers. […]
It’s Time to Revisit Sales Processes Congratulations! You and your team have likely enjoyed the greatest run of net profitability in the history of your store! Of course, so has every other (non-Carvana) dealer in America. What a great (and weird) time it was to be a car dealer. Tight inventories created discipline at the […]
The Great Car-Buying Experience: Telling is Only Half the Equation Even before the pandemic, many dealerships were beginning to focus their marketing and messaging away from low prices toward providing a better customer experience. Certainly, the lockdowns and resulting (now fading) rush to at-home test drives and (still in its infancy) online buying sped up […]
What’s Your Plan When Inventories Normalize? Today (if you’re like most dealers) you’re selling everything you stock and you’re making the highest grosses on both new and used vehicles that you’ve made in years; perhaps decades; perhaps ever. Of course, while many sales managers will chalk this up to their superior desking skills, the truth […]
Tight New and Used Car Inventories: Where Can We Cut? Chip shortages and a stimulus-fueled increase in consumer demand have led to a wild start for automotive retail in 2021. Auction prices – driven higher by low new car inventory and the likes of Carvana and Vroom – have made acquiring adequate levels of used […]
(This article was written for the Winter 2021 edition of Tennessee Dealer News.) The Cure in Any Market: Attitude + Activities Depending on who’s providing the forecast, vehicle sales in 2021 are projected to be somewhere between up and down. Given that we know so little about what the future holds, what can Tennessee dealers […]
We Were Killing It… Now What? For a variety of reasons (pent-up demand, stimulus checks, fear of public transportation, etc.) year-over-year sales increased for virtually all dealers in the third quarter. Moreover, because of tight supply, dealers were able to hold more front-end gross on the vehicles they sold. Even the publicly-traded groups – which […]
(Originally published in the Fall 2020 edition of Tennessee Dealer News.) The 5 Things Dealers Can Do Today to Stay on Top In 2021 While the forecasts change almost daily, vehicle sales in 2021 are not expected to be like 2019. What I can predict is that 2021, like 2020, will be a weird year […]
Steve Stauning’s 100% Biased Gift List for Christmas 2020 2020 has been a strange year (to say the least). Though despite the on again/off again restrictions, your family, friends, and coworkers still expect a gift from you this holiday season. Instead of the clothes they’ll never wear or the ever-impersonal gift card, why not give […]
Ridiculously Simple Sales Management: The Blame Game (This post is one of 24 short and ridiculously simple chapters from Ridiculously Simple Sales Management. The book was written to help any sales or BDC manager quickly build and maintain a truly high-performing sales team. Each chapter concludes with Key Learnings and Chapter Exercises that make implementation […]
Sell One Today For many valid reasons (too many other duties, too many subordinates, wrong pay plan, etc.) and some invalid reasons (lazy, apathetic, schadenfreude – look it up), automotive sales managers often struggle to properly motivate their charges to reach stretch goals. Of course, this should be their primary duty. That is, ensuring their […]
The Dirty Dozen – 12 “Secrets” of Successful Salespeople As we start to ramp up to our new normal, one thing that isn’t likely to change is the difference between the top and the bottom of any sales organization. While every industry has its relatively few true superstar sellers, a third of the remaining group […]
Should I Cancel all Advertising? Marketing in An Uncertain Environment (This post is an updated summary of advice I provided my clients last month.) I’m getting a lot of questions from clients about what to do with marketing budgets during the current crisis, so I thought I’d share with you what I would do if […]
Automotive Retail Disruption: How Process Would’ve Made a Difference We all know good habits are learned in bad times, and bad habits are learned in good times. For virtually every car dealer in America, the good times started sometime around 2011, and ended suddenly in mid-March 2020. An industry disruption no one could’ve predicted. So, […]
Dealers: Beware Artificial Activity Targets I get it. The dealership sold zero vehicles on a Tuesday. Salespeople spent the entire day in the vaping circle or surfing the web. No one was making their calls. Fifty Calls Per Day! To combat the lethargy, someone on the leadership team demanded action. “I want each salesperson making […]
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 […]
(Forgive the long post, but there are some important lessons in here. If you don’t have the patience to read 3,200+ words, then you’re going to have to learn to be happy with treading water this year. However, feel free to skip the first 300 or so words and jump to The Two “Secrets” … […]
Automotive Internet Sales: The Difference Makers I see all kinds of internet sales structures; from high-performing BDCs to cherry-picking internet sales teams to the hot-mess-convoluted-no-one-is-accountable combinations. To be clear, any structure can work (some, of course, better than others) if the store leadership drives the activities. That’s a big if. Some automotive sales managers, in […]