In the October 2013 edition of Dealer magazine, I examined a phenomenon that occurred last Christmas. Partnering with luxury shopping site Gilt.com, Starbucks offered an ultra-exclusive steel metal loyalty card for sale on their site for $450. The loyalty cards came pre-loaded with $400 in Starbucks credit…

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Beggs on the Used Car Market. I’m Ricky Beggs, Editorial Director at Black Book. We have completed the final full week of auction and market activity for 2013 as the final two weeks on the…

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Make Money Mondays with Sean V. Bradley - 'Value Package Proposition' - Automotive Sales - Car Sales

Dealerships and individual sales professionals NEED to differentiate themselves... you MUST identify what is different and better about you and your…

To paraphrase the immortal movie icon, Ferris Bueller, "The Internet moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

That seems to be the case with many digital marketing practices, particularly in the realm of advertising versus marketing. Oddly enough, it wasn't too long ago that I was preaching the reverse;…

A new online marketplace at www.WantALease.com has launched with the promise of helping car dealers connect and engage with car lease shoppers online. Dealers currently offer lease deals through a variety of platforms, but WantAlease.com is the first online marketplace to help them sell new leases to customers locally and in other parts of the U.S.



With WantALease.com, car shoppers throughout the country can…

  Mary Barra's uniqueness as the new Chief Executive Officer at General Motors is not because she is the first woman to lead the company. Barra's understanding of how stuff works at GM is dramatically different from any of the men who came before her.…

Stan Sher of Dealer eTraining discusses how sales management needs to properly work with the internet sales and BDC department. This includes understanding the functions of the department and what each person in the department does. While it is important to monitor and…

Online reputation has been a hot topic for a couple of years now. As solutions continue to emerge and the business of reputation management as a service expands, there's a dangerous trend that should be addressed.

Reputation management isn't about sending an email. It's not about filtering results by checking their sentiment first before directing them to the…

The biggest news of automotive M&A came at the end of the year as Dealertrack has agreed to acquire Dealer.com. Following their…

As the holidays quickly approach, many companies are giving back to their customers. Through toy drives, volunteering at local charities or fund-raising, businesses across the nation are pooling their resources to help the needy. Some businesses, however, have chosen to direct their resources to the people that help them remain successful: their customers. And it’s paying…

The basics of down payment....

VinSolutions®, a marketplace leader in automotive software, announced today that its customer relationship management system (CRM) has received certification as a certified BMW iSTAR Partner.

(Logo: …

Swapalease.com, the nation’s largest car lease marketplace, reports lease credit approvals were down slightly in November compared with October levels. The year-to-date approvals for customer credit finished November at 72.6%, compared with October levels of 72.8%.



Over the last three months, the lease credit approval rating has slipped to 67.9%, and under the 70% healthy level on the…

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are two different things. The Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) scores that many dealerships and manufacturers rely on as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) do not really have much to do with building loyalty. Customers can be loyal to a company and have an unsatisfactory experience, or they can have a very satisfactory experience without being loyal to the company.

I believe the CSI surveys should be phased out and replaced with…

Now is the time of year when everyone begins thinking about the New Year and what 2014 will bring.  It is a time when people think about how and what they can change to make the new year better than the last. They resolve to make changes to improve their lives in the coming year.

Here are 3 resolutions you can make to improve your level of success in 2014.…

As I've said on many occasions, there are only a handful of social media websites that you need to focus on at your dealership. Despite claims that you need to be on dozens of them, the real ones that are making an impact today and in the near future are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest with Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, and LinkedIn sitting comfortably in…