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