Ever wonder why CarMax is the largest seller of pre-owned vehicles, selling more than any other company?  They retail 160,000 used vehicles just about every quarter and make approximately $2,200 per unit front-end profit -- over $350M.  If you do the math on 153 locations, each store averages 348 unit sales per month and grosses right at $800,000. In addition…

As we head into 2016, one of the most exciting new technologies that some dealers are experimenting with are beacons. Beacons are small, inexpensive hardware devices that can be attached to a wall in the showroom or placed around a dealership's lot. Using Bluetooth technology, the beacon detects nearby smartphone devices and can send customers push notifications with a welcome…

Patent covers “similarities engine” that enables CarStory Market Reports to automatically generate relevant and ‘like’ vehicle recommendations to car buyers, helping facilitate a better, more informed car selling/buying experience

Austin,…

News for the Week of 12.9

Facebook Messenger Arrives at a Website Near You 

Facebook recently introduced new Page plugins for Messages and Events, allowing users to message your business easily and check out what’s going on with your Events directly from your…

 Prize winning, methods the Jedi's use to avoid the SLUMP.

by Roger Williams 



Prevent, avoid, and escape from the dreaded sales slump.



There’s a 100% chance of meeting face to face with the dreaded slump at some point in your sales career. It’s highly likely you will face a slump many times over. A mini slump, a prolonged slump, any slump can have brutal implications in an environment where people notoriously earn above average incomes yet live check to…

Content Marketing is one of the fastest growing forms of digital marketing employed by businesses in 2015. Where traditional advertising (even online) has its limits, content marketing's only limit is your business's creativity.

But with all sorts of options out…

Swapalease.com, the nation’s largest car lease marketplace, has new data that shows where men and women are paying different monthly prices for the same exact car.



While conventional wisdom has often thought of women as having less negotiating power than men, a recent analysis of car payments shows women often have lower monthly payments on similar vehicles.  Although monthly payments…

Recently Auto/Mate received a 'Best Places to Work' award from the Albany Business Review for the sixth year in a row. We have also been voted a 'Top Workplace' by the Times-Union multiple years in a row. Focusing on employee happiness has long been one my top priorities. People often ask me how I do it, but before I answer that, I'd like to explain why I do it.

This is a fact: your customers will never love your company unless your employees love your…

There’s little doubt that the experience provided by auto dealerships in the past has jaded consumers into a stereotype and perception that isn’t necessarily accurate any longer, yet continues to persist. Because of this perception, companies such as Beepi, Carvana and more are creeping into the automotive space and threatening to snatch sales away from dealerships. (how? by…

December is here, which means the holidays are right around the corner. When we think of Christmas, several things come to mind, one of them being good ol’ Saint Nicholas—or Santa for short. 

The holidays are the perfect time to appeal to consumers and find innovative ways to bring in-market shoppers into your dealership. A simple way to attract more business…

By now, pretty much everyone has heard about the power of social media and the effect it can have on businesses that are leveraging it to enhance their bottom line. What may or may not be known—even by the businesses that are using social media to their advantage—are the actual numbers that are churning behind the scenes of specific social campaigns. So how can…

One of the fastest growing practices that dealerships are utilizing to increase sales is prescreening a Service Customer that has either made an appointment to have work done on a vehicle or just shows up. In addition, there are numerous companies that offer equity calculations not only on vehicles that bought from the dealership but even those that did not. The “Auto…

Yes.

Now let me explain.

In our industry – as well as life – we continuously talk about transparency. Let’s be brutally honest here. Sometimes honesty isn’t the best policy. Is it always that way in real life? If your wife asks you whether she looks fat, you know you’re always going to say “No.” How about those times you go to a friend’s house…

According to Black Book® data, the average price of a used vehicle for model years 2010-2014 declined -2.8% during November, reinforcing the notion that cars and trucks face their heaviest depreciation toward the end of the year. Cars declined -3.1% while trucks declined -2.6% during the month. Average pre-recession annual depreciation was continually recorded between -15% and -18%, and Black Book expects 2015 depreciation near -13.0%.



For the second straight month, cargo mini…

"The have time..."

By: Alan Ram

I speak at a lot of dealer 20 Group meetings and one of the questions I ask of the Dealers at every meeting is, “do your managers listen to every sales call on call monitoring?” A reasonable question, right? The overwhelming majority of the time, here’s what I get:

“I wish my managers listened to sales calls, we probably listen to 20% of them or some other lame answer along…

You might be someone who has recently started working for a dealership who sells cars, or you might be the owner of a dealership that is recently online. If this sounds like you, there are certain ways that you want to handle your business. It is important that you know how to handle your business and to guarantee that you get as many customers as possible.

An internet business is much different than owning a business that people walk into. The first thing is that you have to…

In a newly released report conducted by J.D. Power and commissioned by the National Automobile Association, trade-in value reduction due to proposed legislation could have significant financial impact on both dealers and consumers. The “Used Car Safety Recall Repair Act” will prevent…

Automotive Future 

Autotrader’s recent Car Buyer of the Future study shows only 17 out of 4,002 people prefer the current car-buying process, with the rest saying they want significant changes. This means the industry needs…