I see so many dealerships that do not put an emphasis on training in the store. This is so important! Training on both product and internal processes is lacking in so many places. There are lots of ways that dealers attempt to do this.....some successful some not. 

 At the dealership we were requiring sales agents to to spend time in our bdc department for crm training and a few other things. We mainly relied on the oem training for product. Sales process training was sketchy at best. They are currently working on a curriculum for all of this with the driving sales training group. 

 No matter which group that you use I cant stress enough the importance of developing something or bringing something in for this. This will help in so many ways......From turnover to customer satisfaction. 

 Take a look at this if you want see how much turnover alone can cost your dealership http://go.drivingsales.com/hubfs/HCM/HCM%20Whitepaper%20Final%20Final.pdf

I  have been reading a lot lately about the future of the auto industry in regards to artificial intelligence. What i am finding is that there is a whole lot of vague information out there about this subject. With all of the voice activated devices that are now available where will that leave us? At home last night I tried searching for various auto dealers and service centers on my amazon echo. I got a real mixed bag of results. Unless I was very name specific the results that I got back were all over the place. At one point I was directed to a service center six hours away! It will be interesting to see the road that this takes us down in regard to paid and local search!

 At the dealership and in my old twenty group we would look at a ton of website data on a day to day basis. However we seemed to always end up in a discussion regarding trying to figure out which data was really relevant. Actually we spent to much time on this!

 I am purely speaking from the experiences that I had at the dealership and within my twenty group. We would spend tons of time just discussing things such as bounce rate, page views etc.

 While I think that all of these things are important I also think that each dealer should take a long at their website and pick the key performance indicators that are important to them. For instance my hot buttons were Number of visits , conversions and bounce rate.

 What are your most important things to measure?

This was by far the best dses yet. It was extremely helpful and organized. We had a very full agenda. 

Day 1. Jareds keynote was actually the best. He talked a lo about people management as well as whats next in the industry. The best idea contests are always awesome as well. This year did not disappoint.We had some great speakers as well in the breakout sessions. 

Day 2 . Kristen Hadeed was great on day 2. She is extremely insiteful and knowledgeable. She had a lot of great points. All of the breakouts were great this day as well. 

If you didn't make it make sure that you do next year!

How do you create a brand for yourself? 

 I have been in the sales Business for most of my adult life. I first worked at a corporate job where branding was not so important. I moved in to boat sales quite a while ado and decided it was time to try to start building my own brand. I spent hours trying to learn my tradecraft. The first thing that I set out to do was to know as much about the industry as possible....I took every product training class that I could get. The that helped me the most was building relationships with my customers. 

 So I kind of got drug in to the car business kicking and screaming! I applied the same work fundamentals and ethics to the new business though.  I found it to be harder to create a positive brand for myself in the car business. I had to fight all of the preconceived thoughts and feelings that people had about car dealers. So I had to make a point to always do what I said I would do for a customer....even if I sometimes had to cover it. After a while I started getting referalls as well as people that I had dealt with in the boat business started calling me. It all paid off!

I feel that it is important to decide how you want people to perceive your brand and then stick to making it happen

 Lets talk a little about social media. The dealership that I have worked at has always focused on Facebook in this area. We would do a daily post and post things about the dealership when special things would happen. we also had our agency put some joey in to local awareness ads as well as posting our inventory via retargeting etc. We also did some lead generation stuff as well. In my experience it seems like we did more than most dealers.

 My question for you guys is what other mediums are you using and what other types of things are you doing in social media that seem to be working

We have had a business development center for our stores for several years now. While the department certainly has evolved and grown for quite some now the department statistics have stayed the same. On the sales we touch 50 to 60 percent of the deals each month. On the service side 60 to 70 percent of the repair orders have appointments. On the sales side we see that around 50 percent of the people that made appointments show up. Of those that show 60 to 70 percent of them will purchase. On the service side we have a 80 to 85 percent show rate. We are working on documenting the average repair order amount.

 My questions for the community are:

1. Am I measuring the correct things?

2. Are the results in line?

3. Any ideas on improving those results?

I recently had a chance to go to my third DrivingSales Presidents Club meeting in New York. It was a great conference! We had a great day of networking with some of the brightest people in the industry! We had several great speakers as well. Most of the discussion revolved around what's coming in the future in the automotive industry. We also had quit e a bit of discussion about Human Capital Management. The breakout sessions were great as well. Any of you that went post on this blog, what was your favorite thing about the meeting?

At Allen Turner automotive we are very active in the community in a whole lot of ways. We actively are raising money for food groups and other various charities throughout the year. As a dealership we feel that this is very important. Last month we had a special needs teacher reach out  for some help with a group of kids that are about  to graduate. She wanted to take them out in to the business community to learn some of the skills needed to live. She asked if she could bring them to the dealership. We of course said yes. We rolled out the carpet for them. I was able to get them in to the conference room and talk to them about the car buying process. I also went over the importance of having and protecting credit. I was amazed at the interaction! I am hoping that this will help them in life. Please take a look at the link below to see more about it.

http://www.allenturnerhyundai.com/new-skills-program

 We attended the nada convention this year in New Orleans. This was one of the best conventions that I have attended. We took four people from the dealership to the convention. We went to the convention with a long list of things to accomplish. We made us a list of vendors to see and workshops to attend. Having this mapped out made us a lot more productive. I can't imagine attending this conference without that type of plan. 

 The workshops were very organized and I got a lot out of them. On Thursday I attended a round table discussion on digital marketing for service. It was nice talking to my peers about this. I came away from this with several things that i am implementing at the dealership. I also saw the session that Jared Hamilton did on Human capital management. I can't wait to get that going at our store. On Friday I saw a session that Joni Stuker did on having a blended bdc. This knocked my socks off. 

 On Friday and Saturday I visited many vendor booths between the workshop sessions. We were able to look at a lot of the new technology. It was nice to be able to compare all of the products that we were looking at in one convention hall. We came away with a few new products. 

 One of my favorite things at the convention was The modern dealership display that nada put together with a few vendors. I think the kiosk's were my favorite part of that.