Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager
Joe is at it again with another video that will have you laughing.
Joe Webb and David Hudson of DealerKnows demonstrate how important knowing your inventory can be.
How necessary is product knowledge when selling a vehicle? If you haven’t yet, Subscribe to Joe’s YouTube channel
Millennials now make up the majority of the U.S. workforce, and they bring different expectations to the job than the generations before them. In order for companies to attract top talent today, they must highlight the ways in which they can meet these new employee needs.
For many companies, the job descriptions they have used for decades must be revamped with appropriate wording and highlights to appeal to a new target audience. Job descriptions featuring keywords will yield organizations more qualified candidates for consideration, by positioning them as an employer of choice to top talent.
The most successful job descriptions should be a combination of marketing, a description of the role and career path, and the company culture and vision.
Read on for the top five keywords every job description should include to help attract the best candidates for your dealership. [Read more…]
I am in the process of restructuring our BDC and I am struggling with what should be a simple question… What constitutes an appointment?
Obviously when a rep speaks with a customer and schedules an appointment that is easy. The question that I have is if a rep has on-going contact with a customer and calls when the customer is on their way in… Or a customer calls when they are on the way in.
Should these be paid?
The argument could be made that it was the contact and rapport built with the rep that drove the customer in. Either way, the rep needs to get the customer on the schedule so the sales team knows they are coming but what is fair as far as compensation?
Can Peyton Hoffman Keep Me from this 5-Hour Energy Drink & another Digital Dealer review?
Woo hoo! It’s spring break!
I mean – “Hey boss, is it OK if I go to Digital Dealer 22 in Tampa to learn about the latest and greatest in automotive digital?”
Use your noggin knucklehead!
The last approach might be more successful if you want to join fellow dealers in sunny Florida to work, train, and network 24/7 to become a better digital dealer when you return. And who doesn’t want to go to Tampa, Florida for Digital Dealer 22 after a long, cold winter? Are you ready to begin this recap? [Read more…]
Every fixed operations department across north America thinks that weather has an impact on the number of completed repair orders (ROs) each day. Every fixed operations department across North America thinks that certain days of the week are slower (i.e., fewer completed ROs) than other days. We’ve uncovered some unexpected results.
More than 100,000 service records from 2015 and 2016 were used to construct 12,000 data points for analysis in this study. Various locations from the U.S. were used to account for differences in regional reactions of the same weather pattern.
For example:
[Read more…]
Thought I would throw this question out there to see what the DealerRefresh community thinks – Do customers even look at hero banner sliders on homepages?
As you guys probably also experience, our manufacturer reps constantly hound us on making sure we have 5-10 sliders on the homepage promoting this month’s deals. In my opinion the majority of customers have banner ad blindness and breeze right past the homepage and into the search results.
I tested my theory using UTM codes and found less than 2% of visitors clicked on our banners, with 1% clicking on the first slide and then the remaining 5 slides receiving the fraction of a percent.
Personally someone seeing the offer and it making an impression on them to take action later is more important to me than a direct click on the banner so I used a hotjar heatmap to see where people’s cursors went because cursors can be an indicator of where someone’s eyes may be looking but the hero slider area was cold with most of the heat on the navigation and search bar.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of website vendors disable the hero banner slider on mobile so ~60% of our traffic won’t even see the banners. If the website vendor does show the banner slider on mobile can customers even make out what the image says since it was created with the desktop user in mind?
So why do we spend all of this time creating hero banners and taking up valuable homepage real estate if it seems no one is clicking or looking at them?
I think this quote from http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ sums it up well:
“Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page. Use them to put content that users will ignore on your Home Page. Or, if you prefer, don’t use them. Ever.”
Of course it’s still important to promote these limited time sales but I think there are better ways and places of doing so. For example creating relevant banners that show up at the top of vehicle search results pages dynamically based on what vehicles they are searching for.
What do you guys think?
Popups have a terrible reputation: they’re annoying, they’re intrusive, they appear when you least want to seem them and cover content you actually want to see.
Most of us know the experience of arriving on a website, only to be accosted by a popup we don’t want, which sends us scrambling to get rid of it, or to leave the site altogether. And the worst part is, we may have actually stayed onsite for longer, maybe even converted, if it weren’t for that popup.
On the other hand, we know popups can actually work. Businesses report more conversions once they start using them– and that means more paying customers.
So are popups really so bad?
No. Bad popups are bad. Great popups are great and can be an effective tool for creating a better online shopping experience on your dealership website. The key is to understand the difference and create campaigns that really work for your customers– not push them away.
We are setup with Lightspeed EVO (a CDK Global product) for our dealership DMS and over the last month I have been comparing the Lightspeed CRM to others that are available on the market. Part of that comparison involves looking at what would be required to integrate a 3rd party CRM.
I reached out to Lightspeed to see what data can be sent to the CRM through an API and what the cost would be. They replied that it will cost $2000 per location for a setup fee and $175/mo per location to maintain the API.
We have 4 locations so we are looking at a pretty hefty sum…$8000 setup and $700/mo. This sounds rather steep to me but wanted to reach out and see if any of you have had experience with this and could tell me if they are just punishing us because we are looking at using a different CRM than what they are offering. Because it kind of feels like they are.
