Kelly, I've worked for two large groups. The first one, VanTuyl, was very supportive. We had great websites, CRM tools, and a staff that could answer any question that you could imagine. If you were performing, anything was available. They viewed the internet as the future of the car business.
When you hear people, on DealerRefresh, recommending websites, CRMs, Inventory Management systems nothing we used, at the second group, would be on the top ten list. The Variable Operations Manager locked the backend tool, to the website, to not allow any form of formatting. Everything was locked down, at the dealership level, so you couldn't make any changes. They had a central accounting office in another city. Being a strong believer in a short days to market, I had to manually enter all the inventory or wait a week or more for my vehicles to hit my website.
When I got there, there were three ISMs selling 30 to 40 internet deals a month. When we went over 100, eyebrows were raised. When we hit 150, beating every dealership in the group, we came under intense scrutiny. The Variable Operations Manager, Efin Idiot, decided what we were doing was impossible. Nobody closes over 15% of their leads or sells 70% of their vehicles through the internet. He sent people to audit the store do determine how we were jicking the system. The Director, that I trained to replace me, is still being audited, months later. Instead of embracing their accomplishments, he is having each buyer called to prove that they are not internet customers. He has yet to find one jicked internet deal but he remains tenacious in his effort.
If he accepts that they are actually performing at this level, people will want to know why he isn't getting the same level of production from the other 140+ stores.
I have confidence that you can drag your dealer into the new millennium. Trust me, it is much easier than a large corporation. I'm sure many of you have an Efin of your own.