I'd like to see how many of the tip of the spear (the DealerRefresh community) are paid on attaining and selling Internet leads.

This poll is for dealers only, but vendor voices are welcome in the comments.

Aside from sales and gross, what metric do you like to track most?

Question: Do you have any sales reps that are actively 'working' their personal FB account?

Actively Working their FB account would mean they mention something about their work at least once a week. IMO, these are FB All Stars. Into their news feed, they intelligently mix in pics of deliveries, pics of scarce units (i.e. low mile tradein), etc.

I see an new opportunity here, but in my travels, FB All Stars are a rare breed.

Your thoughts?

Question about etiquette for rejecting job applicants...

Is it better to send a generic, "Thank you for applying, after reviewing all of the submissions, we have found others who fit better with this position." Or, provide feedback, based on what immediately took their application out of the running?

Example, first two sentences of an resume stated: "I am custom service. I love to service and help people," there were a plethora of spelling, and grammatical errors, that ended up being those small details that helped whittle down the submission pool.

Thank you!

Advertising is advertising. But do you consider your dealership website (desktop and mobile) to be advertising? On your statement, do you charge the cost of your dealership website to "line item" Advertising?

In other words: Is the cost of your dealership website included in your overall marketing budget?

What about conversion products that plug into your website such as chat, trade-in tool, texting, pop-up coupons, etc. Technically these are not advertising services. Should they be included in your ad budget?

I'm sure you've heard the news already - Apple is getting into the car business.

Steve Zadesky is to lead Apple’s automotive research labs and they just hired Johann Jungwirth, former President and Chief Executive of Mercedes-Benz Research and Development of North America.

First questions is WHY? Why does Apple have this urge to get into the automotive business?

With a reported $178 million in cash - I guess they can do whatever they want. Carve out their own niche and pipeline. I'm sure Tesla is sweating a few bullets.

Another question - will Apple cars be sold through the usual dealer franchise or go direct to consumer?

If Apple shows any degree of success, how far behind will Google be?

Hey Guys - Jeff and I have been bouncing ideas back and forth over the last few days trying to determine what is best for dealers: an in-house marketing department or outsourcing to outside providers, solutions, and agencies.

I am convinced giving my first hand experience that having the marketing done in-house is the most cost-effective and best way to positive ROI and marketing results. That said, the people I managed as the Director of Marketing were and are (with a few exception extremely talented) and as a result of their talent I'm sure our performance numbers with highly skewed.

What do you guys think? Should a dealer's marketing be an in-house effort? OR Outsourced to Agencies and Vendors? Or is there another option we should be exploring?

I have written some of my thoughts on this topic in an article that urges dealers to get off of the bench and into the marketing game. Should dealers rely on fishermen, or learn to fish for themselves?

Aside from taking in trades, how common or uncommon is it for dealers today to acquire used vehicles from private sellers?

For those that do seek vehicles from consumers listed online (not trades), what are some of the obstacles you encounter? How has this impacted business at your dealership?

I am looking for a new seo tool. Was considering either MOZ or WebCEO. Which one do you use or would you recommend?

Earth Shattering stuff from the Moz blog - Why I Stopped Selling SEO Services and You Should, Too

• Search "best headphones" - No product pages, all articles
• Search "restaurants in Miami" - Not a single result on the first page is a restaurant's website.
• Search "plumbers in San Francisco" - Not a single result on the first page is a website

Huh?!

They go on to make this recommendation:

• • If you're an attorney, you need to be on sites like Avvo, Lawyer.com and Find Law because they dominate the SERPS
  • If you're a local business, Yelp and Thumbtack are crushing it right now
  • If you have an e-commerce store, get your product on as many platforms where your customers are as possible (including Pinterest)
  • If you sell large-ticket B2B services, SlideShare and LinkedIn are gold mines for connecting with C-suite executives looking for information

There is a place for third party sites.

I'm 6 days into a position with a new dealership and was in a marketing meeting. We were discussing options on who to partner with to do our PPC and retargeting for us. As I was discussing the trouble I had at another group finding a competent partner, an associate asked "why don't you do it?"

I never really gave it much thought because I always assumed it would be too time consuming. However, it's an interesting question. I feel as though I'm analytical and savvy enough to do it, but there's a lot on my plate and I'm not sure if I'd have the time.

So...does/has anyone manage their dealership's SEM? If so, how much time would you say you devote to it each week? Is it worth it?

Is diesel on the brink of having its old reputation of being a fuel better used in heavy equipment? If so, should we thank Volkswagen for getting caught or the EPA for pushing the rules too hard?

Does anyone use a Behavorial Marketing Automation system such as silverporp, hubspot or marketo ?

The three main goals for lead follow at most dealerships up are rather simple:

1. Get them to the dealership.
2. Get them to the dealership.
3. Get them to the dealership.

Which is in conflict with consumer's goals which are:

1. Get as much information as possible.
2. As fast as possible.
3. And stay out of the dealership as long as possible.

Every report I've read for the last 5 years (from J.D. Power, AutoTrader and Cars.com) all restate the obvious, 90% or more of vehicle buyers use the internet to research prior to purchase. Are there any dealers in America who have not realized this fact? Is any dealer under the impression buyers are waiting for the Sunday paper to starting looking for their next vehicle? However, what these reports fail to point out is, buyers still purchase at a dealerships, as opposed to online. Which leads dealers to focus on rules one..two and...three; get them to the dealership. Hence the conflict.

Is the Car Buying World Different Now?

It always feels safe to do what has always been done. In fact, its unlikely an Internet Manager or e-Commerce director will lose their position by doing what worked last year and the year before. But expectations that are too small are a waste. When those decisions were made, they were based on information we knew to be true at that time. How much has the landscape changed in the last 24 months?

Many dealer's will say, not enough to change our processes or technology. It's a position easy to defend by stating, "we're off to the best year we've ever had". Is this in fact proof dealers have optimized their processes and technology or simply enjoying a periodic fluctuation from pent-up demand due to improving economic conditions and loosing credit from lenders. Time will tell. But after I read this article in AutoNews about 3 guys who created an automotive start-up 30 months ago, and are now doing $70 million a month in vehicles sales, with a valuation of $1 billion, I believe this represents the size of the opportunity for those dealers that can figure it out. For startups that are "born digital" they are operate from different realities which makes it easier. In a sense dealership are suffering from the "Innovators Dilemma", because of their current success they miss out on a new wave of innovation.

Pulling the Rabbit Out of the Hat

One thing about about forecasting the future and the next wave of innovation is there are no right answers. What is possible is to follow trends and create probabilities. These trends stand out:

• Millennial behavior indicates mobile is key to the car-buying process.
• The Information Empowered Customer will take center stage.
• Technology is influencing buyer behavior.
• Car sales people will be a lonely bunch waiting outside for ups.

Dealers can acknowledge consumers have the power and remove the fear and anxiety from the car buying process; think Carvana and Beepi. Offering transparent buying is one step and is being leveraged by TrueCar. Focusing on the overall car buying experience is another. Dealers have an opportunity to create a multi-channel car buying process today using off the shelf technology. The question about the future of car buying is, will there will be more or less car buying done online in the future? For dealership and vendors that believes consumers will embrace online buying, then those dealerships and companies should develop an aggressive digital strategy to facilitate online buying for consumers. Creating alignment with changing trends is not simple, which is why so many people spend so much time defending past choices.

The question is, are consumers ready for a digital car buying experience?

Pretty much every Refresher knows how this particular poll is going to go. Anyone who has worked at a dealership with OEM mandates for websites, PPC, social media, or anything else has likely run into a situation where they were forced to use a company, product, or service that they didn't believe was the best. I'm looking for compelling reasons to either abandon or support the current state of affairs. Chime in regardless of where you work today because if trends continue, just about every OEM will adopt some form of mandates in the very near future.

My hope is to find compelling reasons supporting or denouncing the marketing mandates that OEMs lay down. If it's a bad thing, give us examples of how it hurts overall sales. If it's a good thing, try to convince us that it's a benefit for you or your dealership. Once we have a strong batch of reasons and enough votes in the polls, I'd love to send this thread to contacts at the OEMs.

I mentioned in a recent blog post titled "Why OEM Marketing Mandates are a Great Thing for Dealers (at least those who do it right)" that I don't believe I nor any individual can have enough of a voice to get anyone's attention. That may be true. However, as a community, DealerRefresh might have enough clout to reach a deaf ear or two and make them hear.

Leave your comments here. Let's have a real discussion. OEM or vendor representatives who are following this thread should chime in as well. Then, vote in the poll above if you haven't already. Thank you for your time. This industry is too amazing to let poor decisions at the top hurt those of us in the trenches.

@Joe Webb just posted a must read article over on the blog around ALL THOSE DAMN CHAT INVITES! You can read it here - http://www.dealerrefresh.com/too-many-dealer-chat-invites/

When was the last time you stepped through your own dealer website and at one point found yourself frustrated because every damn time you went to a new page, some Chat invite was sliding down the page, popping up in your face or worse yet - causing the page to load so slow it would have been quicker to walk outside and physically touch the vehicle!?

Wanna Chat? What about Now? Now? Now? How about Now?

Why are we doing this? What's the purpose of having 1, 2, 3, even 4 chat invites on one page? Take the poll up there! At what point did someone do a backasswards study proving that the more chat invites you throw up in front of the shopper, while ruining their experience or flow for information, ultimately leads to converting more shoppers into a high quality leads?

DO NOT take this the wrong way. I'm a HUGE advocate of online chat. A dealer website without chat, is like a Tinder date without a kiss goodnight OR a dirty martini without blue cheese stuffed olives. Either way, let's agree it needs to be implemented PROPERLY, with the customer experience being most important, not the quick lead conversion.

What's been your experience with chat invites? Like'm - Leav'm?

How many is too many? (take the poll up there at the top of the page and comment below)

If given the choice between calling, text, chatting or emailing, what do you think the preferred contact method is for customers choosing to engage your business? This is probably a question not one person here could answer. Better yet, what would the distribution percentage look like?

Well these are questions I would like to answer and with your help I will provide some great feedback on these questions. I have developed a new tool for websites called Talk Options. See example below of the Talk Options widget deployed on the Recon Ninjas website.



Here is a video of what happens when clicking on the icons in the widget.
Login to view embedded media
It’s basically a widget that resides on every page of your website and customers are given the choice on how they engage your business. Between now and the end of July I will allow any dealership the opportunity to participate in this study at no charge. If you would like to participate please call me at 618-4ninjas and we will get you setup in less than 30 minutes. You can also sign up at Talk Options.

For the record I did run this by Jeff Kershner before posting. Yes I am promoting my new company, but I will also be offering the community value by providing feedback on customer engagement. And you get to try Talk Options for free over the next 45 days.

Not asking your preference for cars, but rather websites

This was on a tech site and the discussion is very technical, much of which is way over my head.

Bottom line - which is better for our dealership and why?

I have my suggestions (and will share later), but I would like to hear from the community. How many leads do let individual BDC reps handle on average per month? I am talking about appointment setters who hand the lead to a salesperson.

Since beginning of this year we got 8 stores switched to Vin CRM, and we had too many problems with it. I want to start this topic because it's been way to long that VinSolutions is not doing anything about our problems. And I want to see if anyone else here is using Vin CRM for the BDC and do you guys have the same problems? or it's just us?

Just keep this in mind, all our stores are separate from each other. And we have one centralized BDC, that handles all communication and follow up.

here's few problems:
1. Wish List alert, fires for all stores. but we need it to fire only for that specific store.
And our BDR's have to have a global inventory access other wise BDR's can't work off of Task Page for all dealerships.
example: BDR logged in to Dealer1 and the task is for Dealer2, customer asking to send a price on few different vehicles, so without global inventory we can't pick those vehicles from the inventory because it will only show Dealer1 inventory.
This is also fires a task to a saleperson at the store, that we found matching vehicle, but when salesperson goes to check, the vehicle located in the dealership that is 2000 miles away, that he doesn't even have access to.

2. Past due appointments pop ups, which ones you see once you logged in. It shows only for the dealership BDR is logged in. Now imagine we have 20 dealers in our group, so our BDR would have to switch between 20 different stores to take care of his missed appointments? Again why BDR can't see all of his appointments for all dealers on Task Page?

3. CRM Dashboard is showing information only for the store you are logged in. That's makes it very hard to overview BDC. There's tons of workarounds but again, all those workarounds take extra time, extra reports, if I am a BDC manager I should see Dashboard for the BDC not just for that one store, and if I have 20 stores now I have to switch between each store.

4. When you merge 2 customers there's no option to chose BD agent, so it takes 5 minutes to merge and if you don't get back to that customer and assign proper BD agent to it, when next task fires for BD agent it will round robin BD agent on the customer to someone else who have nothing to do with this customer.

5. Every week, 2 days out of 5, CRM is Super slow, it's to the point where we can't even operate. We can't change anything on the customer(salesperson, BD agent, custom process,lost sale, or mark bad etc) non of that is working, and when you call the support they can replicate the problem, but then they would call me back stating it's something with internet on our end. But your support people replicated the problem on their end. How does it even make sense?
Case#01134499

6. Have you ever try to add new BD agent to the CRM? here's the process:
I add user to the CRM in one store, then I have to EMAIL, you can't even call, it's has to be an email to support asking to give that user global access, then once they done (approximately 4 hours), you have to go back to each store one by one and setup that user with all information. Since I have 8 stores it takes a really long time, when it should be as easy as adding user to one store.

7. Let's say one BDR leaves and now I want to reassign all his customer to New BDR, which is BD agent on the customer, well you can't, you can only reassign saleperson.

8. Missed appointment process still fires even if you lost sale or mark lead as bad. So when you lost sale a lead, it's stops any active process, any unsold, or follow up. But not missed appointment.
Case# 01153205

9. Why Service Agent get's automatically assigned to every sales iLead? the same for BD agent, every time service lead comes in it assign Service Rep but it's also assigned BD agent who have nothing to do with this customer.

10. Permissions is a huge minus in VIN, there's only 3 types of permissions, Saleperson, Manager, Admin.
You can try to give more permissions to a salesperson, like desking deals, lost sale leads, but not the managers. Anyone with Managers permissions pretty much can do anything. And there's no way to restrict that. In ADP CRM I can easily create my own custom profile and assign it to the user. Why I can't do the same?
again because this system is not design for BDC. It's design for Dealership and bunch of band-aids and workarounds for the BDC.

11. Every Credit App iLead creates a Duplicate customer. If name, phone number, address, email is matching it will still create a new customer and won't even trigger a skate alert, so now we have two people working the customer. One from Sales team one from Internet team.

12. Do you guys knew, that phone task will pop up in your tasks page, 12 hours in advance? And email task, 5 minutes in advanced. But no one in Vin even knew that, so all our processes are build based on Vin Trainers telling us that BDR's will not see any tasks until it's due for that task.
case# 01152320

13. You can only merge customers within that store, So if you logged in to Dealer1 you can't merge 2 customers that are in Dealer2. Now you have to change the dealer, do the search again, merge them, then wait 5 minutes for it to merge, then assign BD agent back, because when you merge 2 customers BD agent changes to NONE. Why?

14. If you logged in to Dealer1 you can't unwind deal in Dealer2 or end a showroom visit for Dealer2, you have to change the dealer first.

I can go on and on but this is the most frustrating issues we been having, I want to hear how other BDC's working the system.

Over All IMHO this system is not design to work for BDC. And I'm very tired of workarounds Vin suggesting me.

We got this system and we thought it will be easier to use and navigate, but everything takes extra steps and extra workaround and extra time. And we been told that everything will be working the way we want it. But no, it's not.

Do you guys having the same issues?

I feel like every page is design for saleperson on the customer, but BDC managers needs to see how BD agent is performing and not just for that one dealer, for all of them in one screen. Like the Daily Activity on Dashboard is so worthless because it's not for all stores, so for us to get the number of task BD agent completed we would have to switch between 8 stores and calculated them?

and BD agent's can't find their customers, because search will only show you customers you assigned as a salesperson.

Alright I'm done. Thank you and hope to see some resolution or ideas.

I've seen some showrooms still running Windows XP, so just curious if most showrooms are running old software?

Nothing fuels my desire to write like the need to set the record straight. I was recently forwarded Alan Ram’s interview on CBT news. In that interview, Alan shared his thoughts on dealers’ spending money with third party services that reviewed calls and coached calls. Well I am here to tell you my BS meter is going radioactive!

In the interview Alan stated: "managers should be listening to their dealerships calls." Alan, when’s the last time you did this? Do you realize how many calls the typical dealership receives in any given day? It’s a lot, and what manager has the bandwidth to peruse calls all day long! This is a job that can be outsourced for a lot less than what it cost to employ a manager. Why would I want a guy making six figures listening to calls that can be reviewed by a person making minimum wage?

There is plenty of evidence indicating dealerships spending $1K listening to recorded calls can quantify that spend with an additional $10K in profit. Services like CallRevu actually listen to calls within 20 minutes of origination, and are able to alert key dealership personnel when a calls potential was not met. With the average dealership not even answering 34% of their calls, one can see there’s plenty of potential to capitalize on missed opportunities. When people know they are being monitored, they tend to perform at a higher level. This great article written by Mike Haeg from Century Interactive will help you better understand the “Hawthorne Effect.”

Coaching calls is a great way to offer training in areas where improvement is needed. I realized long ago that seminars and video training were ineffective unless followed up with personalized coaching. Salespeople watching training videos and attending seminars will only retain a small fraction of the information presented. Dealers paying a monthly fee to access training videos are wasting their money. The employee watches the video once and then goes right back to their old habits.

Let’s look outside the box and examine the golf industry. Let’s say you’re a 30 handicapper and you have decided it’s time to become a scratch golfer. You purchase several golf instructional videos in hopes of improving your game. The day comes and you decide to take your new knowledge to the golf course in hopes of shooting a career round. Unfortunately things don’t work out and your crappy swing is producing the same three digit scores. A more effective approach would have been to hire a PGA teaching instructor to follow you around the course. Your Instructor would offer a critique after every swing. This type of training is much more effective since it offers the precise training required for that individual based on their actual results. This is exactly the type of service Phone Ninjas offers dealership personnel when coaching individual calls.

So before criticizing dealers for using “magic bullets,” one should do a little more research and better understand how technology can in fact help dealerships gain an advantage over their competitors. I have a very close relationship with CallRevu and I can tell you that our best mutual clients are achieving 80% appointment ratios with first time phone shoppers.

On a brighter note, I do agree with your opinions on BDC’s.

How does the rest of the Dealer Refresh community feel about this? Do you monitor your calls, don't care, or use a third party service?

We are a fairly new dealership right now, 10 cars max, and looking to get more exposure. I want to use Cars, Autotrader, Dupont, whatever, but need the good and bad on them all. I don't know what to think, since I have used cars.com to sell a car for my personal use, but I got a ton of crap. Any suggestions and maybe pricing would be a HUGE help before I call them and give them money. PLEASE HELP

We're in the process of changing our process for soliciting online reviews. It's long overdue, of course.

By asking our customer's that have positive surveys to leave a review, I hope they'll leave one review in return. 2 or more is a bonus of course, but if they only left one, which review site is the most important?

Google?
Facebook?
Yelp?
Edmunds?
Cars.com?
DealerRater?

Or perhaps another site? So, what review site holds the most weight?

I’ve seen very few dealers have a solid process for hiring, and let’s agree that if a dealer has little to no process for hiring, you know damn well there’s no process for training. That’s even more frightening.

We've had many discussions around the topic of hiring the right people and where to FIND the right people to work at the dealership. Adam Robinson from Hireology (say hello) posted his first article http://www.dealerrefresh.com/hiring-success-at-dealership-gameplan/ over on the blog highlighting 2 processes:

1. The thought-out, trained & documented process OR
2. The basically wing-it process

Be real - which one BEST describes your dealers hiring process?

What prevents most dealers from having a real process for hiring the right people for the right job?