NEWSFLASH: Consumers are tired of wasting 3-5 hours of their lives buying a car.

The average prospect today has done more than 19 hours of research before they ever set foot on your lot; so they know what they want to buy, they just don’t want to spend an entire day buying it from you.

Recognizing the need for speed, some dealerships have done a decent job of abbreviating their Road to the Sale for many customers: getting them from the Meet & Greet through the…

(Another helpful excerpt from our free 2015 Car Dealer Mystery Shop Study of more than 400 dealers.)

Why Does Lead Response Matter?

Lately, much has been written about the drop in the number of electronic sales leads dealers receive – not coincidentally, of course, most often by those wishing to sell more of their own brand of marketing to these same dealers – and while the decline…

Quick Quiz: If you’re part of an automotive dealer group comprised of anywhere between 2 and 290 stores and you do not run a centralized sales BDC, then you’re:

• A) Wasting Money
• B) Losing Sales
• C) At a Competitive Disadvantage
• D) Not Leveraging Your Economies of Scale
• E) All of the Above

If you answered E, congratulations! You’ve recognized the downside of sending your inbound leads and phones to those black holes…

We just finished a 30-day, full (email, phone and text) internet sales mystery shop of 21 dealers for a 20-group presentation I’m delivering next month. Of the 21 dealers we shopped, only five sent an auto-response to the inbound e-lead. Five! This means more than 75% of the dealers did not use an auto-responder.

The 20-group I’m addressing is a mixed group with mostly GM dealers; and it’s interesting that only one of the General Motors dealers used an auto-response. This…

(This is an excerpt from our 2015 Mystery Shop Study which provides lots of free best practices and other great advice for dealers.)

OEMs, dealer groups and even Dealer Principals expect much more from their internet sales efforts today than…