Best PracticesDealership Communication ToolsDealership Operations & ProcessesOpinions & Advice

Stop Overthinking Your Emails!

Overthinking Your Emails and Email Templates? Between prepping for 20-Group presentations to serving our regular clients, we mystery shop scores of dealers each month – reading their emails (mostly templates) and texts, and listening to their voicemails – and while we’ve seen definite overall improvement over the years, one aspect of the internet sales process …
Dealership Communication ToolsDealership Operations & ProcessesIndustry News & Trends

Hey, Mike Jackson: So Call Me, Maybe

So Call Me, Maybe (Author’s Note: While the title of this post might lead you to believe this is all about AutoNation, it is not. The issues addressed here are common across nearly every large dealership group I encounter – publicly traded or private.) … Hey Mike Jackson, is it true you wrote the following …
Best PracticesDealership Marketing

Some Website “Expert” Adjusted Your Buttons, And It’s Costing You Sales!

Website Buttons… and why in the world are you letting self-appointed “experts” screw everything up? There are two quotes from baseball’s late, great Rocky Bridges that I just love: “Albuquerque: You can’t spell it, but you can smell it.” and “There are three things the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else: …
Best PracticesDealership Operations & ProcessesIndustry News & Trends

How America’s New Car Dealers Can Prepare – For the Coming Autonomous Vehicle Disruption

As I wrote in 2015’s Self-Driving Cars: the Winners and the Losers, new car dealers will be among the “Obvious Losers” when, not if, self-driving vehicles become ubiquitous. However, I also predicted that this evolution wouldn’t likely begin impacting new car dealers before 2025. My timeline has actually contracted a little in the last year and …
Best PracticesDealership Communication ToolsDealership MarketingDealership Operations & Processes

Mystery Shops: What You Don’t Know Could Be Dangerous!

I’ve often heard top process people say something like “The first step to process improvement is understanding what needs to be improved.” Knowing, they say, is half the battle. We mystery shop hundreds of dealers each year and like to think we learn something new with each shop. Certainly, the shop reports can be eye-opening …
Best PracticesDealership Communication ToolsDealership Operations & Processes

The First Call Should Be the ONLY Call

One of the greatest challenges for dealers trying to master the internet is getting over their own preconceived notions about what internet sales entail. As I’ve been writing throughout this this 7-part series, internet sales are not hard; they’re not mysterious and they’re certainly not anything to overthink. My hope has been to detail in …
Best PracticesDealership Communication ToolsDealership Operations & Processes

Email Templates can be Personal AND Automated

Internet sales are easy! There, I said it (or rather, wrote it.) Let me be clear: internet sales are about as black and white as anything we do in the car business – they really are. The problem is we tend to overcomplicate things we don’t understand; and traditional automotive sales managers have (for the …
Best PracticesDealership Communication ToolsDealership Operations & Processes

Yes, You Should Always Use an Auto-Response

No offense to anyone reading this series: but far too many people in our industry tend to overthink everything related to internet sales and digital marketing. Perhaps it’s because so much of this is new or perhaps it’s because change is happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with the actual “best” practices …
Best PracticesDealership MarketingDealership Operations & Processes

Treat EVERY Lead and Call Like an Order

When I first started working closely with dealership internet teams in 2003, I was surprised whenever a traditional sales manager took any interest at all in their activities. Back then there were two primary types of managers heading up a store’s internet efforts: There was the “guy who was good with computers” and there was …