In this video, we look at different learning styles and how addressing them can help you with your walkaround.

What are the basics of mapping career plans for your employees? Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

In this video we discuss following up with an unsold guest and give you some tips to professionally follow up without being a pest.

This is a guest post from Brian Finkelmeyer, Senior Director of Business Development of vAuto.  He'll be speaking at the 2018 DrivingSales Executive Summit on Winning the Zero Sum Game in New Cars.

Today’s retail new car business is beginning to look more like a game of poker than the actual car business.

In 2016, Automotive News reported that the collective annual sales objectives for every manufacture in the US was 21M, but the actual SAAR was only 17.5M.  I once heard the annual sales objective-setting process referred to as “smoking the drapes” inside the corporate office.

I don’t entirely blame the car companies; their job is to impress shareholders by growing market share. They accomplish this by enticing their Dealer body to stretch for higher and higher sales volumes.

The problem is, often these objectives are calculated in a financial fantasy world and not based on the realities of the marketplace.

Over the last five years, New Car Dealers have become increasingly reliant upon manufactures for their financial success.  According to NADA this year, 90 percent of the income captured in the Net Adds account on a Dealer’s financial statement is factory bonus money.  To win this pot of gold, Dealers have no choice but to literally “go for broke” to achieve their aggressive monthly sales targets.

Polk data highlights that on average, approximately 40 percent of a Dealer’s monthly sales comes from their owner base, which means the other 60 percent is generated with conquest sales. 

In my workshop at the DrivingSales Executive Summit, Dealers will learn key conquesting tactics for attracting customers from outside their local market area.  A Dealer’s ability to effectively conquest will have a very strong correlation to the number of “Pots and Size of the Pots” they win.  This will remain true, as long as the new car game is being played out like the World Series of Poker.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (October 16, 2018) – Xtime is proud to name Fletcher Jones Audi in Chicago, IL, as the winner of the second Xtime Customer Experience Excellence Award at Digital Dealer’s Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, NV, October 16-18, 2018.

Xtime first partnered with Digital Dealer in April 2018 to create the Customer Experience Excellence Award, which recognizes a dealership or dealer group in North America that has demonstrated a strong commitment to delivering superior customer service. After receiving and reviewing numerous submissions, Fletcher Jones Audi was selected as the definitive winner, in large part due to their robust retention rates and customer-first business approach.

“Fletcher Jones Audi is delivering on the technology-enhanced experience that consumers have come to demand, achieving 100 percent utilization of online scheduling and 88 percent tablet utilization on the service drive with Xtime,” said Jim Roche, vice president of marketing and managed services at Xtime, who will be speaking at Digital Dealer’s conference on converting one-time visitors into long-term customers. “This emphasis on using new technologies is helping contribute to an overall stellar customer service record for Fletcher Jones Audi — a 75 percent customer retention rate and high praise on DealerRater with 4.9 out of five stars on almost 500 reviews. Fletcher Jones Audi’s emphasis on customer experience excellence fits with Xtime’s ongoing efforts to help dealerships drive customer loyalty and retention, ultimately helping them boost overall profitability.”

Fletcher Jones Audi also was one of only 13 dealerships to receive the Magna Society Elite Award, Audi’s award for outstanding customer service, earlier this year.

“At Fletcher Jones Audi, offering the gold standard in customer experience is paramount. We pride ourselves on providing excellent service, and we strive to secure repeat business by exceeding our customers’ expectations at every step of the process. It is an honor to be recognized by Xtime’s Customer Experience Excellence Award for our efforts,” said Dave Donnelly, service manager, Fletcher Jones Audi. “Our success is enhanced by our technology-driven service center powered by Xtime, which plays a central role in enabling us to offer our clients the best car ownership experience possible.”

For more information on the Xtime Customer Experience Excellence Award, visit https://www.digitaldealer.com/conference/customer-experience-excellence-award/. For more information about Xtime, visit https://xtime.com/.

About Xtime

Xtime increases customer retention for automotive dealer service departments by using technology to transform the ownership experience. Improving customer satisfaction and retention drives dealer revenue and profitability. Xtime is committed to delivering the experience consumers demand – an experience which emphasizes value, convenience and trust. Xtime books 44 million service appointments and processes 120 million repair orders annually. Twenty-nine global OEMs have chosen Xtime to drive that same type of success for their businesses, converting $9 billion in service revenue for more than 7,500 dealerships across three continents.

About Cox Automotive

Cox Automotive Inc. makes buying, selling, owning and using cars easier for everyone. The global company’s 34,000-plus team members and family of brands, including Autotrader®, Clutch Technologies, Dealer.com®, Dealertrack®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, NextGear Capital®, VinSolutions®, vAuto® and Xtime®, are passionate about helping millions of car shoppers, 40,000 auto dealer clients across five continents and many others throughout the automotive industry thrive for generations to come. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately-owned, Atlanta-based company with revenues exceeding $20 billion. www.coxautoinc.com

About Digital Dealer

The Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition is where top dealers go to stay ahead of the technology curve, delivering the largest array of industry speakers, peer to peer opportunities, and exhibit hall offerings – all carefully designed to impart groundbreaking business strategies for your dealership.

Media Contact

Brian Spittler

Communications Director, Podium

brian.spittler@podium.com

Dane Saville, the Public Relations and Brand Director of Reunion Marketing, will be speaking at DSES.  His breakout is titled, "Relevance is King: How Your Content Can Save You Money, Build Your Traffic and Convert Your Browsers".  This is a guest blog from Dane on measuring your marketing.

There’s the old cliche that “good things come to those who wait.” I’m hoping that you’ll feel this adage applies to my egregiously late submission for introducing you to my DrivingSales Executive Summit session. Let’s not waste another moment.

First, a little bit about me.

I began my career in automotive marketing with Leith Automotive here in Raleigh, North Carolina. I was hired as a copywriter to craft radio advertisements, television spots, blogs — really, just about everything. One of the first novel concepts I had was to write the Average Joe test drive. What does a casual car shopper really want to know about driving a vehicle? This lead to a lot of dealership visits where I had the opportunity to see how things operate in the showroom and on the lot.

I moved onto an independent agency, where I took the role of chief editor for the automotive team. And, ultimately, coming on board to form Reunion Marketing as the Content Director and, later, Brand and Public Relations Manager.

So what is it that I hope you’ll learn from me at DSES ‘18?

Relevant content can help fulfill the potential of every single marketing dollar you spend.

Take the Guesswork Out of Media Buying

The NADA released a report that “Internet” advertising comprises 55.4% of a dealership’s marketing budget. This means there’s still significant spending in traditional media, such as television and radio. There’s a problem with this …

You’re indexing audiences to target the greatest percentage of people who fit — demographically and geographically — your defined audience with as little waste as possible. After you’ve attempted to limit the scope of who your ads will reach, this manual buying involves a process of negotiating, purchasing, and monitoring. And guess what?

There’s still an incredible waste of spending no matter your market.

That’s because traditional media does not offer the same granular targeting that programmatic media does. Even if you pay the money to be able to drill down your audience with understanding their preferences or personal habits, like exercising regularly, you’re still not matching the power of programmatic channels.

Programmatic media buying (think of Facebook, video pre-roll, and Pandora) eliminates that waste because you can go beyond basic demographics to understand their shopping behaviors and other indicators that help ensure you target people who have a high level of interest in your brand around which you can stimulate interest in your dealership.

This means every marketing dollar is spent on your exact audience and not an estimated percentage of your local market.

]The 3 Pillars of Paid Search

If you get these three pillars right, you’ll save money on every single click.

The Right Ads

You want to have the proper account structure.

You need to focus on being mobile-friendly.

You must maintain a great Quality Score. The QS of your ads directly affects their cost.

The Right Impression Share

You should align your budget with strategic impression share.

For searches that demonstrate an intent to buy, you’ll want to maintain a greater impression share. That’s because you have more opportunity to create ads with greater specificity while generally not competing against third-party sites.

For searchers that are broader, you don’t need a high impression share. There are more strategic ways to attack those searches with a lower share and leveraging a specific Google tool.

The Right Targeted Market

This pillar is the most simple. You have targeting options with your paid search strategy to ensure that you’re not spending outside of your targeted area — the most viable market. This goes beyond just setting a radius.

Website Content

Your landing page content must match the search query intent.

Is your Search Console connected to your Google Analytics account?

You can see the search queries for which you receive the greatest number of impressions. Along with that, you’ll see other information that can help you make smart decisions.

Is your Google Ads account integrated with your Google Analytics account?

You’ll get even more insights on other search queries by understanding that I’ll discuss. Plus, you have the added benefit of potentially increasing your Quality Score by applying this strategy — remember you may be paying more right now because your ads don’t have the right landing page.

It’s all about understanding your local search market.

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO fulfills the potential of your SEO and SEM efforts.

Conversion Rate Optimization is not just changing a button color or when your chat tool pops up. It’s understanding how people behave on your site and making strategic updates that compel them to do what you want them to.

It means understanding that five homepage banners is not helpful to car shoppers. That’s because 79.09% of all homepage clicks are on the navigation or inventory search widget. I’ll discuss what percentage clicks on homepage banners.

It means utilizing heatmaps to see what elements capture your site browsers’ attention the most. I’ll discuss how to use them and what you can discover.

It means optimizing your content across all devices. Shoppers are as diverse as the vehicles on your lot, so you want to make sure that you’re not neglecting a great experience for all of them.

It means creating and optimizing content that’s relevant to their searches and removing the friction that let’s them convert while engaging with that content I’ll discuss and show some examples that can guide your next strategic updates.

It means knowing that conversions on your site directly affect how you rank in SERPs. It influences the key factors for how Google determines whether or not your site is giving car shoppers what they want. Google rewards that with a better rank. I’ll talk about the ways you can take up this real estate in SERPs and dominate the positions that get nearly 50% of all clicks.

See You at DSES on October 23rd at 9:50 a.m.?

There’s so much more to share, so I hope you’ll join me at the DrivingSales Executive Summit in Las Vegas.

RedCap Technologies, LLC ("RedCap"), a Solera Holdings, Inc. company, launched its courtesy shuttle alternative for its OEM/Dealership partners, following the successful integration of Lyft rideshare services into RedCap's transportation platform.

The new offering leverages RedCap's existing mobility solutions and taps into Lyft's Concierge API platform to deliver a seamless and convenient experience for both dealers and customers. Any user can request OnDemand Shuttle rides, powered by the Lyft network, for service pick up, drop off and Roadside Assistance. Dealers no longer have to support shuttle operations and can rely on a scalable service for any in-store customer. 

Shuttle OnDemand provides numerous benefits to dealers: a cost-effective alternative to loaners and customer waiting, fully white labeled for the dealership; it reduces or removes the dealer's liability and expense of running their own shuttles; it improves customer experience; and increases service spend. In addition, dealers can distribute credits for customers to use Shuttle OnDemand for extended periods of time should they require the customer's car for additional services. Dealerships can also save a great deal on managing expensive loaner fleets.   

For those who prefer not to visit a dealership at all, the RedCap transportation platform supports concierge pick-up and delivery of vehicles, which reduces the entire customer time investment for service to roughly 15 minutes.   

Not only is this a pleasant experience for the customer at an otherwise inconvenient time but leveraging this type of mobility allows dealers significant flexibility and can save the dealer nearly $3,000 per shuttle while not being disruptive to normal sales and service operations.  The availability of DMS integration allows the dealer to measure specific Repair Order attribution as well as capture valuable customer feedback through a proprietary survey platform.

"Traditional courtesy transportation options have been less than efficient for both the dealer and customer," says David Zwick, Managing Director of RedCap Technologies. "The importance of giving customers choice of how they want to do business with you is paramount and having this more convenient and timely option is what customers now expect."

RedCap Technologies has emerged as a modern solution provider to support the changing winds of customer expectations and engagement for vehicle sales and service. As consumers become more accustomed to bespoke experiences and instant services á la Amazon, dealerships are responding with service offerings like RedCap that are customizable and seamless in order to drive better customer satisfaction and retention.

About RedCap
RedCap is a category creator of automotive retailer mobility and logistics. RedCap's platform allows OEMs and dealers to provide rich experiences to their service and sales customers and greatly improve a dealership's overall vehicle and customer logistics operations. RedCap is a nationwide provider with tiered solutions servicing all brands. Customers, dealers and OEMs can use RedCap's easy to use white labeled, DMS integrated software or interface with existing applications using the RedCap API.

About Solera Holdings, Inc.
Founded and continuously led by inventor and entrepreneur Tony Aquila, Solera is a global leader in digital technologies that connect and secure life's most important assets: our cars, trucks, homes and identities. Today, Solera processes over 300 million digital transactions annually for approximately 235,000 partners and customers in nearly 90 countries. For more information, please visit solera.com.

SOURCE RedCap Technologies, LLC

This is a guest post from Russ Daniels, the Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Homenet. We're excited to have Russ presenting at the DrivingSales Executive Summit.  

Effective merchandising drives deeper interest from car shoppers, however, dealerships today do not know to differentiate their online inventory. 

In our dealer research, we found that 83% of dealers believe they can increase margin and reduce days to sell by improving online merchandising, yet just 12.0% feel their online presence was highly differentiated from their competitors. 

To begin understanding how to stand out, you need to understand how to measure several aspects of your merchandising. Below are three areas that I believe can provide the most insight into the impact of your current merchandising processes. 

Measure Merchandising Performance

Measuring the overall effectiveness of your online listings starts with tracking search result page and vehicle detail page views. Having an idea of the online engagement your inventory receives allows you see the impact your merchandising has on attracting shoppers.

For a deeper understanding of online engagement, track views for specific aspects of merchandising, such as videos, photos and 360 spins. 

In many conversations I have with experts across the industry, 125 VDP clicks per vehicle acts as a starting benchmark of measuring merchandising success.

Measure Time-to-Market

Used cars can take up to 11 days to be fully merchandised and online, but high performing dealers can accomplish this within three days. Use smart automation and technology to streamline this process as much as possible to save time and effort. 

Remember fully merchandised vehicles are going to drive consumer engagement. Listings with real photos get 349% more vehicle details page views than those with stock photos and vehicles with descriptions receive 27% more views than those without. 

Merchandising that Boosts Search Rankings

Industry leading classified sites like Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cars.com and Cargurus are using merchandising completeness to drive which vehicles display at the top of the search results page. Now vehicles with real photo sets, video, descriptions etc. will be showing higher on the results page. This shift is aimed to drive a better shopping experience.  This also validates the need to measure the time it takes to merchandise your inventory and track engagement.

If vehicles are underperforming – it’s important to investigate where merchandising processes can be improved to maximize return on your advertising spend. For example, photos and thorough descriptions can be easily overlooked. By expanding the detail of your comments and taking more photos, you can give car shoppers more information to make a purchasing decision.

RelayCars Pro includes a host of features to aid dealers and OEM product managers with the selling process, product design, training and more

 LOS ANGELES (October 9, 2018) – RelayCars, the virtual reality automotive experience that puts consumers in the driver’s seat of thousands of vehicles, today announced the launch of its virtual reality application RelayCars Pro, an automotive sales platform. The new application offers a suite of services with an immersive approach to present cars to potential buyers.  Powered by the most expansive VR automotive asset library on the market, the salesperson can place consumers in the driver’s seat of any vehicle through the virtual reality showroom.  With a database of thousands of vehicles that is constantly expanding, dealers are able to show car buyers a realistic view of a vehicle that may not even be physically on the dealership lot.

Recent automotive studies show, 80% of car shopping touch points between the initial research and visiting the dealership are digital.  As this digital trend continues to grow, with RelayCars Pro, dealerships can further the car buying experience through VR tours.  Customers can view interior and exterior 360° spins around each car as well as explore different trims, colors and videos of the models.

Additionally, RelayCars Pro with ‘Commander’ allows one or many users at a time to be guided by an agent, aiding in design reviews and research where buyers may not be centrally located. Commander option is available to work over a local area network or remotely over the internet with either 1 -1 controls or with the agent controlling multiple headsets via a companion app running on any Android device. This option prompts salespeople with USPs that are unique to a vehicle model. A self-guided experience is also available, with a white label version of the application accessible on both iPhone and Android, requiring no headset. 

“At RelayCars, we are proud to offer a product made specifically for dealers that will continue to shape the future of selling cars,” said David Falstrup, RelayCars CEO.  “We have already found great success working with a large network of dealerships and look forward to bringing more businesses on board as our VR library grows and technology continues to advance.”

Businesses interested in working with RelayCars Pro may apply to try the VR sales platform for free by registering here.

RelayCars’ consumer application is also available now for free on iOS, Android, Oculus Go, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, Microsoft MR and soon-to-be Magic Leap.

About RelayCars®

Featuring the most expansive and high-quality VR automotive library on the market, RelayCars is a virtual reality suite of apps that allow both enterprise and general consumer users to explore the interior and exterior of thousands of different vehicles via smart phone, tablet, web or VR headset. The app is available for free on iOS, Android, Oculus Go, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR and Microsoft MR. RelayCars is the sister-company of EVOX Images, a company best known for providing rapid, large-scale global image creation solutions on demand with a focus on automotive VR and 360 images. For more information on RelayCars, please visit www.relaycars.com or follow RelayCars on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.

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