The recent news of Cars.com’s acquisition of DealerRater is creating a stir, basically because a review GIANT will be born when the transaction is completed next month. The new Cars.com will have the largest dealer review platform in the industry, with more than 4 million consumer…

Who is going to be the most ideal customer to purchase from your dealership? The question so many ask, and so many wish they had the answer to. The obvious answer would be an existing customer, preferably one who purchased their most recent vehicle from you. Your dealership has already built a…

Selling to women has been a topic in dealership training for years. But this technique of differentiating women from men as decision makers, as unpopular as it may seem, is flawed. Gone are the days when a wife would make the introduction, choose her favorite vehicle, and the salesperson would then turn their focus on how to convince the…

Many dealerships have at one time or another, had automated email campaigns set up for generating sales. It makes sense with the "new consumer" dominating the industry. Attention spans are shrinking and the new generations are forcing dealerships to create a uniqueness to their brand, all in the hopes of keeping the dealership at the forefront of the mind of the consumer. But exactly what is an automated "drip" campaign? This type of marketing automation includes a series…

First Contact & Follow Up. It's a simple ask of sales personnel, yet it's become one of the largest downfalls in the sales process. It's not the act of actually making contact, its the method that in fact creates the madness. By splattering phone calls, texts, and emails at random…

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…

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…