In today’s world of constant noise, it’s more difficult than ever to market your dealership. Dealers are constantly trying to guess where the best ROI is when considering how to spend marketing dollars. How much money do I invest in traditional marketing? Online marketing? Direct mail marketing? The rep from each medium will tell you that their media is the best to use for…

Written by: Thomas Bear

Realizing the dealer/general manager’s day is full of interruptions, if you could wave a magic wand and create the perfect day, what would you do during this day?

Which activities do you wish you did every day? Which activities are the top ten for you to do every day?  Here’s an exercise we use in our 20 Group meetings from time to time that might be helpful for you to realign your daily priorities.…

There was a time not too long ago when the live chat icon on websites was both a rarity and a novelty. Inquisitive site visitors would notice the live chat software prompts in the form of a button on their favorite Internet hotspots but would be too scared to click them for one reason or another. Those days are gone now and while thousands of upmarket and progressive…

Since early 2009 Google's Matt Cutts has recorded a superhuman number of videos to help struggling site owners understand their site in search. While the videos are great,…

Words are cheap. What matters is the true belief system behind your words and the actions you take because of those belief systems. Economies don’t improve, people improve. Waiting for something to happen is for losers. The most important economy is the one created between your ears.

During down markets you have to get creative to make things happen. Although you may not be able to push a new car market if it’s not there, you can niche market, create affiliations, utilize…

With all the noise about making the Industries more transparent you would think that the vendors that supply the those Industries and say they their purpose is to provide consumers more transparency would  reciprocate and be transparent with their client base before launching their new strategies.

When launching new programs that impacts the clients that you serve it…

In the early days of search engine optimization, the pitch that many companies used was very appealing. “We’ll get you listed on thousands of search engines so that everyone can find you.”

Today, this seems like a ludicrous statement. There’s only three real search…

Each year at the start of football practice, Vince Lombardi, the coach of the Green Bay Packers started his season the same way. His opening statement to his players was, “This is a football.” Every year, John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins started his first practice of the season by demonstrating to his players how to properly put on their socks to prevent blisters. Pretty basic stuff, huh?

Notice the similarities between Wooden and Lombardi in the…

I was moderating a small panel at a conference about two and a half years ago that focused on Facebook fans. The two panelists represented the two different sides of Facebook promotion at the time: one focused on local quality fans and the other focused on bulk fans. After the debate, one might have called it a draw. That was over two years ago. Today,…

DID YOU AUTHORIZE YOUR INVENTORY TO BE POSTED ON ANTI-DEALER OR HOSTILE WEBSITES?

5:00 AM and the Alpha Dawg is on the…

For years, the dog has been man’s best friend. He’s got a lot of things going for him; one of the best things is his dog nose. The dog’s nose is some 50,000 times more powerful than our human noses, and has some amazing powers.

Our dogs sniff out bombs, buried earthquake survivors, skiers buried in avalanches, drugs being smuggled. Dogs have a world of smells open to…

Written by: Gene Daughtry

In BHPH, like any other automobile dealer, you’ll start the sales process out with a meet and greet. From there you should go in a different direction from other retail outlets. If you have been on a franchise dealer sales floor I am sure you or your sales staffs have joked about wanting a screening machine that they could walk a customer through for an instant credit reading. Since that doesn’t exist, your sales process is probably similar to: 1. “up” your…

This is a rant so I’m going to keep it short and not so sweet. There’s a trend in the automotive industry towards putting out really, really bad webinars. It hits really close to home…

Does your dealership have a process in place for a quick transition from the sales floor to the finance dept?  Are your customers waiting for a hour or more to get into the finance office?  Does your F&I producer come out to meet the customer before the consumer get's to his/her office?  Ladies and gentleman I could go on and on with questions that I talk about with automotive managers and what we find is very concerning.

First, the transition from the sales floor to…

THE DIGITAL DEALERSHIP SYSTEM AND EVOX IMAGES® ANNOUNCE PARTNER PROGRAM

Written by: Leo Hart

NCM has just completed the spring cycle of 20 Group meetings, each focusing a large segment of meeting room time to the Parts Department. Truth be told, we had not focused on this discipline for a number of years, being more concerned about the variable sales and expense management areas of our auto retail business. Have you ever been broadsided, completely unaware the hit was coming?

As a result of the discussions, a few crises became apparent. One wakeup…