They are tired of doing so much work.



After 250+ mystery shops I think I can safely speak for the group when I say that my mystery shoppers are exhausted.  Their eyes hurt and their heads ache.…



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They don’t trust you.

 

We both know it’s largely unfair, but they don’t trust you. 

 

You’ve seen all the polls where buyers say if they could bypass the dealership and buy directly from the manufacturer they would.  They trust the OEM, but they don’t trust you.

 

A couple weeks ago, I heard a Ford maven say this (I’ll paraphrase): “The more your outgoing emails resemble Tier 1 emails, the more prospects trust you.”   By gawd, he’s on to something.…

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Our team’s official Ford Motor Company job title is Digital Marketing Consultant. Sounds cool. I like it.



But it’s actually a misnomer as it suggests that we want to sell you SEO/SAO, website development, lead generation and other services. And we don’t.



For some time now I’ve been telling people that our real title should be Best Practices Consultant: Internet-based Retail New Car Sales. But besides being too long, it’s also inadequate because it suggests (to me, anyway)… Continue

Imagine that you run a restaurant.  

Out in the dining room it’s nothing but surprises: you open each day with no idea how many people are going to come through the doors, what they are going to order, whether you have too much or too little staff or food on hand, etc. etc. etc.  Anything goes, and that’s what makes it fun.

 

But back in the kitchen there must be order and process: if the kitchen is not systematically organized and operated the dishes will not make…

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It’s odd how, in the fortnight that passes between these lite essays, the theme for the next one always appears out of recent dealer visits.  For example, if I write about lead response times it’s because, unexplainably, LRT became an issue multiple times in my visits during the two weeks prior. 

The issue that revealed itself this time is Over-Thinking The Lead.  I had some poor mystery shops, and from stores that should know better and do better.  When we looked for a…

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I just discovered that in the past sixteen months I have launched more than 225 mystery shops.  Wow.  I didn’t realize there had been so many.



You’d think after 225+ mystery shops a guy should have some profound observations and conclusions to share about mystery shops, right?  I don’t know about the profound part, but, yeah, you’re right, it seems that a person should have some observations and conclusions to share.

So I’ve spent the last couple hours…

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Are you still debating whether to employ text messaging in your eLead response process?  This story may get you off the fence.

 

One day a couple weeks ago, as I do most days, I was sitting in a General Manager’s office reviewing his store’s recent mystery shop. 

 

When I told him the Lead Response Time (LRT) was a disappointing 5 hours 36 minutes he immediately went to his CRM to verify.  To my surprise, the CRM said the response time was 41…

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This week a wonderful thing happened.  I got to see real salesmanship in action.



Here’s the set-up: I only mystery shop Ford dealers, and I almost always mystery shop for an F-150.  But this week I got the wild urge to do something different.  I had two stores to shop so I sent the same request to both: the female shopper clicked the “Get  Info” button on a specific 2012 Ford Focus in the dealer’s inventory and, in the Comments/Questions box, wrote “Does this one have a…

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Last week, while at a dealer client, and while reviewing the mystery shop I had just done for them, I flashed on a story told to me last year by one of my teammates.  First know that this was a pretty typical mystery shop – the shopper received 2 emails and 1 phone call before the store stopped contact attempts.  Now the story:



Bob was 13 years old, in middle school for the first time, and faced with having to ask a girl to an upcoming school dance.  Like a lot of 13 year old boys…

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As one who launches three to four e-mystery shops per week, I get to see the marketplace from a perspective far different than the one I had when I worked at a store.  I’ve learned that a lot of what, in my selling days, I thought was good material actually contains a message far different from the one intended – and that the message that comes across is not always a good one. 

 

Judging by some of the follow-up emails I get from dealerships today, many stores still have the…

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OK, the title of this story is intentionally cheesy, but rest of it is real.  I mystery shopped some Dallas Region Ford-Lincoln eCommerce Elite (Top 100 stores in USA for new Ford-Lincoln Internet sales) stores recently and was surprised to discover that their response processes are similar.  This piqued my curiosity, so I called my DMC teammate in southern California to ask him how the  #1 new Ford Internet sales store in the country does things.  Turns out they work much the same as the…

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This is a true story told to me in 1996 BC (Before Computers) by my friend and sales trainer extraordinaire Diana Ball Cooksey. (http://www.dbcooksey.com/)



Diana was a busy working professional and single parent with little time for projects outside her day-to-day work and home responsibilities.  But she needed to buy some health insurance.  So she left voice messages after hours (this is the days before PCs, remember) with three agencies,…

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