How do some dealers over achieve while others just plod along and settle for mediocrity?

I often ask myself this question as I monitor the progress of my clients. My training program provides me with the ability to monitor the scores and results of my clients, and it’s always nice to see a new client climb their way to the top of the list. Yet there are others who start off in the bottom 20% and stay there month after month.

As a coach and trainer this troubles me and has led me to incorporate accountability tools into my training program. But, no matter how good the solution or product, change only happen when effort is put forth. You will not get physically fit by simply purchasing a gym membership. It takes a lot of hard work and effort to make a difference.

Dealers often waste thousands of dollars to procure solution after solution with hopes of increasing automobile sales. Vendors claim their products will help you sell more vehicles, however, if not used properly the investment becomes another needless expense added to your bottom line.

How many of you have the latest and greatest CRM tool, yet your sales team doesn’t use the tool as intended?

How many of you spend thousands of dollars on advertising, yet your salespeople are not trained to properly handle a phone call?

What about the Internet leads that generally go unattended for hours before a salesperson decides to respond? And if they do respond quickly, it’s typically just enough to satisfy the expectations of the manufacturer. Simply throwing money at a problem does not solve the problem.

Do you want to be great in 2011?

Well it all starts with the captain of the ship. If it’s not on your radar screen it certainly won’t be on the minds of your employees. Do you want to drive positive change in your dealership? Why not start by putting a well thought out process in place? Explain the process, provide training on the process and demand results. Then, monitor and manage the process and hold your staff accountable.

Failure to execute should result in the execution of ones employment (?).


Staff who have been trained but still don’t meet expectations should be replaced. There is no reason to settle for people who just want to be mediocre, including General Managers.

Success in this industry is generally very well compensated. Parting ways with underachievers sends a clear message to your employees. “Be the best at what you do or we’ll find somebody who will.” Getting rid of slackers makes room for superstars and leaders should always be on the lookout for the next superstar.

Bringing competitive people into your business will increase competition among your current employees and, ultimately increase sales.

Consider tying compensation to more than just units sold. For example, if you pay a salesperson 20% commission on sales, consider holding 5% percent back. In order to be eligible for the other 5%, require employees to meet certain expectations like the ones below:

• Maintain a minimum CSI score of 95%
  
• Customer e-mail collection rate of 75% or higher
  
• Log a minimum of 50 new prospects in your CRM each month
  
• Remain current with manufacturer training expectations
  
• Maintain a Phone-up Ninja score of 2.5 or higher on Phone-ups
  
• Schedule 20 solid appointments per month.

Criteria such as these are critical to the success of your dealership and should be modified as needed based on your goals.

Consider starting with some simple goals and as the bar is raised, raise expectations. The pay plan of your managers should reflect these goals. For those who do not meet the criteria and collect their 5%, give the money to the top three performers in your dealership as an added bonus. Start rewarding those who are driving the majority of sales. Salespeople are coin operated, so manage your pay plans accordingly.

Many of you had a profitable 2010 and perhaps that was due to the processes you have in place, or the hard work of your employees. However, some of you may have prospered simply because you were open for business and our industry saw more buyers this past year.

What if we experience another dismal year like 2008? Now ask yourself this question,"How satisfied am I with the way my operation is currently running? What can I do differently that would allow me to sell more vehicles? How can I provide my customers with a better shopping experience?” Make a list of your areas for improvement, build a process, and get to work!

With that said, what are some of the process you have in place now that have been successful for your dealership?

What process would you like to develop for your dealership in 2011?

DALLAS--Industry leading automotive CRM and marketing provider, eLEAD CRM, has unveiled a new corporate Web site, eLEADCRM.com. The new Web site features its best-in-class Bundled Solution Platform that provides auto industry professionals the most powerful and effective tools to improve dealership performance and strategic relationships among every department. The eLEADCRM.com redesign incorporates fresh graphics, showcases the company’s new automotive blog,http://www.eleadcrmblog.comeLEADCRMblog.com, and dons a user-friendly interface that streamlines visitor access to the latest information about eLEAD CRM products and services.

“Since its inception, eLEAD has continued to develop new products and enhancements. We want to make it easier to access our tools, expertise and content that help Dealers meet their day-to-day operational objectives”

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“Since its inception, eLEAD has continued to develop new products and enhancements. We want to make it easier to access our tools, expertise and content that help Dealers meet their day-to-day operational objectives," stated Bill Wittenmyer, Vice-President of eLEAD CRM. "Additionally, we want to ensure that the content on our Web site – from news releases to expert articles to videos – is highly visible in search engines and easy to share through social media tools such as Facebook® and Twitter®.”

With over 25 years as a leader in the automotive industry, eLEAD CRM is at the forefront of the trends and issues shaping today’s auto dealer and dealer group. eLEADCRMblog.com now provides the opportunity for open, real-time interaction with the automotive community.

NADA convention attendees can find eLEAD CRM at booth 2226S in the South hall of Moscone Center, San Francisco NADA Convention and Expo.

About eLEAD:

Founded in 1985, eLEAD has steadily grown to over 700 direct employees with the number one automotive call center in the nation. eLEAD offers a bundled solution approach, a single login gives dealers access to CRM, desking, pre-owned inventory management and marketing. The company’s unique month-to-month business model fuels their sense of urgency to deliver monthly results. Along with an impressive number of recent groups that have chosen to partner with eLEAD, the company focuses heavily on maintaining their large reference list of over ten year customers. For more information, visit www.eleadcrm.com,

Do car dealerships really know how their advertising dollars are performing?

For an industry that spends as much as it does in advertising, one would assume that they are tracking the return on investment down to the penny and taking action based on what they see.

As a relative newcomer to the world of automotive marketing and call tracking, I was curious about whether or not this was the case. To find an answer I decided to take a hard look at the call and website tracking data from a representative pool for dealerships to see what it was trying to tell me.

For the month of November, I isolated 17 of our larger automotive dealership clients that were tracking all of their calls and dealer website sessions to see if there were some common threads that we could learn from. I looked at total calls and unique callers for each store and then compared that with the percentage that came from the main website. Then I looked at how many web sessions occurred at each store and the associated referring source and referring keyword for each.

This is what I found:


In summary, 17 Large Dealerships included in survey (extreme outliers or bad data was omitted from the
analysis as shown in red above)

• 56% of calls are coming from their main website # (54% of unique callers)
  
• Google is referring 43% of web visitors
  
• Roughly 29% of referring keywords are some combination of the dealership name (roughly refers to the fact that defining this variable across 17 stores is not a perfect science)
  
• 26% of visitors came in through the direct domain

The first question I asked myself was, “What is this telling us?” Well, I think the data is screaming a few things at us.

1. Most people are going to the website before calling the dealership (Duh!).
   
2. Over 2/3 (69%) of website visitors are coming through Google or the Direct Domain.
   
3. Over 1/2 (29% + 26% = 55%) of people knew exactly where they wanted to go when they started their search.

The next question I asked myself was “What does it mean?”. I think there are a couple of important takeaways from the data and not all of them are new.

1. We have known for a while now that the internet was the dominant source for driving phone calls. People are using the internet like the yellow pages.

This study reinforces that and lets us know that most of those people are entering the website before making the call. Embrace that fact! Don’t be afraid to drive everyone to your website. The data tells us they are going there anyways.

Make sure your website is well constructed and invites phone calls. Understand the analytics. We know that a single page view and a phone call are some of the most valuable, so don’t get too upset about your bounce rate.

2. As numbers two and three above highlight, the people visiting your website set out to visit your website before they say down at their computer. They did not find your website while conducting some long drawn out search that eventually led to your site. They sat down and entered your url directly or typed your name into Google. I think that this fact illustrates the vital importance of branding.

How did they know your name? Where did they hear about you or your website? Where did they see it? This data suggests that could have come from any number of sources (AutoTrader.com, Radio, Print, Facebook, etc . . .). They were branded at some point with your name and initiated a web session based on that prior branding. Make sure your marketing efforts are organized accordingly.

3. Finally, you can see that tracking all of these streams is more challenging than ever, as is interpreting the data. It becomes more important than ever for the marketer to dig into the conversion rates of these secondary channels because there is a high likelihood that they are translating to conversions via Google and Direct Domain due to the branding effect they have on the consumer.

Proper attribution of conversions tied to branding is the next big challenge for marketing analytic companies. In selecting a call tracking provider, dealerships should be sure that the vendor that they select is at the forefront when it comes to technological innovation. If they don’t have this on their radar, you should probably look elsewhere.

As a call tracking provider, we get questions all of the time about the data that we provide, and one of my favorite sayings is "The data is the data, and it doesn't lie." The data presented above is valuable information. If you have any marketing budget at all it is absolutely vital that you are looking at the data. It usually tells a story, and the moral of the story is always smart marketers spend less and make more.

Here are a couple of bonus observations from this study:

Bonus #1: All of the dealerships surveyed in this study use CRM and Call Measurement religiously. It is ingrained in their process and culture, dictating much of their sales strategy and approach. All of the dealerships surveyed in this study come from large automotive groups (more than 80 stores) and represent the top producing stores within their respective automotive group. Is there a correlation between the two? As I like to say "The data is the data."

Bonus #2: The top seven producing dealerships surveyed in this study also utilize outbound call measurement, meaning they track and measure all outbound calls to potential customers. In addition, one of these stores actually received more inbound calls from their Outbound Caller ID than any other source by a wide margin (a blog in and of itself waiting to be written). The moral of this story is, if you’re not using outbound call measurement, why not? The data suggests that you probably should be.