Critique our Internet Department

[JesseJ]

The background for this post is that I'm three months into my job as the Internet Sales Manager at an Upstate NY car dealership. The dealership does well as a whole, but the internet department was non-existent before my arrival. I myself am new to the car business. The dealership averaged around 5 Internet sales per month previously. Since I arrived the numbers are Feb: 10, March: 13, April: 14 and counting.

Here is the general overview of our department. I'm not asking to have my hand held, I'm just asking if any of you veterans see anything that jumps out as something we are missing or doing incorrectly. Mind you are budget for the internet department is currently somewhat limited, but subject to a slight increase though I'm not sure when.

We utilize the following:
- Reynolds and Reynolds Contact Management
- Dealer Connection website plus premium home page service
- Auction 123 for exporting of photos only (I know there are other ways to use this but I'm not sure what)

Lead sources:
- Ford direct (Dealer Connection)
- ZAG, Every Car Listed...that's about it. We average between 90-140/month

Things we don't use:
- Craigslist (I can't figure out how to not be ghosted)
- Youtube (I think our videos are up there but not by my doing)
- Ebay, Cars.com (anymore)
- Autotrader (anymore). I can't convince the owner that those third party sites are for more than leads alone.

We have no SEO management of any kind. We have no chat platform set up either. I just took a look at our google analytics for the first time. We had 6,000+ page visits last month. No idea if that's good or bad.

Bare in mind we are a smaller dealership. We sell between 40 and 80 units per month on average, so I have actually been closing out over 10% of our leads which isn't too bad I guess for entry-level.

Any knee-jerk reactions? Thanks in advance. I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff.

 

[flosho]

Craigslist would be a good start to get leads. Craigslist is as much mainstream as cars.com/autotrader.com/eBay and it is free!

I can't speak for third party lead generation since my dealership doesn't utilize any of those with the exception of cars/AT(yet).

 

[JesseJ]

Craigslist would be a good start to get leads. Craigslist is as much mainstream as cars.com/autotrader.com/eBay and it is free!

I can't speak for third party lead generation since my dealership doesn't utilize any of those with the exception of cars/AT(yet).

The problem with Craigslist is that I can't seem to avoid being ghosted.

 

[Bruce Novicky]

The problem with Craigslist is that I can't seem to avoid being ghosted.

Lookup "Cargigi" best CL service.... love them we get TONS of calls.

 

[danoneil]

A Manufacturers website usually provide the best sales leads. How many Ford leads do you get , how many show & how many close ?

You need to be where your competitors are.

Have you shopped your competitors to see if they are quoting prices ? Are they leaving things out that you know a customer will be charged for such as freight,process fee's etc ?

 

[danoneil]

We do pretty well with Zag leads. You do know that the zag customer will get 3 quotes instantly. If your not equal or a little bit lower, chances are zag leads will not come to your dealership unless you have the vehicle they want.

 

[JesseJ]

Dan,

What name did you use when you sent that lead? I don't think I got anything over at the time you listed. I appreciate you taking the time to do that though. That is undoubtedly a glaring flaw, our after hours response time.

I normally send something back from my phone to the effect of "Thanks for your interest, I'm out of the office right now, but I can answer any questions you have in the meantime. You can reach me by phone xxxxxxxx or email xxxxxxx. Etc."

I'm kind of under the weather so I passed out last night, so you probably wouldn't have gotten a response anyway. Normally though, people at least get something within I'd say half an hour if it's after hours.

As for Zag leads, our sales manager gives me the pricing guidelines, and our prices are all on the high side. We aren't a big volume dealership, so they set the prices to counterbalance the price of the sale. Everything is +300 of what we would normally quote. We still get a hand full of sales out of them each month, but consider that we get like 40 leads from them also so there is probably room to improve.