We are headed to the NADA convention! Here are a few things that I have done to prepare. I have gone through each days workshop schedules and mapped out a schedule. I hope this will help maximize my learning time. I am planning to focus on learning more about digital strategies and also get some ideas on how to better manage my Business Development Center. I am also hoping to gain some knowledge on how to better mine our data for sales and service customers. 

I have also scheduled quite a few appointments with vendors as well. I plan to look at some upgrades for my business development center. 

The only downfall to this week before NADA is the amount of calls from vendors calling about the convention. I understand the sales aspect of it however we were just bombarded in the last two weeks. 

Having said that, I am still really excited about getting to go to the convention!

 2016 was kind of a strange year for my department at the dealership. We bought a New store a while back and have really been working on getting that Business development center up to speed. We have both sales and service representatives in this department. The center is actually in the same area as the existing bdc that we have had for sometime at our Hyundai store. That in itself has its pros and cons. The bdc is actually located an our away from our Chevrolet store. This presents the obvious logistical challenges. Communication between the Business development reps and the sales people is that great due to the distance. The upside is that I have all of my reps together which makes tit easier to manage. This also makes training the reps easier as well.

 In 2017 we will be moving the Chevrolet business development center to the store that it supports. My concerns for that are that being a separate entity they will be harder to manage. I do however understand that communication will be better. Do any of you have any experience with centralized vs. Non centralized bdc's for multiple stores?

  We have a service and sales bdc team for each of our stores. One is a Hyundai store and the other is a Chevrolet store. We have Three sales Business development reps for sales and two for service at our Hyundai store.  For the Chevrolet store we have two sales and one service bdc reps.

 Currently we train on an as needed basis and informally do performance feedback sessions. The sessions are not nearly as frequent as they should be. We do a good job at monitoring all of the performance metrics. (sales to appt ratio, show to appt made ratio etc) however I am looking for ideas on tarining and development processes that I can implement within the store without hiring a vendor to do it for us. I am also looking for any documentation that you may use for performance reviews.

Driving Sales Executive Summit 2016

For me this was the best Driving Sales Executive Summit to date. I have never networked as much as I did at this conference. The industry's top leaders were definitely there!

Day One

On Sunday morning a group of us actually cycled in Red Rock Canyon. The people that I met on this ride are all industry leaders that I am super glad that I met! A huge thanks to Gary May with Interactive Marketing and Consulting Services for putting this on. Getting contacts like this is so valuable to me.

Jared Hamilton opened up the conference with a great speech! He talked a lot about how the automotive industry has actually become a forerunner in the digital marketing world.

Dan Zarella spoke next….the social media marketing info that he spoke about will be a great help to my dealership.

We then had the best idea sessions. While all of them were great I especially liked the one on the community calendar. This is a way for any dealership out there to get themselves known in the community by doing the right thing. I really liked the way that they asked for feedback from employees on which charities to take on and help.

My favorite breakout of that day was secrets to building a top performing service BDC. I have a pretty good BDC at the dealership currently. This session certainly gave me some improvement ideas.

The day ended with John Boudreau giving a keynote speech

Day Two

Day 2 was extremely crazy! We had breakout sessions and keynote speeches that were full of data and knowledge. Jared started off with his keynote speech which was very insightful and inspiring. He spoke about how we need to cut turnover. He presented a training path that they have tried with some dealers. It has actually cut turnover quite a bit at those stores.

My favorite breakout session of the whole conference was held that day. It was called “Digital Isn’t Driving Fixed Ops Revenue - Phone Calls Are." It reminded me of how important it is to handle every customer call properly. Casey Jenkins did a great job as a presenter. I especially liked the “tips” that she left us with.

I also had a chance to see Joe Chura’s presentation later in the week at my twenty-group meeting. (Cutting edge practices to combine PPC, SEO, mobile social into onsite website strategy) This was awesome as well.

Day Three

Day three was equally as rewarding as the others. The breakout session connecting the dots from online to in-store was very good. Of course Jared’s closing remarks were good as well.

Over all this was a great conference for me. It was great to be able to learn from the industry leaders. I strongly recommend it! I also that recommend that you try to check the videos of the breakouts when they are available. 

We've had a business development center (BDC) at our Hyundai store for quite some time. We receive about four hundred internet leads and maybe 120 NEW sales calls a month (people not in our system). I feel we do a good job, but I'm always looking to improve. I am going to outline below how we handle each type of lead. Please provide feedback!

Internet Leads 

Our Internet leads are round robined out to sales people on the floor and a business development center rep. is assigned at the same time. If the salesperson can't get right to it my business development center reps are all over it. They are then working for the salesperson and will try to get the customer in to the store. Once they reach the customer, they contact the salesperson and let them know that an appointment has been set or inform them that they may need to contact the client.

Phone ups

Our inbound sales calls are sent straight to our business development center dept. They take the call and set the appointment. The appointments are told to ask for the sales manager. The business development center reps will then let the sales manager know that they have someone on the way.  The sales manager may go ahead and assign it to a sales person based on the situation. If needed on the initial call, the bdc may provide pricing and condition information. 

Walk ins

These are pretty straightforward. If the client does not buy on the first visit to the store, my business development center reps will do a follow call (save a deal call) on the next day. This is normally a very productive call.

Our average close rate on internet leads is 15-18% and close rate for phone ups is 25%

This is a very brief overview of our process, but it should give you a good enough picture to give us feedback.

I am looking for some new ideas on how to improve the performance of my bdc associates. I have two sales Business development teams and two service bdc teams. They are split between our Hyundai and Chevrolet stores.

On the sales side They are averaging about 70 set appts each 50 showed appt\s with aprox 25-30 of those buying each month.....They are set up as a reverse bdc. Currently I monitor calls(some) and have them going through the driving sales training.

On the service side They are taking Inbound service appointment calls and calling recall customers. At the hyundai store they are setting about 400 appts each with an extremely high show percentage. At the Chevy store they setting roughly 250 appointments.  I have not really been  able to find any good training sources for this team.

I am the digital marketing/bdc manager at a Hyundai and a Chevrolet store. They are two seperate stores.

 We do a lot of e mail marketing at both stores. I am starting to second guess that strategy and am looking for some advise on email marketing.

 We have the normal campaigns that are run within our crm. These are the schedules that are set up for continuous contacting the customerfor both sales and service. We also do an e mail blast about once  a month as well. This is usually used for some time of sales/service message.

 My questions for the community are:

1.How many e mails are to many?

2. Do any of you have any info on what type of stuff to NOT put in your emails?

3. What is a good open rate?

4.What is a good click through rate?

 I have some info on these questions that was put together quite some time ago. I am hoping to get some more up to date feedback.

At our last Internet 20 Group meeting, we got in to a lengthy discussion as to what each of us should be using to measure various digital marketing campaigns. What we found was that each of us were measuring different things.

On search engine marketing campaigns (ppc), I measure cost per click. I also put a lot of weight on lost impression share as well. What I do not have for this area are any benchmarks to measure against. On display marketing campaigns, I also measure lost impression share. I dont put a lot of weght on clicks in this area. We use this mainly as a branding message. We do put tracking numbers on these campaigns and track the phone calls that we receive from each of them.

On our video preroll campaigns, I measure how long the videos are watched. Once again, I don't put much weight on clicks in this area because it is more of a branding play.

I really don't know what to measure on our Facebook/ocial campaigns. This is fairly new to us.

Any input on what you guys are measuring in the digital world would be a great help....also, if you could share the benchmarks that you are using as well that would be helpful.

We have a bdc department for our Hyundai store and our Chevy store. At our Hyundai store we have 3 sales bdc reps and two service bdc reps. We are receiving aprox 320 internet leads per month and aprox 10 Phone calls per month(new customers). We are closing the internet leads at 15-18 percenct and the calls at 30 to 40 percent. These are the main activities that my bdc reps concentrate on.  This store averages 220 to 230 new and used car sales per month with my bdc department touching about 40 percent of them. We also have recently started doing a little data mining.

 Our chevy store has two sales bdc reps and one service bdc rep. This store receives aprox 260 leads per month with a close rate of 5 to 6 percent. They receive aprox 80 new phone calls per month as well. This store is doing 75-85 cars per month with the bdc dept touching about thirty percent of them.

I am looking for some ideas from the community that I can use to try to get more sales out of my department. Please share! What other things are you guys doing in your bdc departments to help the store?

We were recently awarded Hyundai Dealer Rater's Dealer of the Year for the U.S. and Florida. We also won the award for Florida last year. This is something we worked really hard at all year. We were able to get the whole dealership involved by going over the goal at every sales meeting....especially in the last two months of the year. We shared the reviews that we received each week in our weekly sales meetings. We also shared where we were at in relation to our goal. We originally were trying to win Florida again, but ended up getting the award for the U.S. Not only does this help with our image in the customers eyes, but it is a great team bulding exercise as well.

One may ask what value does this have for us? Well the SEO value alone has helped in a big way. We also are able to bring this up in our traditional advertising as well. We felt that while it is good to get reviews in all areas that maybe we should put an emphasis on one platform and be the best. We have also been able to show our sales staff how they can leverage this to brand themselves. We have one salesperson who is really old school, but bought in to the review process. He actually has had several customers come in and ask for him because of seeing his reviews! He has created his own brand! Take a look at how he shows up when you Google his name.

https://www.google.com/#q=Roger+spadaro+pensacola