On the Line: Phone Skills Set the Stage for Winning the Deal – Webinar

While email response often takes center stage in the world of internet sales, don’t forget the phone. Consider this: the most effective form of response to an email lead is often a phone call. Also, online shoppers are three times more likely to call your store than they are to send an email lead, making phone skills an essential qualification for internet sales managers. Is your dealership making the most of telephone opportunities or are sales left hanging on the line?

Join Kathy Kimmel, Cars.com’s manager of automotive consulting and dealer training, as she leads a discussion on phone techniques that drive sales.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Identify and groom salespeople with excellent telephone communication skills
• Use the phone to effectively follow-up with email lead senders
• Engage callers in meaningful dialogue
• Use the phone to set appointments and move closer to a sale
• Monitor and evaluate the quality of your calls to ensure ongoing sales success

Date: Thursday, August 7, 2008
Time: Noon to 1 p.m. (Eastern)
Location: Your Computer
Cost: FREE

Please note that the August Webinar is on a Thursday instead of the usual Friday.

FOODFIGHT!!!

Alright, we’ve had our fun. I was up late last night deleting the swarm of comments that had come in attacking individuals, including myself (which is ok). This post has gotten out of hand and that was not it’s intent. This isn’t Hollywood and it’s not what our industry is about.

I know some will be pissed at me and say I was weak for un-publishing this post and others will say it was the right thing to do. In one of my comments, I wrote “Is this history in the making for our industry or will this blow over and will no one think about it 2 months from now? ” I don’t think it’s history in the making and I hope for Paul and Jim’s sake they figure this out and it does blow over.

If we get anything out of this, I hope every one of us; dealers, vendors, sales people and myself,  think twice before hitting the SEND button and ask ourselves a few questions.

• Am I CAN-SPAM
  Compliant?
• Did I legally obtain everyone’s email address?
• Does my marketing email provide a way for recipients to unsubscribe? (Opt-Out)
• Am I using good emailing practices? Have I been honest and truthful?

Humans learns from their mistakes or by the example of others mistakes. My advise to Jim Ziegler; be sure you know the game before you step on the field, especially if you’re viewed as a coach. What you did was wrong and you got caught. Just because “everyone does it” doesn’t make it right!

I should have stuck with my gut instinct when I said “It’s disturbing to see something like this happen and maybe I shouldn’t be posting about it and possibly bringing to more to light to an awful situation”. My mistake!

This is an awful situation and could have been solved with a simple phone call. When something like this happens, PICK UP THE PHONE and talk about it. You’ll often be surprised with the outcome.

I hope we can all agree that nothing positive was coming out of this post and after time we might have looked back and said..”maybe I shouldn’t have been a part of this discussion”.

So lets call it a day and move on. I’ll get to crunching on some “informative” posts.

And NO I was not contacted my Jim or Paul to remove this post. I made my own decision.

The comments are open.

If you have ever worked with dealer advertising and marketing, you will enjoy this video!

For anyone that has ever had to deal with Honda DMA compliance. You’ll love this little cartoon put together by an anonymous cartoonist.

Online Consumer-generated Dealer Reviews

I keep reading that dealer ratings/reviews are becoming important, and that dealers should encourage their customers to go online and fill them out.  While I agree that consumer-generated dealer ratings may someday become an integral part of the automotive sales and service process for consumers, we’re not there yet.

People can go online to find consumer ratings/reviews on almost anything: for instance, Epinions.com has 79 different models of toasters with at least one consumer review each.  A critical aspect to building any ratings is the network effect: ratings become more valuable and useful as more consumers visit and contribute.  Conversely, Web sites that are unable to attract sufficient traffic and consumer ratings stall out.

For this article, I visited three Web sites with automotive dealer reviews: DealerRater, Edmunds, and Yahoo.  In my survey of these sites, I searched for the top 20 dealerships from the Ward’s Dealer 500 – these high volume dealerships should be good candidates to attract consumer ratings. 

DealerRater, as the name indicates, is a standalone site focused on dealer ratings and reviews.  In its six years of existence, it has managed to accumulate many reviews: of the top 20 sites, eleven dealers have five or more.  On the downside, many of these postings are old, indicating that the site may be losing momentum.  For instance, Crevier BMW (Santa Ana, California) has 19 reviews total, but only three since January 2007.  There are also other problems that hinder the site’s viability.

• No consistency in dealership names.  For Ray Catena, a New Jersey-area dealership group, DealerRater gave me ten different options, including Ray Catena (2 reviews), ray catena (0 reviews), Ray Catena Motor Cars (7 reviews), Ray Catena Jaguar Porsche (2 reviews) and Ray Catena MErcedes Benz of Union (0 reviews).  Note: the last is not a typo.
• More ads than information (as shown below).
• Sales and service ratings/reviews are mixed together.

On Edmunds, where vehicle research is the primary attraction, dealer ratings play a secondary role.  Still, Edmunds does better than DealerRater in some respects, including separate sales and service ratings, a map showing the dealer location, and less advertising clutter.  On the downside, I found fewer reviews: the greatest number was eight total reviews for South Bay BMW (Torrance, CA).  Many dealers had one review or none.  It remains to be seen whether Edmunds’s volume of dealer ratings will achieve the robustness needed to be a useful source of information.

For Yahoo!, ratings are an additional piece of information that gives users a full understanding of any product or service, including dealers.  As shown below, the Yahoo! Local entry for Landmark Chevrolet (Houston, TX) provides contact information, hours of operation, map, photographs, and ratings/reviews.  Thus, anyone looking for any information about the dealer will probably see the ratings/reviews.  If there’s only one or two, so be it.  As it turns out, eight of the top 20 dealers had at least five reviews, while five dealers had no reviews at all.  Yahoo!’s reviews functionality has been around for over three years, so it’s clear that dealer ratings haven’t taken off here, either.

In general, ratings have evolved as useful, though still supplementary offerings that support a site’s main goals.  For instance, Amazon’s consumer-generated ratings and reviews are not its focal point – instead, they support the goal of selling products.  Epinions is an exception and thrives because it offers numerous reviews on a broad array of products. 

DealerRater, as it is positioned currently, will be continually challenged to build enough traffic to become a popular destination.  Third-party sites also have their own challenges: they attract far more traffic, giving them more chances to solicit visitors to submit a review, but these visitors may be less inclined to contribute.  Both Edmunds and Yahoo seem to suffer from this problem.  As it stands, there’s no single reliable source of consumer-generated dealer ratings/reviews.

It’s still too early to write off online dealer ratings/reviews, but the existing players have not yet made a compelling case for its usefulness to-date, either.  There’s still the opportunity for a new entrant to get involved and really own this area, but they will need to bring something new to the game or run the risk of achieving only mediocrity.

Guest Posting by Amit Aggarwal
Editor of the J.D. Power and Associates Online Automotive Review

Hello, my name is Alex and I’ve been handling Internet specials for one automotive group since 2001. Every month there are 10 or more franchises I have to create sets of specials for, and I really enjoy it! However, I really can’t stand how hard it is to extract information from the stores who I make these specials for. You see, I don’t actually come-up with the prices, payments, or rates; I lend a hand in those things, but I create the art and messages. Usually, I get these things done within the first week of a new month, but today is July 16th and I finally got all July ads completely posted yesterday. This was a particularly bad month for stores getting information to me, and it blows my mind because this just helps them sell more cars.

Am I the only one with this frustration?

It is as if the stores know they have a bad tooth, and want it out, but just don’t want to go through the pain of having that bad tooth pulled.  Once the tooth is out, everything is better and the pain is gone.

What have I done in the past to make this process better?

• Created a form that I emailed out on the 1st of each month with a due date
• Made every sales manager accept a calendar event in his/her Outlook/Exchange account
• Sent email reminders every other day until I had all specials
• Visited and called the stores to push them
• Sent an email showing who the good stores were and the bad stores, CC’ing their bosses…this was actually the most effective
• Among other things

I know we are structured differently than most dealerships, and I also know this is more of a “people problem”, but I’m curious if anyone has a decent process for getting things done in this area?

On a side note, we have some stores that are excellent at getting information to me (our BMW store is incredible and Toyota does a great job), but I think it is because those stores have people who enjoy flexing their creative brain-muscles.  It goes back to the left-brain/right-brain theory.  So, this is a “people-problem” based on a struggle for creativity, but it certainly doesn’t mean people need replacing.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a weekly refresh. So let’s get started!

• New Study: Decrease Days in Stock for Pre-Owned Units by Nearly One-ThirdHomenet performed a
  solid study showing dealers that had great multiple photos, comments and pricing for their pre-owned vehicles could move their inventory nearly a third faster.

• A another new study by
  The Nielsens Company summarizing the amount of activity, including video viewing, which occurs on a monthly basis by the average user over television, Internet and mobile phones.

  

  “Watching video on the Internet is no longer a novelty; nearly 119 million unique viewers viewed 7.5 billion video streams in May 2008. The average viewer spent 2 hours and 19 minutes in May streaming video online.”

• Some very basic SEO knowledge for for your dealer
  website! The one and only Matt Cutts.

• As I commute to work, the Amber alerts are rarely but sometimes warning drivers of a possible missing child. The other morning I was thinking how great it would be if one could subscribe to a text messaging service that would alert you when a child was missing in your area. Well, low and behold..there is!The national Wireless AMBER Alerts Initiative is a voluntary partnership between the wireless industry, the United States Department of Justice, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), to distribute AMBER Alerts to wireless subscribers who opt in to receive the messages and are able to receive text messages on their wireless devices.I encourage all DR readers to sign up for Wireless amber alerts.
  https://www.wirelessamberalerts.org

That’s it for this week.

How do I grow and evolve my dealers Internet sales department from 10-15 trackable sales a month to 20, 30 and more?

I know people are going to the site and looking, then just coming to the dealership and not asking for me. I am still paid based on the cars I sell vs a salary job, which I’m OK with but if I’m doing this amount of work I need people to understand and use me vs other salespeople.

I’m wondering what suggestions you may have for me as well as anyone else, on what I can do to get this thing jump started.

Reis Hauser
Internet Sales Manager
Dubuque Autoplaza

This is a question many dealers and Internet Sales Managers have. If anyone has some great advise to offer Reis, let’s not hold back.

Great news for DealerSkins and BZ Resuts (maybe).

Dealer websites built with Flash has always been a topic of conversation here on DealerRefresh. Having a dealer website designed in flash has been one of the biggest drawbacks for getting your dealer website properly indexed in the SERPS. Search engines can see the file, but they could never see what was in it. Maybe things are changing??

Apparently, Adobe has a way for the search engines to read SWF (Flash) files and now index the information within. This means any text or links in your dealership Flash website could now be indexed by Google and Yahoo.

Of course with some “gray hat” techniques some of the flash website vendors have been saying for years that they were able to get their websites indexed.