While working with one of my clients covering a strategy on changing the price of a vehicle he had priced at $15,298, my first reaction was to tell him to reduce it down to $14,995 so he wouldn’t miss any searches done up to $15,000 because of his $298. Then it dawned on me, don’t even change it to $14,995 that might not work either. After the conversation, I come across a strategy that has changed the way I tell my dealers how to price a lot of their cars. It made me research all pricing strategies and how this type of pricing started in the car business. Pricing a vehicle at $19995, $14998, or $9997 is a strategy that marketing experts call Physiological Pricing strategy. How it Works “A psychological pricing strategy works by selecting prices to which consumers will have an emotional reaction. For example, a car might be priced at $14,995 rather than at $15,000. A completely rational consumer would recognize that a price difference of $5 ...

I started doing Internet sales in 1997 and since then I have always tried to stay ahead of the next dealership. Doing things that no other dealer is doing, so one of my biggest challenge that I never got resolved, until now, was to find a way to include a hyper link into my listings on Autotrader and Cars.com to direct customers back to my site or any where else I would like for them to go. To be up front, I am a vAuto rep for the store Moberly Motors in Moberly MO, and they gave me the permission to test an idea I had to include a QR code into their photos to see if it would work on sites like Autotrader and cars.com. So I took the url address that they had on their site for a video they did on market based pricing then created a QR code to link to the video. They do their photo management in our tool so I put the code as the second photo and it WORKED!!! I think this is huge!!! You can link customers to any site or just have it give them a text message about the car. ...

To continue from my last posting talking about getting back to the basics, here are some benchmarks to be looking at:
Now would be the time to strengthen the Internet department to make sure you are taking advantage of every single opportunity that you have.
There needs to be a commitment from the top to make this work. You need to know what approaches that you want to make toward the internet, what bench marks you need to set and achieve, and not just in sales but in service, parts, and F&I.
A good internal process for sales would be to track every lead, every appointment, every show, every sold, every “up” that is generated by the Internet. And use the report to manage on the items that are successes and failures..

Here are some good attainable goals for sales. First, most dealerships leads come from 50% third party, 30% dealership site, and 20% OEM. One goal would be to reverse the third party percentage to 30% and the dealership to 50%. One way to do this is to put...

Dealerships should always try to stay ahead of the guy down the street. Thinking "out side the box" to gain market share. And there is a lot of talk about the next big thing that they want to do, video, video search engine marketing, blogs, SEM, SEO.....

But through a lot research and process building at dealerships across the nation, I think the first big hurdle would be to make sure you have a strong process and process management in place before going for the "next big thing". Build the foundation first, make sure it is solid, then frame, dry wall, paint..... but  alot of times we try to go right to the painting first (because that is what everyone else is doing) in hopes it would bring a solid foundation that has been lacking from the beginning.

I started doing Internet sales in 1997 and all we really could do then was to focus on building and managing a process. We had 3rd party leads fighting for our business, but other then that, all we had to focus on was our process...