Since the beginning of car sales, we have tried to find that elusive balance between holding gross and increasing volume.

OEMs would love nothing more than to have an army of sales professionals whose sole focus was moving product- so much so, many of them have decreased profit margin to all time lows in the name of “customer satisfaction”; leaving dealerships with fewer and fewer ways to generate revenue.

So how do we continue to hold gross in a climate that has very little of it to hold? TRADE -IN VALUE!

Let’s talk about “LOST” and I am not talking about the widely popular television show that just recently concluded on ABC. I am talking about your lost customers. It all starts with that phone call to unsold customers.

“Hi Jeff this is Jerry with… oh you did, what did you buy?”

How many times have we all heard that conversation? We then conclude with, “Well if you’re ever in the market again please give me a call…” and off to our CRM we go to mark that customer as “LOST!”

We’ve all heard our managers say over-an- over a thousand times, “keep selling until they buy or die.” Well the person who came up with that saying is an idiot! It should be, “keep selling until they die.” The average person will spend over $300K on automobiles in their lifetime. Big deal, you missed out on a sale this time around. A true salesperson will figure out how to win their business the next time around. If you treat them like a customer they may in fact become a customer.

So how are you going to win their business?

What if you had Superhero powers like Spider-Man, Batman and Superman? You could have an amazing gift to do the unexpected and save the day. Sure, you’ve been tracking calls from your dealership’s website for years. Your store may even be running an expensive pay-per-click campaign that is bringing well-qualified leads. That is what the average “Clark Kent” is managing for his dealership and probably getting praise for being on the cutting edge of internet marketing. Are you ready to be a Superhero? Get ready to switch from Clark Kent to Superman and unveil that special uniform under your suit. Extract the most out of your dealer website tracking with the following Four Superhero Powers.

Power Number One: Have x-ray vision. Find out which keywords are bringing you phone calls. Is it the term “Honda” or “Honda oil change coupon” that is generating leads? There are ways to track these calls back to the individual keyword without constantly monitoring the program, adding phone numbers and investing too much of your marketing budget. Proxy sites can create a bit of a mess for your SEO, so steer clear of this method. By using x-ray vision, you can tell your SEM to shift your ppc budget those terms that are actually selling cars.

Power Number Two: Try leaping tall buildings in a single bound. List one number on your dealership’s website with a greeting to connect callers with the right department. If there are 3-4 numbers listed, often times the caller will dial the first number listed anyway. Your customers will have a better experience, and the sales team will be happy when talking with leads that want to buy a car (not make a service appointment). Look at trend analytics of your inbound calls. What time of day or day-of-the-week are you getting an influx of leads? Are you staffed appropriately at these times? Features like scheduling and round robin will help the team to not miss an opportunity. More than likely, there is no additional cost to set this up.

Power Number Three: Use accelerated healing (think Wolverine). Don’t let those bad sales calls wound you or your sales team. Listen to call recordings and save a potential customer from calling your competitor, then play back the call in a training session. Everyone will learn quickly what they should be saying and how to close a sale faster.

Power Number Four: You’ve become immortal. Import calls from your website into your lead management tool, your CRM. This is your lifeblood and the place where you spend all of your time anyway. You shouldn’t have to log into another system to look at calls. Who has time for this? You are there to sell cars, not remember passwords and instructions on how to run a call report. Integrating your call tracking with your CRM will make your life easier.

You cannot deny the powerful gifts that you have been given to effectively manage your website and call tracking system. Be the Superhero that you were meant to be and start today with these Four Superhero powers. If you aren’t sure how to use these powers or forget what they are all about, contact your call tracking provider to help you get the most out of the service. Their job is to support the Superhero!

Do you have a replacement strategy for your job?  Or have you been like me, and have just been too busy to bother with it?  Now that I am changing positions, I am having to train my replacements and it is incredibly enlightening.  I highly suggest you have someone sit next to you and explain what you do in an elementary fashion while that person writes it all down.

A few pieces of the training have been done with my boss present.  As I have been the lead for everything Internet at Checkered Flag over the last 9 years, my boss has placed a lot of trust in me.  I made connections in reports that I never needed to explain to him – I’d just say something like “with the stats from our website being up and the increased number of leads, I was shocked to see how low the sales were at Honda this month.”  He’d take that simple statement and get to work on the Honda store.  Now I am showing him how I made these connections, and really explaining the nitty gritty, and, as a team, we are now making even more connections.  In this regard, we’ve made new discoveries and come across new ideas.

I just got back from Digital Dealer 8 and almost every presentation was on Social Media.  Many vendors were preaching why dealers should be doing something in Social Media, but there weren’t many telling their clients how to do it right.  That’s mostly because many of these vendors don’t understand how Social Media truly works themselves.

Social Media is a platform where many people can communicate equally.  It is really that simple of a definition.  It is not just facebook, or twitter.  Those sites have a lot of eyeballs, but the ones that really last forever and are more relevant are the blogs and forums – especially for our vendors.  Blogs and forums index with search engines, and if your company is talked about on one of these blogs or forums (like DealerRefresh) those conversations are going to show up when a potential client searches for your name.  I’m not tooting the DealerRefresh horn, or DrivingSales’, or ADM’s, or even David Kain’s platform; I’m just going to stress that these kind of places can make or break you.  And this is going to become a bigger factor with time.

Here are some easy rules to live by: