Here is a post from a course I teach to prospective salespeople. It never ceases to surprise me how little most people understand about the profession of selling. Properly grounding newbies in their purpose is part of starting them on the path to success. You may find parts of this introduction useful when you begin to train new salespeople.

Why Become a Salesperson – Part One

Selling, salesman, sales clerk,…

We are asking each of our members to invited 5 friends in the Automotive industry to join dE today. Call them,email them or text them. What ever works best for you! Together We could make this happen!  

 34 more member's to reach 6000

There are many reasons why your search engine rankings can drop, and unfortunately, many times car dealers are at the mercy of Google and the other search engines.  Google is earnest in their mission to provide the most relevant content to  their customers, so they provide tips and suggestions for how content providers can rank highly for their relevant terms.  Below are some things that could cause your car dealership website to be…

Dealerships everywhere are looking for ways to cut themselves to a profit. Let me save you and your accounting team some time. The only way to change things is to start capturing more of the business you are loosing and generate traffic and sales for your dealership.

Sales

Even the best automotive salespeople close only 15% to 20% of the people they speak to in a given day or month. In addition most stores don't have a…

We all have a list of questions designed to help salespeople discover customers wants and needs.  The trouble comes when a salesperson hones in on the answers to the questions and runs through their list like an interrogation.

The customer can be put off by this approach.  It can leave a bad taste.  The unfortunate impression is that the salesperson doesn't really care, is just trying to sell them a car as fast as possible, and it comes off as pushy.

I don't…

Google seems to be everywhere lately, especially with their introduction of +1 and Google Plus.  Many people have so many different aspects of their life integrated into the search engine (email, social network, search engine, calendar, document management, etc) that sometimes it is hard to remember how we ever got along without it.

Most estimates put…

I was asked 1000 times back in my General Manager days, how do you do it?   Every store I went to (I did not skip around but rather was a trouble shooter) went the right direction and fast!   The answer was the same every time.   You have to have all the parts clicking at the same time.   You can't drive big traffic if your inventory or your sales staff can not support it.   You can not have a large inventory and great selection if you do not have the traffic to support the "turn".  You Have…

My youngest sister was born premature and as a result had pulmonary problems as a child.  Because she suffered from chronic asthma, there was little expectation for her to be a strong and healthy child.  One of the therapies she was subjected to in an effort to strengthen her lungs, was swimming underwater.  I am sure this started out as a…

Mobile phones are everywhere, be it a regular phone or a smart phone. It's almost like people have them attached to them. Based on this fact it's no surprise that your team should be collecting multiple numbers from customers and potential customers.

We have found in most dealerships that we work with that in most cases only one maybe two numbers at best are in your database or CRM. Now if you staff has asked correctly one of these numbers should be a cell phone. This information is…

The Ride

It was the big hills that scared me.  That and the killer outfits some of them were wearing. Not to mention the bikes that weighed about as much as my shoe.  I didn’t want to be the domino that caused the whole group to end up being scraped off the pavement into ambulances.

It was late spring last year. I was at the Village Bike shop, getting my gear out of the car and getting myself into possible pain and humiliation on my first group ride billed as “Ride with the…

Who is facilitating your Coaching?

There are literally thousands of coaches out there…with their own slant or insight… on what is the correct way of doing things…

My question is this…

Does their coaching align exactly with what your core values and culture are all…

The Value of the Imbedded Sales Process

Ask yourself this question:  “Do you want to run a loose ship and still make money or a tight ship and make lots of money?”  Look, I know that money isn’t everything, but it’s a great way to keep score.  Where am I going with this?  Well, in my opinion every dealership should have an embedded sales process.  For this and many other reasons, structure at the sales desk is imperative.  It leads to consistency and…

Years ago in dealerships all over the world, the dealers were to only way to get pricing. Customers did not have access to invoice pricing, shipping cost, etc. The simple fact is that today this is just not the case any more. I hear dealers all the time talk about the "good old" days when customers did not know so it was easy to make money.

I also hear a great deal of blame as well being tossed around. It's the manufacturers fault, it's my competitions fault, it's the salespeople etc.…

Rolling!  Lights, camera, terror.

My first automotive sales manager videoed me doing vehicle presentations and it took me from a knock kneed novice to a top presenter in record time.  For the first time I knew what I looked like when I was presenting.  It turned out that when I was nervous I tended to not only smooth my clothes but grab them and hold the edge of my shirt in a bunch.  Hilarious. Unless it’s you.

Here’s the key.  I only had to see myself do that once.  I fixed it…

At The Dealer Resource Group our goal is to provide the highest level of service to our dealer clients.  Our 21st Century Selling System(c) teaches ethical sales skills for the curent market.  Our goal is to lead by example, practice what we preach, and really walk the walk.  Doing so often attracts the best of the best.  This announcement is just that.

Here are our newest additions to the DRG Team:

Gene Diehm

Gene Diehm has been…

Training.  It's an important element to any successful department.  While it's my livelihood now, when I was managing dealerships, I think I missed a lot of opportunities to be a better trainer.  Standing in front of a room for an hour or less delivering a technique or other instruction, just didn't create the improvement I was looking for.  Later in my career, many managers confirmed that belief with their own experience.  While multi-day training programs, with notebooks and class…

Published On: July 25, 2011

"The Sales Manager’s Laws of CRM Use" presented by Greg Wells at the 10th Digital Dealer Conference.

We’re living in the age of information, and a CRM is an effective hub car dealers can use to record, analyze and implement information. That’s the message Greg Wells presented at the 2011 Digital…

You can have wonderful gross profit margins and even show wonderful net profits on paper however without great processes on accounts receivable you will just have paper with no real value to celebrate with. For those of you with a large amount of aged receivables and the desire to take action start by calling your customers with old balances and offer a discount to pay using a credit card.…

One of the SEO sites that I frequently read (www.searchengineland.com) has a VERY interesting post by a  reader, LebSEO Design's Wissam Dandan.  He has found examples of Google Adwords ads appearing at the bottom of the page for some searches.

No one on our search team at…