“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” –Mark Twain

As you have already noticed, nearly everyone in the medical field has made the move to wearing scrubs, paper pushers and surgeons alike. My wife occasionally wears them for her profession and loves the pajama-like feel. The other day, I was struck by a young professional’s choice of medical attire. Their scrubs were so tight that you could accurately count their goosebumps. I thought to myself, why the hell didn’t you buy the size for your body?! 

Then it occurred to me. Some people are petrified to admit that things no longer fit. If car dealerships needed to shed their ill-fitting clothes, most would be forced to go naked...

Hoarder’s Closet

Some dealerships hold onto everything. A box full of VHS tapes? Check. A threadbare t-shirt bought during the Clinton administration? Check. Wood paneling in the service lounge? Check. 1986 Dodge Omni GLH? Check. These dealerships will not let go of anything because they might need it down the road. On the admirable side, they’re extremely loyal. On the pitiful side, they are extremely loyal. They won’t let go of ADP/CDK because, during the Blizzard of ’78, the sales rep (long since dead) stayed at the owner’s house. Bob, AKA “Creepy Bob,” is on his sixth lateral move in five years because he arrives early every day (presumably, to drink coffee and harass the female staff). Sure the Budget Lot has never turned a profit, but someday the fresh graffiti on the cars might attract more visitors. Luckily, that Omni GLH is buried in training binders. It’ll be perfectly preserved for when the lights go out.

Aspirational Size

Many dealerships have a self-determined ideal size. At one point, they found their peak and determined that they had the magical size for eternal success. All their friends complimented them on how good everything looked. But, as their business changed (as it inevitably does), they had to get bigger. They had to add staff, inventory, technology, and that new OEM mandated façade. But, packed deep in the staff and management’s psyche, there is an obsession to squeeze back down into that ideal size. Never mind that inventory gets more complex by the day, the way people shop keeps changing in unpredictable ways, and that smoking indoors is illegal throughout most of the US. Someday, that old stuff will fit again. Yes, those pants do make you look fat.

Emaciated Chic

While some dealerships remember what they feel is the right size, others make it a mission to keep things trim. Then trim down some more. These dealerships wonder why they can’t compete and why turnover is so high. Their accountant (who buys from the Audi dealership down the road) thinks they are doing great. They feel great, except none of their technology is compatible with modern devices, their websites make Craigslist look busy, and their business is solely predicated on walk-in traffic. They had their best year in 2001 (along with the rest of the industry), and have kept expenses super lean ever since. All their 20 Group friends ask why they look so sick. Their response is that they still need to lose a few pounds. RIP, Karen Carpenter.

Busting Seams

Another group of dealerships, simply cannot contain their girth. They read a few articles about the most successful dealerships, and wanted to match them dollar for dollar, pound for pound. They spend four times more than what they should (probably with 4X Digital) on advertising, making sure to use only the most expensive vendors. They never ask where their money is going. They redesign their websites every six months, while going through a new CRM every two years. The staff won’t be fired because everyone knows it. Anyone who cares about them tells them they need to trim back, but those people are just haters. If it works for an exclusive luxury group near Silicon Valley, then it must work for their rural Mitsubishi Kia dealership. RIP, Mama Cass.

Rightsizing

We’ve all been told throughout our lives that we’re supposed to adapt. If that’s the case, then we are bound to outgrow things. Periodically, that means permanently retiring those skinny jeans. On other occasions, that means bidding adieu to team members. We expand to build our ranks and bulk up to get stronger. We shed weight to stay healthy while making changes to our habits to prevent us from sickness down the road. It is that adaptability that allows us to sustain.

Don’t let external labels hold you back from looking and being your best. One company’s XL is another company’s Euro medium. Just because everyone is choosing a particular vendor, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be right for you. Just because you’ve always had ten salespeople doesn’t mean that you don’t need more or less to support today’s business. Just because certain pieces of technology and processes were in fashion three years ago, doesn’t mean that they work well together today. Keep discovering what works well with your size and philosophy. If it no longer fits, stop wearing it.

E-commerce has increasingly become a platform for big-ticket purchases like TVs, mattresses and cars. Car buyers can not only complete online before stepping into a dealership, but in some cases, they can buy cars directly from web-based vendors, cutting out the traditional dealership entirely.

Sites like Carvana allow customers to buy a car online and then pick it up, or even have it delivered to their driveways. Meanwhile, behemoth retailer Amazon has started testing online car sales in Italy and recruiting top car executives in Europe – both signs that the e-commerce giant is positioning itself to enter the automotive sales industry in a big way.

Additional disruptive forces for traditional dealerships include the development of self-driving cars and vehicle subscription services. AutoNation, the largest new vehicle retailer in the U.S., has partnered with Waymo, Google’s self-driving car partner, to provide maintenance for driverless cars. Waymo also negotiated a partnership with Lyft for the development of a driverless ride-sharing service.

Another emerging business model is vehicle subscription, which gives customers the option to rent cars on a month-to-month basis. These services are quickly adding more affordable models to their lineups, and users sometimes have the option to change what type of vehicle they rent based on their needs that month. Ford and Cadillac are two brands that currently offer subscription services in select markets.

What Does This Mean for Dealerships?

Retailers across industries are impacted by changing consumer tastes – in general, today’s consumers recoil from strong sales pitches and gravitate toward helpful, low-pressure customer service and customer education. The shift toward online car-buying and other innovative options reveals that consumers are less interested in being sold a car and more interested quickly buying — or renting — a car without the traditional sales pressure.

Despite this shift, seventy percent of buyers report that they still want to visit a dealership to see a car in person, test drive it and learn about its technological features. To retain customers who still prefer walking into a physical dealerships, it’s critical to eliminate sales pressure and adapt to consumers’ evolving preferences.

Here are a few ways traditional dealerships can remain competitive in an age of Amazon, Carvana and other emerging competitors.

Rethink Employee Priorities

Realign your approach to customer service to prioritize experience over sales. An excellent customer service experience is what will close the deal and bring buyers back to your dealership.

Because of the ease of online research, many buyers already have made a decision before they set foot in your establishment. Therefore, the service they receive is the only thing standing between your customers the final purchase. Avoid intimidating guests with high-pressure sales tactics, and don’t let the process get bogged down by involving too many employees.

A commission-based pay plan does not support this shift away from sales and toward customer experience. Take a page from AutoNation’s book, and consider adjusting your compensation structure to a base salary with bonuses. This encourages employees to focus on excellent customer service rather than sales commissions. It also makes it easier to attract and retain top talent. Many millennials seek jobs with steady pay, and they have a variety of options outside the automotive industry. If you want to stay competitive, it’s advantageous to remove the guesswork and offer a strong base salary with opportunities for sales-based bonuses.

Offer Support At All Stages

Another way to drive home your value to buyers is to offer top-notch post-purchase support. An e-commerce website can offer a list of a car’s features, but it can’t offer a face-to-face conversation about how those features work or post-purchase maintenance.

By positioning your employees as the go-to experts both before and after buyers make a purchase, you create more reasons for customers to visit your dealership. For example, BMW has started hiring product specialists, called BMW Geniuses, to help educate customers on cars’ technological features. As car features get more advanced, it becomes increasingly helpful to have designated product experts on hand during the buying process to show customers how to connect with Bluetooth, configure apps and set up voice commands.

Post-purchase maintenance is another way to differentiate your dealership from online disruptors like Amazon and Carvana. Embrace the buying process as an opportunity to build relationships with your customers. This makes customers more likely to return to your dealership when their cars need to be serviced. The more customers frequent your dealership, the more chances you have to strengthen relationships, establish value and increase after-sales revenue.

Looking Forward

Car buying continues to evolve, but that doesn’t mean your dealership has to see disruptive business models as a threat. Traditional retailers across the world are pivoting in order to compete with e-commerce forces like Amazon. By focusing on customer experience and offering support at all stages, you can ensure your dealership is poised for ongoing success.

For more information on how your employees can help you get ahead in the rapidly evolving automotive market, download our FREE eBook, “Planning for People in Retail Automotive.”

A colleague once told me, "I'd rather spend 60 minutes learning from someone who already figured out what I need to know, than spend days, weeks, or months trying to figure it out on my own." This is precisely why webinars have and continue to be so popular.

Problem is that in today's business culture, we are all struggling to find time to invest those 60 minutes here and there to absorb new lessons and curriculum. In many cases, webinars can be painful to endure, offering limited or minimal value.

Introducing, the Mini-Webinar

To help with this, we would like to introduce the Mini-Webinar - an abridged version of the original webinar recording, re-squenced and condensed to quickly get to the key takeaways of a webinar, giving you a chance to spend as few as 5-10 minutes viewing and/or listening to the most important segments within it.

We've already published a few, so if you're a regular reader or subscriber, you've probably come across one or two, and hopefully appreciate the work we put in to each one to help save you time and give you more value. You can locate all mini webinars by visiting the 'mini-webinar' tag here on the blog.

About DealerRefresh Webinars - Live Web Chats

In 2017, in response to repeated requests from dealers and sponsors throughout the community, DealerRefresh began offering Sponsored Webinars. Unlike your conventional industry webinar, however, our approach to these has been to make them more conversational, rather than presentational, which is why we advertise them as Live Web Chats.

In a live web chat, the webinar presenter is asked to come prepared with a branded presentation, but also be open to questions and interruptions from your hosts - me and Jeff, and from live attendees.

For all practical purposes, our goal with these live web chats is to capture a conversation that is authentic and empirical, informative and educational, and most of all useful, so that we may re-purpose the material in video form and in audio form, alas a podcast. The challenge of course with the podcast version is that there are no visuals.

[highlight color="#fc431e" font="black"]
 Go here to learn more about the DealerRefresh Podcast[/highlight]

Before we release the mini version of a webinar, we first release a 'trimmed' edited version of the original recording. Typically this reduces the original webinar about 25%. During the live webinar, there are portions that pertain only to the live audience. By removing these portions, viewers and listeners can experience a slightly reduced version of the original webinar experience.

Even after the live web chat is conducted, you can still sign up to receive access to the full recording. The mini versions of these webinars are made available to all once they are released. The 'trimmed' versions are only accessible upon request.

Sponsored webinar guests include industry professionals, partners, and vendors who bring innovative ideas and solutions to the table, packaged as a marketing campaign and delivered as educational and informative. The goal of course is to provide our audience with key information that can be implemented at dealerships immediately and in a meaningful way.

Get Involved

To benefit from DealerRefresh webinars, keep your eyes peeled for mini-webinar video releases, and announcements of upcoming webinars. When you see one that piques your interest then sign up, whether it's to reserve your seat on the live webinar, or to access the full recording once it's released.

Also, be sure to subscribe to the DealerRefresh Podcast "In the Mix" to immediately receive not only the podcast versions of these webinars, but all podcasts we publish. Simply search 'DealerRefresh' on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

 

When we talk about 'connected consumers' it's usually in the context of a customer's online presence; how they expect - and in some cases demand - transparency and information, especially when it comes to big ticket items. But giving customers information and the tools they want to comparison shop is one part of the equation when it comes to the idea of a 'connected consumer' because, at the end of the day, consumers want a connection with people as much as they do information.


The fact of the matter is, most customers already know exactly what they're looking for when they visit a lot. Either they've seen an ad online or they've already checked out the online inventory. So when they come in, they're not looking for a car exactly, they're looking to connect with someone they trust before they're willing to fork over a substantial amount of money.

[highlight color="#e2562f" font="white"]>> FREE INFOGRAPHIC: Download the PDF Today

[/highlight]
When customers have already done the research on what vehicle they want, they often turn their attention to researching which dealer they want to work with. 1 in 3 shoppers reported they sought out a specific salesperson within a dealership based on positive reviews. Interestingly, cross-shopping between dealerships has become increasingly common. A Cars.com study found that, even while in a dealership, nearly 30% of customers will

continue to read dealership reviews.

Companies have said for years that people are their greatest asset, but today that adage is more important than ever. In an age where customers can look for - and purchase - cars from dealerships across the country, you need to have more than the right cars. You also need to have the right people and a way for customers to know who to deal with once they know what they want.

Skip to the point if you don't care to read the backstory.

I sit back, this morning, amazed at how unreliable email delivery is. It might be getting worse and worse every year. Due to abusive advertisers we all want to safeguard our inboxes from disgusting amounts of delete button presses. And so, car dealers suffer. Car dealers become email losers.

Sure, dealers' practicing carpet bombing marketing tactics with "free" email campaigns can absolutely be given all the "I told you so's" and "you get what you deserve's" that we care to expound. Anyway, my point is not to get lost in a you reap what you sow scenario.

My point is to reflect on a current purchase experience I am going through for my fiancé. Her lease is up soon and we've been shopping. I'm obviously not your typical car shopper, and that becomes quite apparent to my salesperson when asking about cap costs, residuals, and the money factor. They get quite a bit put back when I can calculate a rough payment in my head with those numbers <Alex, stop tooting your own horn> .... But I like to digest the numbers at home and that requires an email to present the numbers lawfully.

The point

Most dealers I have worked with cannot get an email to me. They claim it has been sent, but I cannot receive their emails in my Hotmail, iCloud/Me.com, or GMail accounts. These dealers have had to forward an email to their own personal accounts and then send from there, instead of their CRM, to get something in my inbox.

Their CRM is blacklisted. And the combined forces of salespeople, sales managers, and Internet managers cannot fathom why. And I'm not talking about a single CRM system here. This is across multiple dealerships in multiple states. It seems like every CRM system is plagued by this.

So, dealers, do you have a way to measure your email response rates? I believe this is a key metric that can tell you two things:

1. Whether your emails are getting through
   
2. How good a particular employee is at composing an engaging email.

Are you aware of how much of an email loser you are?

Comment over in the dealer forums

This article serves two purposes:

1. Explain the need for branded search and what it should actually cost and why.
   
2. Show dealers how to inspect what their SEM vendors are doing to determine if they working in your best interest or their own. Enjoy!

Why Do I Need to Buy My Dealership Name? I Have Great SEO

This is one of the most debated topics coming from car dealers using Adwords or Bing SEM. For those of you unfamiliar with what (Dealership) Branded Search is, Branded Search are SEM campaigns that contain keywords and ad copy directly related to your dealership’s brand name Example: “Mondello Jeep Ram”.

Often I’m asked, “Why do I need to Bid on My Own Name?

I already have SEO!” unfortunately there isn’t a one size fits all answer to this question. For some dealers, it may be possible, if you have a heavily restricted ad budget to do without Branded Search campaigns. This is not a fantastic idea as it leaves you extremely vulnerable to attacks from competitor’s looking to conquest you. Branded search (if done correctly) should be a small but key component to any well-thought SEM approach.

How Much Should I Spend on Branded Search for My Dealership and Why?

“How Much Branded Search Should I do?” “What is the amount I should spend?” Those can also be tricky questions. It really depends on how much competition you have in your backyard and whether you are being conquested with SEM by rival dealers, 3rd parties, as well as tier 1 & 2. Other factors include how much budget you as well as your business goals are. Here is an article from Jeff Kershner explaining this looks like.

What is a Reasonable Budget to Use for Branded Search at my Dealership?

If 12% or more of your budget is dedicated to Branded search terms it may be time to investigate. I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong to spend over 12% just ensure the costs are justified and the strategy is sound. You need to understand what you are paying for.

Special situations where more Budget may be required include dealerships where the town name is incorporated into the store name and other similar complications. Additionally, if your dealership appears to suffer from a Brand recognition deficiency adding more budget to this effort could be beneficial.

How much should I be paying per click on my Dealership Name?

When it comes to branded search aim for CPC bids starting at a dollar or less. Why? Because if done correctly buying your own company should be easy and affordable. In some metros this bid may be light however I maintain that starting at a sub-dollar bid is the way to go. But keep in there are those rare situations such as the ones mentioned above where a higher bid may be appropriate. A great way to monitor and inspect your branded search ad quality and investment without adding cost is possible.

We use a great tool from Google called Ad Preview and Diagnosis (https://adwords.google.com/apt/AdPreview) to prevent skewing our dealer’s metrics while still showing them their keywords and how ads appear in context to other dealer’s ads. This is VERY important.

What Branded Search Does Well

Branded Search can be a great way to generate low cost, high-quality traffic and leads for your dealership. Of course you should expect low costs and high conversion, as the people coming to your site through branded ads were actually looking for you! Branded ads offer a great way to share your message and align off-line or other digital branded efforts with your SEM. Unifying your overall marketing message is extremely important and branded search can be highly effective. Branded search should not represent the focal point or entire foundation of your SEM strategy. If it is, you’re doing it wrong and need to make course corrections.

Dealers: This is How You’re Getting Screwed.

I’ve been seeing a growing trend of agencies and SEM software companies (serving dealers) including branded search terms grouped into single campaigns instead of following Google Best Practices which suggest creating a separate campaigns for each theme of keywords.

Why would they do this?

Simple. Branded Keywords can inherently be purchased at lower cost because of their relevance to your dealership website. But some of the purchase strategies employed by vendors make branded keywords insanely overpriced but still lower than model and used car keywords. They use these expensive branded keyword costs to off-site outrageously high bids on model and dealer term keywords. The result is that your campaign(s) look like they’re kicking butt and have a decent cost per click when in fact the majority of the traffic generated is coming from branded terms that you are overpaying for.

This helps to conceal outlandish bids from being apparent it is a largely deceptive practice. This enables agencies to hand car dealers pretty reports or show you 3rd party analytics dashboards that look fantastic but hide tremendously poor advertising practices and high costs. Google says "Your Ad Groups [Should] contain a set of similar ads and keywords".



This dealer has spent 25% of their budget on these 3 branded keywords this over 40% of their total clicks for the month. Are you outraged yet? This is from a well-known Dealer Search provider.

In addition to over-budgeting towards branded term search many PPC advertisers are over-bidding on Branded keyword terms. Dealer’s need to know and understand that if your ad agency is spending over $2/click on your name – there’s likely a problem. With the right keyword mix, match types, and organization we have created branded Search campaigns (not display select, another one of their tricks) with click costs well under a $1.



To help hide costs this Large company has included Branded (in Blue) Geographic (in Green), Dealer Terms (in Red) and Even a Competitors Name (in Cyan) all in the same Ad group??? This is against Adwords Best Practices!!! Look at the enormous variance in cost $1.61 - $5.78 a nearly 260% cost increase with no relation between keywords.

Another sneaky trick I see comes from Dealers using their website provider for their SEM. It often appears that Dealer's homepage meta description and meta titles are sandbagged on the home page so that the provider to generate more Branded SEM cost. This is by far the sneakiest move and harder to spot. Here's how to identify it.

1. Google your dealership name.
   
2. Observe your branded search ad.
   
3. Scroll down to your homepage's organic listing.

If your dealership name is the first thing read reading from left to right, you're in great shape. If it isn't, you might want to have a chat with your Website/SEM company.

I encourage you to talk to your provider and ask them questions about branded search.

When the market is down, sales are declining, and lead volume is lower than normal.  How can your dealership respond, not just to maintain a flat line, but to turn around the trend and outsell the national average? What information is available, and what tools exist, to tackle this not-so-uncommon scenario?

When Morrie’s Brooklyn Park Subaru began experiencing a considerable decline in lead volume earlier this year, they were faced with this exact issue.

In this video with Morries Automotive Group Marketing Director Ben Robertaccio and AutoHook President David Metter, we look at how Ben’s Subaru dealership was able to increase sales and reduce defection rates despite down market conditions and a considerable decline in lead volume.

Talking Points include:

• Hear straight from the dealer’s perspective of how they were able to reduce lost sales by over 50% in just 90 days.
  
• Learn how to define your greatest sales opportunities and losses tied to a specific salesperson, lead or traffic source, model, competing dealer or brand, zip code, & more.
  
• Continuously grow your market share using the latest methods of exposing holes within your dealership’s operations and the sources responsible for lost sales.

 

Login to view embedded media View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EJgxLFVerw


Full Webinar RecordingConversation

To view the completed 'edited' version of this Live DealerRefresh Web Chat:

• Sign up to receive immediate access, or
  
• Premium Members go here to view the full webinar in the forums.

[highlight color="#34a01b" fg_color="#ffffff"]Become a Premium Member today to access more great premium content like this.[/highlight]

A new year and time again for my favorite blog post of the year!

I love to see the constant progress dealers make to improve their operations. The changes in consumer behavior are always fascinating to witness, and the solutions vendors deliver to the industry play a pivotal role in the success dealers experience.

During the last few years, many solutions and strategies have begun to blur the lines of performance improvement. Let's be honest, many dealers and vendors continue to miss the mark.

Many ignore the signals indicating the changes necessary to maintain the competitive advantage needed. Even worse, some are in a stagnant cycle of progress due to the solutions used. Six years of record new car sales has made it easy for some industry professionals to become very comfortable with their ways.

We finished 2017 with a total of 17,230,436 units sold, down 1.8% from 2016's results. Dealers will find it difficult to achieve the same levels of success without paying attention to the changes facing the industry this year.

Many have become complacent. Complacency breeds mediocrity. It's everyone's responsibility to identify these trends and adapt accordingly to ensure continued success.

This year's Automotive Marketing Predictions include ideas about:

1. How dealers will change the way consumers shop and buy.
   
2. How vendors will change the way they show value to dealers.
   
3. How connected cars will be marketed to consumers.

How dealers will change the way consumer shop and buy vehicles.

Subscription-based ownership models will increase.

Expect to see more medium and large dealer groups introduce new vehicle buying alternatives. The new dealership programs will provide a different level of experiences and flexibility that will have a massive impact on the concept of vehicle ownership.

We could see a ripple effect from these models as they change the way consumers handle traditional activities such as insurance and vehicle maintenance.

I had the opportunity to sit down with an old friend, and one of the top automotive professionals in the industry, to ask a few questions about their new car buying program - Kevin Frye, eCommerce Director for the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family.



EM: What were the key factors that led the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family to decide to start the Wyler FastLane program?

KF: Simple. Our goal is to continue to grow and become more consumer-facing every day. Wyler FastLane allows us to provide a flexible mobility solution to our customers that is personalized and convenient while helping us to become more consumer-facing. In this time of disruption, every dealer, vendor, and OEM should be asking themselves this same question before any move they make.

EM: Does your new FastLane program leverage the Clutch platform?

KF: Yes, we are. The Clutch software engine provides machine learning and several years of data to allow us to provide the best experience for our customers. It is important to emphasize that while there are a few dealers that have introduced auto subscription, each dealer is pursuing a different strategy on how to make this work best. This is a very innovative approach that does not come with an instruction book.

EM: How has the internal response been towards the Wyler FastLane program and how do you see this affecting your group's culture?

KF: Everyone that I have talked to about Wyler FastLane is very excited, especially here within the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family. Our culture is to pioneer and innovate to make our industry better, and Wyler FastLane fits into that perfectly.

EM: What other types of automotive consumer behavior changes are you anticipating for 2018?

KF: We are the first, and I believe, the only dealer in the country that has developed augmented reality solutions internally that we are using in the dealership showroom to better engage our shoppers. This past December we were the first in our market to introduce virtual reality test drives on our websites. Why do I share these Two examples? Our consumers’ expectations are rising each year, and our goal is to exceed those expectations wherever we can – while becoming more consumer-facing.

As disruption faces our industry, we must recognize that the best people to disrupt our industry are ourselves. We must do this with strong leadership, and a genuine goal of becoming more consumer-facing in every aspect of our business.

EM: Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate you sharing your insight with the community. Best of luck in 2018, we're all anxious to hear about your successes with the FastLane program. (I would have already signed up if I lived in one of your markets!)

I also believe we'll finally see more OEM's will also introduce their versions of subscription-based buying programs. Cadillac launched their Book by Cadillac last year with minimal fanfare in three markets. Book by Cadillac provides access to several vehicles and multiple swaps (30!) allowed over an 18-month subscription term.

A common misconception is the belief that Millenials aren't buying cars. They are buying cars; they're simply waiting longer to buy a vehicle due to the ride-sharing options available.

Another item contributing to their delay is a simple fact - used car quality is the best it's ever been vehicles are lasting longer, and the average age of vehicles on the road is at its highest point ever at 11.6 years. In California, the country’s biggest car market, Millennials outpaced Baby-Boomers for the first time as car buyers. Millennials’ new-car market share jumped to 28% in 2015.


Car shoppers will expect faster and more relevant results.

When shoppers are ready to buy a new or used vehicle, they're looking for helpful, specific information. When buyers can't find incentive data, lease payments and finance offers instantly, they get frustrated and lose trust.

Dealers need to evaluate their current marketing process and determine its ability to merchandise each make and model available for sale. The most effective automotive marketing solutions in 2018 will provide dealers the ability to accomplish the following activities easier and faster, using one convenient solution.

1. Publish vehicle offers with payments to your website in real-time
   
2. Deliver paid search ads with contextual pricing
   
3. Build responsive body-style and model-specific vehicle landing pages with their respective transactional data
   
4. Create email marketing content for instant campaign delivery
   
5. Distribute merchandised vehicles to your social media channels

Dealers will also realize the importance of relevancy as a cornerstone element of their marketing strategy. Here is several items dealer must focus on in 2018 to gain a competitive edge as consumer search behavior, expectations, and search engine technology changes.

We all need to pay attention to the behaviors that become familiar and accepted as the "new normal."

• Organic click-through rates are important. Highly relevant landing pages with content that solves the user's problems are literally what Google recommends and what they want to see when crawling your website. Your content must match the user's intent!
  
• Dwell Time will remain a high-priority item. This is the time between a user clicking on your search result, landing on your page, and then returning to the search results page. Google watches this time closely on every click to determine the quality of the page. Short dwell times are not good.
  
• Long form content pages rank higher than pages with shorter, less relevant content.
  
• Voice search behaviors cannot be ignored in 2018.
  
  • By 2022 55% of US homes with have voice-enabled smart speakers. (I have four already!)
    
  • 60% of people currently using voice search just started in the past 12 months.
    
  • 40% of adults now use voice search at least once a day.
    
  • By 2020 50% of all searches will be done by voice. Yes. WIthin 24 months.
    
  • I expect to see voice search to be integrated into Google Analytics and Google Seach Console. (Remember when mobile devices were first noticed in the mid-2000's? Watch the same thing happen.)

The push for marketing relevance will be extremely important as each one of these behavioral trends continues to grow in 2018. Longer, specific content which matches buyer intent will improve voice related search experiences.

Mobile-first indexing will improve shopper experiences.

Google's Mobile-first index will be completed in 2018. Pages will now be indexed from the mobile user's perspective - not solely from the desktop user's view as it has always been done.

What does this mean?

Everyone knows that Google prefers responsive websites. Google gave us all plenty of time to prepare for this event over the past few years. You would think more people would pay attention to the things Google says it likes.

Every year, "This is the year of mobile!" is repeated. 2018 will finally be the year mobile-first indexing affects the search results displayed.

Most car dealers won't notice anything different if they're using a responsive website and they provide their users with the same excellent mobile user experiences that mimic their desktop sites.

However, dealers using sites considered to be adaptive, other forms of adaptive platforms, and different mobile structures (m.) may not fare as well as smart kids in class using responsive platforms.

Why?

Non-responsive sites don't always show the same content and may not allow users to perform the same functions. It's that simple!

How should you prepare for site mobile-first indexing?

• Make simpler click paths from home page and lower level page links.
  
• Don't make users click four links deep to get the info they're searching for.
  
• The biggest culprit of poor click paths? Pages showing lease deals, finance payments, and manufacturer incentives.
  
• Fast load times will be a priority - customers remember slow mobile pages and won't come back again.
  
• Easily digestible content formats - unordered lists, numbered lists, interactive content, and more video!
  
• Google wants the same high-quality desktop experience available on fast mobile devices.
  
• Make sure your SEO elements such as page titles and meta descriptions are descriptive and unique.
  
• Google says their magic number for unordered lists is nine bullets.
  
• Show helpful content that answers specific questions and answers. This helps Google find the best content for featured snippets.

Car shoppers will use more online eCommerce solutions.

2018 will see an increase in the number of dealers offering online shopper buying experience. Dealers will add new website eCommerce solutions such Online Shopper, Roadster, and Drive Motors.

Dealer Inspire's Online Shopper sees a 40% conversion rate to lead. 5% of consumers will complete an online credit application and move on to the next steps. Mid-size dealerships using their solution are also averaging one sale per day via Online Shopper. They claim dealers are resulting in grosses that match the dealership average or better.

“Our industry is in the infancy of enabling the consumer to purchase a vehicle online. Expect automated service contracts and paperwork in 2018 from multiple companies including Dealer Inspire.” Says, Joe Chura, CEO of Dealer Inspire.

Dealers want more automation, and these type of solutions can deliver a nearly automated process. This poses an interesting dilemma. Dealers may be seeking efficiency and productivity, but this doesn't exclude them from managing the process and providing an exceptional in-store experience. This will accelerate the path to the sale, not guarantee 100% customer satisfaction.

Used car leasing will increase.

The number of used vehicles available to the market will continue to rise in 2018. In 2016, there were 3 million lease returns. 2017 had approximately 3.5 million lease returns and may reach nearly 4 million used cars returning in 2018. Used cars sales estimates for 2018 are expected to hit 40 million vehicles.

Vehicle quality is excellent, supply will be high, and demand for these vehicles will remain strong as these factors put pressure on new vehicle pricing and incentives.

Lease returns are pushing used car values down and presenting exceptional values for price-conscious buyers. These buyers are not just poor-credit buyers either. Prime-credit used car consumers have risen to 55% of the market, up from 49% a decade ago per Experian.

There are nearly 30,000 independent dealerships in the U.S. market. Independent dealers who specialize in high quality, late-model, low-mileage vehicles will be positioned well to move used vehicles.

Used car leasing will become another option dealers will consider in 2018 as the depreciation is less significant in the monthly payment of a used lease. I also believe this will represent another favorable ownership alternative to younger buyers.

 



 

Used car leases may also provide a new opportunity for customer retention and loyalty. Customer retention rates among lease return owners are higher than regular retail customers.

Plus, vehicle service business is higher among lease customers. 63% of lease customers return for service while only 56% of used car buyers return to the dealership for service.

 



 

Dealers will need to evaluate their pricing management processes immediately to avoid stocking inventory priced unfavorably to the market. Be prepared for sudden used car market pricing shifts before you're buried with losses.

The total number of used cars available to the market combined with the pricing pressures on new car leasing can create dangerous situations for dealers not managing prices consistently.

How vendors will change the way they show value to dealers.



 

Relationships based on trust - at all levels of the dealership. 

It doesn't matter how great your technology is, what matters the most is the relationship with the people using it every day. There is a significant opportunity for any vendor to change the way they approach their dealership client relationships.

Dealer Principals, General Managers, and Marketing Directors are typically strong leaders. They prefer to make decisions based on facts and not emotions. Fear and greed can drive the worst decisions.

I expect to see a different approach taken towards managing client relationships in 2018. Journey Mapping and similar performance concepts will drive these efforts. The result:

• Improve stronger relationship building
  
• More efficient communication processes
  
• Deliver deeper customer paths throughout the lifetime of the relationship.

Vendors who take these relationships for granted and don't support these initiatives can expect to lose business. Dealers expect guidance at every stage, and if they don't get it, they'll look for it elsewhere.

Accountability will reach new levels.

Dealers will face aggressive business objectives in 2018. There will be an increased focus on vendor performance as monthly sales objectives are heavily scrutinized.

This will be accomplished with improved communication processes for the customer journey but mostly from what defines successful performance from the solutions.

A higher level of accountability in 2018 will extend to the dealership marketing staff. Dealers will examine their efficiency and productivity as well. New technology solutions make it easier for marketing processes to execute faster. Difficult questions such as, "Does it need to be done this way?" and "Can it be done faster?" need to be asked.

Trust will play a larger role this year. Dealers are tired of being told they simply need more education. Dealers want to trust the platforms they're using will deliver the results they're seeking. And if they can't, vendors have to be transparent enough to own this fact. Yes, it's a difficult thing to do, but it's also the right thing to do for the dealer.

"Too many vendors are still perpetuating old digital marketing myths." Says Sean Stapleton, CEO, Dealer Teamwork. "The current system is broken. 2018 will be a year of massive change. Dealership professionals will need to work harder and smarter. Half of the dealers will realize their performance won't improve using the three or four vendors with same outdated solutions they've been using. Unfortunately, the other half will continue along their current path, miss their chance to improve, and let their competitors move ahead."

Dealers should expect to see simpler reporting from their own Google analytics and not third-party reporting solutions. The only dashboard you need to view is either in your Google Analytics or, my favorite, Google Data Studio.

Your reporting should include both behavioral and acquisition-type of activity, while also focusing on metrics that demonstrate the value of your marketing efforts.

 

Intelligent automation will alter dealership processes - productivity will be watched closely.

I'll steer clear of talking too much Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning. These will be buzz words you'll be sick of hearing by the end of NADA this year if you aren't already.

Expect a meteoric rise in the use of both of these terms. (Remember the days of "Big Data"?) There are so few solutions that can base its entire foundation upon the claims of AI and ML. And yes, there are industry-leading data mining solutions use these concepts such as AutoAlert to provide massive value sorting large data sets to help create more opportunities to sell cars.

The marketing environment is making a hard shift. It's moving away from fragmentation to consolidation in products. The winners? Dealers who can use technology differently within a newer operations model that combines different functional roles and simplifies time-wasting activities.

I'm a big fan of the how the technology within the subscription service models can improve our experiences and lifestyle events based on the available data. However, don't be fooled by those leading their value-propositions with claims that are better suited for the Silicon Valley elite.

Some of the most powerful solutions using these technologies include Google's Cloud Platform, IBM's Watson, and Salesforce's Einstein.

Expect to see automotive marketing solutions introduce new functionalities that improve both performance and productivity while also reducing costs. Today's marketing stack must leverage intelligent automation processes. This is how dealers will connect with more buyers easier than ever.

Connected cars marketing will increase.

 



 

Mobile phones became our defacto platform years ago. Our vehicles will become the next platform that connects our lives to the things that are important to us. Connected cars currently create up to 25 GB of data an hour. As this continues to grow so will the opportunities for users to interact with this data without distractions. Expect to see more ways for this data to benefit us via Amazon and Google's voice-powered technologies.

Vehicles will be positioned as a new, third-place for this data interaction to happen. New vehicles will be marketed as providing seamless, safer driving experiences thanks to smarter algorithms and improved ergonomic interior design.

The new measuring stick will be the next wave of premium vehicles which have minimal controls and rely on voice controls beyond basic vehicle functions. Less interaction with controls, zero distractions, and more integration with your cloud data.

Augmented reality will be introduced into the heads-up display to deliver more information. Vehicle updates, destination-based information, and trip-based data will appear to save us both time and money.

Vehicles will know when parts are about to break and even have the ability to order a new part for preventative maintenance. ("Alexa, please order me new wiper blades!") Updates regarding your destination will alert you before of your arrival. Construction and emergency data will notify you of potential changes ahead.

Our connected lives have been based on the goal of providing us with more time. Our vehicles will be able to do this as well. Cars have been able to parallel park for years. Soon our cars will be smart enough to enable "predictive parking modes" and find available parking spots. Vehicles can already park themselves in autonomous mode and pick you up when you're ready.

Expect to see deeper personalization in premium vehicles. Soon our vehicles will have passwords, cloud integration, and even payment gateway access. This will set the stage for wider adoption across more brands and models.

Subscription-based dealership ownership models will also have the ability to connect vehicles with their owners. Consumers will have the ability to connect their profiles to the subscription platforms to create new ownership experiences based on life-events and their daily calendars.

Imagine your current vehicle is connected to your calendar, knows you have a weekend trip planned and automatically recommends, reserves and delivers a replacement vehicle for your trip.

All of these experiences will provide new marketing opportunities. Dealers will have the chance to provide detailed content on connected car experiences that satisfy the "Want to know" need and help drive them to a "Want to do" moment faster.

 

Predictions from the automotive community.

Sean Stapleton Tier 2 adverting will be eliminated by several OEM's!

Danny Benites

• With an impending downturn, getting lean will become as important as getting leads.
  
• Automation keeps winning. As we lean up, dealership operators will be wearing more hats and will rely more on ‘Tap on the Shoulder’ technology in the form of mobile alerts and notifications.
  
• As the data deluge reaches ridiculous levels, dealers will insist on digestible data with limited real-world KPIs.
  
• Expect a continued effort by dealership service departments to finally take an organic search stand against national repair companies that are currently kicking their asses.
  
• There will be only one way for businesses to post on their Facebook page….pay for it.
  
• Vendors that are exploiting holes on Facebook and Google will face challenges from…..well, Facebook and Google. This business is too big for them not to notice.
  
• Rural dealers will unknowingly take power and become bigger targets for larger dealer groups.
  
• The self-professed, hyper-niched Guru Sales Trainer herd will thin. The full dealership, net profit-based dealership collaborators will be more in demand.
  
• Thanks to intelligent and predictive search technology, dealers will gain organic search ground on CarGurus and Cars .com and invade page one.
  
• The hot girls at the search party are named Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. I predict that the latter will get a sexy name soon. Who has time to type, anyway?
  
• Assigning attribution weight will be a hot debate. Companies will do their best to convince that they have the best way to formulate attribution. They will all claim victory. Last click will finally become an 8-track tape.

Ed Brooks 2018 will be the year that 'Digital Retailing' becomes mainstream - at least starts to become mainstream. Driven by the large dealer groups, by cutting-edge dealers who are always looking for the opportunities change brings, and by the 'disruptors' like Carvana, more and more dealerships will feel the heat and begin adding 'Digital Retailing' modules into their websites. Their success will depend on more the dealership culture and mindset than on technology.

Bill Playford I will try to make an automotive prediction that doesn’t include blockchain. Oh, crap, I just said it.The 2018 forecast calls for more coalition between Tier One suppliers and OEMs to further consolidate efforts on the autonomous driving front.

Look for more action by the telecoms to get involved, as mobile devices will provide the missing link to V2V communications.Forward leaning metro dealers will skip the buy-online investment, and instead lay the framework for fleet management. As OEMs conspicuously move away from the retail model, committed dealers will be proactive in protecting the business they’ve worked so hard to maintain.

Also, look for the conglomeration of rural and exurban dealerships to gain steam, as those are the dealerships that will serve the future of retail. Don’t be surprised if these conglomerates start doing away with commission-based compensation.On the marketing front, machine learning will continue to get smarter.

Look for true nano target advertising from the companies on the bleeding edge. The ability to offer the right car, at the right price, at the right time, to the right audience, through the right media channel is totally possible. Moreover, the technology exists to source the right inventory to make the process repeatable. This will create a seismic shift in advertising, meaning much of the currently wasted budget can be reallocated to other efforts (hopefully, it's directed towards human resource management).

Finally, I'm going to call 2018 the year of the pretender. The language from the vendor community is going to sound the same, but the results will be wildly different. Anyone can put a V12 sticker on a trunk lid, but when it comes time to open the hood, most will still have a wheezing, decrepit, four-cylinder still burning oil.

Dealerships need to start having intelligent conversations when it comes to creating and maintaining vendor relationships. If they do not take the time to do the research, they will be paying too much, no matter how it’s measured.

Joshua Burton Copeland - Simple, dealers that provide an exceptional in-store customer experience will continue to see gains. Dealers that continue to be distracted by "shiny object" products and services will continue to slip and wonder why. Digital retailing will not take off in 2018.

The pendulum is clearly swinging back to an in-store experience from getting everything done online. Dealers should focus on doing a great job in both areas, but concentrate on providing a world-class customer service experience that people will jump online and write about in a review. In 2018 we will see customers traveling greater distances to buy from dealers who provide the whole experience.

Michael Donovan - You will be able to track all of your marketing activities through the Google platform without having to pay companies to do it for you. Oh sorry, that was 2017. For 2018 AI will play a more significant role, and Facebook will be at an all-time high for being able to track vehicle sales back to Facebook marketing efforts.

Owen Moon - 2018 is the year that more dealers will start to focus their marketing efforts on Fixed Ops. This includes attracting new service business, bringing back lost service customers, and turning service customers into sales opportunities more frequently.

Lee Drake - My prediction for next year: Security and SSL is a key change that will influence the successful use of your sites. With the latest changes to chrome, edge and other desktop browsers eventually moving to mobile browsers on Android and Apple if you're not serving all your pages that have input (search, etc) with an SSL certificate by end of next year your customers will be getting pop up warnings not to enter data on your site.

This is HUGE for heavily search based sites on which most of their content sits on a page with some kind of input. If you're not serving them by end of this year with SSL you're probably going to see a dip in desktop browser usage. By end of NEXT year with mobile browser usage.

Thank you for following along for another year. Wishing everyone a very healthy and successful 2018!

What you don't know can't hurt you.

It's a euphemism we all know and we've all used - even if ironically.

According to the experts at the Oxford Dictionary, the saying dates back to 1576 where it appeared in a book titled A Petite Palace as "So long as I know it not, it hurteth mee not.”

While it's a common cliche, the fact is that life experience often proves it wrong.

If you want to see the proof for yourself, you need not look any farther than your sales floor. Because what you don’t know about your salespeople can hurt you.

We don’t often associate analytical tools as the best way to measure the performance of the people we hire to connect with our customers and build lasting relationships. I’m a common sense guy, so if my staff is hitting their numbers and selling cars, there’s really no reason for concern or to take a deeper dive into the opportunities they’re working…right?

Not necessarily.

What I’ve come to accept over the last few years is that when good data is presented in a way we can easily understand, it has a tendency to challenge everything we “think” we know about selling cars. Too many of us think that we are the “Presidents of the I Think Club.” I learned that from one of the truly smart guys in the car business, Gary Marcotte, over 10 years ago and I've never forgotten it.

[highlight color="#1d4699" font="white"]

Case Study: Tell Lost Sales to “Get Lost” with Traffic Conversion Analysis (TCA)

[/highlight]

Dealers have always been able to see their close rates, or how many opportunities each salesperson successfully converted into a vehicle sold. But there is an entire other side of the story they haven’t been getting – and that’s how many opportunities they didn’t close and purchased a car from someone else. In other words, their defection rate.

When you layer in data that shows defection rates to competing dealers or brands in your market, it gives life to a story we’ve not only never been able to see before, but one we never even thought to look at before.

I sold cars for seven years, spent years as a sales manager, then the General Manager of a dealership and I eventually became the CMO of large dealer group with 1,100 salespeople to account for. It would have been impossible to analyze every opportunity every person in our organization touched – so the first time I saw this data in action I was blown away.

Take a look at the graph below. The blue line shows how many cars each individual sold during this 3-month time frame. The gray lines show you the number of opportunities that salesperson touched that went on to buy from someone else – whether it was a same make competitor in your market (light gray) or from a competing brand (dark gray).



In this example, this dealership thought that John was one of their best salespeople. But when you look at your CRM data with a 3-dimensional lens and layer that lost sale (defection) data on top of it, you start to see the true story behind your “all-star” players. You see how many opportunities John touched that went on to purchase from your competitor down the street or from a different brand entirely.

In reality, Jordan is this dealer’s best salesperson. Based on the opportunities he was working, he sold substantially more than he lost. In fact, out of everyone, he lost the least amount of opportunities. So success doesn’t always translate to selling more cars than you did last month. It can also mean losing fewer opportunities to competitors.

Here’s another example. The screen shot below shows the actual effectiveness of a salesperson as they compare to the dealership overall. So in this case, Jim may only be selling 8 cars a month, but because he’s not getting all the opportunities, his effectiveness is 149% - meaning he’s outperforming based on the leads he’s getting. Bill on the other hand might be getting way too many opportunities and he might look like one of your best sales people, but he’s really only about 47% effective towards closing everything he touches.



Your best salespeople are the ones who consistently deliver HIGH close rates and LOW defection rates. But you need that defection data in order to truly evaluate a salesperson's efficacy.

Of course, if a salesperson has a high defection rate, it may not always be their fault. Maybe they’re being assigned far too many leads than any one person is capable of handling. Or the types of leads they’re working come from providers with low overall close rates. There are all these other factors involved. But the first step is getting the data.

It is a side of the sales world few people even think to consider. But it's one that can highlight salespeople who are able to convert contact into sales more effectively and identify those who might just be approaching every and simply playing the odds - if you approach enough people, eventually SOMEONE will say yes.

What does this insight give to someone managing a sales force? The ability to better direct customers. The insight needed to direct the right sales person to the right situation. Working with someone unsure and needs some extra support and patience? Make sure they're working with one of your top converters. Being able to direct the resources you have more effectively is one of the best ways to improve business.

Without this insight, you're left with a sales force that may work harder; but they won't have the tools to work smarter. That hurts everything from their development and earning power to your bottom line.

By now, we've probably made it clear that the old saying 'what you don't know can't hurt you' simply doesn't hold water. But if you need any further convincing, consider this.

George Petite, the man credited with coining the phrase, is reported as having died "in the prime of his years" and "being then a captain and a man of note". No details remain on the cause of his death, however, implying that whatever it was may very well have been avoided; proving, once again, what you don't know really CAN hurt you.

Many dealerships make the mistake of waiting until there’s an immediate job opening to start the hiring process. Instead, dealers should have a more proactive solution in place that includes continuous job openings and a diverse set of candidate sources. A proactive sourcing strategy offers several benefits – including optimizing job board spending and building a network of quality applicants.

Risks of Reactive Hiring

Most dealerships have a reactive hiring process – they only hire new employees when the need arises. This approach is often ineffective and poses many risks for a dealership’s overall staffing health. With a reactive strategy, dealers limit themselves to what is available on the market at the time – often causing them to scramble and make a last-minute hire from a narrow pool of applicants. In addition to a smaller pool of job candidates and increased competition for top applicants, there are many other negative side effects to reactive hiring, including:

• Holding on to Bad Hires for Too Long - With a reactive strategy, dealerships often keep bad hires for too long to stay fully staffed. The resulting costs add up quickly, from training and salary expenses to productivity losses. Many dealers only try to replace the bad hire when the employee’s poor performance gets out of hand – often causing your dealership’s profitability and overall employee morale to take a hit.
  
• Losing Overworked Employees - When there’s a role open at your dealership, the other employees have to pick up the slack. The longer this goes on, the greater the chances your overworked employees will look for other jobs – ultimately adding to the problem with even more unfilled positions.
  
• Making Hires Too Quickly - The pressure to fill an open position can cause some dealers to be hasty when making a decision with new hires. Without a reliable network of quality candidates, hiring managers might choose a candidate that is either unqualified or a poor culture fit. Making a subpar hire is a short-term solution to a long-term problem that will only cause productivity and employee satisfaction to decrease.

Benefits of Proactive Hiring

In addition to mitigating the risks associated with reactive hiring, a proactive sourcing strategy brings other advantages. Using a proactive approach, dealers can optimize job board spending and create a network of qualified applicants - making the hiring process more cost-effective and efficient.

Optimized Job Board Spending

With a reactive strategy, dealers often make the mistake of buying costly, one-off job board postings to quickly fill a role when there’s an immediate opening. On the other hand, proactive hiring allows dealerships to plan for job board expenditures - allowing for a more predictable budget and transparent insights into each sourcing channel’s ROI.

By recruiting proactively, you can set a monthly or annual job board budget. This will ensure you don’t run into unpredictable job board spending that could hurt your overall profitability.

Proactive hiring with a set job board spending budget also allows for a more thorough understanding of ROI for each channel. Estimate the cost per candidate by dividing the total costs of each channel by the number of quality candidates you receive. You can quickly and easily see which channels are giving you the best candidates for the most affordable rates. This is especially helpful when comparing job boards and other networks that have different pricing models.

Network of Quality Applicants

A proactive hiring strategy also enables hiring managers to build a network of quality applicants. Continuous job postings create a pipeline of quality talent and are much more cost-effective than one-off job postings. Continuous postings are especially useful for high-turnover and high-demand roles, such as dealership auto technicians or sales staff.

Keeping jobs open on your career site and regularly posting on job boards also maximizes your chances of adding qualified passive candidates to your network. Passive candidates are applicants who aren’t actively looking for a new job but are willing to consider a great opportunity when it comes their way. Passive candidates are often highly sought-after but very difficult for hiring managers to target, since they are employed and less motivated than active job seekers. By constantly posting on career sites and job boards, you will keep your dealership in candidates’ minds and maximize the chances of them finding an opportunity they can’t pass up.

Improve Your Dealerships Hiring Strategy in the New Year

Now is the perfect time to rethink your hiring process. With the appropriate sourcing strategy in place, you can save money and hire more quality candidates throughout the year. Here are some of the ways you can optimize your sourcing strategy to support proactive hiring:

• Leverage Multiple Channels - With multichannel sourcing, you can target quality candidates through different mediums and job sites at once. This will allow you to find quality candidates faster, review them more efficiently and ultimately speed up your hiring velocity – helping you secure top candidates.
  
• Showcase Your Employment Brand - A strong employment brand will encourage more candidates to apply for jobs through your career site and job postings. Showcase your brand and culture with each method you use to reach candidates, and highlight what makes your dealership unique in your job descriptions.
  
• Stay in Touch with Candidates - If you don’t have the resources to make a hire right away, you should still make an effort to keep in touch with strong candidates. Invite them to an informational interview or check in with them every few months to see how they’re doing. Showing an interest in them will help keep these candidates in your network until they are actively seeking work.

Anticipating the need for new employees and hiring proactively can significantly improve your dealership – from higher job satisfaction and employee retention to optimized recruitment spending and higher-quality hires.

To learn more about proactive hiring, download our eBook, “Why You Should Always Be Hiring.

From boosting sales to evading obsolescence, selling OEM parts and accessories online can add a lot of value to your new car dealership. Greater value means more customers and better recognition, and INCREASED PROFITABILITY.

Problem is, most dealerships don’t know where to begin.

In this 7-minute video, we break down step-by-step how your team can launch a profitable online parts business with no techie knowledge required.

Talking points include...

• 5 simple steps to launch an online auto parts business
  
• Pros and cons for each online selling channel, e.g. eBay Motors & Amazon WebStore
  
• Strategies and best practices for boosting parts sale

If you want to grow a new revenue channel with e-commerce but aren’t sure how to get started, this video is for you.

Login to view embedded media View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozV3-ngyeOI


[highlight color="#f4b945" font="white"]Post Your Questions in Dealer Forums[/highlight]

[highlight color="#fd431e" font="white"]Podcast Coming Soon...Sign Up for Free Access Today[/highlight]

 

[highlight color="#ffffcc" fg_color="#464d4d"]

Access the Entire Conversation

To view the full 'edited' version of this Live DealerRefresh Web Chat: 

• Go here to request immediate access, or
  
• Premium Members go here to view the complete 'edited' version now in the forums.

[/highlight]

[highlight color="#34a01b" fg_color="#ffffff"]Become a Premium Member today to access more great premium content like this.[/highlight]

Dynamically updated ads based on current dealer inventory are one of the hottest ad formats in automotive advertising right now. Not surprising, considering the dramatically improved targeting, relevancy, and performance these ads provide.

The benefits of dynamic inventory ads on Facebook and Google include:

• Reach customers with laser-focused messaging based on their online car shopping behavior.
  
• Retarget website visitors with ads promoting not only the vehicles they reviewed on your site, but also with similar vehicles in your current inventory.
  
• Cross-device user recognition serves your ads to shoppers on mobile even when they first started on a desktop machine.

In October 2017 DealerRefresh Founder Jeff Kershner and I sat down with Hoot Interactive Founder Miles Olson and Dealer OMG Founder Andrew Street to explore the latest dynamic inventory advertising methods, strategies, and results that top-performing dealerships are implementing to get ahead, and stay ahead, of their competition.

In the workshop, we addressed the following questions about Dynamic Inventory Advertising:

1. What are dynamic ads?
   
2. How do dynamic ads work?
   
3. What are the benefits of dynamic ads?
   
4. What kind of performance results have dealers achieved using dynamic ads?

Below is preview of the webinar, which provides an overview of everything we covered. If you like what you see and are interested in viewing the full 'edited' version of the recording then visit the access request page or if you are a Premium Member then follow this link.

• What are dynamic ads?
  
• How do dynamic ads work?
  
• What are the benefits of dynamic ads?
  
• What kind of performance results have dealers achieved using dynamic ads?

Login to view embedded media View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OLC3GFkV3Q


[highlight color="#F4B945" font="#ffffff"]
Join the conversation in the Dealer Forums

[/highlight]

[highlight color="#34a01b" font="#ffffff"]
Premium Members - Access Full Recording Here

[/highlight]

[highlight color="#fd431e" font="#ffffff"]
Podcast Episode Coming Soon...Subscribe Now

[/highlight]

*Dealer OMG is offering DealerRefresh Members a Special Introductory Offer. Learn more in the Deals4Dealers section of the Forums.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in sales is front-loading all of your effort. An amateur salesman works really hard to bring customers in and then sell them a vehicle. Once the sale is over, their efforts belong to the next prospect.

An experienced salesman knows every customer driving away in their new car is a potential ad, a repeat customer, or a five-star reviewer. The experienced salesman knows the goal isn’t necessarily the dotted line, but creating and cultivating a relationship.

That’s why what you do after every sale can make or break your business.

Investing time in customers, post-sale, cultivates relationships, builds maintenance and fixed op loyalty, and increases referrals and repeat customers.

[Tweet "Don't Be The Amateur Salesman, Try Any of These 7 Post-Sale Video Ideas Today!"]

   1. THANK YOU

A simple “Thank You” goes a long way. The fact that a consumer chose you among other dealerships and salesmen deserves a 30 second video. Remember, the goal is a lifelong relationship, with you being their go-to resource for everything automotive.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/LT_MOLCBeEs?rel=0


   2. REVIEW REQUESTS

Review requests are one of the most popular videos we see. Not only are they more effective than sending an email, but you have the opportunity to simplify a process that can be daunting to people. Explain how to fill out a CSI email or leave an online review. Explain why these surveys and reviews are so paramount to you.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/adKnoosmc1o?rel=0


   3. REFERRALS

Video is a fantastic way to gain referrals. You’re one click away from being face-to-face with potential buyers. A simple forward of a text or email by your customer is all it takes and as we all know, the value of a referral from a friend or family member is like gold!

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/dCM0uhvbMIo?rel=0


   4. HOW-TO

How-To videos go the extra mile. The tech options in vehicles now can be extremely intimidating. We’ve seen salesmen take the time to shoot a quick instructional video on things like backup cameras, smartphone-syncing, even Pandora.

   5. UPDATES & REMINDERS

Do you have any updates or reminders for your customer? It’s another opportunity to show your face, personality, and stay top-of-mind. Confirming details about tags, titles, payments, parts arrivals, and informing on recalls are all great examples.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/9THyA7ziWFI?rel=0


   6. BIRTHDAYS & SPECIAL OCCASIONS

Set reminders on your calendar for birthdays, holidays, or special occasions. You’d be hard to find anything that helps you stand out more than a birthday or holiday message from a car salesman. Note things like vacations, kid’s games, graduations, etc., perfect for well wishes and announcing special deals.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/UCy92eck3-U?rel=0


   7. YEARLY PURCHASE ANNIVERSARY

Shoot a video for the yearly purchase anniversary, even if you weren’t the salesman that sold the vehicle. Introduce yourself as the point of contact and remind customers of service deals and the status of their warranty.

Login to view embedded media View: https://youtu.be/3d6-eH6uuhg?rel=0


   Question...

What are you doing to make sure you are gaining customers for life, and not just one purchase?

After nearly an entire year of collaborating, designing, and experimenting, I am excited to introduce our latest new media program - The DealerRefresh Roundtable. What began as a series of conversations between DealerRefresh Founder Jeff Kershner and myself more than two years ago, and which secured official support at NADA 2017, the Roundtable is now officially being unveiled to the world.

Like the other super exciting new novelties being introduced here at DealerRefresh such as Refresh Fridays and the DealerRefresh Podcast, the Roundtable project is designed to be a platform where we can explore the hottest topics going on RIGHT NOW in auto retail in a way that is meaningful and useful so that all of us in the industry can take action, innovate, and improve.

Exclusive Partnership

During a scheduled meeting with the marketing team in the Cars.com booth at NADA 2017 in New Orleans, we exchanged ideas on how Cars.com and DealerRefresh could band together to create a unique partnership that served both entities and the automotive community. We ended the meeting with a mutual agreement that Cars.com would be the exclusive sponsor of a new media broadcast brought to you by DealerRefresh. Although we didn't have all the details worked out until months afterward, we knew walking out of the meeting that we were going to do something special.

In the Forums and On the Lot

At one point shortly after NADA while expanding on our original ideas, the tag line 'In the Forums and On the Lot,' which was coined initially by Cars.com Senior Director of B2B Marketing Tari Haro, immediately stuck. During this phase we considered many different names for the show, and the show format, and ultimate came up with the Roundtable.

Show Format

The idea behind the Roundtable is to conduct a talk show-like environment but in a video conference format where guest panelists can join remotely and where viewers can attend remotely as well, like a webinar, but unlike conventional webinars there is no Q&A or audience participation.

Each show is limited to 30 minutes and 2-3 guest panelists along with your hosts - Jeff and Ryan. We typically open up with a couple trivial subjects before diving into deeper subject matters, chosen ahead of time based on the panelists and what's going on in the industry.

In July we ran our first test - Session #1, in a closed invite-only setting, which went quite well. We have since conducted a total of 5 sessions, one a month, with number six scheduled for December 7, and will continue doing them monthly.

Beginning in January 2018 we will open up attendance for the public to attend the live sessions.

When you view the recordings you will see it moves along swiftly and combines conversation with debate and tough questions, opinions, and some good laughs here and there too.

Recurring Webinar Series

The shows are conducted using Zoom Webinar, a video conferencing and webinar platform. You can now sign up at www.dealerrefreshroundtable.com. if you're interested in attending the live sessions. Because it's a recurring webinar series you only need to register once, and by doing so you will receive email alerts and reminders for each upcoming session in the series.

Recordings and Podcasts of The Roundtable

The shows are recorded, then edited, reproduced and published as videos and as podcasts. For now, each session is being published to the forums and tagged with 'the dealer refresh roundtable' so you can catch all published sessions with this link.

You can also find them in the videos section of the DealerRefresh Facebook page where there is a playlist featuring all published Roundtable sessions, and eventually on the all-new DealerRefresh Podcast on Soundcloud (or in your preferred podcast app).

Questions, Feedback, and Input

As you can see, the Roundtable project is a new concept and a work in progress. Our vision is for the Roundtable to become a desired destination for thought leaders, influencers, and innovators to collaborate, debate, and explore the auto industry's hottest topics, developments, and innovations for everyone in the industry to enjoy.

Feedback & Ideas

There is a discussion thread in the Forums where we welcome your feedback and ideas on the show.

[highlight color="#f4b945" font="white"]Share your feedback and ideas here[/highlight]

In October 2017 I had the honor of co-moderating a panel discussion at the DrivingSales Executive Summit. Together with fellow attribution front runner, Steve White, Founder & CEO of Clarivoy, and our dealer experts, Shaun Kniffin, Marketing & Technology Director of Germain Automotive Group and Ben Robertaccio, Marketing Director of the quickly-rising Morrie’s Automotive Group, we were fortunate to have a jam-packed room on the last day of the conference. I guess the panel title (or the speaker lineup) evoked some attention.

Following is a list I compiled of the top ten takeaways from the discussion, and at the end of the post is the original Facebook Live recording by DealerRefresh.

1. Sales Attribution vs. Traffic Attribution.
As an industry, we need to shift away from traffic attribution models and zero-in on sales attribution. Traffic attribution only gives you one slice of the pie. It looks at the traffic that comes to your website and builds marketing strategies based on that alone. Roughly 75% of people that buy cars from you visit your website – so what are you doing to account for the other 25%? Traffic attribution doesn’t tie a sale to that site traffic, where sales attribution directly ties a car sold to the path that led to the sale. Furthermore, we have to factor in the reality that 71% of online users remain anonymous.

2. Too Many KPIs to Track.
Shaun Kniffin shared the story of a recent initiative at his dealer group to define the most important KPIs that exist within all the profit centers of a dealership.

“Together we identified 127 KPIs as the key ones to follow. In digital marketing alone, we identified 27 critical KPIs. Our GMs all agree that between 4-16 of those 27 digital KPIs should be looked at on a daily basis.”

Click to expand...

But how many of them actually do it? Dealers are reported to death. Dealers are inundated with data and it’s often impossible to know where to start without enlisting the right help.

3. In a Perfect World, EVERYONE’S Data Would Reside in the CRM.
Everyone’s data should reside in your CRM. If you know the behavioral traits specific to the customers in your CRM, your salespeople can simply look at their screen and immediately see every digital destination that customer has passed through. That’s what your salespeople need in order to have more meaningful, efficient conversations with their customers.

[highlight color="#00497f" font="#ffffff"]
Case Study: Tell Lost Sales to “Get Lost” with Traffic Conversion Analysis (TCA)
 [/highlight]

4. Google Analytics is A Great Tool…IF It’s Set Up Correctly.
Google Analytics has the potential to be a phenomenal tool, but it can also be complicated, involved and difficult to derive any real actionable insights from. How many GMs go into their GA dashboard every day? Not many. So how can we expect our managers to actually obtain any real value or insights from of GA alone?

Ben Robertaccio advises dealers to have their key goals and conversions set up properly in order to measure what’s actually happening - and that includes SRPs, VDPs, leads, chats, calls, texts, map views, etc. The best reports out there take GA data and feed in multiple other data sources to deliver a clear path towards correcting the flaws in your business.

5. There Needs To Be a Consolidation of Analytics Tools in The Market Space.
Because of the intertype competition amongst tiers and players within the automotive vertical, we need to get to the point where dealers can know (or at least have a solid benchmark) of how many cars each vendor will help them sell per month.

Kniffin reminds us of the ugly truth that, “This industry has more snake oil than any other industry,” and he’s right! Additionally, there aren’t any real standards or benchmarks to let dealers know how they are doing at any given point because of the fact that every dealer and every market is so different. We need to push for more open data sharing, partnerships, and standardization amongst vendors and at all industry levels.

6. 3rd Party Listing Sites Like Cars.Com & Autotrader Are NOT Lead Generators.
Leads aren’t everything. Clarivoy Founder & CEO, Steve White says, “Don’t ignore the cumulative effect of the journey that took place to produce that lead.” People don’t just go to Cars.com and submit their information – it’s not that simple. Autotrader, Cars.com, CarGurus and all those sites are not lead sources. Their responsibility is to expose your inventory on a grand scale.

7. Using Last Click Attribution Is A Lot Like…
Steve White, made the analogy of comparing attribution to a hangover. “It’s a lot like blaming a hangover on that last beer you had. But in reality, it wasn’t just that last beer, it was the cumulative effect of the 10 other drinks you had before that. So that’s what you have to think about from an attribution perspective. There is a cumulative effect to all of your different marketing touchpoints.” Making really big decisions based on last click is just not the smart thing to do.

8. Dealers Suffer From A.D.D.
Which of course stands for, “Another Damn Dashboard.” Every vendor has their own dashboard. The last possible thing today’s dealers want is another report or system to log into. These dashboards have become nothing more than complex conundrums of numbers and statistics that lack meaning and more than anything, lack the ability to execute.

Kniffin says when it comes to their vendors, “I just want to know if you’re involved in the sale. I just want to know are you part of my math, are you part of my chemistry? Are you going to help me attribute more sales? As marketers all we want to know is how can we make these numbers better? How are you who manages my paid search going to make your numbers better and help us optimize our spend?”

9. Hold Your Vendors To A Higher Standard.
Robertaccio emphasizes, “We all need to hold our vendors and our partners to a higher standard to make sure they are feeding into our analytics appropriately and ensuring the data they provide us with is pure and valid. In a utopian world, all our vendors would work together openly and all agree on how to measure things.”

10. Don’t Rely On Your Customers (or Your CRM) to Help With Attribution.
If dealers were to ask their customers what their click path consisted of before coming in for a test drive, most people wouldn’t have a clue. The digital journey that takes place leading up to a sale is just that – it’s a journey. It’s something that happens organically, over time, across devices, both at home and on the go.

Kniffin adds, “Single source attribution in CRM – THAT’S frustrating! We’ve challenged every one of the CRM companies out there, and it’s a crowded space, but the truth is, single source attribution does not help us develop a strong marketing strategy, period. And how much of that is really subjective data?”

Robertaccio shares Kniffin’s frustration and follows it up with a good point, "Pretty regularly I don’t remember what I had for dinner the night before so how am I going to remember what traffic source influenced my purchase?”

[highlight color="#f4b945" font="#ffffff"]
Join the Conversation in the Dealer Forums
 [/highlight]


This is a slightly abridged version of the original article published on the AutoHook blog.

Millennials, the term used for the generation born between 1982 and 1997, differ substantially from previous generations when it comes to how they shop. This is equally as true for household items and consumer electronics as it is for cars.

Dealers, however, because of the unique complexity to shopping and buying cars, are faced with tremendous new challenges when it comes to embracing e-commerce, but they still need to adapt to accommodate this generation of shoppers.

In this video with Drive Motors Head of Growth Rune Hauge, we touch on what defines a millennial, their core values, and how to enhance the shopping experience with this demographic.

Talking points include:

• Who millennials are and their buying habits
  
• What your dealership can do to win over millennials as customers
  
• Digital tactics that you can implement today

Login to view embedded media View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGk8acb0j8A


[highlight color="#f4b945" font="white"]Join the Conversation in the Forums[/highlight]

[highlight color="#fd6821" font="white"]Listen to the Podcast on Soundcloud[/highlight]

 

[highlight color="#DEDEDE" fg_color="#464d4d"]

Sign Up for Access to the Complete Conversation

To view the full 'edited' version: ,

• Sign up here for to receive a link to the entire video conversation, or
  
• Premium Members may immediately access the complete version here in the forums.

Become a Premium Member today to access more great premium content like this.
[/highlight]

When the market is down, sales are declining, and lead volume is lower than normal, how can your dealership respond, not just to maintain a flat line, but to turn around the trend and outsell the national average? What information is available, and what tools exist, to tackle this not-so-uncommon scenario?

When Morrie’s Brooklyn Park Subaru began experiencing a considerable decline in lead volume earlier this year, they were faced with this exact issue.

In addition to a large drop off in leads, their lost sales and defection rates were significantly higher than the national sales trends. They needed a solution to identify the source of all lost sales, and a strategy to reduce the rate of defection to other dealers, while growing their market share in surrounding zip codes.

That solution, was AutoHook’s Traffic Conversion Analysis tool.

Morrie’s Brooklyn Park Subaru used AutoHook’s Traffic Conversion Analysis (TCA) to identify the sources responsible for the highest number of lost opportunities during the 90-day period. TCA is the first ever report that allows dealers to view and compare their own sales data versus the sales they lost, and defection trends to competing stores or brands in their market.

It works by taking a dealership’s CRM data and matching it up against Urban Science’s near real time sales database in order to reveal their greatest opportunities and losses.

[highlight color="#1d4699" font="white"]

Tell Lost Sales to “Get Lost” - Download Free Case Study Now
[/highlight]

You Can’t Win Without Knowing What You’re Losing

AutoHook leveraged TCA data to analyze the leads already in Morrie’s CRM and pinpointed the largest areas of lost sales by zip code, model, salesperson, lead source, and competing dealers or brands in their market. TCA exposed holes within the dealership’s internal processes and removed the leads that had already purchased elsewhere, helping to eliminate wasted spend and marketing effort.

AutoHook then implemented customized, targeted offers to drive customers into their showroom.

Outcome and Action

TCA was able to identify Morrie’s greatest lost sales opportunities:

• By Dealer
  
• By Model
  
• By Lead Source
  
• By Zip Code

Armed with this information, Morries was able to target underperforming models and zip codes while also targeting the lead provider with the highest defection rate.

By doing so, Morrie’s Brooklyn Park Subaru was able to reverse the trend and effectively increase Outback sales growth, despite Outback sales slowing, both nationally and even more so within their own market,

Even with fewer leads, Morrie’s was able to successfully cut defection by a minimum of 50% in the two zip codes TCA defined as their greatest areas of opportunity.

The Results

The results don’t stop here. By increasing their sales of Outbacks by more than 15%, Morries’ exceeded the national average by more than 200% with significantly fewer leads. Morries saw more than a 50% decrease in defection (“Lost Sales”), closing more than 85% of leads, practically a 20% increase from before.

> Go here now to download the full case study in PDF

"We have always seen great results using AutoHook Solutions and we were optimistic when signing up for their Traffic Conversion Analysis (TCA) that it would drive results. The tool has provided us with a robust, new lens for which to view our data and has provided actionable insights we've simply not seen elsewhere. Despite a 28% reduction in Outback leads, we were able to use TCA data and consult with the AutoHook team to grow Outback sales by 15.7%. Our AutoHook leads closed at 87% during this 90-day window proving that the TCA and AutoHook lead tools are a winning combination.” - Ben Robertaccio | Marketing Director, Morrie’s Automotive Group

Click to expand...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and when it comes to building a profitable buy center at your dealership, those links are your people and your processes. Outfitting your buy center with skilled team members is a difficult and essential ongoing effort for all managers and directors.

In the video below, the following points are highlighted in this condensed mini version of the original live web chat which aired in September 2017 where Vehicle Acquisition Network Founder Tom Gregg and Del Grande Dealer Group Used Vehicle Director David Long discussed what it takes to build and manage your used vehicle acquisition team.

• Identifying the "right fit" for your acquisition team
  
• What should be expected from a "newbie" in a buy center
  
• What goals and expectations should be set for team members
  insert video

Login to view embedded media View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FNgK9UnqIo


[highlight color="#f3b851" fg_color="#ffffff"]Join the Conversation in the Dealer Forums[/highlight]

[highlight color ="#fd5720" fg_color="#ffffff"]Podcast coming soon...subscribe free now[/highlight]

 

[highlight color="#d6d6d6" fg_color="#464d4d"]Sign Up for Access to the Complete Conversation

People are the greatest assets in dealership operations and Buy Centers are no exception to the rule. With personnel turnover rates exceeding 35-40% in the automotive industry as a whole, it’s critical to identify the right candidates for your buy centers, and then train, pay, and set objectives to retain them over the long term.

Having the proper structure in place to support the buy center employee’s success and keep them engaged should be at the top of every managers mind. Developing a routine of meeting with buy center employees and giving them a voice in the evolution of the processes and procedures will improve your employee engagement and increase the efficiency of your operation. Providing the employees with clearly defined goals and a potential career path will keep them motivated and driven.

To view the full 'edited' version (17 minutes), signup here for to receive a link to the entire video conversation. Premium Members may access the complete version here in the forums. Become a Premium Member today to access more great premium content like this.
[/highlight]

 

Upon hearing news just now that Authenticom has informed 55 employees that they will be laid off effective Feb. 2 because of the company’s prolonged antitrust battle with two larger companies, I have to say this is a sad day for our corner of the industry, not only for the workers affected, but also the automotive community as a whole.

In July, Authenticom won a court injunction over Reynolds & Reynolds and CDK, forcing the companies to continue making it possible for Authenticom to service it's customers, dealers and providers alike, but the battle to continue doing so is taking its toll, which is exactly what Reynolds & Reynolds and CDK knew they could accomplish soon enough.

Cottrell’s announcement to the affected employees came two days after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago dealt Authenticom a blow in its suit, which the company filed in federal court in Madison on May 1.

"The human side of the layoffs is sweeping,” Authenticom founder, president and CEO Steve Cottrell said. “I deeply, personally regret this. We’ve done everything in our power to avoid this.”

Click to expand...

Authenticom, which tried to hold its number of layoffs to the dozen announced in August, set the Feb. 2 date to lay off the 55 to extend benefits for them, Cottrell said. They will receive help with job-placement efforts, resume writing and other assistance needed to secure new jobs, he said.

“These are the people who made this company, and made us a success,” he said. “This is a tribute to what the larger team has done. We have found significant opportunities outside of the automotive sector,” he said.

Click to expand...

“Change is on the horizon, and we are inspired by the way our industry has embraced both technological change and at the same time pushed back on the status quo of control of emerging technology by the privileged few,” he said.

For a complete breakdown of the backstory and timeline of events of this situation, read Dealers Still Own Their DMS Data...For Now.

[highlight color="#f4b945" font="black"]> Join the Discussion on DealerRefresh[/highlight]

What do grocery stores, weather apps, and streaming content providers have in common?

ANSWER: They all use concierge services to personalize the user experience, and drive revenue.

Concierge services include anything that puts items or services in front of customers before they even realize they need it. It's the approach behind grocery stores that present coupons and special offers based on a customer's shopping habits and previous purchases. It's what drives the code behind those spot-on recommendations from Amazon and Netflix.

The general demand for concierge service has also been the catalyst for companies like Uber, TaskRabbit, Fiverr and the multitude of subscription services now available.

We've already seen the growth potential in this area thanks to the rise of online shopping. Not only are people happy to order clothes and personal items online, now grocery store sales are taking off. It's an industry that is expected to grow to more than $100 billion by 2025.

Meanwhile, Amazon is setting the bar when it comes to driving sales based on recommendations. The approach of recommending products now accounts for a third of their annual sales.
What is the Concierge Economy?

[highlight color="#1580fc" font="black"]>> The Concierge Economy and Your Dealership Infographic - Free PDF <<[/highlight]

Concierge Services in Auto Retail

So how can dealers harness this power and tap into the concierge economy? It's simple once you understand the basic road map that creates a concierge economy within your dealership:

• Gather and analyze data
  
• Provide personalized content
  
• Anticipate customers’ needs

People want to make their lives easier and the concierge economy does exactly that. People can delegate everything from shopping for their monthly essentials and picking up dry cleaning to standing in line for concert tickets and wrapping gifts. There are ways to make this approach work in a multitude of industries and, when done correctly, the pay off can be huge.

Concierge economy service provides a seamless, personalized, and convenient digital shopping experience. Shoppers have come to expect this high level of service in every area of e-commerce, and they are expecting this type of experience when shopping for their next vehicle now too.

News broke in June that Amazon is recruiting car sales executives and may soon start directly selling cars throughout Europe. Amazon Vehicles has already broken into the Italian car sales market, acting as an online sales service for several Fiat models, with buyers picking up their car from brick and mortar dealerships. Market analysts say it is only a matter of time before Amazon becomes a major player in direct car sales across the market.

Amazon has the competitive advantage of catering to the growing segment of online car shoppers. What they are losing out on is post-purchase customer service.

What does this mean for traditional auto dealerships? To compete with Amazon and other web-based retailers, dealerships need to shift their sales staff from focusing on selling cars to enhancing the customer experience. According to Autotrader, 54 percent of consumers would buy from dealerships who provide better experiences compared to lower prices. Capitalizing on their ability to provide face-to-face, fast and easy customer service will be essential for traditional dealerships to remain competitive.

The selling process needs to be streamlined, expedient and focused on customer needs to win over consumers. This will solidify the relationship with customers, encourage them to return to your dealership for any service issues and show customers that dealerships can offer benefits beyond what online retailers can.

Let's find out how...

Better Hiring for a Better Customer Experience

Your customer service is only as good as the people you hire. Successful hiring begins with a well thought out hiring processes that align with your larger operational goals, including improving customer service and other hiring objectives.

Create and Follow a Hiring Process

Following a standardized process is the first step in clearly defining your hiring process and goals. If you’re hiring with the idea of improving customer service, you can more easily develop concrete steps in your hiring process to attract and hire candidates who fit your needs. For example, a critical early-stage action dealerships can take is using pre-screening surveys to see how candidates would respond in specific situations to demonstrate a strong commitment to customer experience.

Set Clear Expectations

It’s critical to be specific and transparent at the onset of hiring – beginning with your job description. Make it clear in your job description that you’re looking for candidates who value a positive customer experience and that customer service is ingrained in your dealership’s culture. In a recent interview, one of Honda’s best sales leaders Jason Graciano emphasized the importance of setting clear expectations and having a company vision for recruitment: “It’s very difficult for a person to be a leader if [they] don’t have a vision or a direction in which they are headed,” said Graciano. “You have to be able to provide that vision, energize those people and convince them, ‘this is where we’re going, and this is why you should come with me.’”

Focus on Soft Skills

Too often dealerships – and other companies – get caught up in required experience instead of necessary skills to succeed in a given role. Focusing on customer-oriented people with good interpersonal skills can be more beneficial in ensuring quality hires than the candidate’s years of dealership experience.

How to Continue Focusing on the Customer Experience

Once you’ve hired the right people, it’s essential to sustain a dealership culture centered on customer experience. There are several ways you can continue to uphold the high standard you have set for your dealership:

Understand the Customer’s Perspective

The key advantage dealerships have over online sales is direct, face-to-face access to customers. Regularly ask customers for feedback and how you can improve their experience. If you don’t get enough direct feedback, pay attention to your customers on review sites like Yelp or your Google My Business page. Actively listen to your customers and the interactions they have with your employees when they’re in your dealership, and make an effort to track customer interactions with specific employees through your customer relationship management (CRM) software and talent management system.

Introduce Product Specialist Roles

Dealerships are increasingly moving toward product specialist roles and away from traditional sales positions. By design, product specialists are oriented toward improving customer experience instead of hard selling. Customers shop at their own pace, while still having access to a product specialist who can provide additional information about the cars they are considering. Product specialists are more equipped to build healthy relationships with customers, since they serve as a guide for purchase, help expedite the buying process and can walk customers through setting up car technology post-purchase.

Humanize Your Dealership

Although technical skills are more important for technicians, make sure your service managers are customer-friendly. They will be the ones answering service calls and directly interacting with customers. Look for service managers with good interpersonal skills, who can convert one-time service customers into repeat business. Encourage all your employees to be energetic and inviting, and cultivate a relaxed and fun environment.

Moving Forward

A superior customer experience should be your dealership’s primary focus to cultivate strong customer loyalty and remain competitive in the market. As online retailers enter the market, traditional car dealerships need to ramp up customer experience initiatives to get customers through their doors, return for service and generate referral business. A valuable, face-to-face experience, as well as fast and convenient service offerings, differentiate dealerships from digital retailers.

Chances are if you were finishing your business education in the late nineties, The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, was mandatory reading. To this day it’s still considered one of the best business books in modern times. It was in this book that Christensen coins the term disruptive technology (later changed to disruptive innovation), to describe a process by which a product or service gains a foothold in simple applications at the low end of a market, then pushes up market, eventually knocking off the established competitors. Simply put, great companies can, have, and will fail despite ostensibly doing everything right. Think Kodak and Xerox.

As I’ve worked in the automotive space for basically my entire adult life, I’ve got to see the forefront of several technologies and services that were self-declared disruptive. Hell, I thought the lead scoring I helped develop would be considered disruptive, but with the absence of third-party leads, it now looks rather ho-hum. Sure the basic logic has led to martech and fintech applications (and recent sales of a company with a lottery valuation), but It didn’t have that Netflix vs. Blockbuster impact. Time will tell that tale.

I’ll default to the good Professor Christensen when it comes to the matter of true disruptive innovation. It should be said, however, it’s hard to declare that a technology is disruptive while it’s actually being developed. In the beginning, few would’ve predicted that the electric motor would completely wipe out steam power, or that the mass-produced automobile would eliminate the horse and carriage. If several generations relied on something, rational people couldn’t conceive that in a single generation things could fundamentally change. Entire business ecosystems were built to support these monopoly technologies, with thousands of jobs depending on that status quo.

As new technologies were introduced, that monopoly of the legacy devices was broken, ushering in a new supply-side of supporting companies. It took years, even decades, for these technologies to be realized for what they were: disruptive. However, during my lifetime, the personal computer destroyed the typewriter, just to have the smartphone destroy the personal computer. With this acceleration has come an ever-increasing lexicon of fresh buzzwords to describe this movement. What was state of the art, became cutting edge, became leading edge, became, bleeding edge. Now disruptive seems to have taken on that same connotation despite the fact that it takes the passage of time to determine.

It’s the buzzword rich environment that has created a false reality that the declaration of disruption equals true disruption. Unfortunately, there’s an ever-increasing market of spenders who desperately want to take advantage of these technologies, at any cost, and do not have the ability to tell the difference between an immature, yet helpful solution from an awesome idea. Unfortunately, there are insidious people who are fluent in buzzwords, but have no intention of creating an actual disruption. Instead, they offer tools associated with a buzzword, create an illusion of sophistication, leverage a first mover advantage, and do nearly everything to prop up the monopoly of status quo. All of this is done while hoarding the cash at the user’s expense. I call this Corruptive Technology.

Corruptive Technology masks itself as disruptive to an exploitable audience. This audience is characterized as having a narrow focus, a large degree of technical ignorance and disposable budget, easily glamoured from performing any background research, and having an overwhelming desire to find a “magic bullet” solution. Corruptive Technology expertly packages buzzwords into a minimally viable product, dispatches an extraordinarily skilled sales and marketing team to rapidly deploy the technology, and generates profits from contractual agreements. Corruptive Technologies also find a boost from influencers (buzzword alert), who often tout the technology as if it’s the greatest thing since the advent of the Internet while collecting a pile of money, thereby doubling the burden on an unsuspecting mark. As one exploitee cycles off, another cycles on. Think of it as an exquisitely detailed box, with nothing but stale air inside.

Like a disease attacking the human body, Corruptive Technology often leaves a business weaker. It redirects resources from incremental improvements that can lead to predictable goals. It sours that staff on using such technologies in the future, as the Corruptive Technology often proves itself to be a monumental waste of time. More importantly, it sucks the life out of certain segments, as better thought-out technologies can’t get a second look. This last symptom might be the most deadly.

Terms like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI; simply defined as technology that teaches itself without human intervention) are tailor-made for Corruptive Technology. These technologies are buzzworthy, exciting, complicated to understand, expensive to use, even more resource intensive to disprove, and could be the most magical of bullets. Confusing the market with simple algorithms or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk on an immature product or service while shouting that it’s AI from the rooftops creates a negative brand association with term AI. That negative brand association is compounded by trusted, but highly compensated, spokespeople that tout the product’s benefit. Consequently, the term AI then gets corrupted by the negative brand association. Then, along comes a more mature product or service that’s powered by IBM’s Watson or Google’s DeepMind, but the AI ship in a corrupted segment may have already sailed, as there is no longer a demand. This is a rinse, wash, and repeat problem in retail automotive.

Corruptive Technology surrounds us, but doesn’t control us. We have a duty to each other to remain skeptical. If something is spray painted in buzzword gold, try flaking some of it off. Spend some time researching the technology, and pay very close attention to those who developed it. Sometimes a 19-year-old college dropout gets super lucky, but most of the time that lucky dropout went someplace like Stanford or MIT. Ask about what patents have been granted or are pending. If the US Patent and Trade Office doesn’t find it terribly novel, neither should you. If you’re flaking off the paint and finding a turd, just stop. If you’re finding something raw in the middle, but promising, don’t pay to beta test. Offer, instead, to help develop the tool in exchange for its use. If you do the research and think that the technology will be life-changing, proceed, but do so with caution.

Technology continues to change our lives every day. And, new businesses are started every day to make our lives easier, while taking money out of the pockets of established companies. This is how business grows. Yet, all of us have a broom in our closet to clean up the messes our vacuum cleaner can’t. Don’t allow yourself to be corrupted by companies that market themselves as disruptive. Let history resolve that.

A few weeks ago, I discussed The Enormous Untapped Potential of Live Chat for Service (here’s Part 2) and how it benefits both your dealership’s processes and your service customers. The summarized version is that 30-40% of chats are related to fixed operations, and you should be chatting for the service department.

Now, as promised, I want to dive into the strategy behind live chat for service.

Your Website: Prime Real Estate for Service Chats

The short answer to “where do I put a chat button for service on my website?” is everywhere. Why? Because chat buttons and annoying pop-ups are no longer interchangeable. Find a chat provider that follows a brand standard and offers unobtrusive, mobile friendly buttons that enhance the customer experience.

If you’re using a traditional chat invitation that deploys only on your service pages, make sure you’re strategic on where you place the button. Generally, the best place to deploy chat is on the service specials page and the appointment setting page. Customers on your service specials page are just waiting for a nudge to do business with you and chat can get them there. And your service appointment setting page is a no-brainer; the easiest way for a customer to set an appointment is to have someone else do it. Offering chat as a means to set a service appointment will significantly reduce drop-off and, if used correctly, will increase appointment show rate and RO dollars.

If you’re experimenting with the deployment of chat invitations with custom messages, here are three rules of thumb to follow:

• Be relevant - Context matters. Your customers shouldn’t see a chat invitation about an oil change while looking at tire specials.
  
• Be brief - Don’t try to put all of your USPs in the chat invitation. It’s a big turn off and will definitely hurt conversion.
  
• Be grammatically correct - I wish this went without saying, but I’ve seen it in action. Always check for spelling and grammar before deploying your chat invitations.

3 Unlikely Places to Add Dealer Chat for Service

Live chat technology can be used for so much more than ‘traditional chat’ on your website. Some companies in the industry have taken leaps and bounds towards multi-channel conversations, allowing dealers to engage and convert shoppers wherever else they may be in the digital world. For the sake of brevity, the term ‘chat’ will replace digital messaging variants such as text, Facebook Messaging, etc.

If your chat provider doesn’t offer anything but website chat, then do you even chat, bro?



Facebook

The inherently social and business-friendly Facebook recently gave businesses the opportunity to tailor posts based on intent and call-to-action, with Messenger being a natural option. The context of social media is that people are there to engage. What better way to connect with customers on Facebook than through Facebook?  

Ask your chat provider if they integrate with Facebook. If you use the software, it will make your life easier to use one platform for multi-channel service conversations. And if you have a managed solution, then you’re broadening your lead sources. Regardless, make sure the service leads and appointments go directly into your CRM!

Google

Last year Google launched Click-to-Message, an extension that allows shoppers seeing your Google Ad to start a conversation with you from the search results page. Then, as if we needed further proof that text-based communications are the future, Google launched My Business Chat, a feature that lets you connect with consumers who find your business listing on Google Search.

Your call-phobic service customers can now reach you instantly and directly without having to navigate and possibly leave your website, and you can:

• Reach more mobile shoppers to fill your showroom effectively
  
• Fill more service bays by setting more service appointments
  
• Leverage your SEO and PPC efforts to reach customers

Run, don’t walk, to turn on My Business Chat (it’s free), and if you’re running Google Ads for service, use Click-to-Message for your always-on, text-savvy service customers.

Emails

A static link in your email is the simplest, most overlooked way to get people to chat.

If you invest in email marketing, giving your shoppers the option to chat via email allows them to connect with you as soon as they read it. Not to mention that customers who open your email are showing a higher level of intent to take action, so you have nothing to lose and everything to gain! Here are a few options on how to do it:

• Link a phrase in your email like, ‘Chat now to set an appointment’
  
• Get fancy with it and make call-to-action buttons
  
• Set it and forget it on your email signature

Remember, Conversation is Key

The competitive advantages of the service department inside a dealership far outweigh the ones of the Pep Boys and Valvolines of the world. Use chat to showcase what your service department has to offer, and add value to these conversations by informing your customers about things like:

• Dealership Amenities
  
• Specials and Coupons
  
• Other Service Opportunities
  
• Service Loyalty Plans

Chat gives your dealership a digital platform to showcase its competitive advantages, build trust, establish rapport, and win service customers, but only if the conversation is of high caliber.

In this day and age, a bad chat experience can cost your dealership thousands of dollars. What good is offering live chat for service across channels if you don’t help customers and drive them to your service lane? No matter how you propagate chat for service, the results will still be the same if the conversation sucks. You won’t see the ROI and the consumer experience will suffer.

Implementing live chat for service takes preparation and follow-through. Equip your team to succeed, monitor the results, and adjust accordingly.

Don't you just love a good old-fashioned radio show?

Well if you do then you should listen to the radio. But if podcasts are your medium of choice, then be sure to subscribe the all-new DealerRefresh Podcast - "In the Mix!" Hosted by Refreshers Ryan Gerardi and Chris K Leslie, In the Mix is quickly becoming a preferred for keeping up with everything going on at DealerRefresh.

From webinars to interviews, Refresh Friday broadcasts, and humorous insightful commentary with your hosts and occasional guests, the DealerRefresh Podcast showcases everything going on...and more, offering up perspectives, opinions, obstacles, and observations from the best minds and personalities in the industry.

Subscribe and Listen on iTunes, Soundcloud, and Google Play

At present, the podcast is being hosted on Soundcloud where you can catch all current episodes using your browser. This is where we will link people to from blogs, discussion threads in the forums, emails, etc.

If you're an avid podcaster then be sure to search for DealerRefresh from your favorite podcasting app, be it, Apple's Podcast iOS app, Overcast, etc. Here are some additional links to get you started:

• The DealerRefresh Podcast on iTunes
  
• The DealerRefresh Podcast on Soundcloud
  
• The DealerRefresh Podcast on Player.fm
  
• The DealerRefresh Podcast on Google Play

Comments, Questions, Feedback, and Ideas

At DealerRefresh we are always striving to provide the optimal experience with our Members and like all new ideas and experiments like this, we welcome your feedback and ideas on how to improve what we do. Please follow this link to the Forums to let us know your thoughts and ideas around the DealerRefresh podcast. Thanks.

 

[highlight color="#f4b945" font="white"]

Join the Conversation in the Dealer Forums

[/highlight]

Earlier this year we began experimenting with a new broadcast concept. The idea was to conduct a periodic live broadcast that was casual and fun yet productive for us and for the audience. After a few tests, Refresh Fridays was born.

"Refresh Fridays" is a recurring webinar series broadcast live on DealerRefresh (most Fridays), hosted by Ryan Gerardi, Jeff Kershner, Steve Stauning, and Tom LaPointe where we catch up on that week's (and upcoming) events and activities, hot topics and discussions on the Blog and in the Forums, and where we explore other topics and subjects related to Auto Retail, often times with a guest (or two).

Special Guests every week

In addition to the hosts, we often invite one or more Guest Panelists to appear on the live broadcast or dial in. Ideally, everyone joins through video conference. When that is not possible then you can dial in via phone.

The Refresh Fridays concept

The live broadcast is capped at 30-minutes because we want people feeling the need to tune in each week and come back for more, knowing it won't interfere with their day.

The idea behind Refresh Fridays is to be MEMBER-FOCUSED. DealerRefresh has more than 8,500 registered members and reaches more than 30,000 people each month through the blog, forum, email, and social media. By focusing on our members' needs and interests, we are able to bring the content and conversations to life that are occurring digitally and socially.

Recording and Distribution

Each Refresh Friday is recorded and edited. In some instances, we produce and release it as a standalone video and podcast. In other instances, we only extract bits and excerpts to include in other DealerRefresh media productions. The original Facebook Live recording is also always available on Facebook.

Sponsorship

DealerRefresh has strong media partnerships with many of the conferences, events, and expos in Auto Retail. We also have a growing alliance of strategic partnerships, alas "Sponsors" that support what we do and make it possible. Refresh Friday is not meant to be a platform for anyone to push an agenda or a branded message. We do of course use Refresh Fridays to bring awareness of and spark interest in the activities of DealerRefresh and our members.

How to Join the Refresh Fridays Live Streaming 

Facebook

Anyone can view Refresh Friday broadcasts live on the DealerRefresh Facebook page. People can also view unedited recordings of these broadcast in the Videos section of the page.

Zoom Webinar

Viewers may also register with Refresh Friday where they can reserve a seat on the live webinar broadcast. Registration is required only once and by doing so, registrants will receive an email reminder one day and one hour prior to each scheduled event. Registrants are not required to attend and they do receive exclusive access to some of the related content.

SMS Opt-in

You may also opt-in to receive text alerts by texting DFRESHLIVE to 555888. Please note that depending on your carrier and plan, Standard Message & Data Rates May Apply.

[highlight color="#f4b945" font="white"]

Join the Conversation in the Dealer Forums

[/highlight]