People often ask me how my sales career began, so I thought I would share the back story with you. Between my junior and senior year of high school, a good friend told me about a summer job opportunity. I was not interested in the least because I played summer baseball every year and didn't want to miss the season. My first response to my friend Richard was a big,…

Batteries are basically portable storage points for pure energy. When a battery is activated, it causes a flow of electric current to be sent out. This is known as a discharge of the battery. These devices were made over 200 years ago by a physicist in Italy known as Alejandro Volta. He was the person who first invented the voltaic pile, a primitive rendition of a modern battery. The pile was basically a stack of paper that was soaked in a solution of silver, zinc and saltwater. One of the…

What are you doing on Facebook to provide value?

By creating a Facebook group, you'll be able to nurture the database that you already have, as well as increase the audience for your business.  Your new Facebook group will give you the opportunity to get feedback on products or services, engage with customers, and build top-of-mind awareness.…

So it’s been a long time since I wrote a blog (for myself, that is) but after attending Jim Ziegler’s Internet Battle Plan and watching a kid yell "I found a Pokémon!" then promptly walking into a wall then watching adult auto industry attendees, vendors and speakers choose to go Pokémon hunting rather than network with industry colleagues and dealers, it got me thinking.…

With any marketing campaign it is of utter importance to hit your customers where they are. Whether that be Social Media, Digital Media or Traditional Media. To brand your message you have to develop a trust in what you are marketing by making it familiar to your customer because they have seen the message enough to trust it purely from being seen. If you are marketing to them all around their digital footprint using Google and Facebooks Algorithms you…

These days, for most of us at least, the term “phone call” is now synonymous with “voicemail”. If we are having difficulty getting our prospects to call us back, it’s probably because our voicemail skills suck. Here’s a few quick guidelines to suck less. A lot less.

The basic voicemail structure is: 1) Introduce…

Company culture is a hot topic recently, and with good reason. Companies with a great workplace culture enjoy increased employee and customer retention rates, as well as higher profits.

But how do you know if your dealership's…

Assigning leads, a core responsibility of a sales manager. Simply put however, it can be a hassle. Lead assignment requires a great deal of time and energy by knowing the who, what, where, why, and how, for every prospect that funnels into the dealership. This will always, because of human error, have mistakes that occur. A groundwork of rules…

I was about to be introduced by Blair Upton, a Senior Executive with General Motors Canada, to deliver the keynote address to all their senior leaders and dealers. The room was packed with over 600 highly successful people. The energy and anticipation was high, and I knew it was going to be a very special day.

We had been contracted to write,…

Internet leads suck.  No one is calling me back.  All internet shoppers are grinders.  I can’t make any money in automotive sales.  I need to invent the next uber or snapchat if I really want to make it in the world.…

Communication and engagement go together like biscuits and gravy, like macaroni and cheese, like bacon and eggs. Most of the time, it’s pretty hard to have one without the other. (Who wants a dry biscuit anyway?) Now that everyone is hungry, it’s time to take a look at the many ways communication is at work in your dealership and how you can use it to boost employee engagement, in turn, boosting performance, improving profitability, and increasing customer loyalty.

“All that from…

Unprecedented, Yet Simple Tracking Worksheet Helps Build Your Business

There remains an untapped opportunity in your sales plan now to implement. This will make a huge impact just by tracking and measuring a few new metrics.

Follow this: While half of car buyers are women, and that percentage increases to 53% for millennial women. 1 in 3 women out earn their husbands.

But how successful is your dealership in converting…

Imagine that you are applying for a loan at a bank. As you sit there with the loan officer, you notice that she is using a laptop with an American Ninja sticker on the back of it. You laugh and point, "What's that? Is your bank sponsoring that TV show?" The loan officer laughs and shakes her head. "Oh no," she says, "I'm a…

While lead generation is important, according to this article on Inc.com, many companies would see far greater results (and better, more-qualified leads) if more emphasis were placed on nurturing, engagement, and providing value through content…

When you think of customer ownership and customer abandonment both seem drastically different, but in the dealership marketplace they are all to often tied together. Take customer ownership: Bob gets a lead, and will forever own that lead, that lead is tattoo'd with Bob's name. Then we have customer abandonment: Bob takes a lead, but then Bob takes a vacation and the customer comes in. Bob's not there and the customer hears “I’m sorry, we can’t do your paperwork because Bob isn’t here, but…

Welcome to this week's edition of Black Book Market Insights, with in-depth analysis of used car and truck valuation trends and insights straight from the auction lanes. Click here to download…

According to Black Book® data, the average price of a used vehicle for model years 2011-2015 depreciated by -1.7% during June, following light depreciation (-0.5%) in May. Cars overall saw noticeably higher depreciation at -2.2%, compared with trucks, which saw just -1.3% on the month. All vehicles are averaging a 12-month depreciation change of -15.4%, in line with pre-recession rates.

Sub-Compact Luxury Utilities saw the highest depreciation during June at…

Key Tracking Systems for Car Dealerships is a mature market with little or no innovation in recent years.  Names like Morse Watchmans, Keyper Systems, KeyTrak, etc are recognizable names for providing these systems.  

Key and Car Tracking, llc is introducing the next generation of key tracking systems for car dealerships.  Using an advanced cloud based application as…

I recently attended a few conventions where I had the opportunity to meet and talk with many automotive product vendors and automotive dealer principals. Often, the conversations revolved around relationship-building between the two. When asked, both the vendors and the dealers agreed that the most important thing in any business relationship is the…