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Website / Inventory Manager pay plan questions

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#12
mcampo2501 said:
Stephen,

You're crazy if you think that internet marketing has zero to do with the sales process. If that's the way you feel, you shouldn't be paying him/her anything at all. I have worked in many different capacities within an internet department and am currently running the department. Salary depends a lot on your market, but know that you will always get what you pay for in this industry and a payplan should be structured around the results you want to get. Subi has created a great skeletal structure for how a "marketing manager" should be paid. Alex makes a great point in that we really haven't made clear how an internet department should run, what responsibility everyone should have, and what the people within it should get paid. That makes most of these compensation conversations moot, as every dealer will approach it differently.

This might sound like a lot of work, but the best way for a dealership to work out an internet pay plan is to go to the person that is managing the entire internet process and presence, and set up some goals and expectations. If this person does not exist, you know where to start. Once you know what your goals are, take a baseline snapshot of each metric you intend to improve, and ask yourself the following questions and consider for each position you are trying to fill. How many more cars will you be selling if you are meeting your goals? How much money are you averaging per copy? Do the math and that is how much money you should be spending on improving your internet department.

Lets try one out! Having a marketing manager would improve our intenet presence and provide a greater click through rate for our current advertising efforts. Our current internet process allows for a 10% close rate. If the goal is to increase traffic to the website by 1000 visitors, and your current conversion rate is...lets just say 3%, then you will be gaining 3 cars per month if you meet your objective. If your averaging $2000 a copy, thats $72,000/yr. In this instance, I would create a pay plan that would allow for a salary around $48K and allow for up to $2000 in bonus money each month if objectives are being met. If a year goes by and the objectives aren't getting met, you hired the wrong guy. All to often a dealer wants to give up on the internet department because the desired results weren't met. Would a grocery store stop selling meat if the deli was operating at a loss? No. You hire a new deli manager, as it would be impractical to not sell meat at the grocery.
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I don't think I have established all job duties this position would entail. Making it tough to establish those incentives. We do not have an Internet Dept or BDC. All leads and phone calls are handled by the sales floor with the sales managers in each department. This "Internet Marketing Manager" won't be involved in any of this. Main Duties would include creating reports for the GM and New/Used Directors, managing vendors performance on SEO for the websites, overseeing our managed PPC campaign, all social networking, etc. These duties will evolve over time I'm sure. I have the salary figured out but would like to establish some incentives for creating more traffic to the website and getting them converted to form submissions. I guess I was hoping that someone may already have something like this established in their store.
 
#13
Stephen Hill said:
We do not have an Internet Dept or BDC. All leads and phone calls are handled by the sales floor with the sales managers in each department.
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I know all stores work differently, and this is a little off topic, but has anyone else found this to be an effective way of handling internet leads? My opinon is that there is no way sales people can pay the appropriate amount of attention to an internet lead to get desired results. They'll always get the low hanking fruit, but anything that requires extensive follow up I've found always gets put aside and adventually forgotten about. Anything less than 200 leads per month can be successfully handled by one BDC agent and you'll certainly sell enough extra cars to pay for him/her. I know this isn't why you posted, and not the suggestion you're looking for, but I would be very hesitant to spend more money on digital advertising until I knew that I was going to be able to handle the increased lead volume. Hiring someone to do the job you described is going to bring in more traffic to your website and will lead to more internet leads, not showroom leads. If you're tracking the prduction of your leads now and are happy with the close rate, then maybe your group is the exception to the rule. I personally think that no matter how good you're doing now, you would do better with a dedicated department.
 
#14
mcampo2501 said:
I know all stores work differently, and this is a little off topic, but has anyone else found this to be an effective way of handling internet leads? My opinon is that there is no way sales people can pay the appropriate amount of attention to an internet lead to get desired results. They'll always get the low hanking fruit, but anything that requires extensive follow up I've found always gets put aside and adventually forgotten about. Anything less than 200 leads per month can be successfully handled by one BDC agent and you'll certainly sell enough extra cars to pay for him/her. I know this isn't why you posted, and not the suggestion you're looking for, but I would be very hesitant to spend more money on digital advertising until I knew that I was going to be able to handle the increased lead volume. Hiring someone to do the job you described is going to bring in more traffic to your website and will lead to more internet leads, not showroom leads. If you're tracking the prduction of your leads now and are happy with the close rate, then maybe your group is the exception to the rule. I personally think that no matter how good you're doing now, you would do better with a dedicated department.
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I understand this isn't the most popular way to handle internet leads within folks on this forum. We have had the "Internet Department" before and wasn't able to get consistent results. Maybe we had the wrong person in charge or maybe not. We are a multi-franchise store and get somewhere between 400-550 email leads a month from dlr websites, manf. leads, 3rd party, etc... With the Department, we closed 3-5% at best every month. Going to an "Internet store" about four months ago has led to 8-10% close rate. Typically a higher close rate on used than new but I think that's due to the lack of quality in new 3rd party leads. I'm not convinced that you have to have an internet department. The internet is just another way to market to the customer. Sure, some contact us through email instead of phone or walk in, but it's not entirely different. We never created a "newspaper department," so why do we HAVE to build an internet department? Maybe us being a multi-franchise store affected our success with the department by having an ISM too spread out on multiple product lines? I feel as though our New GMC manager and New GMC salesperson, who have the most knowledge and passion for that product, are best suited to make that deal on a new GMC. Same goes for our other brands. One thing I'm sure of is that more traffic to our website does lead to more than just internet leads. I visit with customers every day who reach our website and never make contact online.
 
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