Umer said best...apply what you learn.

Are we really doing all we can to teach oursleves, to learn and to to execute?

Since we're sharing - CL works. Use it.

Here's a sample ad: http://rochester.craigslist.org/car/730734485.html

The only person who will be able to address your dilemma is the Dealer Principal and/or General Manager. If they understand the importance of what you do, then they'll help you. If they don't, then you should find another job.

The solution is to offer INTERNET ONLY pricing. Internet shoppers must be told very clearly that they can ONLY get the special internet price you are offering by dealing directly with you. It doesn't matter if the internet price is higher or lower than the "lot" price...what matters is the customers thinking they are getting a special internet price. As I said, some DP/GMs will allow you to do this, and some won't.

Most customers believe that car dealerships offer lower prices on the internet. I doubt that's true, but I'm happy they feel that way and Lord knows I'm not going to try to change their minds! It's in my best interest to let them know the "special deal" I am offering is for that "elite" group of internet shoppers who are savvy enough to avoid the normal car buying process and deal directly with me - the Internet Sales Manager.

Fortunately at our dealership we have an awesome CRM system (ADP) which allows me to log customers as soon as they send in an inquiry. Once I log a customer, no one else can "skate" me. Even if the customer comes in and doesn't ask for me and winds up buying a car, the work initial work I did is on record. The GM can track the sale, and at least I'll get some recognition for the part I played in it.

PS: I find this to be a solid CL post: http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/car/746018777.html

what do you folks think?

Make sure that you're branding your department alongside your inventory..... do little things like make sure photos of yourself/staff are prominent and easily found on your dealer website.... splash your name into the 'comments section' of your inventory listings..... use tools like eBay and craigslist for more exposure by including actual photos of your staff into these specialty listings. The more consistently you market yourselves as 'everyday people who happen to sell cars' to 'everyday people looking to buy a car' the higher your chances of making that connection.

Don't tell people to call you for the best deal. Tell people to call you for the best advice. Put your name in their mind as they decide which car they're interested in buying......

Get track able number on the site...

You can always go with a nasty tag line like... ask for Reis for Internet Price or lot pricing applies... err..

Add Google analytics to your site... read up the articles in Google conversion university... apply what you learn...

I built that ad to send traffic to my site. That is why I used that pic so they would have to visit my website to get an idea of what it looks like. I have followed the clickthrus from the url and the traffic to that one car has increased 42% don't really care if they buy that car just want them to visit my website/showroom.....kinda like a free watch giveaway back in the day.

I agree with everything that has been said. Of course, you are always going to have people that come in and don't ask for you. That is true for Internet Sales and regular sales guys. What would you tell a regular sales guy that has this problem? I would tell him he should do a better job building a relationship with his customers so they feel compelled to ask for him when they arrive. Build trust and value in yourself. Obviously, the best way to do this with an Internet customer is over the phone. Be inquisitive about the customer's needs and really listen to what the customer has to say. Do not limit the conversation to the vehicle of interest. Ask them about thier daily lives to spark conversation and establish a bond. Of course, you will not get 100% of the people on the phone. There are several things that I have done in the past that have worked well for me. The first thing I did was create my own personal web site. I personally own the site so I can post anything I like without the dealer being responsible. I put a lot of my own personal views here. It gives the customer a chance to "meet" me before they visit the dealership. I put links in all of my emails to predetermined pages on my site. It isn't anything fancy, and since I now assign leads to other salespeople, I don't keep it up as much as I should, but it might be perfect for what you are trying to accomplish. Here is the page I normally link to http://www.ikewinebarger.com/page2.html. You will see that there is also a page for why a customer should ask for me. I even post pictures of my certifications.

A quick note. Your Craigslist page looks good, but what's the phone number?

This ad on craigslist has the nitromethane effect for our store.

Reis! I got something for ya!

Get YOURSELF a blog. If management won't stop the skating (hahaha... did I even say that?) then build yourself a web site that sells YOU.

Here's a post I made on DR a few weeks ago:

"Building Your 1st Blog".

>>>Hire yourself a local fellow that can throw up a WordPress Blog for you. Cost: $300 to $600. You'll need it hosted: $200 p/yr, you'll need to be trained on how to post inventory to it (offer your geek pal $100 to be avail to you by phone at any time you need it).

OK, now your almost ready to fly, Do your homework on what vehicles are HOT on the net and look thru your inventory for matches. Start posting inventory into your blog like a mad man and make it personal. EXAMPLE: http://usedcarqueen.com/ (my wifes blog).

While you're waiting for your blog to fill and the search engines to index you, Spend money on PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on Google and Yahoo. Keep the PPC budget low and ask your Geek to help you with tracking.

Now, your burning with NitroMethane! (aka: kik'n a**)
Joe
p.s. Have your rent-a-geek train you on how to post inventoy to Craigs list. Also ask him for a WordPress mod to allow you to easily post inventory to Craigs list.

I don't think skated is the word I would use. I think a better way to rephrase would be.....How's the best way to educate customers to ask for the internet guy rather than finding a car on a website and then just coming in if they think it's the car for them. I get paid well, I have flat for every internet customer sold whether I sell them or not but if I sell them then I get comm. plus the flat. But from a greed standpoint I want to sell the car and get the bonus.

I didn't catch the "skating" reference...maybe Tony Hawk would have hit my demographic?

Reis,

This one isn't perfect, but it's a good launching point and timely. Cars.com is hosting a webinar this Friday titled The New ISM Survival Guide: Top Tips for Top Performance.

Here is some info:

Internet business accounts for a growing percentage of dealership sales, creating intense pressure for new internet sales managers to hit the ground running. In this workshop aimed at new Internet Sales Managers and those looking to improve their game, you’ll learn from successful ISMs about the proven tactics they use to produce results for their stores.

Panelists include leading internet sales expert, Cory L. Mosley, of Mosley Automotive Group, and internet sales managers D. Rawls, of Saturn-HUMMER of Union City, GA, and Ed Goldstein, of Wigder Chevrolet of Livingston, NJ.

In this session, you'll learn how to:

Put email templates and phone scripts into action to boost performance
Manage time to help you get more out of your day
Implement new practices and refine existing sales processes to close more deals
Set realistic goals and manage internal expectations
Drive results that get you noticed

Here is a link to follow if this is of interest to you, you do need to register ahead of time. I know the panelists take questions during the discussion, it might be a good chance to get a few of your specific ones answered.

Joe - you crack me up! I'm going to shave my head bald and get a hairless cat now. By the way, did I see your site hit a PR of 6 the other day?

I agree with Dorothy too. There are some things you can do better for tracking, but it will give you a headache too and you won't catch it all. Like Joe said, consumers prefer to remain anonymous until they're ready to make a purchase. I don't blame them for that because I'm the same way. I don't want my phone and email blowing-up with follow-up things from various dealerships while I'm just trying to make a decision....on my own.

Another thing that always bothered me, up and beyond what Joe said about less than 2% of your unique visitors buying cars each month, is in our exit surveys. We survey most customers who purchase a car from us while they're waiting on their tags to be issued. One of those questions has to do with whether the customer visited Checkered Flag.com before coming in, and even that number doesn't jive with our own numbers....it'll fry your brain every time you try to figure it out. I like to think consumers are being as honest as their memory is at that point, but they make our other numbers look too high. There are some other questions in that survey that compare and relate various ad campaigns across the medias and Internet absolutely murders everything else (except TV - only about a 10% beating), so all the things we're doing are still well justified. By the way, what our customers are telling us, are the same things they're telling you and all the other survey companies.

On another note, nobody is ever going to make you successful. You have to do that yourself. Don't wait, do. If the road you're on isn't taking you where you want to go, make a new road. In this Wild West of Internet, we are in charge and it will be what we make it.

Good luck with things and never stop pushing.

I'm with Ms Hamil,
ISM's hard work are plus business over and above the site's traffic generation (shoppers perfer to shop stealth!)

Lord knows I'm a marketing guy, but I've been saying it for years, Auto dealer sites are more a marketing tool than a sales machine. SMART dealers realze this and ATTACK their market by out efforting their competitors (see Dr. Evil's world domination site: CheckeredFlag.com for a peak into the future).

Here's my metric that drives me nuts.
We sell and deliver ONLY 1.6% of the unique visitors we get each month. Whereinthehell do the other 98.4% go? Are they in the market? Did they buy this month from a competitor? Can I figure out a way to get a 1/2% out of this traffic?

Sorry I wasn't much help Reis,
Joe
(hahaha. Dorothy Hamil... a great skating name)

Find another job. You'll be skated on deals forever. I'm serious. Owners need to realize where the customers are coming from and compensate ISM's for their contributions to the bottom line, of course this would mean realistic sales track sourcing which will never happen.

One thing that I have had a problem with is customers that are viewing flash websites from work. Many cooperate firewalls are set up to strip all flash files from their employee's web browsing. The result can be devastating if you have a 100% flash solution. You should always at least have a phone number and address in a text footer for such a moment as this.

One more thing regarding Mitch' comment:

Since Mitch wants to get paid to share his ideas or knowledge. Here are some links on what Linearization means. Second link goes into more details.



I really wish we could use this forum more for sharing ideas instead of shooting each other down or bragginig about what we know. What a concept! Google never charged for using their search engines. Youtube never charged for using their video search. Keyword here is FREE. You did not come up with any of your knowledge yourself, you read it elsewhere or copied techniques from others. It's free. So can't we make these discussions about what we can learn from eachother so we all get better?

Regarding Mitch' comment:
"#2. What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO. The biggest deciding factor in your site's search presence is how many inbound links you have, what level of quality the links are, and how those links describe your site. This is another aspect of SEO that no web developer understands in this business, as evidenced by the total ignorance of the canonicalization strategy when building a site."

Wow. That hurts! "No web developer understands in this business" I think most people on this forum understand, but most of us are limited by third party websites, time, and what our managers want.

I do want to point out though that "what is on your page" actually is the biggest factor in ranking well. I agree that keyword relevant links has the biggest influence, but with no relevant content on your pages, your rankings will quickly tumble.

"If you care about site content and how it relates to search presence, you ought to get busy writing content that people will link to rather than writing content you think spiders like to read."

Seems like this is a contradiction to "What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO"

Just a thought!

I do totally agree with the fact that dealership SEO is very very easy since the competition is very limited. That is probably the only reason I have not created my own website over using a automotvie specific vendor. It's not worth the investment or time for me.

Much of what many of these companies IE BZ and others, with their expensive solutions, offer is soon to be outdated and old school.

Many times the answer to video is with the OEM's and the regional managers asking them for a resource and contact person.

Many times a mistake is going to the Ad Agency which views this whole process as a threat to their business or (like dogs) they are terrorital about things.

Another beauty of this process is we are becoming the solution to finding our own way to success in what we do, selling service and product. It is more cost effective, more personalized for our company and sales department, most important it allows us to be more visable to the potential client, developing the relationship with them.

I hope this information from the source helps to process information and mis information found on this issue. While Adobe has created some new processes on Flash many of the existing flash sites will not work as they will need to be redone with the new program, I wonder who will pay for this?? BZ and others should provide this upgrade free of charge as they have been telling dealers they have found a solution for this issue for years which is misleading as it is only true on the splash or certain pages (maybe). The dealer actualy loses the effectiveness on their bulk of their site and additional pages.

MS has developed a great solution which I have posted a few months ago: Microsoft has developed a competitor to Flash called Silverlight, which (before today) was more search engine friendly than Flash.

While Microsoft’s apparent from first access will give more power to the guys and girls at Google, Adobe’s assistance may help bloggers seeking fancier layouts via flash, without having to sacrifice invisibility from the never sleeping web crawlers.

However with all this attention on Flash ETC why waste the time when Video Streaming is making hugh inroads and will allow the dealers to use existing video footage supplied by the manufacture's to promote the products and services??? at a fraction of the cost?? They spend millions of dollars to produce this footage and few dealers take advantage of this, they would rather spend $$$ money on Flash and other fancy toys / tools which makes little to no sense with todays economic climate.

mitch, don't be such a negative nancy. i follow everything you've said and even disagree with most of your second itemized tirade. let's engage in a dialog instead of characterizing and dividing each other.

"What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO."
"If you care ... you ought to get busy writing content ..."

come on, i'm not going to let you get away with that.

Did I miss out on some study proving that car shoppers/buyers prefer FLASH websites?

Hmm... on second thought, who cares! Those tachometer loading pages are so cool!

This change means very little to the sites in our industry... BZ and other vendors have been plugging keywords in (some legitimate, some not-so-legitimate) as alternative HTML for years, which works just as well as this will for them. They'll get as much mileage out of this new development as they've been getting out of their current tactics, which is to say, not much.

#1. Linearization. No web developer in this industry knows what that is, or what it means to Google. Flash has allowed these vendors to come up with some disgustingly non-linear content layouts, and now those developers will have even less reason to grasp the idea of linearization and the value it has for spiders AND users.

#2. What's on your page is the least important aspect of SEO. The biggest deciding factor in your site's search presence is how many inbound links you have, what level of quality the links are, and how those links describe your site. This is another aspect of SEO that no web developer understands in this business, as evidenced by the total ignorance of the canonicalization strategy when building a site. The only reason you see noticeable changes to the SERPs when you change your site's content is because our industry has little competition for most keywords. If you care about site content and how it relates to search presence, you ought to get busy writing content that people will link to rather than writing content you think spiders like to read.

#3. On second thought, someone should be paying me for this information. That's all you get. Spinning wheel animations and flashing headlights for everyone.

A website isn't just about ranking in search engines - it is a very personal thing that brands you and excites your customer base. It is a marketing tool, and indexing in search engines is only a small part of it....albeit an important part.

I'm a HUGE fan of flash! I love the creativity it inspires and the enhanced abilities it gives over GIF's. I think flashing headlight roll-overs are cool (don't need a full flash video for that though), and I even like the carousel Mr. Metter put on Mileone.com - it is cool looking.....what do you think Jeff? [haha].

On the other hand, Flash can be over-done and absolutely destroy your indexing if not used in small doses.

Someone made a good point about spiders taking the path of least resistance. I'm not sure how true that statement is, but it sure sounds like human nature to me and I think those spiders are still programmed by humans. Maybe that's just my weird logic.

I think it is great that there will be some flexibility in the future, but I will remain somewhat traditional with CSS, HTML, and the other indexable languages as long as I can still be creative with them. Flash will continue to play a small part in image slideshows and videos in the meantime.....and I'll still be learning how to use Flash CS3.

Indexing of Flash is great... but it doesn't change the overriding goal of the website... this is not an issue unique to auto... see what the heavyweights in other industries are saying are the true issues about Flash + websites as part of a total ecommerce execution.

Hi,

NOT ALL FLASH FILES WILL BE INDEXED. SO DON'T GO CRAZY
LIKE A KID IN A CANDY STORE!!!

There might be some confusion so here is a link explaining;


All the best,

Pete from Chicago