I absolutely suck before I get my daily dose of coffee.  I’m grumpy, groggy, and completely idiotic.  In one of my brighter before-coffee moments I decided I would work on quotes for my move from Virginia to Vermont.  I Google’d “Moving Company” and got something like “123movers” as the first result.  Being the ignoramus I am to moving I thought 123movers sounded pretty good.  I surfed around on the site and dropped a lead – that was around 6:00 AM.  Time to get some coffee, read some more emails, read the iPadPapers (news papers), and catch up on DealerRefresh – NOPE!  Within 5 minutes my phone started ringing.  It is now 6:05 AM EASTERN TIME, and this guy wasn’t anywhere near Mumbai.  Even better, he wasn’t from 123movers either.

Over the next week I received at least 6 calls a day with most days being more like 10.  Not a single one was from 123movers.  I went back to 123movers and realized that this is a third party lead generation site.  I’ll take the big “Duh Alex” for that one because it says right on their homepage that they’re a moving company comparing site.  So when I tell you I’m a huge moron before coffee, you should take me at my word.  However, I definitely made a mistake in thinking I was only contacting 1 moving company when I ended up speaking to 12.

I need to move, I need to speak to a moving company, and I need to understand how they charge so I can feel comfortable with my decision.  I know none of this.  I spoke to every single one of those moving companies.  Each initial call was about 15 minutes long as I tried to describe my “inventory” of furniture, clothes, and other junk.  Everyone quoted roughly the same pricing but varied their methods either by square footage of truck space occupied or the weight of the load.  But, they all had good reason to pre-qualify me before giving a quote, and they were all there to give a quote.  Absolutely none gave me a quote by email up front even though I asked for it from a few of them.  I didn’t reply to most of their emails and noticed quite a few went into my junk mail due to big images and lots of links.

There was one company that spent the time to educate me on things and they even gave the highest quote – a good $800 more than the next highest.  I liked that.  They told a good story, understood that I didn’t know anything about moving services, and quoted me higher – it made me think that they were based on quality.  But at the end of the day I didn’t go with this company.  I got too many calls and emails and to be quite frank – I lost them in the shuffle because they never followed up after that one call.  The guy thought he had the sale in the bag I guess.

After all the frustration of dealing with so many companies I went back to the old fashioned way of doing things and asked my friends and family.  My dad convinced me to only talk to Mayflower or Allied Moving and I ended up choosing Allied because Mayflower never showed up for their scheduled appraisal appointment!  The representative from Allied knew a few of my high school friends and was very professional.  I feel good with my choice.

What can you learn from my experience?

1. Shoppers aren’t always intentionally “shopping you”.  Sometimes we get sucked into third party sites.
2. People who submit a lead are serious.  When they tell you otherwise it is because they’ve made a purchasing decision – you were too late.
3. Don’t be afraid to quote high if your story is compelling.
4. Rapport-building still wins.
5. Fancy emails don’t mean squat when they’re in a junk mail folder.  I could have cared less about the fancy stuff anyway.
6. Fancy websites, on the other hand, definitely lend to credibility and perceived quality.
7. In an extremely competitive market you have to differentiate yourself.  Strategize for the niche and not the whole population – you ain’t gonna get everybody.
8. Referrals are still the greatest advertising source.
9. Follow up, follow up, follow up!
10. Don’t talk to me before coffee.

I was just catching my daily dose of TUAW.com (a site for Apple geeks) and came across two articles:  Is my iPhone making me dumber & Is my iPhone making me smarter?  Those articles are interesting ways to look at what technology has done for us.  But forget Apple and the iPhone for a minute because I want to talk about all the fantastic resources made available to us in the car biz.  What could I be talking about?  I’ll give you a hint – you’re looking at one right now.  Those articles got me thinking about DealerRefresh, ADM, DrivingSales, and all the others like Pasch’s, Kain’s….there are getting to be too many to list.

We’re trying to gauge what the average Internet Sales Manager or Director is making across the country.  Answer the poll on the DealerRefresh forums:  http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f40/pay-internet-sales-manager-director-903.html

Poll results as of April 28th at 3:33 PM EST.

This could be your opportunity to show your boss that you’re under-valued.  Regardless of where you fall in the current poll, the more people who answer it the more accurate the numbers become.

Thank you for taking the time!

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.