Hearing about Klout.com? Is it showing up in your Twitter feeds, Facebook news feed, on Google+?

Klout is becoming bigger and bigger for those who want to know where they stand with their Social Media reach & influence.

So, what exactly is Klout? 

The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

• True Reach: How many people you influence
• Amplification: How much you influence them
• Network Impact: The influence of your network

Basically your Klout score is a rough indication of how successful you have been in getting people to respond to and share your content online in the past 90 days and especially the last 30. In the past 18 months my score has increased from 47 to fluctuating between 69 and 71. An average score on Klout is 20 but if one follows the following list their Klout score shall rise quickly. But keep in mind the higher your Klout score goes the harder it is to keep making it rise, i.e.: Its easier to go from 20 to 30 than 40 to 50, and easier to go from 40 to 50 than 60 to 70.

1. Create content that will get a response. Don't always talk about yourself. Ask questions. Seek advise. Get people to comment on your personal Facebook posts and retweet your tweets. Share PopCulture and industry news. Try to share breaking news as quick as you can. (scheduling content works better for me. I use HootSuite to schedule 80% of my stuff on Twitter and Facebook)
2. Reply in some way to everyone who engages you publicly. Hopefully within 24 hours but at least within the week. Promote the people who reach out to you.
3. Share liberally and give credit to the creator and curator of the content that you share. Part of sharing is following, friending and circling back. Put yourself in the mind and position of the other person. 
4. Create at least some kind of content in automotive and publish it every day.This will brand you as an expert in automotive software & marketing. The sharing that you do will result in even more sharing of your stuff. Make sure you share each others content in sales.
5. If someone compliments you or endorses you then allow and accept it. Promote it!
6. Be 100% positive. Always. If possible be fun too. People go online to be inspired and entertained. Not depressed and bored.
7. Thank your followers weekly. Create #FF (follow fridays on twitter), retweet your followers, +1 all your Google+ friends' posts, Like and comment on your Facebook friends.
8. Be around at least a bit everyday. People will engage and share the content of those who they know will see that being done and people who they think will respond. 15 minutes a day is better than 10 hours on just one day a week

Klout.com can be used to track businesses too. 

Social Media Marketing Manager

@LittleJoeAtVin

VinSolutions.com

Office: 800.980.7488 X199

PRLog (Press Release) - Apr 30, 2012 - 
VinSolutions, an industry-leading developer of automotive Internet-based Customer Relations Management (CRM) and Internet Lead Management (ILM) software, is excited to announce its company-wide charity initiative, “VinGives”, allowing employees the opportunity to contribute to their favorite non-profit organization. 

Through VinGives, employees at VinSolutions may apply to receive monetary support and recognition for their participation in community service.  Each month, an executive committee will review applications received through their website and make unanimous decisions, track progress and trends, make notifications and evolve the program accordingly.     

"Philanthropy has not only become our corporate responsibility, as one of the fastest growing and successful companies in the nation, but an important part of making a positive impact in the lives of our most valued asset – our people,” said Keith Polsinelli, Chief Operating Officer of VinSolutions.  “VinGives is an extension of our “Be One with VIN” motto and continues to foster the kind of culture that encourages job and personal innovation through teamwork and balance."  

Community Outreach is a core value that VinSolutions is eager to adopt in hopes that employees begin to get involved and volunteer throughout the year.  Find out more about VinGives here:http://www.vingives.com

About VinSolutions (http://www.vinsolutions.com)

VinSolutions, headquartered in Overland Park, KS, consolidates data from all areas of an automotive dealership helping dealers to find, sell and keep customers more profitably with their fully-integrated “Dealership Marketing System.” VinSolutions’ all-in-one internal management and external sales and service marketing solution platform includes  search marketing, online advertising, social media marketing tools, mobile marketing, websites, ILM (Internet Lead Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), sales force automation, desking, appraisal, finance, used vehicle marketing and market pricing, inventory management and distribution, window stickers, automated video tours, loyalty management and targeted marketing with email, text, direct mail and telemarketing services. This cloud-based system is available for large dealer groups and individual dealerships from anywhere an Internet connection is available and can be viewed from any smartphone including BlackBerry, Google DROID and iPhone.  VinSolutions’ Dealership Marketing System is installed by their implementation experts and supported by best practice retail strategy consultation, process training and customer care.

VinSolutions was named on the Inc. 500|5000 in 2010 and 2011 and has received many industry accolades including the Automotive Website Award for Best Integrated Website Platform and the Driving Sales Innovation Cup for VinLens™. VinSolutions is certified by GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Hyundai, Acura, Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Kia, Saab, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Jaguar Land Rover North America and Nissan and is ADP, Reynolds & Reynolds and DealerTrack DMS certified. Other alliances include, but are not limited to, Kelley Blue Book, Black Book, Galves, NADA, CARFAX, R.L. Polk, AIS Rebates, KnowMe, AutoSoft, Arkona, Autodata and RouteOne. Founded in 2006, VinSolutions became a subsidiary of AutoTrader.com in 2011.

http://bit.ly/VinGives

Toyota Marin’s Numbers Tell an Impressive Story:

• Toyota Marin is among the top dealers nationwide in Internet new and used car sales, with 1,710 Internet sales units in 2010 and close to that number for 2011.
• The dealership ranks 10^th in the region for new car sales. That’s up from 41^st in the region when the Price-Simms Group acquired the store in 2004.
• Toyota Marin is 145% sales efficient – selling almost 1.5 Toyotas to every Toyota registered in its primary market area, as defined by Toyota.
• Toyota Marin’s fixed operations are up 21% year over year.
• 2011 was Toyota Marin’s fourth consecutive year winning Toyota’s President’s Award.

An open mind, an aggressive sales strategy, and ongoing critical evaluation of the performance of its digital technology vendors are keeping Toyota Marin among the top dealerships nationwide in Internet sales.

And, the dealership has just completed remodeling to Toyota Image USA II standards a Scion facility that will be its new direct sales building.  That is expected to more than double the dealership’s capacity for new car sales and for the direct sales department in 2012. 

Toyota Marin’s General Manager Mike Christian and General Sales Manager Jay Brownrigg recently shared with Digital Dealer magazine the secrets to the success of this remarkable dealership.

Click here to read Mike and Jay’s full story and the rest of the March 2012 Digital Dealer magazine.

First of all, Mike, how did you get into the car business?

Mike: In 1985, I was 16 years old, my mother was in the business and I was hired to sell cars on weekends and after school at Ricart Ford, in Columbus, OH. I fell in love with the business and worked my way through high school and college and never looked back.

I worked at a few different dealerships. Then, I moved to California and went to work for the current owner of this dealership, Tom Price in 1998. He had a group called First American Automotive. In the early 2000s, he sold out to Sonic and I stayed with Sonic. Then in 2004, Tom Price bought Toyota Marin and in March of 2007, I came back to work for him here.

Jay, how did you start in the business?

Jay: I started in the business in 2001 after I got off of active duty in the U.S. Air Force. I responded to an ad in a local newspaper and was hired by County Ford and worked there for five years. Then I was recalled to active duty to serve in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I was done with my tours of duty, my wife and I moved to California and in 2010, I applied to Toyota Marin and I was hired as a sales manager. I’ve since progressed to general sales manager and I manage our Internet sales.

Tell us about the company culture that fosters so much success at Toyota Marin.

Mike: The dealership group we are part of – Price-Simms – is unique. We are very open-minded and generous. We are constantly looking at other dealers and vendors in order to help improve our own operations. We also bring dealers in from outside the organization and share information with them. We all stay actively involved with what’s happening within our industry. For example I am on the dealer advisory board of AutoTrader.com and others sit on boards like ResponseLogix.

We’re embracing a lot of things that many dealers are resistant to — such as the intangible results from a blog or from postings on Facebook. Some dealers may feel: Why waste the time on it? We’re trying to be more forward thinking than that. We’re constantly looking to evolve.

We pride ourselves on our ease of doing business, and whether it’s for our sales people or the consumer, we like transparency. We have transparency at our sales meetings; we will talk about aspects of our financial statement or why and how things may operate. We have transparency with the consumer. We pre-discount all of our cars. We quote prices, terms, rates, and availability questions right up front.

We’re completely negotiation free on pre-owned. We sell 165 pre-owned cars a month and our goal this year is to expand that to 250 and it’s based upon a totally upfront, straightforward and transparent sales process.

From a new car standpoint, a couple of times a month we’ll shop and determine what price cars are transacting at by model. We use Toyota’s reports as well as outside sources like; Edmunds.com, Zag and other third-party providers. Once we feel we have an accurate picture of the transaction price we simply price the cars there right out of the gate.

It just makes good business sense. The least amount of control I have is over my new car margin. So, I want to spend the least amount of time trying to manage that aspect of my business. Our transparency in pricing makes it easier for everyone (consumer and salesperson alike) to do business, after determining what price the car is transacting at, we just put it at that price and go.

When the tsunami hit last year and supply diminished, obviously the cars were transacting at a higher price and we made a little more margin during that time. But, at the same time, we remained committed to our value pricing, and so we kept discounting when other dealers simply saw an opportunity to gouge a consumer.

How about pricing on the pre-owned side?

Mike: It’s really the same thing on the pre-owned side. We just tell ourselves the truth every day. When we take a car in, we price it right at the market price, right out of the gate. That allows us to turn our inventory two times a month. We are selling 165 used cars a month on a lot where we never can carry more than 85 on the front line at any given time.

This past year, 2011, we sold a little over 1800 used cars and sold just about 1700 new cars.

What percentage of those sales were Internet sales?

Jay: Strictly speaking, about 44% of our sales are Internet, based upon our direct sales department numbers. We get about 1,200 to 1,300 Internet sales leads per month and our closing ratio for these Internet leads is about 12%.

Unlike many other dealerships, we don’t count phone leads as Internet leads. They are an entirely separate channel, and we track them a little differently. Most of the phone leads go to the direct sales department, but a retail floor person can take the training for our own certification program and they can handle phone leads as well.

We get between 700 and 800 phone leads a month and we generally close around 10% of our phone leads.

Many dealerships do count phone leads as Internet leads. Often the store’s number that the customer is calling is only available from the dealership’s website.

Mike: In a broad sense, we actually attribute 95% of our sales to the Internet, because all customers are touched by it — even the ones who walk in with no mention of any prior Internet queries.

And that’s why most of our advertising is focused online.

Do you do any traditional advertising?

Mike: We spend about $5,000 per month advertising with Comcast in our local market, for fixed operations and sales. Our total dealership’s ad spend is around $100,000 a month.

The other $95,000 a month is spent in online ads or services such as: SEO, SEM, and third-party lead aggregators – we spend a decent amount with AutoTrader.com – and our email follow-up company.

Our e-mail follow-up leverages analytics to send targeted multi-channel communications to our customers on the fixed operations side. That, along with our superior customer service, and the fact that people are keeping and servicing their cars longer in this economy, is why Toyota Marin’s fixed operations are growing at 21% year over year.

We can also give some credit here to Xtime, which we use to schedule service appointments. Xtime is doing a very good job for us. We upgraded Xtime to become a premium dealer so our customers can do bill pay online. We’re moving towards being more transactional on our web site.

How do you manage your website and drive traffic to it?

Mike: Dealer.com hosts our website and our mobile website and does a great job with both. Our inventory lead management system is VinSolutions, which works very well for us. We do our own specials, and we also have an ad agent, ThinkOut, that specializes in online marketing and sales and helps us manage our ads, SEO and SEM as well as our web content.

ThinkOut is headed by Beth VanStory and she is phenomenal. When we brought her onboard, she tripled the number of leads that came in for sales and also for fixed operations. She does an amazing job for us.

What percentage of your leads does your own website generate?

Mike: Our web site generates 50% of our Internet leads. The other 50% comes from our third-party lead providers – mostly from AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, and Zag.

We’re constantly scrutinizing our third-party lead providers and their territories. We’re constantly redefining our territories and evaluating providers by quality and close ratio.

Throughout the year, we periodically change our third-party lead providers. If they are performing well for a period of time, we stay with them, and if they are not, we cut them off.

There’s been several that we shut off during the past year and now we’re back with them. We’re very aggressive from the standpoint that we’re always looking to get bigger and grow our operation, but we certainly want to work with quality and not waste our sales persons’ time. If we don’t feel the leads are performing – say a conversion rate drops down to 4% – we’ll take a hard look at that lead source.

Rather than just shut it off immediately, we’ll concentrate on the leads we get from that source and work a little harder on them, to see if it’s us or the quality of the lead. If we work that source’s leads for another 30 or 45 days and we can’t improve the conversion ratio, then that provider is gone.

How do you process your Internet sales leads?

Jay: We look at everything as its own individual channel. We treat an Internet lead or a phone lead with the same level of intense follow-up as most stores treat a walk-in consumer.

Most dealerships focus on walk-in traffic and they can count how many ups, demos, write ups, etc., and they handle walk-in follow-ups more aggressively than their Internet leads. We handle all our leads aggressively.

We have 26 salespeople altogether. Twelve of them handle Internet leads and 12 handle phone leads. We don’t have a BDC.

Everything channels into our CRM no matter what type of lead it is and every lead has its own type of work plan – whether its phone follow-up, or email or mail follow-up. It’s all dictated by which channel the lead came from.

What is your normal response time to an Internet lead?

Jay: We use ResponseLogix and it performs very well for us. Our immediate response to an Internet lead is a custom-tailored price quote sent out by ResponseLogix within 10 minutes. That frees our sales person to pick up the phone and call the customer while that customer is still at the computer. Our personal response time is within half an hour.

Our follow-up time for both Internet and phone leads is 75 days. We have one required follow-up call on a phone up and then we traditionally will have one of the sales managers call on that lead as part of customer relations. That call is to see if the first call was handled properly.

Then we use services like Who’s Calling, a call capture service, which allows us to track whether the prospect makes an appointment or not. So our managers can react quickly on the phone leads, if the phone call did not go in the manner that we want.

What do you use for CRM?

Mike: We are actually thinking of changing our CRM this year. We are shopping and keeping an open mind to anything out there. As the technology changes, we’re constantly looking to improve communications with consumers and make things a little easier for our sales people to do business. There are some great new advances in CRM technology that we are looking to take advantage of this year.

What specific advances or features are you looking for?

Mike: Everybody’s CRMs are good at trading, workflow and a sales person’s to-do list. The lead comes into the CRM and it quotes a price, or not, depending on your business model. Then, all the CRMs offer a set of templates for emails that go out to the prospect and, of course, all CRMs offer the sales person’s phone action plan and to-do list to coincide with all that.

We are looking for a CRM that does all that, but will also help us improve our leads to sales ratio. To do that you have to fine tune communications with the consumer.

We’re seeing different consumer behavior in today’s market. The old buying funnel is disappearing. It used to be that a consumer would start by looking at five different cars four months out, and as they got close to transactional time, they would be considering two cars – like a Toyota Camry and a Honda Accord. Today, we’re seeing the consumer typically start with two cars and eventually go to three or four when it comes down to transaction time.

So, our goal this year is to make sure that we are speaking to the consumer about what’s relevant to them when it’s relevant. Companies like Dataium can watch and track what each consumer’s behavior is and help us tailor our message to each customer and deliver it when the consumer is most receptive.

For example, let’s suppose a consumer sees that we have a really cool used car, a Toyota Supra on our home page, and submits a query, which becomes our Internet lead. Meanwhile that same consumer goes on to look at five Toyota Tundras in our inventory. If we are able to track that online behavior, we know we need to be communicating to that consumer about a Tundra, not a Toyota Supra, because based on their behavior, the Tundra is what they are really interested in buying.

It’s about using all the information that’s available about consumers online and being able to educate our sales force and improve communications, so we can talk to our customers about relevant information in a timely fashion and help drive more customers through our door.

How do you keep up on technology?

Mike: We read Dealer magazine. We go to the Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition. We are part of the Price-Simms organization, so we get together as a group twice a year and invite several vendors and listen to their presentations. We are receptive. We try to be very open-minded. We’ll look at things. We are always trying to deal with vendors that are best in class and we’re always trying to figure out what is the latest, greatest development.

How do you handle social media?

Jay: We use Digital Air Strike for social media. We are extremely pleased with the approach they take.

One of the reasons we chose Digital Air Strike is that they offer more of an agency, hands-on approach, rather than provide some automated solution. They handle Facebook and Twitter for us – posting links on those sites to wherever consumers have put reviews about us online.

Mike: Digital Air Strike is much more proactive than we have the time to be. We have a lot of things to do during the day. Sitting down and writing and posting things on Facebook, and Twitter are not top of mind for most dealers. But, I think social media is an important and growing segment.

That’s why we write our own blogs for our website. Each department head is supposed to write one blog per month. Beth VanStory and I just post them. We are constantly reminding the managers to make sure they get their blog in and I can’t say we’re successful every month, but I think we do a better job than most.

Specifically, how do you handle online reputation management?

Jay: Digital Air Strike helps us with online reputation management and we get a lot of traction with the online reviews. We personally answer all the reviews that require an answer.

We are on DealerRater.com with an average rating of 4.9, with 23 reviews. We’re constantly looking to drive up reviews. Whenever a customer reaches out to us to tell us about their experiences here, we respond with a templated e-mail that has the hyperlinks to the big review sites. When we want to push to get more reviews on DealerRater, we put its link first and foremost on the email. Google Places is probably the next initiative we need to take to get more reviews.

What is your biggest challenge?

Mike: We have several: Margin compression – that’s a problem for everyone in the industry; maintaining quality personnel and being able to grow people; and keeping on top of all the technology we use – between the CRM and the products – and having 22 different model lines.

As for maintaining a quality staff, Price-Simms is an upwardly mobile and growing organization that’s launched several new dealerships all in the San Francisco Bay Area this year: Ford of Fairfield, Mercedes Fairfield, Fisker and McLaren for all of Northern California.

That’s good for us, because it allows us to recruit more and keeps people on a career path. At the same time, it’s a challenge, because there’s constant evolution. It never stops, so we are always training.

What is your vision for the future?

Mike: Right now we have 120 employees at Toyota Marin and we’re selling over 3,600 cars per year. We’ve recently expanded and opened up a used car facility across the street to increase our used car capacity.

Our vision for the future is to constantly grow our organization and improve our CSI. We want to be number one in CSI, sell 250 used cars per month, be in the top five in the region for new car sales rankings, and top five for certified pre-owned sales. We are always looking to get bigger, including our fixed ops side. We’re constantly driving our sales volume up to increase our units in operation and our used car volume to drive our reconditioning which in turn fuels our fixed operations. We are always looking to improve, refine and grow along this trajectory.

Link to Article

Most dealership fan pages on Facebook are a lot like really bad first dates, they won’t stop talking about themselves.  The words “I” and “we” tend to be the most used words when dealerships post to Facebook.  Check your last 10 posts or your last 10 tweets. Are they all about you? Are they all about your vehicles, services or whatever you are pushing?  How many are about your dealership versus those that are about engaging your fans? The truth is that your customers don’t really care about those things. They care about themselves.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously said, “ The Medium is the Message”. He was referring to how the advent of different media itself has had profound impacts on culture, business and society at large.  Back in McLuhan’s time, marketing messaging was more difficult.   Buying media was expensive and kind of a big deal. You had to make the most of it. 

But the web age has changed the medium and therefore the message. 

Unlike TV, radio or print, the web now allows us to communicate endlessly for very little cost. Yet we are constantly amazed at how many dealerships still treat their Facebook fan page as a precious brochure, radio pitch or tv commercial! It’s not.  Connect with them like it’s a cocktail party, not a speech. 

Back in McCluhan’s day, if you wanted to learn about products and services you had to suffer through sales pitches and advertising.  It was the media’s world and you were just living in it. You had no choice. 

Now customers do. 

In a world of instant information and limitless choice, customers have the freedom to quickly explore a hundred different options before making one.  Now the relationship is more like a cocktail party. And just like in a cocktail party, don’t talk about yourself too much. Its boring and you loss those valuable “likes” to spent time and money on to collect.

So if you’re going to use Facebook to sell something, don’t talk about yourself, you won’t get a second date.

Joe Little

VinSolutions' Social Media Marketing Manager

@LittleJoeAtVin

Orchestration is a fine science that builds the art of a symphonic performance. It’s the composer’s understanding of blending or contrasting the various voices of the instruments of the orchestra that bring the written notes on a sheet of music to our ears. Often what we hear moves our emotions and evokes strong feelings, memories and sometimes passion.

Marketing Orchestration, in similar fashion, can evoke profound consumer response through the combination of the inherent strengths of a number of marketing media moving in simultaneous harmony and timing. This has the effect of producing profound profits for the marketer who knows how to orchestrate these multiple consumer touch-points into a meaningful experience for each individual communicated with. This effect is even better when that’s a profitable experience for both parties.

The futurist and writer Alvin Toffler wrote over two decades ago in his book, PowerShift, that… “Today the customer pays twice: once with money and the second with information that is worth money.” That is the proper perspective for the smart marketer who practices the art and science of marketing orchestration.

American automobile dealers are businessmen and women in a highly competitive and capital-intensive arena. For some, with a reasonable marketing budget and marketing acumen, this coordination of communication channels is a must. Others who lack vision, boldness, optimism and a willingness to consider change in the way they locate and harvest prospect and customer opportunities, may have their years numbered.

There is beauty in boldness and acting on developing smart marketing approaches to sell our dealerships that weren’t needed when ‘things were fat and easy.’ Gone are the days of event sponsorships because they ‘feel right,’ in-dealership radio broadcasts, and loud TV spots with lots of reverb. The precious handful of active automotive shoppers, at any one time, now has more sources of information and options than dealers can afford to counter. So don’t try. Keep your marketing allocation on the table and use coordinated marketing channels to reinforce a singular campaign thrust to strategically-targeted audiences. 

Seek and Find

Smart marketing leadership by the automobile dealers who have not only survived the past few years, but have advanced their position against their competition - reveals that they have built integrated campaigns that utilize all or the combination of direct mail, email, mobile, websites, smart landing pages SEO and social media to advance in the marketplace. Multi-channel, focused messaging, driven by performance metrics has proven to receive a warm and fast response by active shoppers. Active shoppers - who because of lease expirations, accidents, mechanical failures, changes within the family, life stage, or lifestyle, Need a new—or new to them, car—or service or body  repair.

Next, in two weeks, we’ll explore the marketing communications tools at our disposal and how to deploy them in an effective, coordinated manner.

VinSolutions, a leading provider of automotive dealership software, is growing its Sales Team and needs a Territory Manager for the Western region of the United States. This is a great opportunity to put your sales and communication skills to work. Daily, you will be prospecting for new business and helping close sales with dealerships. Previous sales experience to automotive dealerships is highly desired or experience in the automotive industry is a plus. As the Western Territory Manager for VinSolutions, you will report to the western regional director and the Vice President of Sales. Your territory would be California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Alaska and Hawaii. For more information and to set up an interview, please email don.favero@vinsolutions.com

We have a saying at VinSolutions “Bad data in, bad data out”, meaning even with all of the technology we have today, if your customer information is incomplete it is not worth keeping. One of the biggest challenges we have in setting up new accounts in Implementation is getting good data from another CRM/ILM. Every CRM/ILM has their own formats of exporting data and let’s face it; they are reluctant to give you the data you need, since you are leaving them for a competitor. Here are some tips on how to ensure you getting the most out of your data before exporting.

First, when you know you are getting ready to switch CRM/ILM companies, spend some time going through your unsold customer data; don’t assume the data is perfect. Look for customers that are missing pertinent information like phone numbers, email addresses, home address, etc, it is great to have a bunch of customer names, but what good is it if you cannot contact the customer? Consider using a third party that can update customer contact information. Sure it costs but in the end it is worth the investment if you can actual market to a customer that was a lead 6 months ago and is still looking. One sale may make up for the investment you made in updating your customer data.

Next, don’t allow any customer to be an “orphan”. With the high turnover in sales personnel it can be difficult to keep up with re-assigning customers to an active sales person. Changing CRM/ILM companies provides a perfect opportunity to get this done. Customers would prefer to see a specific sales person’s name on a letter or email, rather than the generic “Your Friends at……. “, you will also be ensuring that each customer will be getting followed up with by assigning tasks to the sales people.

After you have “cleaned” up your data and you are ready to export it into an Excel or .CSV spreadsheet, ask your Implementation Manager what information they need to make the transition the best it can be. Every system handles data differently, so it is important to know beforehand what fields are required, what fields can be handled and what your expectations are of the data once it is imported into the system. A rule of thumb is to get as much data as possible from your current CRM/ILM provider, than let your new company tell you what they can and cannot use. Also, have realistic expectations of “Active” customers, bring customers in as “Active” from 6 months ago is not practical or effective. Generally, going back 90 days or less is sufficient for follow up.

Finally, try not to show your hand to your current CRM/ILM provider, do not let them know that you are about to fire them, as many companies will become uncooperative and hold your data hostage. Instead, tell them that you are interested in doing a large ad campaign to your current unsold customers and you need to have all the contact information, notes, dates, etc. because you want to make the campaign as personal to the customer as possible. Remember just because you are switching companies it doesn’t mean your data is going to magically become clean and updated. If you put a little time in beforehand and clean up your data the result will become “Good data in, good data out” than sit back and  watch your sales increase.

Want to gain instant credibility with your customer?  Email them your car’s window sticker.

Why does this grant credibility?  If the window sticker comes in an email rather than as a conversation on the lot, the customer is going to feel like it is legit.  If it is in their email box then the numbers can’t be changed.  For example, say that you have a customer named Jim on the phone.  Jim isn’t ready to come down to the lot yet.  So to entice Jim, you offer to email him pictures of the car he is interested in, incentives, the window sticker and even desk spread payments or an example of what his payments are going to be.  This gains instant credibility with Jim and he is more likely to trust you as a salesperson.

In order to be able to do this, your window stickers should be integrated with the rest of your system, meaning that you should be able to generate them out of your inventory.  If you are set up to do this, then you are on track and can begin gaining your customers’ trust.  If not, then you need a system that can easily generate window stickers from your inventory.

Window stickers are a huge part of branding.  They are most often the first introduction to a car.  So it is all the more important that this information can be easily accessed and generated from inventory into email form.  Once you are set up to do this, then you have an extra option to peak your customers’ interest.