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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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