At the moment I'm on the plane returning to Salt Lake from Seattle. We spent the afternoon with some of the executives at Cobalt who are experts in search, email marketing and website utility. They lead up some impressive research that, in my opinion, is not known well enough in the industry. What really hit me (I had about 10 ah-ha moments today, this is just one of them) is the disconnect between our commitment to a sequential process in selling cars in person and our dedication to a sequential process to converting site visitors to leads. These processes are in fact, very parallel. These guys at Cobalt actually study log patterns of dealer site visitors and, among other things, dissect where the customers enter a site, what pages they visit, in what order, how long they stay and where they leave from. To most this might sound boring (personally for me it would be a blast) but regardless, think of the impact of this data! By studying it they find patterns to successful site conversions based on the demographic of that particular dealers store (brand, location, etc) IE: how do you convert a site visitor from simply surfing your site and leaving to go elsewhere, to actually taking a visitor and convincing them to seek assistance from your store in purchasing a vehicle. What they are proving is that just like you have a sequential process to convert a walk in to a buyer: 1 Meet and greet, 2. Needs analysis, 3. Product selection, etc"

How many vendors call you on an average day? Seriously, so much of my time is spent managing vendor relations! Now, I'm not complaining, for me that it's one of the best parts of my job. I love business strategy and each vendor (assuming we have signed with them) presents an opportunity to tweak our strategy for growth. Plus I'm somewhat of a people person and I enjoy learning from and networking with different people. (Further evidenced by this siteJ ) Anyhow, if it is not kept under control the constant barrage of daily sales calls can be overwhelming and sometimes outright paralyzing. It's strange to think that 10 years ago"

Maybe its just me, but the autotrader.com model is frustrating. In my little opinion it's antiquated for the segment and they could provide WAY more value to us dealers. I had a long talk with my rep the other day and on a side note he is a good guy, but his proposition frustrated

me. Essentially, he wants me to upgrade to their fancy "gee wiz" top of the line program and literally increase my spend over 400%! (we sell just shy of 100 used cars a month so while we are not huge... we aren't small either.) What would I get for tripling my spend? More exposure, nothing quantifiable just more exposure for our store. Now, I get that exposure can lead to car sales, but to me used car classified is about getting my phone to ring and email inbox to be flooded because consumers want "that particualr car." Their site isn't about branding "Ford" (at least not for me, that's the manufacturers job), their site isn't about touting my dealership or building my brand (I'm a one price store, I'd LOVE to have some solid online exposure to our one price philosophy). Their site is about advertising my specific cars to get the phone to ring. To me the autotrader argument is the same that the newspapers have been touting for decades... to that my response is the old saying, "half my advertising works brilliantly, half is worthless... now if I could only figure out which half was which." We are stuck in the old non trackable, guess on your ROI marketing programs. I dont understand why autotrader is so afraid of a pay for performance model?? UsedCars.com has a great model, the same one that Autobytel is now doing with thier used program. Essentially you can list your entire inventory for free, and you pay only if they send you a lead (via phone or email). To me there is so much risk in that... Of course Autotrader has the market cornered, for now. Eventually that will turn, they were just quick to capatilize on their incredibly strong name that they had branded very well through their paper publications. Hmm... The tides will turn one day for autotrader and I guess then it won't be so hard for me to say no to the bump in "exposure". Either I will be stoked to have a better model from them or their traffic will be slipping as they lose the share to others... I'll worry about that when we get there, until then, I think my budget is better spent elsewhere. Besides last summer when the bump was only 200% more (not the 400% that it is today) I was on the program and tracked everything: the result? Nothing except higher expenses.

Ok this is a good one. We have a sales person who is new to our store but does a really good job with his guests. He has been in the business a couple years, has a good personality and is completely honest. He had been working with a customer and couldn't close the deal. The customer's credit was less than perfect yet the guest was still quite rate sensitive. Like a good sales person should, he turned to the deal to his sales manager. The sales manager worked and worked with the guest, who they were genuinely taking care of. In fact the sales manager went ahead and got the deal approved at a much lower rate than what the guest was hoping for. Still, no luck in closing the deal, the customer was adamant about leaving and promised to come back the next day. (We all know that means they still want to shop the deal).

I don't know about you, but for me finding good people, especially for sales, can be an incredibly daunting task. Not withstanding our own shortcomings as an industry (I'll discuss that in another posting) the recruiting landscape has shifted under our feet and it's difficult to keep up with trends. Here is why I believe we are recruiting on an obsolete model:

Traditionally newspaper classifieds would attract a good amount of quality applicants. However, we all know newspaper readership is on a steady decline. In the 18-35 year old segment, less than 25% of the population read the paper daily. National job boards are supposedly the "newspaper classifieds replacement". I haven't had much luck with monster.com or careerbuilder.com, so I did some homework. Thanks to Google I learned that Monster and CareerBuilder.com have an overall success rate of less than 5%! Wow, no wonder my ads don't get big responses there either. I found it interesting that Monster boasts 4.4 million visitors per month (when advertising to employers) and when they advertise to job seekers they tout their 880,000 jobs posted per month. This breaks down to about 5 visitors per job. Not enough traffic to really provide a good applicant pool, not to mention that their traffic is not automotive specific. How about the niche boards? A recent study showed that over 70% of corporate recruiters preferred niche sites over the national job boards; they should be a good resource. They are better, but not there yet. I believe it is because they haven't reached a critical mass. The niche boards in our industry are still in their infancy. Autojobs seems the busiest but it is spread out over the whole country with poor search capabilities and a lack of local choices dilutes. Most of their jobs are vendor jobs, not dealer jobs.

AutomotiveHelpWanted.com ranks good, their traffic is good, and search capabilities are better, but it only allows jobs to be posted in CA. (Great if you are in CA, but not there for the rest of us yet.) Personally, I'm not much a fan of the train to hire models, it just seems they are lacking in a few areas. Like the niche boards with just a little twist here and push there, this model really could work

I watched a video of a speech given by Peter Drucker, the father of modern management. I'm disappointed that I was never able to make it to Stanford University and listen to him speak in person while he was still alive. He is no doubt one of the most influential business minds in history. He made a comment almost in passing and for some reason it has really stuck with me, perhaps because it was off topic a bit and to be honest, I didn't really understand it when he first mentioned it. What he said was,"A leader's job is to learn to say no. A good leader learns to say no gracefully." After thinking about it a bunch, here is what I've come up with:

A leader's most important asset to manage is his people, so proper motivation is key. There are many ways to motivate and the best forms of motivation usually take time because they involve building commitment, respect, and belief from your team. These things don't usually happen in an instant. De-motivation is simpler: a quick insult, a harsh reprimand or a rash decision without feedback; killing the moral of the team can happen in a split second. Proper motivation and you will be successful, no motivation and your team will die. Think of the last time a team mate came to you with a great idea that you were excited for, most likely is was not difficult to praise the idea, get behind it and as a result your genuine passion came out and you team member was motivated and likely better results were achieved. Think of when someone comes to you as the leader with an issue or idea that won't work, if you dont control you response, your tone or even the disappointment in your eyes you could send the de-motivating signals to your team member. If they are let down then motivation, energy and passion is diminished and you are left with a less committed employee. There are obvious times when a leader must make corrections, after all, that's why we lead. A leader's job is to say no and good leaders learn to say "no" gracefully. Historically, this is a lesson we in the car business have missed. How many of us have been in a sales meeting where the team was told how lousy they we were? It happens at stores all the time! It's demoralizing, and unfortunatly the biggest influences on our leadership style is our managers. The good news is for those who learn to say no gracefully, the auto industry has some huge rewards waiting...

Don't fall for this trap

 A vendor sales person came into the dealership the other day and used a sales approach I have heard so many times, and unfortunately, I have seen so many capable managers fall for it. For arguments sake, let's say he was selling an advertising program. The offer was something like this: "For our complete super-duper month long advertising program your cost is only $8,000! Most of our clients sell 20 to 30 cars from it and gross about $60,000. Besides there is little to no risk, you at least gross 2,000 per car, right?

Poker IF your sales team is into playing poker this spiff can be a blast. All you will need is a few decks of cards and some creativity. On a Saturday morning announce the game of poker and let everyone know what is at stake"

Dice Rolls

Dice Rolls always make for fun spiffs and the variations are endless. Be creative and keep your team motivated. The most popular that I have seen are:

The sales consultant rolls his 2 dice, the sales manager rolls his two dice and the sum total of the roll is paid to the sales consultants. This variation can grow with double rolls, triple rolls etc. Another fun one is to multiply the first die roll with the number on the second. My personal favorite is to multiply the number rolled by the number of cars sold so far that month for the sales consultant. For example if the sales consultant rolls a 9 but they have sold 4 cars they would get $36, if it was their 7^th deal they would earn $63. This way they get more money with each sale"

O-RammaAn O-Ramma can be just about anything, and no matter what you choose to do as you O-ramma, it will be an absolute HOOT.

Some of my favorite O-Ramma's are: Dart O-Ramma, Putt O-Ramma, Horse shoe O-Ramma (yes we put a horseshoe pit at the dealership) and we even did a Basketball O-Ramma. (Although there is most likely a big disparity in ability to play basketball among your sales team, so this one may not be too fair.)

Basically an O-Ramma is you setting targets for cars sold, write-ups, or whatever and they earn throws of the darts, tosses of the horse shoes or whatever. The winner of the actual game gets the dough $$. (or it is passed out according to a % to first, % to second % to third and so forth.) The unique plus to an O-Ramma is that it will get your team interacting in somewhat of a social setting. They can have a good time after sales meeting or late one day after work.