Digital Dealer 8 definitely plans to be a power packed conference based upon the ongoing advertising shift from offline to online, strong speaker line-up and an increase in last minute ticket sales.  (Oh, and do not forget the multiple give-aways that vendors have planned—from free trials to trinkets to ipads)  I have missed the past few conferences and am looking forward to connecting with old friends and colleagues and collaborating with new friends and vendors. 

Top Discussion Points

The top two topics discussed will be mobile technology and social media marketing without a doubt.  The internet community at large is still trying to understand and figure out how mobile technology and social media marketing will impact their businesses.  The forerunners are making strides in these areas, but it is still early in the game.  The leaders in the automotive industry in attendance will not be any different.  They will seek answers to these two buzzwords that individuals are trying to understand and manage.  Mobile and social media both have their role in the dealership’s online marketing tool chest, but they will not be the magic silver bullet. 

Mobile & Social Similarities

I believe that dealers have a wonderful opportunity in the mobile space because of their strong ties to the community.  Most dealerships employ a high percentage of local people, the majority of revenue is still locally based and dealerships provide oodles and oodles of tax money to local economies.  Mobile technology will help draw the local and time sensitive consumer into the dealership for current incentives.  Mobile will also provide simplistic communication regarding vehicle price negotiation, service updates and parts ordering, just to name a few applications.  Social marketing’s relevancy is highest among local individuals.  Yes, people are interested in their out-of-towns friends’ check-ins, but what relevancy does that truly provide for the individual’s current and present needs?  I have plenty of friends I communicate with that are not local, but if I want to “meet” them I call, email or video conference.  Likewise, when an individual has an immediate buying or consultative need, they will contact someone close and immediate to fill that need.  Provided a dealership manages their automotive social media marketing strategy properly, the consumer will seek the local automotive dealership for their next oil change and not Jiffy Lube.   

Your Personal Opportunity

I look forward to the education in the upcoming conference, but I know a three day conference is not enough.  There will need to be ongoing communication with others following the conference to keep the excitement and education fresh.  Returning to a dealership can be challenging when you are charged with making your newfound knowledge a reality when the majority of co-workers respond with the “deer-in-the-headlights” facial expression. 

I recommend meeting with the industry leaders after-hours as much as possible.  I will.  Face it, the standard conference format will not delve deep enough into the issues facing automotive dealerships today.  There is only so much information that can be covered within an hour.  Thus, meet with various movers and shakers to gather further insight into their experiences and ask follow-up questions to their presentations that their hour allotment will not permit.  This is where you will truly glean boat loads of information.  Take this as your opportunity to increase your business. 

Enjoy Digital Dealer 8 in Orlando, Florida.  Learn a lot… Take lots of notes… Make an impact when you return to your dealerships.  I know I will!  I look forward to meeting you at the show.

Everyone knows the economic downturn has caused dealerships to examine their expenses with a scalpel. Dealerships are literally in a fight for survival based upon their expenses because most incomes are drastically shrinking. We know there are successful dealerships weathering through the storm because of their innovation and adapting to the challenging economic environment.

But how are these businesses succeeding? What is driving their success?

A recent interview occurred between two very successful marketers, Seth Godin and Josh Spears. Josh interviewed Seth about Seth’s longstanding success in online marketing. The interview was brief, but included many nuggets of marketing wisdom. The highlight of the interview (for me) was this:

My question to you is: Have you asked your market for permission to access their networks?

Unfortunately, the advertising method most dealerships use involves forcing their message to their local market through direct mail, the internet, newspaper, radio and television without considering the customer’s reason for entry into the purchasing funnel. A brief consideration of the online message could vastly strengthen the interaction between buyer and seller and produce a consumer for life.

Instead, many dealerships blast a haphazardly developed message to the masses and as a result, leads are of low quality, appointments are not kept, closing ratios are low and the repeat customer is non-existent.

Dealerships must consider the changing landscape when marketing to their potential buyer. Advertising, especially online advertising has changed. Online advertising is a response to consumer action and not the manufacturer directing consumer action. There are three pieces dealerships must consider when advertising in the digital space:
1. Manufacturers must ask permission to access markets
2. Manufacturers must provide product validation to remain in the market
3. Manufacturers must innovate based on the consumer’s terms not what manufacturer’s think is best for the consumer

Social media is definitely changing the way dealerships market. Social media enables dealerships to understand their consumer better, but social media also drives the dealership to produce a richer and beneficial customer experience. Gaining entry into a group is difficult. The internet has made this absolute even more difficult due to the interconnectivity social media provides. Dealerships must ask permission to enter these markets because the network is more educated, more solid and more closed-knit than ever before. Through networking with members, dealerships can gain stronger ties into these networks... provided the message is properly developed.

There are definitely different methods of gaining access and successful dealerships are bridging these gaps every day through social networks. Once dealerships enter these markets their products (the customer’s experience with the dealership) must deliver, whether it is ordering a vehicle online, ordering parts, service, etc. If the experience fails, dealerships risk a much tougher time of re-entry and a possible business channel dies.

Dealerships can avoid death by staying connected to their consumer. The voice of the customer has never been louder or stronger than it is now because of the increasing strength of virtual networks. Virtual networks are the sounding boards of consumers’ needs and wants--all a dealership needs to do is listen (or read for that matter). Please understand that I am not saying dealerships need to lay down to their customers. I am saying that dealerships need to embrace and understand their consumers at a deeper level if they expect to be in business the next two to five years.

Therefore, take the time to understand your consumer, it might just save your (financial) life.

We all know at the end of the day that if a vehicle is not sold, no one makes money. A very simple and basic tenet of commission based selling we are all familiar with. The root principle of this model is that more traffic drives more sales. Thus, dealerships’ advertising spend was based on a linear 1+1=2 model—Dealership A spends $X in advertising for a linear return.

The internet has exploded that model from 1+1=2 to 1+1=3. How is that you ask? Simple. Blogs, Online video, Search engine optimization (with text and video), search engine marketing, online video, etc. The results of online advertising are definitely exponentially than the archaic, traditional, offline advertising. The speed to market is much quicker, the rate of return is much higher and the longevity of the customer could be much more sustaining.

The first lesson focuses on driving more traffic to your website. However, in order to drive more traffic, you must first analyze where you are. This involves reviewing the usability of your website and the technical aspects of your website.

What I have found in assisting other dealerships and analyzing a few of our dealer group’s websites is that before we seek outside assistance, we must first start with our current solution. We must review it very closely and objectively. We must not coddle the website (like it is our child) and make excuses for its lack of performance. The challenge for a lot of dealerships is reviewing the dealership’s website under the right eyes. Too many times we review our own websites misguided by our limited knowledge of internet principles. We truly need to observe other websites external to the automotive industry to understand how traffic is developed, increased and maintained.

For example, how many successful websites have pop-ups? Have many websites have music or other sounds playing when the visitor immediately enters the website? These are definitely distractions for the customer and can cause your customer to visit your competition. (Review your bounce rates to fix this problem). In our case, we removed a pop-up on one of websites with strong opposition from the vendor. The result was over a 30% increase in traffic. This change only occurred through education external to the automotive digital space.

This leads me to the technical aspects of your website.

The example I will use here is page titles. Do your page titles provide the right information for search engines to find your website and consequently help you rank higher on websites? Now I know some of you might not know what page titles are, but they are the very top on your screen. For example, if you go to the homepage of this website, you will find, “Automotive Industry Social Networking and Best Practices and Vendor Ratings…” Yes, believe it or not, these can help you immensely improve your rankings with the websites. Speak with your webmaster about changing them if you have questions. A reputable vendor will be a solid resource in this area.

Do an honest evaluation of your website. Your customers do it every day. Their decision is being made by where you rank on a search engine and how easy your website is to use. Make it as easy as possible to find you and work with you. That’s the beginning of online marketing.

In my previous two posts, “Learn online business strategies not just automotive online strategies” and "Now it’s time to get serious about that internet thing. Are you serious?!," I implied that automotive dealerships need to stop treating their internet departments like a detached part of their dealership. Instead, embrace their online strategies and synthesize them throughout their business.

A minority of dealerships understand this concept and are experiencing great success. However, a large percentage, do not and are subsequently struggling.

But, the mood is changing for the better. More dealerships are paying greater attention to their existing internet departments, more dealerships are shifting their advertising budgets online, vendors are improving their products and services and progressive automotive internet professionals are looking beyond the traditional "automotive digital marketing" space, grasping a hold of successful e-commerce strategies that work throughout the web (not just automotive specific) and experiencing explosive results.

That being said, I will present a series of posts on these successful strategies and provide my experience with them.

I will implement various strategies from blogs to linkedin to microsites to myspace to squidoo to video and other social and non-traditional online marketing strategies. (I will be assisted by an anonymous web professional.) I will also audit my old and current strategies to evaluate their effectiveness based on new research.

Bare with me as it does take some time to see the results with some strategies, but I will share them as quickly and as in depth as I can. If you have any questions or requests, feel free to email me at ernest.warner@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Stay tuned and enjoy the ride.

Outsourcing automotive technology services is a vast occurrence across the automotive digital marketing space. The reasons vary, but the majority of reasons surround two main points: knowledge and time. The majority of dealerships do not think they have the knowledge and expertise to market to their online customers and they do not think they have the time to manage their online marketing system. After all, both reasons help define outsourcing (insert link for outsourcing).

(Both are serious points that will be discussed in future postings. However, the bottom line is that you fail your business not to take the time to continuously learn not only the technical aspects of the internet, but also to learn internet marketing strategies.

Back to the point of my post…)

Do not rely solely on your vendor to provide the necessary goods and services without proper reporting and innovation. That's right, innovation.

Plenty of people will tell you that we need to monitor our vendors and make sure they tell us what they do, like a parent shaking their finger at their child saying, "you better do this or...". Similar to a child, the vendor listens to the periodic scolding while the customer rants and raves only to continue business as usual. A good percentage of the time the dealer does not fully know what he/she needs and thus is put off by the vendor's confusing double-talk.

Herein lies the problem, the dealer does not educate himself (or herself) enough regarding online advancements and innovation to fully capture emerging online business models.

To the dealer principals and general managers reading this post, "Did you obtain your franchise rights by only mastering the front end of the store?" Probably not. I am sure you had to master sales AND service (along with plenty of other roles). And now, you have directors and managers handling those duties for you. You are not an expert at f&i or know all the details of your new models or know how to fix every model.

But you do know how to manage people, set the strategy for your business based on the market and look forward. You set the pace, you define the business, you look to the future.

Business development center managers/directors, E-commerce managers/directors, Internet sales managers/directors, whatever your title is... Your mindset should not be any different.

Learn proper internet strategies so you can move your business forward.

Your automotive technology services vendors should not be held to any different of a standard.

We all have been guilty of this at one time or another. We recently fell victim to not properly educating ourselves on certain internet practices.

We outsourced certain components of our search engine marketing. In the beginning, we were riding hide and excited with our results. Month after month unique visitors increased, conversion rates climbed and closing ratios grew. We thought we could do better and studied some of these "successful" techniques on our own. Months went by and we still did well. As time went on, however, we learned of various techniques our vendor was not performing and did not even know. Sure enough our numbers eventually started to turn (and in some cases nose dived). At the end of the day this cost us all not just money, but time.

The reason dealers must learn is not because "the economy is bad" or "the sky is failing" or "I better get serious about this internet thing."

The reason is very simple… Innovate or go out of business. Learn new strategies to push your business forward.

I met with a leading vendor company last week during lunch (the vendor's name will remain nameless). {HINT to VENDORS: Free food is good… provided the company is personable and intelligent}. The vendors discussed their plans for the end of 2008 and shared project concepts for 2009. I enjoy meeting with vendors and learning of new technologies and best practices in the industry (provided the vendor is personable and intelligent). What better brain to pick than those who interact with a plethora of dealerships regularly? (See my post on questions for evaluation questions for vendors).

Through the course of conversation I always ask, what best practices do you see? A pretty basic question that opens the floor for flowing and insightful conversation based on the intellect of the vendor, of course. The vendor admitted that he visited a large dealer group a few times recently. (The dealer group will remain nameless). Shockingly, the dealer group did not have a process to handle internet or phone inquiries consistently. Keep in mind this is a top dealer group lacking a formal process to manage their customers and their employees. When the vendor asked the dealer principal to describe their internet process, he answered, “Our internet manager hands the leads to whomever he feels should handle a lead; however, I think it's time to get serious about that internet thing.” The vendor followed up with the same question to the internet manager. The internet manager answered, “I hand the lead to whomever I think will call the person.” Again, shockingly, this is a top dealer group in the Midwest. Good for me, bad for them.

Obviously, this dealership has limped along to an acceptable standard to the dealer principal and management. Happily they are in my market and losing market share. Shamefully, there are numerous consumers not receiving the proper service they need to obtain their next vehicle and preferably the remainder of vehicles they need for life.

My point is that it is time to get past the rudimentary belief that, “Now it’s time to get serious about that internet thing.” Dealerships, hear me loud and clear, “Continue to have week business processes and you will continue to lose business.” I am sure you have heard this plenty of times before. But I implore you, stop the madness. I suggest the following steps to take to alleviate your apathy.

I. Understand the Current Landscape
II. Create a Plan
III. Control and Evolve the Plan

Understand the Current Landscape
Here are the facts to consider when determining whether or not to create, monitor and evolve your internet department.
20% of customers only visit 1 dealership per make. This decision is largely affected by their online experience
30-40% of internet inquiries are not answered by dealership personnel.
31-60% of customers take their time shopping online. The buying cycle online has increased from 2-3 months a year ago to 6-9 months today.
60% of customers admit that when they start shopping online they do not know which specific vehicle they want.
70% of customers fear sales pressure. Therefore, they use the internet in their filtering process.
90% of customers do not buy their first choice. 56% of customers purchase a new vehicle and 42% of customers purchase used vehicles.

Create a Plan
Yes, I know all readers of this blog know that the plan involves selling more cars. However, the plan must be more granular. Management must consider more specific questions. First and foremost, management must agree that an increasing amount of their traffic originates from the internet. Thus, the dealership needs to have a dedicated internet department or their salespeople need to be trained to communicate with an internet customer. After this fundamental question is answered, other questions must be answered. For example, what is the budget permitted? What are the staffing allotments? What systems, structures and training will the dealership provide to establish and grow the internet team? Too many times the dealer principals or General Managers, say, “Sell more cars.” However, there is no support to do that. Setup a plan with the dealer principal, the General Manager, Sales Managers and staff, as many touch points as possible to build the proper internet environment because the online dealership must connect seamlessly with the physical dealership.

Control and Evolve the Plan
Observing and reporting internet traffic is a must for a proper internet department to flourish. Most reporting today does a solid job assisting management determining their return on investment. The ideal department will not only have reporting, but will know how to use the reporting tools and technology to measure and grow your internet sales.

Happy selling to all!

Below is my article from Digital Dealer magazine, March 2008. This is not a cheap shot at self-promotion. It is merely an entry to remind people of using the basics, focusing on process and audit your vendors regularly and thoroughly.

Beechmont Ford and Montgomery Ford both located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lawrenceburg Chevrolet Pontiac Buick GMC, located in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, are three award-winning, highly successful dealerships whose Internet departments are all under the directorship of one man: Andy Warner. Beechmont Ford, a family-owned dealership operating for 15 years, is nationally renowned for winning the Ford Motor Company’s “President’s Award” – an award recognizing Ford dealerships that have made a commitment to consistently deliver exceptional sales, service and vehicle ownership experiences to their customers – eight times. Montgomery Ford has won the award four times and Lawrenceburg Chevrolet Pontiac Buick GMC is hot on their heels with a reputation for providing a best-of-its-kind customer experience to every customer who walks through the door or heads to the dealership’s web site. Obviously, Warner and his colleagues are doing a lot right to ensure that their bricks-and-mortar locations and their dealership websites are delivering the best service and information. As a bonus of that superior service, the dealerships are consistently taking their Internet sales to new heights. How does Warner keep track of three busy Internet departments and keep them returning stellar leads and sales figures? He wholeheartedly believes in Internet marketing and surpassing customer expectations.

Since Warner began his position as Internet sales manager, all three dealerships have, without fail, doubled their monthly lead count (compared to the previous year) and experienced double and sometimes triple Internet sales (compared to the previous year). The last two quarters of 2007 witnessed Internet sales accounting for slightly over 30 percent of total dealership sales at one store alone. Such phenomenal achievement can be credited to Warner’s thorough and proven Internet marketing approach that includes: search engine optimization(SEO), e-coupons, lead enhancers, landing sites, his sales team’s passion for creating sales videos and their commitment to relentlessly following up with their customers. Read on to discover how his “ever-vigilant” Internet marketing approach, meticulously planned and strictly followed by Beechmont Ford, Montgomery Ford and Lawrenceburg Chevrolet Pontiac Buick GMC, has led to record numbers of leads, sales and devoted customers.

Please tell me about your background.
I started as the Internet sales manager for our two Ford stores in the greater Cincinnati area in 2007. We recently purchased a multi-franchise GM dealership in the Eastern Indiana area, giving me Internet sales responsibility over three rooftops. Prior to my current position, I worked for Dealer Specialties as a business analyst. From there, I was promoted to data partner manager and was closely involved with our data partners including: ADP, AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, Cobalt, Homenet and Reynolds Web Solutions. I worked with them on product plans to help transmit dealership data and consulted them with the most effective products for their dealerships.

How many people work in your internet sales department?
We have eight salespeople, at a minimum, that handle our leads for our three stores. Our Internet department is not structured in the traditional sense. Within our organization, we’ve been able to bridge the chasm between Internet sales and floor sales. Our process includes routing Internet leads to qualified, trained floor salespeople as soon as the leads arrive. We only permit our top salespeople to receive the leads. The leads are delivered to the salespeople via their individual CRM account preferences, including: cell phone, text messaging and e-mail. We have internal criteria to determine lead distribution; while we have a location-specific minimum number of salespeople eligible to receive leads, that number can rise based on lead counts and closing ratios. Our salespeople report their status daily via e-mail, phone or text message. I report weekly to the GMs and dealer principal.

What percentage of your dealership's overall sales is generated from the Internet?
We’ve been able to grow our Internet sales as a percentage of total retail from about 10 percent to over 30 percent. When we first started, our sales were very inconsistent. The reason is because we did not have a process that fit well with our dealerships’ structure. It was comparable to someone fitting a square peg into a roundhole.

What tools or lead generators have really worked on your site to pull in leads?
Our homepage video is working very well. We’ve been able to bridge the gap between annoying or confusing our customers, as most homepage videos do, in favor of actually helping them navigate our site with the video. This has led to increased lead conversions. Additionally, both our online credit application and our pop-up coupon offer have been instrumental in driving qualified leads from our web site. The coupon is by far the number one lead source for each of our dealerships. It’s a $300 coupon that pops up as soon as the consumer lands on our site. The coupon is used as a discount toward the buyer’s vehicle purchase.

What interactive media resources do you utilize? And, please tell me what services they provide and why you decided to go with them.
There are four interactive media resources that we currently utilize. First, we incorporate video on our homepage that is seamlessly integrated into our site and provided by our web site vendor, BZResults. We also use video “walk-arounds” for our used inventory. We’ve been evaluating this product for about six months, and we like what we’ve seen. All of the video we use seems to provide some level of "stickability” with our Internet customers. Given this, we are considering incorporating additional video technology like instant messaging, mobile communication and vehicle valuation. The goal for us is to become driven by individual customers, which is the opposite of traditional media. We aim to address the individual customers’ needs, not the masses. We think video helps us get there.

The second interactive piece that we use from BZ Results is virtual test drives. This product allows the consumer to ask questions of an interactive module on a particular vehicle. Our salespeople use this to improve the individual customer’s interest on the vehicle of interest. Again, this addresses the customer’s individual request and doesn’t seek to just throw something at the customer hoping it sticks. The virtual test drive answers the customers’ specific questions on their specific vehicle of interest.

Third is Time Highway, a vendor of OneCommand, that provides real-time appointments for our service department. The consumers can book their own appointment online. They can look at our “live” appointments and see where they can fit in and be reminded of that appointment by e-mail, phone or text messaging.

Lastly, we also work with Unity Works. We work with them because they understand how to display video by bridging the multi-width predicament. For instance, you have dial-up. You have broadband. Then you have all of those bands in between. With Unity Works, they have consistently proven that they can handle those various types of streamsbetter than any other company that I’ve worked with. They also serve upa much better quality product at a better price, and they aretraceable. We can see with Unity Works what videos customers areviewing and how frequently. Again, what we are trying to accomplishwith our Internet marketing is to make it very customer specific andcustomer driven, which is obviously the opposite of traditional media. Thus, we aim to address individual customer needs and not the masses.

Do you help design/update your dealership site? For example, update inventory, create specials, add photos, etc.
Absolutely! However, we do adhere to a team approach. I am responsiblefor the design and updates of our web sites, including specials. I also work with our used car managers as they play a major role in providing inventory updates at various times during a given week. Our used carmanagers ensure that our dealerships stay competitive. We don’t want tooffer the lowest prices all the time because we want to remaincompetitive in the marketplace. We feel confident that our customersaren’t always pursuing the cheapest route; they want the best experience. So, we will remain competitive in that perspective.

I’m also beginning to work more closely with our F&I managers to increase our share of regular and special finance customers, mainly through our use of SEO and micro sites. Additionally, we’re working on similar initiatives with our fixed operations teams.

How do you use e-mail campaigns to generate leads?
We use a two-pronged approach in our stores. Obviously, we will utilizea shotgun approach to blast e-mail offers to a broad customer base. Generally, we use this method to highlight new incentives or move agedinventory. Our opt-out rates, while initially high, are now quite low, and we’ve seen great success with these blasts. We also employ a more targeted approach by crafting offers to customers’ specific vehicle needs. This unsold follow-up has helped us capture incremental business.

For example, Ford might promote to customers zero percent interest for60 months on all F-150s. The shotgun approach is that we distributebulk e-mail to all of our customers detailing this special. The good thing about that is that we get the word out to our customers that Ford has this promotion going. The downside is that we could end up turning off customers that are only interested in a Taurus or a Fusion, or those who know that their credit isn’t strong enough for 0 percent for 60 months. Our solution to this problem is to distribute a monthly e-mail to all our customers that is season or holiday specific, like: “During the holiday season, it’s cold outside. So, why don’t you come in and check out our hot deals?” Then we list various deals that could appeal to many. These are broad offers sent to our entire database meant to keep our store in front of our customers and alert them to what we have going on.

Our more targeted approach consists of us mining our database and then sending customer-specific e-mails. For example, with the F-150 financing special, we can sort our databases and just send this particular promotional e-mail to potential F-150 customers. This way we aren’t turning off the majority of the people out there. Once we moved to that type of approach, it has been more successful for us because:1) It has saved our marketing powers because we are not trying to blast it out to everybody; and 2) We aren’t losing customers. They aren’t coming back to say, “Take me off of your e-mail list because you aren’t really addressing my concern.”

Can you give me an example of a successful e-mail campaign that pulled in a good number of leads?
We ran monthly used car promotions in one of our dealerships during the fourth quarter of 2007 to move aged inventory. While the e-mails were delivered to thousands of prospects, we received over 40 responses that generated 14 vehicle sales. The campaign cost us nearly nothing to run and we received only a few opt outs. We believe it’s important to deliver compelling offers to customers’ inboxes. This keeps the opt outrate low, because even if a customer isn’t interested today, they are afraid to opt out for fear of missing a future offer.

If you could keep one tool from your current interactive arsenal to generate leads, what would it be?
Our pop-up coupon, it truly drives an amazing number of conversions. While we don’t sell a vehicle to every prospect that completes the coupon, we do add these consumers to our database for future marketing opportunities. Through targeted marketing offers, we’ve successfully sold many of these prospects months after they’ve completed the coupon.

Please take me through the process from when an Internet lead is received, to how it is eventually closed (via a sale or a long-termprospect).
We use a combination of automated and personal processes. The automatic processes entail an auto response that’s distributed when the lead isgenerated. Based on the type of lead, if the customer is non-responsiveto our personal processes, he/she receives automated e-mails for the next 180 days. Of those who buy, 30 to 45 percent of our customers buywithin 30 days, another 30 to 45 percent buy after 90 days, while 10 to40 percent buy between 31 to 90 days.

The personal processes are based on our lead distribution schedule. These leads are sent to salespeople immediately via phone and e-mail. If the salesperson is successful at engaging the customer, the automated e-mail process changes to address the customer’s individual need. Our salespeople use phone guides to set appointments and to make sure those appointments are kept. Once the customer is in the door, traditional retail processes take over.

Then wrapped around that, I speak to the salespeople daily via e-mail, phone, and text messaging to ensure we are constantly staying in contact with these customers and no one is dropping the ball.

How important is follow-up in closing Internet leads?
It’s extremely important. This is what Internet customers demand. We must be diligent and thorough in our follow-up, or else risk losing a sale. Given that during some months nearly 70 percent of our sales occur more than 30 days after the initial contact, we would not be successful if we didn’t believe in follow-up. We monitor calls, closing rates and ROI (return on investment). We train salespeople on proper calling techniques and we report closing rates monthly. We use the closing rates and individual ROI from one month to help determine the lead distribution for the next month. This keeps closing ratios and ROI top of mind.

There are a lot of new tools in the space getting attention: blogs, social networks, SEO and SEM, do you use any of them? If so, how have they worked?
We’ve investigated SEM, and we currently don’t see a great ROI. Keywords have become too competitive and we feel our SEO is strong enough to capture the majority of in-market customers. Additionally, because we have such a large database, we find e-mail marketing to be more successful and cost-effective. Interestingly, we benefit greatly from not only our SEO, but also our unique domain name for the hub site of our two Ford stores: InternetFord.com.

We’ve recently begun to work with a vendor on blogs and social networking, though the jury is still out on whether this will drive incremental business or whether it’s just another shiny object.

With his knowledge of Internet marketing, a driving passion to meet each customer’s individual needs and wants, and a strong commitment to continually fine-tune and tweak his Internet marketing strategies, Warner has created a hands-on Internet sales department that consistently delivers impressive sales figures. His insistence on immediate customer follow-up and his “watchdog” eye for ROI have proven that he is the “best in class” for managing and increasing the bottom line of not just one, but three award-winning dealerships.