At Nada 2020 Kate Colacelli, Senior Director of Marketing at Dealer FX, told us how to manage every step of your service process and how personalized marketing will help you capture service customers by developing trust. If a customer declines specific services you can then market the same service to them for their next time appointment. Creating an option for your customers to text and email to schedule and check-in into service will make it easier for the customer to choose you over competitors. Consolidating different service touchpoints into one tool will help you streamline processes and keep your service department busy.

DrivingSales sat down with three automotive executives to have a roundtable discussion about how dealers are selling cars during social distancing. 

With the coronavirus impacting or halting, the normal dealership operations, dealers have had to think fast and prepare themselves to be as virtual as possible immediately.  During this discussion, dealers asked questions on how others were being impacted and were met with responses of how to approach operations and procedures for the current situation.

In the discussion, there were some common themes.

• - How to meet the challenges from shelter in place requirements. Dealers shared examples of how they were selling and servicing vehicles e without breaking any social distancing requirements.

• - The importance of building relationships of trust and value with customers. The discussion focused on how helping customers in any way shows how much you care.

• - Why dealers need to change their website to inform your customers how you are handling sales and service. This discussion centered around leveraging the dealership website to communicate. One idea was to make sure your service page was updated with how you are handling different service appointments. 

• COVID-19 has drastically changed the way dealers operate in a very short amount of time. Now more than ever dealers need to band together to keep automotive employees and customers happy.
  
  Stay tuned for more posts talking about specific takeaways from the roundtable.

We spoke with Alexi Venneri, CEO and Founder of Digital Air Strike, at NADA 2020 about how automating steps for the dealership can be overwhelming with all of the products you have in place. Centralizing the experience by automating digital processes will create a better satisfaction score for your employees and for your customers. Creating efficiency by automating steps will decrease time spent on the system giving you more time and less overhead.

At NADA 2020 we sat down with Owen Moon, CEO & Cofounder of Fixed Ops Digital, to talk about what you can do to improve your service department. Recalls are a great way to keep your service drive busy. If customers are aware of a recall and they do their own searching online then you might lose a sale. Make sure that marketing recalls is something you are doing or you will lose service visits to competitors. Having services done at the dealership is the best way to build your brand and provide value to your customers. With cars becoming more technologically advanced it is your job to market to customers the value of your store. Third parties are less likely to have the training required for newer vehicles. When someone has a service problem they want it fixed immediately. Learn how you can be there to help by watching the video. 

Every sport has weekly Power Rankings so fans know who is currently the best in the league. They are also a great way for people to know who is improving and who isn’t. DrivingSales is bringing you Power Rankings in the form of quarterly updates. See what the most essential tools for your dealership are and stay ahead of the competition.

How It’s Calculated - 

Each product category is ranked in real-time. As new ratings come in they are ranked based upon the number of reviews, star ranking, percent recommended, as well as the sample size, to create a statistically accurate result. The rankings use an equation that takes into account the frequency, volume, timeliness, and star rating of every review. For example, if a product has great reviews, but hasn’t had a review in the last couple of weeks it will impact its ranking. This incentivizes vendors to get reviews from their customers. After all, people will willingly leave bad reviews but need to be pushed to leave good ones.

We have a team that verifies each review, so if a vendor is reviewing their own product it will be removed. We personally call every review, after doing research to ensure that they are indeed a real person at a real dealership. 

Without further adieu, here are the Power Rankings for the Vendor Ratings Categories for Q4 - 2019

2019 Q4 Power Rankings

Inventory Merchandising

Properly managing inventory will help you save time and money. Elead Inventory took the top spot. One salesperson said it: "makes my job easier." Another said: "the inventory system works so perfectly so we can search without going to our website."

Owner Marketing

Owner marketing is the best way to keep customers. These tools make it easy for you to determine who is about to buy a new vehicle. Elead currently owns the top two spots. Salespeople have said that it allows them to "target specific customers" and that it is "easy to understand and use."

Used Car Advertising

What would you do without used car advertising? These tools make it so easy to add inventory for customers to see.

CarGurus was rated the best with one owner saying that they: "Make a lot of sales through them. Leads are predictable and reliable."

Websites

Your website is the first thing that most of your customers see. These are the best automotive website vendors for Q4 2019. Dealer Car Search took home the top spot for with one GM saying: "Great customer support, fast setup; nice product and professional."

We spoke with the President and CEO of Tire Profiles, Dave Boyle to see why dealers have struggled in the tire market for decades. Selling tires can add a big boost to your business. Tires are not a loss leader. They provide value to your store making you a one-stop-shop. No matter what customers are going to shop pricing, if you can offer them pricing that is competitive they are more likely to purchase tires through you. Properly pricing tires will help you remain competitive and maximize your margins. Explaining to the customer the value of tires through your store can take time. They likely just see the price. Simplify the process for the consumer and show them one or two options for their current situation. Explain the difference between the options. Act like you are explaining this to your mom and inform your customer on the tire that will give them the best value.

Online shopping has changed the way consumers behave. With the rise of sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, consumers now expect the same effortless experience at your dealership. 

Convenience now tops the list of consumer expectations and businesses that aren’t catering to these expectations will be passed over for those that do.

In this webinar, we will discuss how your dealership can compete in today’s convenience economy and meet the expectations that consumers now have.

Webinar Takeaways:
Best practices for your web presence
How to establish a convenient customer experience
Which communication channels your business needs to be using

The younger is no different than the generation prior to it. Everybody wants to be seen, heard, and understood. But the time and the world that the younger generation has grown up in has changed. There is not a strategy or a quick hack to get the younger generation to work well. When you treat them as people, and not a generation, then they will respond and work hard for you, just like the generations before them. 

At NADA 2020 we sat down with the VP of Sales for Naked Lime, Josh Allen to see how we can improve our marketing. Traditional media is expensive. Advertising online is just a fraction of that cost and is much easier to track. Analyzing your data and putting together a strategy is the best way for you to have a successful marketing campaign. Determining which neighborhoods you are marketing in will be beneficial to growing your sales. You shouldn’t be running the same campaign and sending it out to the same zip codes. Send different ads to different areas to determine what works best for each zip code. 

We sat down with Anthony Greenhalgh, Rapid Recon's Director of Group Performance, at NADA 2020 to talk about refining processes. Getting rid of unnecessary steps in a process will allow the organization to operate at its full potential. Sometimes that might be literal steps in the dealership. If you can help people stay close to their working area each day you will help them be productive. Another great way to clean up a process is by focusing on load balancing. Load balancing distributes a workload across multiple resources allowing for a team to work to their full potential.