- Apr 26, 2009
- 155
- 17
- First Name
- Brian
1. One Call vs. three 3rd Party leads - If 3rd party leads close at around 8% then you have a 25% shot at selling a car where a good phone salesman can close 1/3 or 1/4. I'll take the phone lead because it’s pre-qualified for location and dealer appeal. I don't believe people call too often to waste your time, and ask for lease prices and deals, if they don't like your dealership.
A 3rd party email lead may be out of your PMA and just price shopping and often is a blind lead (they don't know where the lead is going). Thus if the consumer had a bad experience at your dealership in the past, they will not respond to your email quotes or calls. So, some of the 3 could be bumped out once they see who you are either by location or past experience.
_______________
2. $2,000 PPC vs. $2,000 SEO - SEO wins if dealership has a longer term strategy to sales development. PPC is designed for instant gratification so if the owner of the dealership gave me $2,000 and expected me to pump up this month's sales volume, it would have to go PPC. If he wanted me to invest in the future, SEO is always the smarter choice.
________________
3. Price is too high vs. You don't have what I want - Always easier to work on the price argument since in the second case they may need to purchase a car quickly and getting a car from another dealer (if possible) may delay and lose the sale. In most cases, everyone is in the same ballpark. With lease pricing it may be due to how the deal was written with drive-off costs and fees. Take the time to walk through the numbers and make the deal work.
_____________
4. Broken Form vs. No Form - The choices was not to fix the form so my answer would be to have no form. It will only frustrate the customer and when they show up for an appointment, that they thought they booked, the experience will alienate a customer.
__________
5. Competitor Under Your Name or Bad Review - Competitors are always around SERP's when you do state and local searches so I'd take that any day. A negative comment on a site like "Dealerrater.com" showing under your SERP can blow up a sale. I have found ways to push all negative comments off page one and two for my clients. That has been a blessing since it is very easy for consumers to post negative and harmful posts at no cost at all that stay indexed forever. Also, dealers need to get their positive reviews posted on Yahoo Local, Google Maps and Dealerrater which will balance comments if negative articles are found or if consumers visit sites like Dealerrater directly.
_______________
6. Pay Plans - I think I would want to be paid for today's performance since the longevity of most sales professional is short and the "annuity" life model in the question may never pay off for past Internet customers.
_________
7. Phone vs. Email - Without reading too much into this, the question would seem that a site could operate in a vacuum and not have a phone number on the site. This would mean that people would have to use 411 or the yellow pages to find their number and call after visiting the website. If other dealers did not have to abide by the same rule, it would soon become obvious that you would have frustrated customers who go to the website to call “service” or “support” and find no phone numbers on the website. So, since I would never want to anger my customer or shoppers, email would come off.
8. Lose Domain vs. Blacklist Mail Server - You never want to lose a good domain, especially one that has been indexed and ranked for years. It takes one phone call to godaddy.com to get a new domain name that you can use for email. So, if your site was www.circlebmw.com, you could create a new URL for email which could be www.circlebmwsales.com.
Blacklisting only applies to outbound emails, so people could still email you and you would just respond with the new URL name until everyone was aware of your new email address. Remember, your URL is what is ranked by Google and Yahoo and not the mail server. If you unfortunately sent out a bunch of spam and got blacklisted, you will still have your domain rankings unharmed.
A 3rd party email lead may be out of your PMA and just price shopping and often is a blind lead (they don't know where the lead is going). Thus if the consumer had a bad experience at your dealership in the past, they will not respond to your email quotes or calls. So, some of the 3 could be bumped out once they see who you are either by location or past experience.
_______________
2. $2,000 PPC vs. $2,000 SEO - SEO wins if dealership has a longer term strategy to sales development. PPC is designed for instant gratification so if the owner of the dealership gave me $2,000 and expected me to pump up this month's sales volume, it would have to go PPC. If he wanted me to invest in the future, SEO is always the smarter choice.
________________
3. Price is too high vs. You don't have what I want - Always easier to work on the price argument since in the second case they may need to purchase a car quickly and getting a car from another dealer (if possible) may delay and lose the sale. In most cases, everyone is in the same ballpark. With lease pricing it may be due to how the deal was written with drive-off costs and fees. Take the time to walk through the numbers and make the deal work.
_____________
4. Broken Form vs. No Form - The choices was not to fix the form so my answer would be to have no form. It will only frustrate the customer and when they show up for an appointment, that they thought they booked, the experience will alienate a customer.
__________
5. Competitor Under Your Name or Bad Review - Competitors are always around SERP's when you do state and local searches so I'd take that any day. A negative comment on a site like "Dealerrater.com" showing under your SERP can blow up a sale. I have found ways to push all negative comments off page one and two for my clients. That has been a blessing since it is very easy for consumers to post negative and harmful posts at no cost at all that stay indexed forever. Also, dealers need to get their positive reviews posted on Yahoo Local, Google Maps and Dealerrater which will balance comments if negative articles are found or if consumers visit sites like Dealerrater directly.
_______________
6. Pay Plans - I think I would want to be paid for today's performance since the longevity of most sales professional is short and the "annuity" life model in the question may never pay off for past Internet customers.
_________
7. Phone vs. Email - Without reading too much into this, the question would seem that a site could operate in a vacuum and not have a phone number on the site. This would mean that people would have to use 411 or the yellow pages to find their number and call after visiting the website. If other dealers did not have to abide by the same rule, it would soon become obvious that you would have frustrated customers who go to the website to call “service” or “support” and find no phone numbers on the website. So, since I would never want to anger my customer or shoppers, email would come off.
8. Lose Domain vs. Blacklist Mail Server - You never want to lose a good domain, especially one that has been indexed and ranked for years. It takes one phone call to godaddy.com to get a new domain name that you can use for email. So, if your site was www.circlebmw.com, you could create a new URL for email which could be www.circlebmwsales.com.
Blacklisting only applies to outbound emails, so people could still email you and you would just respond with the new URL name until everyone was aware of your new email address. Remember, your URL is what is ranked by Google and Yahoo and not the mail server. If you unfortunately sent out a bunch of spam and got blacklisted, you will still have your domain rankings unharmed.
just for fun guys..
