First off, I must admit this article is purely speculation based on rumors – it is about the future, and not set in stone.

Two things have come up this week, which are major concerns for me. One deals with the two big DMS providers: Reynolds & Reynolds and ADP. The second is something I heard about Toyota. We all know privacy laws have become more stringent than ever and continually evolve to encapsulate wider venues almost daily. It was simply a matter of time before the DMS providers had to jump on the privacy band-wagon by creating their own set of requirements.  This should be nothing new for a Reynolds & Reynolds dealer. Mostly this will affect third-party vendors. As an ADP dealer I am beginning to become familiar with their upcoming process. It seems as though they are offering vendors two steps: 1) The vendor has to purchase an API to gain DMS access (about $80,000) and 2) become certified through ADP (about an 18 month process…currently). Fortunately, dealers will be able to send out some information to vendors, but the more DMS information a vendor interacts with the harder it will be for that organization. I foresee the next few years being difficult in working with DMS information and vendors. We will have a short list of approved vendors to choose from.

To further shorten that list is the second part: our manufacturers. This part fully comes from the rumor-mill, but I heard Toyota is considering a new mandate. The mandate will require dealers to only use approved CRM/ILM vendors. This will be more stringent than what Honda currently does. Honda only wants to monitor certain areas of how Internet leads are handled, so they require a dealer to use a pre-approved list of vendors or offer dealers to pull leads through their own Honda Interactive Network. From what I heard about Toyota, they are considering only passing leads to dealers who use one of their pre-approved CRM/ILM vendors, and not offering any other alternatives to access Toyota leads. Speculation on the rumor vine, also states Toyota will take things even further by requiring the whole dealership use one of these vendors. Toyota is interested in not only how Internet leads are handled, but showroom traffic as well. Typically Toyota sets the franchise premises, so it is only a matter of time before other OEM’s move in the same direction.

If speculation becomes fact, this could mean dealers have an extremely short list of vendors to choose from. And dealer groups could be even more limited as one manufacturer requires a particular CRM/ILM that another manufacturer may not.

Can you see what a mess all of this could put all of us in?

P.S. One more time, this is purely speculation from the rumor-mill. I mention it on DealerRefresh to give everyone a heads-up on a potentially difficult future.

Premium Partner with AutoTrader – Again!

Well I did it again. I signed up for another year as a Premium Partner with AutoTrader for their 2007 product.

I was tempted to drop down to the Featured Listings package or get rid of AutoTrader all together and shift my budget over to Cars.com. Not because AutoTrader doesn’t perform well for us, but due to the increase in pricing. We are a smaller dealer and I’m lucky to have 50 used cars on the lot at any given time. Once you take the monthly price and spread it out amongst all my used cars, I was already spending more then I like per car for advertising.

What keeps me going with AutoTrader is the positive ROI I’ve been able to track using the service. Even with the high cost per lead and advertising cost per car, the ROI makes total sense to continue on for another year. Though if they keep hiking their price, this may be my last signed contract.

My biggest complaint I have with AutoTrader is with the price increase each year, they try to sell me on the new “added features” that do nothing to sell me more cars. Like adding the ability to add more photos of your dealer for your dealership profile or the new “Reduced” icon that shows up when you change your pricing (being a Mercedes dealers I think it sort of cheapens the car).

The new Print Vehicle Brochure is a decent addition but the load time for the brochures can be horrendous for slower computers. They should allow the consumer the option for a full or mini brochure (cutting some of the photos and having the option omitting the Carfax).

The best part of the new 2007 product is the new Admin! (if it would only work, but I’ll touch on that later). Now when you log in, you get an inventory age report along with a list of your Top 10 New and Used vehicles. But there’s a problem with the Top 10 reports and something I have been complaining about for along time. The Top 10 reports shows how many times a particular vehicle has shown up in searches BUT it’s for the entire time the car has been in inventory. Obviously if I have a car in inventory for 3-4 months, it’s going to be higher on the list then say a car that’s been listed for only a week. AutoTrader needs to allow us to designate a time period for this report to have any real value.

The most impressive feature is the Market Comparison. While viewing your inventory list screen you get an overview of the average price of similar inventory listed on AutoTrader. This allows you to see how your vehicles compare to the competition. Of course these are just averages, but when you drill down to the vehicle specifics and click on the Market Comparison tab, you get a full list of your competitive inventory while allowing you to click and view the actual vehicle listing. This is something I do before spotlighting a car but I would have to search from the consumer side of AutoTrader. I can now stay inside of the AutoTrader admin, compare my inventory and pricing to the competition and then Spotlight, all from one screen.

Another gripe I have with AutoTrader is the deleting of inventory. If you make any change to a vehicle in the AutoTrader admin, it “locks” that vehicle into your inventory. You are then forced to manually delete the vehicle when it sells. I can see how this would be a huge pain for a larger dealer with more inventory. I don’t understand why they can’t build a rule that says if you make a change to vehicle and it “locks” into your inventory, it will delete if the vehicle is not in the feed from your DMS or inventory tool like Homenet or ebizautos after 2 or 3 updates.

Overall it looks as if AutoTrader actually put some thought into this new admin. BUT as I mentioned earlier; “if it would only work”. Unfortunately after only a few minutes playing around, I ran into several issues. I changed the price of several cars form the vehicle listing screen only to find when I did, it was deleting all the photos for that vehicle. I can’t seem to get our videos attached to the inventory to show up in the multimedia portion of the vehicle listing. When I choose what vehicles I want to show in the Dynamic Display, it doesn’t update and reverts back the original setting.

Hopefully by the time you read this, these issues will be taken care of. I know I’m always giving AutoTrader a rough time here on DealerRefresh but when you’re the Big Guy and you want to charge a premium price, I expect a premium product with premium service.

So another year on AutoTrader for me..we’ll see how this year totals up!!

I thought it would be a good idea to start a new random posting/s with links to relevant news and maybe even some not so relevant news that in someway might (or might not) have an impact on this side of the business and us Internet Sales Managers.

So here we go.. The Weekly Refresh.

• Where is Mark Dubis? – So what is the former editor of Digital Dealer and Interim Executive Director of AAISP up to now? Mark Dubis has formed The Dubis Group, a network of freelancers talented in marketing, public relations, business writing and event planning. www.dubisgroup.com

• Ebay is back to advertising with Google – How surprising!

• Gilbert Chavez has joined the iMagicLab team. Good for you Gilbert! Keep in touch.

• Incase you didn’t already know, Google bought Feedburner. And unless you have a dealer blog or one of your own, chances are your not too familiar with Feedburner.

• Google Apps launches shared address book – I like this!

Is there anything else that you would like to see included in these postings?

The Cobalt Group’s sponsored “Breakfast of Champions” Seminar

I just got back from attending Cobalt’s sponsored “Breakfast of Champions”. It was held at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown beautiful Baltimore, it’s a little over an hour from there I live and usually an easy drive.

Hugh Cabello was the guest speaker / trainer for the day. I thought be did a good job actually. You never know what to expect when you go to these free seminars. Will you take a few “things” back home or will it be nothing more then a plug for the vendor?

Rather then type out a long winded posting here, I thought I would copy some of my notes that I took during the seminar. Excuse the jumping around but I have a tendency to be all over the place when I take notes.

The NOTES:

• Yahoo statistics show that customers send out on average 6-8 vehicles requests during their shopping phase. – I thought this seemed to be a little on the high side but I guess if you consider the consumer shopping for a used car in the mix, 6-8 should be an accurate number.

• Over half of your customers do not know if they want New or Used. -  I totally agree with this. Matter of fact I do my best to roll a customer into a used car whenever possible, always offering used car options for all of my new car inquiries.

• The average customer has 2 email addresses. – I have like 8 but I know I’m not “average”. Most people do have a home and a work email. This was something that Hugh touched on and one of those “things” that I walked away with. He encourages asking for the customers work email. “And what is you work email can I contact you at Jeff?”. Good idea!

• “You don’t have to buy a vehicle today do you?” – I love word tracks. If you’re good enough with the right word tracks at the right time, it can help you sell just about anything to anyone. This is one of those word tracks I would use all the time and for some reason got out of it. That was another “thing” that Hugh reminded me to take back home. This word track works! It removes the pressure that most consumers feel when dealing with us dreadful sales people. You’ll be surprised at the answers you get back.

• No Templates – That’s all I have written down. If I can recall, like I; Hugh is not huge advocate of canned templates. Yea, I have a few that I use but most are nothing more then starter templates and are built for customization. Right after my cover on Digital Dealer I received several emails and phone calls requesting a copy of my “crafty template”. I’m telling you right now, there is NO silver bullet email template. Email templates will never sell you a car.

• It was humorous to hear Cobalt talking about dealer website design and their need to be user friendly.

• There was a lady that talked for awhile about SEO, Google and PPC. A big apology to her, I don’t remember her name (I found out her name was Lisa Dobbs, sorry Lisa for not taking better notes).  She pointed out a few tips; one was to be sure to buy your URL as a keyword. I guess this was note worthy, though about 99.9% of the time if someone types your URL into Google or Yahoo, your website better dam site be #1 in the natural listings.

• Keep a close eye out for previous customers sending leads from your website. – I can’t recall if that was part of the discussion or if it was something that popped into my head and I wrote it down. Anyways, if you have a previous customer send in a lead from yuor website, It’s imperative that you recognize them as a previous client and ask them if they are still driving the vehicle they bought from your dealer. Ask if they would like to work their previous sales person again. Thank the customer for shopping with your dealer “again”. Believe me, it’s impressing when you recognize your previous clients. They love it!

• It takes on average 5 phone calls for a customer to remember your name!

• They spent about 15 minutes reinforcing the importance of using 3rd party leads. Preferably dealix leads, thought they did mention AutoUSA and Autobytel in the mix.

• Hugh said to call your customers 1 day before their Birthday. Not the day of or the day after.

• They went into a 10-15 minutes undertone sales pitch for Onstation. If I had to guess this was main reason for offering the free seminar. I don’t care who you are or what vendor you are, your main intentions for free trainings are to drum up some business. And rightfully so, I’m sure it’s not cheap to offer these free trainings / seminars.

• Cobalt NEVER EVER mentions their Prospector CRM tool. It’s actually a shame. Prospector had its challenges but it could have been way more then what it currently is. Cobalt bought Prospector CRM from Cowboy several years ago, re-skinned it and basically moved it to the side. I was doing some research and actually found that Hugh Cabell was a National Relationship Manager Cowboy Corporation before Cobalt acquiring them.

• Providing Price – Hugh seemed to be an advocate for sending / quoting a price. And we all know this is always a huge subject for discussion. I take my leads one by one and then decide if I’m going to quote a price via email or phone. However, I agree with Hugh, since the customer very rarely buys exactly what they inquire about, why not send the consumer some pricing. It’s what they are looking for.

I had a few more notes written but I think this covers the important stuff. Thanks to Cobalt for putting on a better then average free seminar. Thank you Hugh for your energy and for giving me a few “things” to take back home.

I try to attend each and every seminar or training whenever I can. I don’t care how long you have been in this business; you can almost always walk away with at least 1 thing. And of you don’t, take the opportunity to network and shake some hands. You never know who you might run into.

Subject: Dean Evans VP Marketing resigned from the Cobalt Group.

I opened my inbox this morning to read an email from Dean Evans.

Catchy subject Dean!!

So Dean Evans has apparently officially moved on from Cobalt and Dealix as VP of marketing.

Dean, what will we do? I personally will miss seeing your sexy mugshot and chipper smile in all the Cobalt and Dealix articles?

On a serious note; I’ve had a few lengthy conversations with Dean in the past and personally think he’s a great guy. He sure has done a great job at building his name and reputation. Who in our business does not know who Dean Evans is?

So what will Dean do next?

Will he completely get out of this crazy automotive business or lay low for awhile then resurface?

Dean, I would love to hear your feedback if you’re reading this. What are your plans?