Your DMS Data is held hostage and it hurts your dealership financially EVERY MONTH. And it's been happening for years.

How? First, to be clear, I’m NOT a vendor that has anything to do with your data, though I have been--I don't have my own economics in this dog fight, but I do know how this works against you, is what I mean. I’ve seen it for many years now: Several…

"'Twas the Friday Before Weekend"

    by Keith Shetterly

    (with apologies to "'Twas the Night Before Christmas")…

Pull the plug? On your CRM?? What???

Yes, you may as well try it so that you are prepared for that Very Eventual day when suddenly you have “no CRM”—I mean, real dealer experience shows (more than once in 2016) that at least two of the top three CRMS will eventually turn THEMSELVES off right when you need them.

And these outages to…

General Managers: YOU, and I mean YOU, are being skated out of dozens (or more) of sales every month by your sales staff, sales that you spend advertising money to get. Essentially, you could feel that you are skating yourself. After all, they work for YOU.

Well, guess what: With no more money spent, if you change your…

General Managers: There’s an old joke about ancient times and a Roman galley ship, where the rowers are resting, and the second in command tells them “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you get an extra hour of rest, and double fresh water and rations. … The bad news is … the captain wants to go water skiing!”

That applies to you. How?…

It’s not really black cats and witches on the streets this Halloween that you should fear: What about possible monopoly power in the hands of a few companies that could seriously hurt your dealership’s business this Halloween? And every day?

Now THAT trick is scary.

History can show us a clear parallel to how cartel, or monopoly, power may be…

Do you have a CRM? Did you know that, on average, most major CRMs only see usage of 25%?

Let that sit there for a minute. You pay 100% but you . . . use 25%.

Is it your fault? Maybe. Likely. Sure.

• Your salespeople won’t use it.
• And you won’t make them.

And so you pay 100% of the bill for 25% product…

We don't have an "accountability culture" in the car business, and we need one. Badly. For great examples why, just look at the sports we love that are so successful!

The NFL keeps stats on players that boggle the mind and produce hours and hours of ESPN commentary; basketball hinges on free throw percentages that can haunt a player’s (and team’s) season; and, from…

We lose sales every day because we have no Accountability Culture: We have lost accountability. To understand how that happened, and what to do about it, we have to look back.

We all romanticize the Rolex-wearing old-school salesman from “back in the day”: in the business for…

The Internet has infiltrated your classic Road to the Sale—did you know that?  Think about it this way:  Would you let your salespeople lot-drop dozens of UPs without a turn?  Would you let them yell at, confuse, or manhandle your shoppers on the lot?  Or, worse yet, would you let them ignore your shoppers?

Your website does this EVERY DAY.  Take a second to ask…

When I was eCommerce Director for a dealer group, I was also the group trainer. Phone. eMail. Leads.

Logging.

I can't describe the groans I got from the salespeople about logging. "CRM is too hard!". "It gets in the way of my rapport with my customer."

And so on.

Managers work deals. Salespeople work customers. The CRM is…

The small squads fought hard and terribly for days to take the hill from the enemy.  Standing, finally, at the top, weary to their bones, the hill they took is strewn below them with the awful results of warring, equipment and blasted debris everywhere, things still smoking.…

Getting anyone to recommend a BDC process, lay out a live agent pay plan, and do some comparison between an in-store, centralized, and 3rd-Party BDC at the same time is often difficult.  Especially written down and public--well, here is mine on the link below.



Local Market factors must still…

Yeah, I’m talking about baseball, kind of:  When we’re in a rut, or when we don’t get the result we want, or when we fail, we often use sports analogies like “in a slump”, “swing and a miss”, and “struck out”.  And so often, especially in the car business, we are very parochial about who we discuss these issues with—we look to our peers, our friends, our relationships for…

Mathematically and certainly, the BeBack Fight is dead.  JD Power shows us in the graph below that the average dealerships visited by vehicle shoppers dropped from 4.1 in 2005 to 1.3 in 2010.  Don’t expect 2012 to raise that number.

Why does this “kill” the BeBack fight?  First, logically, it at least kills it as we’ve known it.  If a person left the dealership in…

Big Data is hard to think about for some and so it becomes nebulous:  So, what is it?  It IS a business advantage--it’s not Internet 2.5 or Internet 3.0, it’s Internet^10.  These are some of the coming things possible (some already here!) for dealers to target for SALES with Big Data:

1. KNOW when your current customers are shopping elsewhere for…

Every successful business wins because it has at least these dimensions:  The Paper, The Plan—and The People.

The truth is, I think, that www.AutoCon2012.com advertising is out of control.  Now, I *do* support www.AutoCON2012.com, but really that's because I strongly believe in the idea that dealers need great chances for education.  And I think the line-up is very, very…

When it comes to our data and how it affects our business, how we can and must make money with it, retail automotive needs to wake up!  We need an "Internet Moment"--but, first, what the heck is that?  Understand that the "Internet Moment" was birthed this way at a very famous company:  The mid 90’s were a crazy time at Microsoft. The Internet was taking off, and it had left…