In the Feb. 6^th edition of Automotive News they quoted me as not using 3^rd Party leads and said I had instead committed those resources to developing my own leads (I think we all know that 3^rd Party lead quantity and quality has declined).

In my opinion most of the traffic they get, by rights, should be mine anyway. However, they siphon it off by providing the research portals consumers are looking for, capture their info and sell you that “tire-clicker” as a hot prospect.       

So this is ONE of the free (if you don’t account for the time) methods I have used: Wordpress. That’s right the simple, free version of Wordpress.com. My site is http://volkswagenutah.wordpress.com and currently gets about 200 visitors a day. I refrain from promotional posts (there are a few) but each of the Tabs is a stand-alone site as well that I can optimize for the targeted keywords I desire and drive encroachers off my Google results.

Here are this week’s results for targeted keyword traffic:

 Granted, they aren’t all page 1 results, but the visitors are highly engaged and most of this is re-purposed from Manufacturers’ sites so it helps establish another touch point of credibility.

This is just ONE way to own your digital space instead of renting or being dependent on others content. There are some other ways, but a guy has to keep SOME of his tricks up his sleeve, right? ;)

Good Luck and Good Selling!

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

All across the Country, in fact probably in Dealerships everywhere, a similar scene has played itself out today: Call every un-sold Customer we’ve had all Month, bump all Trades to get a New retail unit, take that loser deal because we need those last few cars, get an update on every non-funded deal, call emergency C.I.T. meetings, whip the B.D.C. into a frenzy….

So after this madness and mayhem of erasing Thousands of Dollars of profits in an attempt to get deals funded and volume up, the same vow will be made tomorrow: “We need to stay on top of this stuff throughout the Month so we don’t have this B.S. next Month.”

Didn’t you say that LAST Month, and the Month before?

If this in no way pertains to you, great, but I’ll bet we can all see something that is applicable.

The false sense of Urgency created at the end of each Month is born of the very real desperation created by a failure to inspect your processes every day. The end of the Month can be much more pleasant when it’s just “going for extra gravy” rather than a futile last-ditch effort to force into being that which could have been cultivated daily.

Luckily tomorrow is a new Day, a new Month and an opportunity to get it right. You don’t have to have a Title to be a Leader. So when are you going to TAKE ACTION?

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

A while ago I was privileged to be involved in a podcast Larry Bruce  had organized. On the call were some of what I consider to be the best of the best in our industry. (I was there to observe and learn.) During the conversation Larry said something to me that resonated, “I’d like to find the person who came up with the term Desk Manager and punch em in the face.” Of course we all laughed, but then a week or so later Jeff Kershner sends me an e-mail of the top posts of 2011 on his site DealerRefresh. By the way my favorite was titled Are Your Employees “Coin-Operated”? And if you haven’t read it yet you should…after this.

The point here is that our industry has become one where in large part a title is just part of an en-TITLE-ment attitude. Once our Title is defined as managing a desk we can easily forget that it’s the Salespeople that keep the need for that desk to exist alive.

So if you’re going to ride it, use the position to teach and inspire rather than rule and repress. A few ideas may be:

1. Have each salesperson bring you one “tough call” to make while they listen and don’t cheat and pull the “manager card”. If you expect them to get the customer back in without numbers and quoting price, show them how to do it.
2. Role-play each pencil before you send it out. Then have the salesman repeat it back to you until their delivery is smooth. Ask them what they think the customer will say and how they will overcome it. Throwing out a monster pencil with the advice “Just get me back to paper” is the most cowardice of acts.
3. Review each guest sheet with the salesperson (sold and unsold) after the customer leaves. Tell them what they did well; ask them what they think they could do better. There is no better teaching moment.
4. Personally go out and thank each customer that you penciled sold or not. Quit hiding behind the “green curtain” pretending all the citizens of OZ can’t see you.

Most of all quit relying on spiffs because you think that will allay your guilt at being unable to Lead and Motivate. After all, the only person who actually could be termed a “Desk Manager” at the Dealership is possibly the receptionist... And if you’d listen she could probably tell you how to better run the Store.

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

As I monitor all inbound and outbound communication of Dealerships watching for signs of impending C.S.I. issues, new or missed sales and retention opportunities and, I am simply amazed at the amount of time, effort, energy and money that is expended by the Sales dept. to remedy issues. By contrast, Service rarely has these problems, but when they do, it’s from the same root cause. That’s right, the “C” word… Communication… or shall I say the lack thereof.

Recently I listened to a customer whose car had been in the shop for 2 days longer than anticipated, the wrong parts had shown up and it was going to be even longer as one needed component was back ordered. When asked about her experience she proclaimed “Your Service guy is a God!” (Keep in mind this was not a warranty issue, she was not in a loaner car and she was footing the bill herself). This response was so far away from what I had expected that I had to inquire further. Her explanation: “Look, I’m not happy about everything but I understand things happen and he has called everyday to offer shuttle service if I need it and keep me updated. Plus he always returns my calls! As long as he is there, I’ll never go anywhere else.”

No CRM or process can force it; this is a man who’s building for himself a career and a following.

By contrast, I’ve seen customers who were so happy with their experience that they sent in referrals who also bought cars. The salesman failed to follow-up on the $100 referral program check he had pitched to them at delivery. Even though the matter was eventually resolved to their satisfaction, the message from their salesperson had been received loud and clear.

Even if the news is unpleasant a swift delivery with a clear message will alleviate most hassles. “no there is no second set of keys” trumps “I don’t think there are but I’ll look and if they show up I’ll call” every time.

Communicate often, clearly and through the channel the customer is comfortable with. The payoff is huge.

What fail-safe's are in place at your Dealership? How often do you monitor or cross-check to measure that your expectation is being met? Pro-active will beat reactive every time!

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy  

In every Dealership or business organization I have ever had the fortune to be involved with, I have been privy to the inner workings and directional planning of its success. The only reason I bring this up is that I don’t believe it’s a widespread phenomenon. Whether it is in their advertising platforms or business models CEO’s and G.M.’s will often map out plans weeks, months or even years ahead with key stepping stones toward growing the business. Yet day after day we require our people to focus blindly on the minutiae i.e. some sort of daily task list or the handful of hot new leads or recently sold prospects.

               Personally it’s easy for me to make that one Management CSI call because from a 30,000 ft. perspective I know how it fits into the plan as a whole. At the same time, it can seem a fight to have every task (read opportunity) completed by a sales/service floor that we whip into a frenzy to secure the daily result needed for our monthly success. Sales people by and large are paid off of what they produce within certain chronological parameters and have little or no motivation to begin the touch-point process years ahead of any sales culmination. I suggest that the best way to overcome this prejudice is to share with your key personnel the vision we as management so viciously guard as “upper-level” information.

                As we move (hopefully) to a more transparent sales process, it only makes sense to do the same with our Management styles. Begin hosting Monthly and Quarterly review/planning sessions with all key dept. personnel and share with them the goals for the Store, the advertising calendar that will help achieve the goal and the costs and benefits both monetary and personally that said plan will provide to them. By getting your entire team behind a quarterly and yearly goal you will not only empower them with a sense of belonging  but also turn them into key advocates to the rest of your staff. By tying inclusion in this Visions Team to key performance criteria you can create and foster a Leader culture and Team vision while enforcing and rewarding personal accountability.

                Information is power but the hoarding of information is counter-productive to team building. We assign feature/benefit analysis to our clientele each day in motivating them towards a specific (buying) action. Doesn’t it make sense that doing the same with our teams could produce the same type of desired results?

                Key points covered should include:

• Potential Ad points – brainstorming will occur
• Costs vs. benefits of campaigns
• Staffing issues
• CSI trends
• Inventory allocations

If your lot tech understands the 3 month snapshot as well as the cars that need detailed today the buy-in achieved will produce more quantifiable results and foster a more productive work atmosphere. Goals set by the Store, to achieve personal level buy-in and make sense to the very people we depend on, must be clearer to all. Then and only then their daily achievements may begin to be the building blocks we see them as. Everyone needs to understand and feel included and empowered towards a Stores success not just accountable to the daily task list.

We gain power by giving it away and Leadership does not have to be limited to Title holders.

Last month I was honored to be named one of the 5 finalists at Driving Sales Executive Summit in the most innovative Dealer competition. Many of you may know that the idea I presented was for a new review platform called the Power Pen now being marketed by Punchline Advertising. I was honored to be named the 3^rd place winner, but I feel that the focus was placed on the product rather than the concept I was trying to convey.

Finding a small local company that was providing a similar service to the medical profession and working with them to, in essence, create a new market segment product that better fit our needs was the true innovation idea. The product is secondary. We as Dealers have neither the time nor the funds to create every solution we may need and so we rely on existing companies to achieve the results. The Power Pen is an amazing new tool that allows Dealers to gather verified reviews from customers in the store and have them posted to an independent site which ultimately takes up more key controllable real estate in the search results for a Dealers name.

While this is great in and of itself, what is truly amazing is the way it came about. As a Dealer Manager I struggle to find the best vendor products that will enable me to secure key results. This goal is often times contrary to those Vendors internal revenue-generating structure. For example, while DealerRater, AutoTrader, Cars.com are all  good Vendors, I’m unhappy that unless I sign for the top most package I will still have my Competitors encroaching on my SERP’s by means of banner ads and other potential brand leaks.

Rather than be put between a rock and a hard place, what if we all continued to look outside the Automotive vertical for solutions, contact those companies and share with them the insights needed to achieve a viable product that is within our own control? To take it a step further, we then share the information and results and collectively benefit from one another’s efforts. The end result is that we could control our own digital foot print to a greater degree and become even more independent.

Quit being a digital share cropper, leasing your own land and giving your hard-earned profits to the very people you’ve paid to enhance your impact, then turn around and monetize your name and hard fought results. It’s a slower process initially but at the end of the day, you can be the master of your own domain rather than being reliant on a 3^rd party and subject to their whims of change. 

I would be hard pressed to describe the events of the day, but if I don’t take a moment now, this feeling of absolute euphoria I feel may escape me as tomorrow prepare to travel and return to the day to day operations of my Store.

You see, for the last two days I have been rubbing elbows and interacting with the most brilliant and innovative minds from a variety of Industries and I am literally “in the ether” (You know, that state of enamor that we all try to elicit from our clientele? )

As I listen to impassioned people sharing ideas on Culture shifts, Marketing trends and truly connecting with customers in ways heretofore undreamed of in the Automotive Vertical, I have hope: Hope for a better Culture, better Sales and more importantly, of erasing the stigma that so many of even our BEST customers have long held of an Industry I love.

It didn’t matter if ideas conflicted; all were presented, cases stated and the audience left to make their own determination. There was no “pitching” of Products or Services and Dealers and Vendors alike were discussing ideas based on their MERIT alone. Strategies were shared and opinions ran strong and passionate and I remembered again of why I love what I do.

The real time twitter feed became an open forum wherein audience participation abounded and Speakers were commented on and rated by their peers IN REAL TIME. Vendors that are at odds and fierce competitors “on the street” sat at the same table and discussed strengths and weaknesses of their Platforms IN FRONT OF DEALERS!!! We hear the term “crowd-sourcing” bantered about, but with the live feed, twitter and input from different camps I have now seen it in action and come away with a clearer picture of what I hope to aspire to and a knowledge that I am not alone in that dream.

A few years ago, some friends of mine, Joe Webb and Bill Playford of DealerKnows, stated to me in a personal conversation, that they wanted to be “The Justice League” of the Dealer world when it came to Vendor Solutions/Consultants. DrivingSales has for these three days created an army of evangelists that will take the things learned and relationships built and enabled the seeds of such a vision to be spread far and wide.

I know I will be looking back through the #DSES hash tag on Twitter and watching these sessions as they become available on DrivingSales TV to further clarify and define the course in the weeks and year to come until the next one.

Thank you Jared and your hard working Team at DrivingSales.com for continuing to push the bar and set a higher standard for learning and interacting at Automotive Conferences. It may be altruistic and naïve, but I hope to be able to carry this passion with me to sustain me till next year’s Event.

I will be implementing take-a-ways from here and giving feedback in this Community and would encourage all those in attendance now, observing from afar or directed to this post by some well-intentioned friend to do the same and make plans now to attend next year’s event. This is not an Automotive Conference in the Traditional definition of the word as much as it is a trek to the Holy Grail. Come and renew, rejuvenate, be enlightened and re-define our role in the Business world. If you don’t, in the words of Gary Vaynerchuck you’ll be “going out of business within 15 years, and if 15 years is all you need, then fine”.

Personally, I too want to leave behind a legacy and know that I left an imprint of good upon the world through selling cars. After all, being a "car guy" (or gal) is, in my estimation, an opportunity to serve others and thereby better myself.

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

Sometime ago I wrote a piece on “Big Pimpin”, to sum it up it encouraged those of us in automotive to not rely too heavily on 3^rd party inventory posting sites. This past week there has been a huge buzz about the new timeline format that Facebook is rolling out by month end.

Whether you love it or hate it is not what this is about; personally I don’t mind it. I don’t use my Facebook page for any “marketing” type purpose and in the new timeline it’s kind of fun to scroll back through my “life” and see and compare my mindset and moods from 3 months or 3 years ago. It is more difficult to see all my friends status updates amongst my own clutter but I’m sure I’ll adapt.

The biggest portion of the new Facebook look and the available real-estate of the page is given over to photo’s. For those dealers who have uploaded every weekly ad they’ve ever run the net effect is their page is going to look like Sesame Street threw up. Every brightly colored “special” that was previously pushed down the page will now appear in all its gory...I mean “Glory”. If that was your strategy, congrats, you’ve just spent years creating an online advertising section, a brightly colored collage of offers that will show your true intent to all your followers and fans.

Of course if you’ve refrained from confusing Social Media with Digital Marketing, you’ll be fine.

                My point here is this: build a house not a trailer (I mean “mobile home” just to stay politically correct). With a house you own the lot and whatever you build on it. A mobile home may be nice, but you are always going to be beholden to the lot owner and you have limited say as to how they monetize their property. You’re just a tenant.

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

I’ve written 3 different blogs this week and every time I’ve come to post, something has happened that has made me stop and think that this is the topic I should write on, not just once, but on 3 successive days! So whatever the fates want, they apparently know manipulation.

1. Recently I purchased a new VW Golf T.D.I. I love it. It is a great vehicle and gets far better mileage than the Prius I traded in. This is especially true when you factor in that my wife will actually drive it as opposed to her absolute refusal to even ride in the “grandpa car” (Hey! Gold is a good color!). The point of this is I opened up a letter from the factory that thanked me for my purchase and …you ready?... found included a $5 Starbucks card in appreciation for my taking the time to fill out the survey regarding New Car quality I would soon receive. I got it the next day.
2. I received an e-mail from Cobalt proclaiming all the advancements they’ve made since becoming part of the ADP family and that I may soon receive a commissioned phone survey that would grade them and the results weighed when considering what direction to go next. Sure enough, I received a call and after ascertaining it was indeed the announced survey elected to participate in the 10-15 minute survey. My main reason for doing so was to express overall, if not satisfaction, at least appreciation for what Cobalt has done. (I still don’t believe in OEM mandated providers) I answered satisfied or somewhat satisfied to most questions with only the occasional negative. At the end of the survey I was asked which of Cobalt’s other services I would be interested in if they were to available to me at a special reduced cost for completing their survey.
3. I called Chase bank telephone banking to reset my pin. 58 minutes and 3 operators later I was still unsuccessful and very frustrated. The only reason I stayed on the line that long is I had elected to participate in their customer feedback survey and I was ready to voice my displeasure. The rep insisted she would not hang up unless I did first. Through a glitch caused by one of the two reps I was on the line with hanging up, the survey was triggered. The rep was still on the phone when I pressed 1 as “highly unsatisfied” with the results of my call. She actually screamed “No sir, don’t you know what that will do to my rating?”

In all 3 instances any feeling of gratitude that may have been fostered by the attempt of reaching out for my opinion or solve an issue on my behalf was dashed by the emphasis put on “the survey” and “the upsell.”

The car industry, Dealers, Vendors and OEM’s, are rife with examples of those seeking to look good rather than be good. I know of several Dealers that try to attach all categories of the Manufacturers survey to the salesman’s relationship with the customer and make it part of their pay. Worse yet we all know of instances were there are still a lot of survey’s being diverted or “launched”. I’ve heard of one salesperson that literally has a notebook full of created e-mails he, with the full knowledge and endorsement of the Dealers upper management, sent customers survey’s to. He no longer works for the same Dealer so I have no doubt that those same e-mails will be deployed again.

            The system is broken from both sides: Unrealistic expectations and metrics that a client base, no matter the industry or position, can and will begin to leverage to hold hostage providers. When ”supercalifragilsitic” is the only acceptable response, no opportunity for real improvement will occur.

Oh and please don’t use the “I just want to make sure your satisfied, now what else can I sell you or who can you refer?” line. It just demeans us both.

Bryan Armstrong

@bryancarguy

This may seem a bit odd, but I want to address FEAR. Most of us won’t acknowledge the word or the concept. After all we are in the Auto Industry, we fear nothing, right? HA!

I have seen fear: of the unknown, of changing market conditions, of new advertising methods and of embracing change. G.M.’s and Owners refusing to acknowledge that the consumers are often times more informed than even our sales staff and wallowing toward obscurity hoping things will “come back”. Unfortunately, just enough fresh traffic still comes in and an occasional high-gross deal is used to justify that somehow those antiquated tactics will still work.

“Fear is only as deep as the mind allows.” ~Japanese Proverb~

My wife’s Grandmother has had two dreams as long as I’ve known her:

1. To own a Red Ford Mustang convertible
2. To walk the beach in Hawaii

The only problem is she had a debilitating fear of flying. She started working on it 8 years ago: Watching realistic movies, reading books about how planes work, seeing a Doctor, a short flight or two to Denver to see her Sister… Each step small of its own accord, yet meshed into a plan with a firm goal in mind.

Last week, she sent me this picture of her first Maui Sunset:

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt~

We are less than a Month away from some of the largest Automotive Educational events in the Industry. I, like many, will be in Vegas for half of October. I look forward to Presenting two Sessions, Networking and Reviewing so many Vendors in one place at DD11 and the intense, cutting-edge learning opportunity DSES provides.

Luckily, in spite of whatever politics play amongst Conference Hosts, DrivingSales allows a truly open forum which includes not limiting its Dealer Editors from participating in other Events. ( I thank you Jared!)

I will be out of the Store and away from my Family and worried over both the entire time. Is it worth it? Will it pay off? Of course! When you invest in education, you invest in the future. Doesn’t it just make sense to ensure the future your securing is your own? If you don’t face the Fear of the unknown now, it won’t go away it’ll just get bigger as the gap widens and your lack of understanding increases.

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” ~Dale Carnegie~

Watch a webinar, read and ask questions on these Forums, hire a Consultant that you’ve vetted here on the Vendor reviews and conquer that which you don’t understand.

Conquer your Fear. Conquer yourself. Conquer your future.

Bryan Armstrong

bryanthecarguy@gmail.com

@bryancarguy