I've been in my role As e-comm director for about a year and I've been in your shoes. A great place to start is those open conversations. Don't get caught up to much with the stores in the philosophy of consumer shopping as they'll lose interest real quick only to pay enough attention to the 20 people that magically call the dealership (as if they looked your number up in the white pages) but no floor traffic because of some reason or another.
I would recommend three steps
1) do what your doing have the open conversations
2) Sales guys live and die by the numbers. If their store had 400 ups, 200 deals and made "x" dollars they had a good month.
If they had 200 ups, and 100 deals they had a bad month. Relate to them, do some data mining. Show them when their websitetraffic is "x" and time on site is "y", and phone appointments are "z" then their Ups =.. If you can find a correlation and figure out ways to influence the correlation you will be worth your weight in gold to individuals who are numbers and results driven.. Quantifying is the hardest part but if you need some ideas I'd be more than happy to help on this and show you what we do for our 15 stores. Every week when our guys get their report I get questions like how can we keep people on our site longer... I noticed our calls are down and traffic is down, can we increase are seo and marketing efforts.
3) A true Internet store lives and dies by driving floor traffic on the phone... Jerry
Yes at the end of the day is it about ups, yes.... Do they care how they get their, no.
Without them we couldn't sell the cars, without us they wouldn't have eyeballs on their inventory... We're all on the same team.
I think your playing it smart by starting with the QandA .... The next step is reporting and
measuring to find correlation but more importantly areas of opportunity.
Sometimes we have to step away from the computer and be a salesmen of salesmen. Good luck with your meeting!