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...