Guest Posting By John Quinn

Exactly what are Sales Managers managing these days?

Ahhhh…. the good ‘ol days… Remember the weekends? The Sales Staff gets there nice and early with enough caffeine in their hands to jump-start a rhino, trailed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. The managers hold a quick Pump-Me-Up session, doling-out spiffs like Halloween candy to eager 1st-graders… $25 a spot, $100 for the trifecta. Salespeople line-up at the front door… a couple hide in the inventory out front… and then it arrives: the Up Bus! As sure as geese flying South for the Winter and Salmon running upstream in October, the Wave of Eager Buyers descends on the lot every Saturday morning.

Schedule a delivery for Saturday? Are you nuts? Appointment on a Saturday? “Sure… come-in…. I’ll be waiting for you.” (Yeah, right). You’d do half your month on Saturdays and mop-up the leftovers on Monday. What a life!

We speak a lot about not going forward until we’ve fixed our core processes first, but I’m going to challenge that notion for a minute.

When my dealer group was on ADP CRM we had the option of denying sales people the ability to email out of the CRM. I know that sounds nasty, and there were some solid reasons behind it I’m not going to detail here, but I can say one was due to us not being able to handle a phone call or consistently mail a letter – if we couldn’t do that, how could we send an email? iMagicLab CRM, which we’re currently on, did not have the ability to turn email off from any user when we first moved over, so we were forced to abandon the policy that 
“if the core is broken, don’t move forward”. Today, I’m really glad we were forced to move forward.

Yes we do. keep reading

I’m going to assume that you’re like me; you didn’t dream of working at a dealership.  NASA, the court room, or even the White House were probably more along the lines of what mommy and daddy got you thinking about early on.  But here we are pounding pavement and fighting for pennies.

What brought you here?…needed some money for some reason I bet.  Did you intend to keep doing this after you got that needed money?  NO!!!??  Why the hell are you still here???!!!  So basically you’re telling me the next best thing hasn’t come along yet.  How long will it be before you stop looking for the next best thing?

Normally when this subject comes up, amongst dealers, a lot of not-so-nice things are said.  I want to take a different approach in this article.  No, I’m not planning to completely side with our manufacturers, but to hopefully create a compelling argument that gets some to rethink their policies (and I’m counting on your comments as well).

I think we all can acknowledge that it is impossible for a national (or even global) corporation to understand every local market.  Some places are a little behind the technology curve and others are deeply into it.  Whether a dealer’s market is in the center of the tech universe or in the middle of ho-dum-hickory-ville there are differing marketing strategies for every type.

How do car dealers advertise on facebook, MySpace, twitter and other social networking sites?

Social networking is all the buzz right now and everyone from the Automotive Industry to Real Estate is trying to figure out how to use sites like facebook to grow their business. One of the largest areas of growth is in the automotive sector. The attraction of social networking sites isn’t hard to figure out. Millions of people to reach and you can basically do it for free…if you don’t scare them all away. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a more effective way to utilize facebook and other social networking mediums to reach your clients? I have a clear plan that is guaranteed to be better than 90% of the efforts being put forth today. Grab a pen and paper and write this down…

STOP POSTING YOUR ADS ON FACEBOOK AND OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES – THEY DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND!

No, that wasn’t a typo. Some of you may be shaking your head at what you just read but frankly I don’t care, and you’ll thank me in just a moment when you read on. Many of you remember MySpace and the popularity it had when it first launched onto the social scene. I am in my mid thirties and I was a MySpace addict at first launch. I had my background all tricked out and added a TON of friends so that I could try to become a networking machine.

Over 5 years ago I was approached by our Vice President of Variable Ops who wanted me to take what I had done as our Honda Internet Manager and spread it through all the stores in our group.  He told me the job was temporary and not to expect it to last more than a year or 2.  He titled me the Internet Director and my job was to train “Internet Sales Agents” on how to move a lot of cars through digital communication.  His thoughts were that I would eventually find a store to call home and continue working my way up in a more traditional manner.

Since he asked me to do this job back in March of 2004, my job title has changed and I’ve worked my way into quite a few very different directions.  Once we had figured out a good way to handle not just Internet leads, but all incoming non-physical traffic too, and we had the right people in place I was able to focus more on things like our website, new technologies, and CRM.  It is the CRM that gets you!

The most important technology of any dealership is the one that promotes process.

Dealers still playing the PRICE GAME on Classified Websites.

Are dealers still playing this game? …ofcourse they are!

I was hoping this shit would stop as print continues to diminish, but it’s obvious that some of the classified sites allow it to happen as well. Maybe it’s OK. Maybe at the end of the day there really is nothing wrong with it. After all, its the customers responsibility to read the print..RIGHT?

As dealers struggle, it only makes sense to find that “trick” that gets the phone to ring, more leads into the inbox and more people through the front door “We’ll deal with the objections once they’re in the showroom”..right?

I just don’t like it and think in the long run it makes it more difficult to brand your dealership as a reputable place to do business with. I also think it brings a bad image to the classified sites that allow this type of pricing technique to happen on their websites. IMO it’s taking away from the “consumer centric” appeal and again provides a disservice to the customer.

What do you think?

Are you providing the customer a disservice by pricing your inventory like this on the Online Classified Sites?

Should the Online Classified Websites allow this type of pricing technique (knowing consumers initially search by price) ?

What are your thoughts?

Your future manager is a multi-tasking fiend. She or he will embrace every form of social media and communicate with staff by email or instant messenger.  Technology use will be first and foremost on his or her mind, with an understanding that it doesn’t always work perfectly, but incorporating technology into processes is crucial. They will demand it!

I am the oldest of 6 and also have quite a few younger cousins that I’m very close to.  They range from 5 years old to 26.  The females spend a lot of their free time on MySpace and/or faceBook and are texting fanatics.  The males also spend a lot of time playing XBOX Live.  They all play team sports, take lessons for a particular musical instrument, read books, and do fairly well in school if they’re engaged that semester. They all have a cell phone (except the 5 year old), a computer (or three), their favorite flavor of social media, and over 900 channels of television to chose from along with an arsenal of movies to watch & videogames to play.

This posting has been removed.

After a deep conversation with Frank, I have decided to remove his post from DealerRefresh. It really sirred up form shit and at the end of the day I would never want anyone to loose their job. I have asked Frank to write a quick retraction request which you can read below.

If you’re familiar with the post, please continue to comment (please keep your comments clean and respectful though )

Jeff, Alex an the rest of the DealerRefresh community;

I appreciate your support, I have been watching my post and I am asking that you remove it for a couple of reasons. First of all I have a huge amount of respect for General Motors and Cobalt websites. In our current economic situation I think it would be a benefit to support the manufacture. I also have a huge respect for the dealer I currently work for and I would not want any bad press for this or any dealer just because of my own personal opinion. I appreciate your cooperation in removing my article from DealerRefresh. After review The GM and dealer principle at this store disagree with my opinion and are 100% on board General Motors marketing plan.

Thank you

Frank Davis

One of our GM’s sent me an email with a link to another dealership who had a welcome video on their homepage yesterday. He thought it was very good, and he was right! The video quality was good, the speaker was good, and the background looked good. It was a good welcome video. The only problem is that I hate welcome videos, and this one was no exception because aside from welcoming me to the dealership website it was telling me how to use the navigation bar C’mon.  Seriously.  Obviously this dealership thinks I’ve never been on the Internet before.  I wanted my 30 seconds back after that. If I were shopping for a car I may or may not have started with the dealer’s website, but chances are I wasn’t born yesterday, bought a computer, then decided it was time to buy a car and I was going to start with a dealership website. It is probably safe to assume a consumer knows how to use your navigation bar. And that dead horse has been beaten.

Sorry about the rant, but I figured I’d give you some incite into what enticed me to write this article. It wasn’t just another dealer’s welcome video, but that was the final straw that broke this camel’s back. For years I’ve been looking at some really dumb stuff in our industry. Whether that be the newspaper ad with more disclaimer than ad or a car being released called the Aztek, we have all done or witnessed some moranisms (like that word?). Let’s talk about some of the genius work that is happening online…maybe I should contract with a publisher before I get started on that.

On second thought I don’t have the patience for a publisher so let’s begin with where a lot of this started:  the manufacturer. Granted, when the Internet became a consumer device none of us really knew how to tackle it for selling cars.  You couldn’t box a car up and ship it somewhere as easily as you could a book. Forget the past, let’s look at 3 things the OEM’s still dictate we dealers do:

1. Some, not most, still require a dealer to go to a special Internet Lead Management site to only respond to a lead for the first time. WTF is that all about?  So we responded once – I guess we’re going to sell that Hyundai now!  Why don’t all the manufacturers work with the CRM companies to help dealers streamline their processes and sell more cars?
2. What is the point of these OEM-dictated websites anyway? If you’re going to force my hand, why have them? Just build one VW or MINI website and show the entire nation’s inventory then have a specials section that dealers can upload specials to. You’re not offering a benefit to the dealer or the consumer by forcing uniforms in school. And last I checked your corporate representative either doesn’t live in this marketplace, just moved to this market, and probably doesn’t have a degree in advertising so what makes you think you know how to market in this market?
3. Are you so naive to think a consumer looking for a Honda is not going to look at a Camry too? Why do manufacturers require these dealer OEM sites? This particular thing hasn’t been talked about too often, but I think it is so silly to have them. There is no other industry that I know of who separates its products. If I am in the market for a TV, I go to Best Buy’s website and can look at Sony’s and Samsungs right next to each other. Why do we make consumers jump through these silly hoops?

How about a quick look at some of the things we dealers do to keep the rule of equal incompetence going strong:

1. Egos: whoa buddy we’ve got some big ones ’round these parts. Let’s put someone with a face for radio and a voice for the newspaper into a video on our homepage…or on TV. Let’s put a welcome message up telling us how to use the nav bar. Who wants to see that?  What other industries use a welcome message anyway?
2. Frames: I like frames for things you can’t duplicate with your site provider like the service scheduling modules. Until the site providers build this technology themselves, I think frames are the only way to do this.  The frames that are bad are the ones where a dealer was too lazy to update the incentives/specials so he just framed in Honda’s national website showing the current Honda incentives. That page was never intended to be a frame, so it looks like you’ve got a website inside a website with links to your competitors. That’s just dumb.
3. Video: we have gone wild with video. I think some dealers are just running around with a video camera and throwing it online without any editing or thought as to what the message is. Before you ever hit the record button you need to think about what you’re trying to do – what is the message you want to get across and if it is how to use your navigation bar…um…you might want to think a little harder. You really don’t want a consumer wanting those 30 seconds back. Oh yeah, that older generation who we think can’t use the Internet isn’t watching your videos – they’re reading your site content instead (that generation read books) – don’t put a welcome message telling them how to use the nav bar because they’re never going to see it.
4. SEO: I’m guilty of this, but am making an effort to get away from it. Yes, SEO is extremely important, but not the generic content of “Thank you for visiting our online dealership in Virginia Beach, Virginia where we carry blah, blah, blah” – nobody wants to read that and I believe you’re just training your visitors to ignore the written content on your site. We need to get more creative with this.
5. The About Us Page: do you even pay attention to this page on your website?  ‘nough said.
6. Site statistics: the most overlooked statistic in a dealership, but just as important as knowing how many customers walked in the door last month. I guess we still view our websites the same way we looked at television, radio, and newspaper ads: with a quick question – “Did we get any floor traffic off the website this weekend?”

I can go on and on. I’m sure many of you can continue to add to what I’ve typed, and we could do this forever. The real question is what are we doing about it? Are you even aware of these things?

Yes, I am totally aware that the automotive industry is a different retail beast than any other industry, but that doesn’t mean we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. If you do any online research or shopping, then you probably know what you like in a retail website and what you don’t. Have you ever thought that your customers may have those same opinions? If you could figure out how to navigate another website’s nav bar, maybe your consumers can figure out how to navigate yours. And no boss, you don’t get prettier with age.

</end rant>

Disclaimer:  can I make this longer than this novel of a blog article like one of those dealer newspaper ads?  Nah, I’ll be serious here.  Debate is something that makes us better. If you don’t like some of the things I’ve stated here, I can assure you my intention was not to insult you.  This is an attempt at education or at the minimum to spark a debate on some of these topics.

To my GM – keep bringing me all your ideas.  You’re one of the most innovative people I know and value your opinion anytime you want to give it.  Even if my answers are a little harsh or blunt from time to time, just brush those off your shoulder and keep things coming!  Let’s continue the debates.