As I am watch the twitter stream from Denver and Arizona, most tweets are trying to sell Manning on why he should be #QB1 for each respective city. Manning and your customer are FREE AGENTS. When Manning arrived in Denver he was properly greeted after his appointment was set. What.... I thought all customers arrived on private jets? He was lead to the teams head quarters at Dove Valley were I am confident Manning was shown around the Denver Broncos facility. (Service Walk and Demo) After that I can only guess Mr. Bowlen; President and John Elway placed Manning in Write Up. During his time in Denver, there was SELLING going on why Manning should be in Orange and Blue. Knowing he was going to Arizona either way, as a Broncos fan, I hope the team made sure Manning as QB1 was important to the them. Your customers are Free Agents and can shop and buy anywhere. After setting appointments and during your customers visit, are you giving them reason WHY you want them to be QB...

True Marketing Time Recently with the help of DrivingSales.com, we conducted a survey to better understand the timing of a used car process and determine Prime Marketing Time and Total Marketing Time. Searching any dealer’s inventory at any given point, we can find “Newly Listed” cars on AutoTrader, Cars.com or a dealer’s site that is without photos or custom comments. The survey had five questions to review the used car process from service, detail, photos to live. The questions were not designed to argue if a car should be place online right away with or without photos, but to determine how much "online" marketing time that could be considered as wasted. As we read through the results, please keep in mind we asked about averages.   Total Marketing Time is defined as when a Used Car is through the entire process, with live photos online a dealers Day In Stock policy.   Prime Marketing Time is defined...

If 100% of your floor takes incoming sales calls and most dealers will tell you 10-20% of them are good on the phones, could changing up your Used Car photos improve the call?   *First, let me start by saying changing how you display your Used Cars online should not take the place of on going training. Phone calls still require enthusiasm, asking questions and setting an appointment.   Have you recently listened to a recorded call and the customer asks; “What are the miles? Does it have navigation and heated seats?” and cringe when the sales person says “Ummm, you mean the Silver one? Can you give me the stock number? I’ll have to go check….” Go online and look at the car on your site, Autotrader and Cars.com to see what the customer sees. Do you then understand why the customers are asking these questions? (it might be your photos)   Your photos are a virtual walk around online. Bad photos and catching a sale p...

I went to the Morehead State vs. Louisville game at the Pepsi Center in Denver for the opening round of the NCAA basketball championship. The game turned out to be a great basketball game with it coming down to the last seconds. While at the game, I was not aware of what Morehead State coach said in there last time out in the huddle.   In an interview with Dan Patrick show, Morehead State Coach Donnie Tyndall presented a play that came to him the night before. He went to his notes and plays at 2:30am the day off the game and run through his mind; “Down one what are we going to run. Down two what are we going to run?” He said if they have the ball down two, we are going to shoot a three for the win. They are going to put it in Harper’s hand because he is 6’3 and the two defenders that could defend him are 5’11 or 6’0. Morehead State's Demonte Harper dribbled patiently and watched the clock tick down. Then, he stepped up behind the ...

If you have been to an airport or looked at a Sunday newspaper ad, QR codes are growing. So how can we use them?   What if QR codes became a virtual walk around? We may not be ready to have them on the showroom (yet), but what about any car you have on display offsite?   What if the Manufactures used them at the Auto Shows?    What if this code talked about the fuel economy of the Lexus RX350?   What if this code talked about the Smart Access Key and Push Button Start?   What if this code talked about the RX Performance and the 3.5-liter V6 Engine?       As I continue to learn more about them, the ideas are limitless. The one recommendation is to create a separate site that is compatible for a smart phone. Don’t send it to your vendors sites like Cobalt and Dealer.com because it opens your dealers mobile site. I am testing out the use of our codes on StevinsonLexusofLakewood.org wh...

Today, customers have many avenues online when it comes to search. By updating your dealership website with the addition of micro sites (separate, often smaller sites that supplement your main site), you can open doors for more visits and better conversion.   Over the last two years, I have requested over 200 additional pages to be added to our website, www.stevinsonlexusoflakewood.com. I have manually added content to these new pages that have little search authority, from ‘accessories’ and ‘parts’ to used car terms and Lexus model library pages. According to our Google Analytics’ “top landing pages,” our dealership Home Page is our top landing page. But, by adding the additional pages, we were able to increase visits to our site.   For example, with the addition of our “Lexus Extra Care Warranty” page, from 8/1 – 11/30 of this year, we achieved over 100 landing page visits. I also added links back ...

Do you know how long it takes to get your inventory through the shop, detailed and add photos? Along with a dealers main website, sites like AutoTrader.com and Cars.com post a dealers inventory, but what are we sending to these sites? AutoTrader.com and Cars.com rewards your fresh trades with a "NEWLY LISTED" tag, but New Trades are not through the shop or detail. This "NEWLY LISTED" vehicle has no photos or custom comments.    Pleas take this short survey. The goal of this survey is to determine Prime Marketing Time and compare the total Marketing Time Online vs. your Days In Stock policy.  Results of the survey will be shared in a later post. Click the link below and take the five question survey.     http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W7FTR68    ...

As fall is upon us, our big tree started to shed its leaves. Knowing the tree still had leaves on it, we raked our yard even thought an hour later it looked like we did nothing at all. Some leaves remain on the tree, some continue to fall and some are blowing down the street. So what does this have to do with SEO? I am not an expert or “guru”, but like leaves on a tree (metaphor), it is important to continue to drop articles, a press releases, post or pages in Google’s yard. The leaves that are in Google’s yard are the most relative links for any given search term. The leaves that are about to fall are the relative links attacking any given search term. Leaves that are blowing down the street are no longer relative to that search term or may be poorly written. When dropping a new article, post or page in Google’s yard, make sure it has good content, clear page titles and page description or risk Google raking it up. It’s ok when your leaves en...

The second annual Driving Sales Executive Summit was a great success. I had an opportunity to listen and met great people in the industry. The layout, timing, venue and flow of the event went very well. It was nice to network and put a face with the person behind the email or twitter account. The speakers and agenda provided a wide variety of topics. Like the first #DSES, the speakers I enjoyed the most was someone who was not in the car business. Last year it was:   Media Spend: Efficiently Reaching Today’s Buyers – Triple your results by understanding how the media environment has changed and will continue to change  - Will Travis, Dentsu America   This year:   Dan Zarrella, award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist and author.   These two speakers gave key information that reminded me of the importance of understanding the customers.  Each gave insight to behaviors of what people do. “Customers no lo...

On the way to the airport with Jody Devere (@askpatty) and Gary May (@imacsweb) after the Innovative Dealer Summit in Denver, Jody asked me a great question after any event; “What was the one thing you got out of the event?” My response was that dealers continue to go to these events and get new information and do not act on it. As DD9 starts and next weeks Driving Sales Executive Summit begins, more dealers will gain new information and fail to act on it. Dealers: Just Do It.   If you continue to attend these events and you turn to your General Manager, Internet Manager or you are one and say “That was great information. We should do _________ (that)” Go back to your store and start to place “that” into action. It is difficult to start a project unfamiliar to most dealers. It does take work, but be patient and start off slow. Open the communication in the store to get feed back from the departments. It’s ok to get the “w...

I spoke to a good friend Friday night who is with Hyundai. His store is part of a developed Auto Group and added a new Hyundai point. He was telling me about how great Auto USA leads are for new and how few AutoTrader leads he gets for Used. My leads are just the opposite. We did not find the same success with Auto USA and no longer with them and get great leads from AutoTrader for Used.   So my question is if your store said you can only keep one “Third Party” lead source, which one would you keep and why? Please reply and support Used “I’d keep ______” and New “I’d keep_________” or if you are weeding them out all together. Please also include the Make your dealer supports and the main city you sell from.    ...

There are two basic Internet lead processes. An Internet Team that handles leads from start to finish and an appointment setting process more like a BDC. We current have one person handling the 90% of the “used car” calls from Autotrader, Cars, our site etc and another handling the email leads. The other phone calls get routed to the floor to available sales. Because we have someone is in a class of his own when it comes to phone skills, we are looking to transfer ALL calls to him (of course not possible), set appointments and turn the appointments. Has anyone made the transition to from one to the other? What was the most difficult part of the transition? How were the Appointments distributed? Knowing he cant take 100% of the calls, who handled the overflow? How was it received to the sales floor? My thoughts are it will be tough to make the change. I do see the sales floor moral to jump because they could be with an customer while a phone up appointment ...

I wanted to introduce myself as a contributor to the Driving Sale community. My name is Gary Sanders and I am the Internet Director at Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood which is just west of Denver Colorado. This year I am celebrating my seventh year at Stevinson and tenth in the car business. I started at a Ford store in Colorado Springs in 2000 when I moved to Denver in 2001. In March of 2003, I was hired at Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood on the floor. When the Internet position became available I started with the basics of Internet lead comes in, answer and repeat. I then learned as a dealer we had to option to edit our Cobalt site. As I dived in, my first step was to the other Lexus dealers in the area then region to see what they were doing with there site. For the life of me, I could not understand why dealer had the options and the tools and did nothing with them? As my career, understanding and education continued, I recognized I had a truly great opportunity to take it to the next le...