This week, the Dealership Innovation Guide, Quarter 2 is set to hit dealerships all across the country. Filled with up-to-date vendor ratings, industry articles by expert contributors, and a completely new and updated look, this issue is taking the magazine to a whole new level. You won't want to miss the cover article featuring Scott Pitman of Suzuki of Wichita, and his journey taking a store from selling 3 cars a month to being the #1 Suzuki dealer in the country three years in a row. Can't wait for the magazine to reach your mailbox? We can't either! That's why we've shared the issue online, so you can read it as quickly (or as often) as you'd like. You can read the magazine directly here or sign up to receive these FREE issues every quarter at www.drivingsalesinnovationguide.com.

There’s no doubt that the advent of the Internet has rushed in sweeping changes throughout the automotive industry. But perhaps even more profound, as many people are pointing out, is the changing face of the customer. There’s constant talk about the millennials and how they operate, how they shop, and how they interact, and quite frankly, how it “ain’t like it used to be.” Well, I can’t speak to how customers used to be, but I do know what they look like today. Keep these characteristics top of mind when trying to reach the younger, more Internet-oriented customer (like me!):

Leave it to Chrysler to have another social media flare up.  After enlisting mommy bloggers to write about occupying children while road tripping, Chrysler’s efforts resulted in a botched attempt at a social media contest.  But where did they go wrong?  Let’s take a look at four key areas to consider when putting together a social media contest and what we can learn from Chrysler’s mistakes:

Purpose

What is the purpose of your contest?  Is it to capture leads, drive traffic, or make connections?  There are dozens of reasons you might want to have a contest, but be sure the calls to action are sufficient.  Whatever their original goals were, Chrysler’s “click-for-attention-for-an-iPad-for-a-trip” premise, as stated by Jalopnik, fell short on the social media scale.  Define the purpose of your contest and ensure the calls to action are appropriate and effective.

Rules

For Heaven’s sake, understand your

There is huge debate in our industry regarding how influential social media really is in the car purchase cycle. Some venture to say that social media is the new way to sell cars, while others still think social media – and the Internet, for that matter – is just a fad. It’s times like these when we turn to the data to see what the true reach of this new platform is, but even there, we find conflicting information. At the 2011 DrivingSales Executive Summit, Dealer.com presented their study on social media, positively demonstrating the reach and influence of social media in the car buying process. The research paper leaves you feeling energized about the possibility of social media and eager to dive deeper into the platform and potential opportunities. However, at the NADA Convention a month ago, AutoTrader.com shared with us their social media study, which prominently indicated that people are hardly (if at all) using social websites to gather information about cars, leaving us ready to abandon our Facebook accounts. So who is right and who is wrong? If both conclusions are based on real data, how can they be so inconclusive?

  When the dealer community speaks, DrivingSales listens, and the dealers have made their voices heard loud and clear on which vendors in the industry have met and exceeded the needs of their dealership customers.  In recognition of these service providers who are leading the way in innovation, performance and customer service, DrivingSales today presented the Dealer Satisfaction Awards to the top three companies in each of 14 categories at the third annual DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction Awards Breakfast at the Bellagio Las Vegas. The DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction Awards measure dealer satisfaction by allowing dealers to rate and review their vendors on our Vendor Ratings platform.  Thousands of dealers spoke up in not only recognizing the excellence of their vendors, but more importantly, helping their dealer peers make the informed vendor decisions that can ensure growth, profits, and greater dealer satisfaction throughout 2012. The 2011 DrivingSales Deale...

Imagine your worst boss ever. Oh, they were terrible! Mean and degrading; apathetic to your achievements and work, but angry and intimidating when it wasn’t done yet. I shudder to even think about that person and how miserable of an employee I was under them. As organizational psychologist Dr. Nicole Lipkin says, “When people suck, we just kind of suck back.” Under our worst management teams, we failed to learn, grow, and produce in the ways we know we’re capable. Now, think back to the best boss or manager you ever had. Encouraging, supportive, and constantly challenging you to be the best you could be. Are you challenging your team to be the best they can be?

  The automotive industry is a male dominated place, so being the only woman on this incredible DrivingSales team is par for the course.  Having said that, it was an incredible experience attending the Women Dealers’ Breakfast put on by NADA yesterday morning.  Being surrounded by a group of successful, strong-willed, and phenomenal women looking to elevate those around them was truly inspirational. As a part of the program, Dr. Nicole Lipkin encouraged us to re-evaluate the current landscape for women in the automotive industry.  Currently, women influence 80% of the decision-making for car purchases, yet only account for 7% of the workforce. If women influence over $80 billion worth of car spend, would making an effort to have more female employees on the front lines to interact with and bring a familiar perspective to the car buying experience increase your month’s end revenue?  Not to mention that a multitude of research shows that wome...

DrivingSales Vendor Ratings is the place to find and provide honest feedback about industry solution providers and their products. Not only does it offer a treasure chest of information helping dealers to make informed decisions about their vendor partners, but it also forces those vendors to continue to innovate their products and customer service in order to maintain high ratings and reviews. So in the spirit of innovation and so that we can provide the community with a better experience, DrivingSales has released an upgraded (and if I may say, way better) automotive vendor ratings site.

“It’s a game changer.” You’ve heard that phrase before, right? It’s the go-to saying, the most uttered words by vendors all across the industry. Are you heading to NADA this week? I guarantee you’ll hear it there. Durkin spoke about committing to these goals and purposes in your life to lead a better life. And that’s when it hit me. The similarity between what Durkin is selling me about better fitness for a better life and what vendors sell dealers about using their products for a better business is the commitment to it.

The consumer shopping process is at the focus of conversations everywhere in the online automotive retail world. Couple that with the gaining traction of Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) and you’ve got all sorts of questions to answer. Google and research firm, ShopperSciences, produced the following video, sharing insights compiled from interviews of over 500 recent car shoppers. This easy to understand animation demonstrates the fundamentals that influence the car shopper in particular and is the first Automotive ZMOT production from Google with automotive-specific research.

  We’ve put a lot of emphasis on the Vendor Ratings lately and for good reason.  The practice of rating your vendors and vendor products provides honest feedback for your dealer peers and keeps the vendor solutions and industry professionals on their toes and evolving to provide better services to the dealer body.  Each year in February, DrivingSales presents the Dealer Satisfaction Awards to the vendors and vendor solutions that have most satisfied their dealer clients throughout the course of the year.  Three awards are given in each of 14 categories: one for the Highest Rated and two more for the Top Rated.  And if the award recipients’ services or products didn’t knock your socks off enough, the trophies sure will.  Hand-crafted and especially designed to embody the Dealer Satisfaction energy, these trophies are custom made of marble and pewter, and stand as solid as the verified ratings that define them. Award recipients will...

As you have already noticed today, websites all across the Internet are blacked out to participate in the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). DrivingSales is one such website, standing up for free speech and standing against Internet censorship. All this commotion is already making waves as TechCrunch reports that some Congressmen are pulling their support from the bills and even joining the protests as well! Meetings are getting cancelled and some of the confrontational pieces of the bill are getting a second look. The largest Internet protest in history is causing this bill to move from swift passage to rising barriers and hopefully a steadfast block in Congress.

Over 1500 websites, including WordPress, Craigslist, Wikipedia, have gone dark today to raise awareness about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s cousin, Protect IP Act (PIPA). Both of these bills are well intentioned: they aim to put a stop to unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content. Remember Napster? These bills hope to punish sites like that, which promote online content theft. The verbiage in these bills grants far-reaching power to the government to censor websites and even block their addresses from being accessed – all with little oversight.

We’ve had so much fun with this Vendor Ratings Contest. Not just because we get to hand out cool prizes, but because it brought us closer to our true goal, which is to increase the Vendor Rating database – a collection of ratings and reviews that helps dealers make informed decisions about their operational investments and equally pushes the industry’s vendors to better serve the dealers. Thank you to everyone who not only participated in the contest, but also those who rated and reviewed their vendors all year long.

A BMW driver takes his car into the dealership to get a warning light checked out and left with no service – customer or mechanical. Steve Rock, owner of a Certified Pre-Owned BMW 335i, took his car into the BMW North Scottsdale dealership because he had warning lights flashing at him; the service technician told him it was merely an emissions alert, disengaged the code, and sent him on his way. A few days later, when his steering failed on the middle of the highway, he found himself crashed off the side of the road. Oops.

Bart Wilson, our Business Development Manager, walks into the local Barber Shop for a haircut.  Standard procedure.  And no, this isn’t an old-school, 1950’s shop – this is a modern, up-to-date business.  And like most companies these days, they operate under the guidance of a standard CRM system.  After entering the shop, the lady looks Bart’s information up in the system and finds his details and hair-cutting preference.  He settled in the chair and waited for his service.  It only took one swipe of the clippers for Bart’s eyes to widen and his mouth to drop.  This is as close to shaved as Bart’s probably ever been.  His typical Nick Carter-esque hairstyle was instantly shaved down to the length that his younger son usually comes away with.  

The DrivingSales Vendor Ratings are now more robust than ever.  Thanks to dealers like you, the retail automotive industry has access to verified, honest feedback about industry professional services and products to inform profit-making decisions.  But the year isn’t over.  Be sure to rate your vendors to contribute to the thousands of ratings and reviews already collected.  The more dealers we get to anonymously share their opinions, the more accurate a picture the industry gets of the vendor landscape. Inform and be informed.

"The best proof that the world has changed is someone tries to stop it." - Anonymous Many people have been curious about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and what it means.  It basically says that any intellectual property holder can request a website to be blocked for infringing content.  For example, sharing or posting TLC's "No Scrubs" or Britney Spears' "Baby, One More Time" with your friends on Napster would result in the site getting shut down.  Seems fair enough, right?  Until the YouTube video you posted of your inventory gets blocked because you have Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" playing in the background.  And the worst part is you don't even appear in court to defend your use.  The person filing the complaint can simply fill out a complaint and your site will be blocked until further notice.  Bye bye traffic.  Bye bye revenue.  Bye bye leads.  Your social media str...

Online reputation is important.  Please take 3 minutes to rate your dealership vendors on DrivingSales.com so all dealers can see who performs and who doesn't. (Don't worry, we verify that only dealership employees submit reviews and we keep all reviewers anonymous.)  To reward you for leaving a rating, we are giving away a Macbook Air and a few Amazon gift cards. Simply click the link and rate your vendors to qualify. Winners are announced weekly. For those of you new to the DrivingSales Vendor Rating platform, it is the only online mechanism where dealership employees can rate and review their website providers, CRM providers, DMS providers, etc. to keep the vendor market transparent and hold vendors accountable. Before you ever sign with a vendor, you should always learn from your peers and see how that vendor is...

As an enthusiastic recycler and a newbie to the automotive world, I couldn't *not* post this. Enjoy!


Infographic produced by the Kars4Kids car donation program.

The DrivingSales team would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who made it out to the DrivingSales Executive Summit in Las Vegas earlier this week. The progressive dealers and auto industry professionals who attended helped make this event the premier event in the industry. From the outstanding research Dealer.com presented regarding the impact of social media in the automotive world to Gary Vaynerchuk’s f-bomb laden inspirational keynote, the material was top of the line from beginning to end. Our completely sold out event (and then some) left us scrambling for more chairs and ordering extra breakfast on the fly, but being able to share industry-shifting information with the high-level, decision-making group that was there is what is going to make our industry – and your stores – better.

  Social media has always been an important part of DrivingSales.com.  Not only because we’re a social platform built to connect dealers and their ideas to increase dealership profitability, but because we’ve always been certain of the impact that social media has on our lives in general and the enormous influence it has in the automotive industry in particular. Just like car dealers don’t use marketing tools or strategies without meticulously quantifying their ROI, we now have the hard-crunched numbers indicating just how important social media really is.  Finally, for the first time in the automotive industry, Dealer.com, in partnership with DriverSide and GfK Automotive, is providing us with the very data that supports our dedication. Announced today exclusively to DrivingSales and presented at the 2011 DrivingSales Executive Summit in Las Vegas, the results of the study show that information on social media networks - such as status updates, c...

  We are so pumped for the DrivingSales Executive Summit in Las Vegas and can’t believe it’s just around the corner!  The line-up is packed with amazing keynotes from Gary Vaynerchuk, Aaron Strout, Jason Falls, Rob Siefker from Zappos.com, and Google.  We will also be releasing some amazing auto industry-specific research exclusively at DSES. The attendees at DSES are high-level decision makers from around the globe, who are eager to push the boundaries of innovation to make their stores more profitable.  And each day, we have more and more of those dealers signing up.  At this point, we’ve reach capacity at the Bellagio and are sold out for the event.  There are a few seats remaining.  If you’ve previously purchased tickets, your seats are yours.  If you’ve purchased tickets that come with extra dealer passes, we’re saving your seats as well.  But be sure to sign your dealers up this week before w...

 



 

 

 

The DrivingSales Executive Summit is less than a month away! The third annual DSES event will bring together the most progressive dealers in the country, along with world-renowned speakers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Jason Falls, Aaron Strout, and Rob Siefker -- all focused on pushing the auto industry’s ‘innovation boundaries’ and translating the latest trends and business realities into solid 2012 action plans for every dealership department.  You’ve registered already, right?! There are only a few spots left, so there’s no time to waste.  Visit our registration page and sign up NOW!

Unlike other automotive industry events, the DrivingSales Executive Summit is 100% dealer driven and designed specifically for the most advanced dealer principals and dealership executives in the industry. The exclusive event has a vendor-neutral policy, meaning no vendor influence on presentation selection and adherence to a s

Alright, Google +1 is officially here, but is it going to stay? Previous attempts at a similar button from Google, like wave and buzz, have not remained as Google would have hoped. So is this one doomed to the same fate? It's a mighty feat to take on the almighty Facebook it's noteworthy "Like." On the other hand, one could argue that Google is the all-mighty. It's the web. I don't search Facebook for information on the web, I go with Google, and the +1 button is Google saying "We're not a social website. We are the social web." But will others jump on with it? We've added it to the DrivingSales site to see how it goes and how people interact with it, but what are your thoughts? Is Google +1 going to stick around?

Want a chance to win $100.00 off dealer registration at the upcoming DrivingSales Executive Summit October 9-11th in Las Vegas? How about a chance to win a FREE REGISTRATION altogether? Well, now’s your chance and it’s super easy. We’re conducting a survey about social media and how it compares to traditional media, but to do that, we need dealers like you. A chance at winning Free DSES dealer registration just to complete a 4-minute survey? Sounds like a sweet deal to me!

Dear OEM: Really? You are in bed with a website vendor and are forcing my hand in using it? Yes, your SEO truly stinks, your sites take long to load, your bounce rates and overall usability is poor – yet you are forcing my hand to use the site you as an OEM has deemed most acceptable. I did try to move away with another vendor who I have used prior – everything I know about this website vendor is ten fold better than what you offer and about half the price. You say it is ok for me to leave…but what do you do, big bad OEM?

A recent study conducted by SEOmoz on ranking factors indicates that 90% of SEO experts believe that social signals will be the most important ranking factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. This trumps even exact keyword match, which significantly dropped in perceived importance over the last two years. They also found that the #1 factor associated with higher Google ranking was the number of Facebook shares. So what does this mean for you?

Nobody knows dealer questions better than you, the dealers, so we’re asking you what new market questions dealers are facing. Each quarter, we’ll take on a new research project to shed some insight on the industry with real data, real numbers, and real, actionable solutions. You pose the problem; we’ll find the answers. We recently had a large dealer group contact us with a market question that is most certainly affecting all of us. Social media tends to be a hot topic, of course, but how does it impact dealerships in particular? Together, we’re looking to understand the influence social media has in our industry compared to traditional forms of media.

DrivingSales is excited to announce that the 2nd Quarter edition of the 2011 Dealership Innovation Guide is officially here! The Dealership InnovationGuide is a free publication from DrivingSales.com full of good stuff for dealers looking to improve. It's packed full of the latest vendor ratings and articles that will help dealers identify and adopt best practices that affect their bottom line. Gain access to these articles and the entire magazine for FREE at DrivingsalesInnovationGuide.com.