Quite reading DealerRefresh and wrap up the month STRONG!!

• Sean Bradley, CEO of Dealer Synergy will be presenting a training session for General Managers, Internet Sales Professionals, Sales Managers, BDC and CRC Managers. This Synergy Session is being held at the Renaissance Long Beach Hotel. Good Stuff!!

• HotSwap To Enter Used Car Market – Think YouTube exclusively for selling cars. HotSwap allows anyone to list a used car for sale with an included video. Next dealers will have to have their own Video and Editing Departments!

• Jake over at High Turnover wrote a posting – Search Engine Marketing Companies for Auto Dealers – Be Careful Who You Trust.

• Twitter is all the hype now so I thought I would add a DealerRefresh Twitter Updates to the side Nav. Go ahead and Follow me over to Twitter!

That’s it for now..I’ll be writing more about Video when I get the opportunity.

I just came across DealerRefresh few days ago and wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the time and effort it must take to keep it up and running.  I’ve been involved in the car business now for almost 4 years and have been on the Internet side of it for all but about 5 months.

For the most part, everything has been a self-taught or at best a trial and error experience.  It’s nice to have a resource such as this one to turn to for thoughts and opinions from others in the industry that are in a non-competitive situation.  I’m working now for a family owned business that has been in business for a little over 58 years.  It was started as a Buick dealership back in the day.  We are now a 4 franchise group, Buick, Isuzu, Mazda and BMW.  We are in the process of becoming only a BMW dealership, that along with the used car department which will expand by adding a high-line section to our current, mostly GM and other domestic inventory.

We now use Reynolds both for our web site design and our CRM tool.  I used AVV at my prior dealership (Honda) for about 3 years.  I can’t say that Reynolds Contact Management is any easier to use, but it does seem to have much more capability and the support folks at Reynolds are outstanding.  With the upcoming new changes in mind, would you have any advice to offer as to a web provider? Reynolds is a bit limited in the template offerings they have available and they only have one template that is BMW compliant in their super premium package.  It’s in use by a BMW Center about 225 miles away from us and I am afraid the same template might be a bit confusing to our clients.  If you had the opportunity to start over with your website, what would you do?

If you have taken the time and effort to read this far, I truly appreciate it.  As well as any opinions/suggestions you might have to pass along to someone who wants to get better and dominate this market area.  I am a full time Internet Manager here and have a pretty free hand as to how I run the department.  It is me and I generally receive and work the leads myself, except the BMW leads which I divide out among 4 Client Advisors.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Sincerely, Ray

-Per Ray’s request, I was asked to remove his full name and dealer info.

Did anyone take notice to this ad in one of the recent dealer magazines?

"Get ready for a surge in shoppers like you’ve never seen before". I don’t know about all of that.

Is it true that Cars.com dropped MSN autos because they wanted too much money for the space and at the end of the day they were contributing less then 8% of overall searches for Cars.com?

Have you even tried to search for a vehicle on MSN auto? It’s a mess!!

Under the "New Cars" and "Used Cars" options you have (2) Go buttons. The first Go button (the one I thought was going to send me to my search results) lands you on a model page with Kelly Blue Book Values, Ratings with an information button to the right that takes you to each model years specifications page. By now you basically have to start your search over if your looking for actual inventory (unless you take notice to the little search box in the upper corner).

In my opinion MSN autos is far from being the most user friendly website and I seriously doubt I’m going to see a SURGE in leads from AutoTrader now that they are partnered with MSN autos.

Nice Ad though!!

Mazda allows haggling on Website - Automotive News

Mazda North American Operations has upgraded its Internet site so that vehicle shoppers can get a price quote from a dealership without leaving their desk.

Most factory sites lead interested buyers to a dealership’s site and will only list the sticker price. But the mazdausa.com site allows Web surfers to contact a Mazda "shopping assistant" via a live Web chat session. The assistant is a Mazda employee.

The program went live today. (July 9, 2007)

With help from the assistant, Web surfers can configure a vehicle, select a dealership, search vehicle inventory, obtain a price quote, schedule a sales appointment and get financing information.

Once a price is agreed upon between the customer and the dealership, the assistant arranges for papers to be signed and the vehicle to be delivered at the dealership.

What do you guys think of this? I’m not sure how I feel about it really. I doubt the process is not as smooth as the above paragraph reads. I read somewhere how it took over 10 minutes to contact a Mazda Rep on the online chat.

Choose your model.

Choose from up to 3 dealers to receive a price quote from.

AutoBlog posted this article on their site and it’s interesting to read peoples comments.

"Excellent idea. Why not take the stealerships out of the picture
entirely and ship direct to Mazda "service centers" where the car can
be test driven, picked up, and serviced?"

"This is exactly what I’ve been saying should happen for years. The auto retail channel (and real estate agents, for that matter) are basically a Mafia of Dinosaurs in this age of information. There is simply NO REASON for them anymore."

"This is a baby step in the right direction. Cars sales and brand
loyalty would build quickly if the process was more like buying a TV
and less like selling your first born."

I remember when I was selling Mazda several years ago and MazdaUSA had introduced their Dealer Inventory Search (catering to the larger dealers) on their website, I was not convinced this was a good move from the dealers perspective.

It’s at tough call; from the dealers side I find this to hinder my opportunity to sell more cars BUT from the consumer side, I would totally be on board with researching my next vehicle purchase, finding the car I want to buy and contacting the dealer for a price quote, all from the convenience of the Manufacturers Website. But then again, I can’t imagine purchasing my next vehicle like shopping at Walmart and having to deal
with a customer service rep that makes $5.00 an hour and could careless
about my needs! 

Is Mazda making it more difficult for dealers to make money by simply making the process easier for its customers?

Is Mazda taking a step in the right direction?

How long will the "New Car salesperson" position be around?

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