We currently have a Hyundai store in  Pensacola fl and a Chevrolet store in Crestview fl as well as a Pre owned store in pensacola. We have really outgrown the hyundai store. So the owner is buildind a new hyundai store from the ground up in pensacola. It will be about a half a mile from the the existing store. Its exciting to see the growth for sure!

We are planning to have as much new technology in the store as possible. We are also going to create a modern showroom which will be geared towards giving the customer a great experience. The old school desks with computers will be replaced with high tops and tablets. The salespeople will have a room designated for them to use to call customers etc. We will also have a state of the art bdc department as well

If any of you can provide feedback on any type of wishlist that i can create for the new store please chime in!

 How much training do you do in each department at your store? We definitely could do a better job on this at our Hyundai And Chevrolet store. I am the digital marketing and bUsiness development manager for both stores. In my bdc and in the sales department all of the employees are required to do the oem required training. In our bdc department we also train every new salesperson on the crm when they start. We dont however (I feel ) have a real consistent process for training. I feel we should have checklists that are signed off on and after that ongoing occasional evaluations and training. 

 Next week I will be attending leadership training for the new HCM training product that driving sales has come up with. I feel that this will be a huge help! 

 I am looking for input from the community on what other dealers dealers are using for training! 

 We have a Hyundai and a Chevrolet Store. Both of them are on different sites. We have had on line buying tools on them for quite some time. They are used by the consumer a very small amount. The one on the Hyundai site is a cdk tool called connected store. The one on the Chevrolet site is called shop click and drive. 

 We dont really push any marketing to these tools. We just kind of rely on people to see them when they are on the websites. The tools are also mediocre at best. I have looked at a bunch of other tools that are "nicer and easier to use for the client". The best one I have seen is Online shopper from Dealer Inspire....Roadster also seems to work well.

So my question for the community is should I try marketing more to get people there for that online buying reason or try to get better tools....or do you think that the consumer is just not ready for this?

 I am about to go back in to the dealer world and will be running a BDC department. In the past we have paid a salary and a bonus that revolved around appointments. This seemed to work well. We also paid a little more for appointments that turned in too sales.....

 On the service side we paid hourly with a bonus for customers that they got in to the service department. We would also throw out the occasional spiff as well. 

 Can all of you bdc managers out there please throw out some ideas for a new bonus structure for bdc reps?

 Are your Saturdays still as busy at the dealership as they used to be? I have noticed quite a few dealers saying that they dont get that big rush of walk in traffic on Saturdays any more. I can remember in years past that we would have barbecues and all kinds of other community events at the dealerships that I was with. These would drive in insane amount of traffic in to the stores. In fact it was prob too much traffic at times I am sure that there were always people that we missed or couldnt get to. 

 Its funny how tings have changed. I now watch digital traffic instead of walk in traffic all of the time. We just have got to treat those people as if they are in the store! 

 The driving sales Presidents club is coming up soon!  I strongly urge any of you that are able to go. I have been to it the last three years in a row! While it is geared towards dealer principals I have walked away from each of them with a ton of practical work knowledge. The conference always has the most cutting edge information. This last year I learned a ton about hiring and retaining employees. 

 In years past the marketing tips that I learned were great! They helped me to be a lot more effective In my job at the dealership that I was at. I have no doubt that we were able to sell more cars because of it. Here is the link to my blog about last years conference. https://www.drivingsales.com/mark-rask/manage/blog/post/edit/313832....Check it out and go learn a lot!

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?

 Last year we tried the tough task of digital marketing for service. This was at a Hyundai and a Chevrolet franchise. We tried several pay per click campaigns at first. At the beginning these got a little bit of traction but not a lot. We tried several different campaigns with very little positive results. We then tried a few e mail campaigns. We had some success with these but not a ton. The success that we did have was with our existing clients. This was a little short lived though. It was nos very labor intensive to build these campaigns in the crm and the lists were hugely hit or miss. So then we decided to try social. At first we just did blind boosted posts that were not successful. We then started taking our customers and making targeted face book posts to them We would go in to service smarts and download the lists that were in targeted categories. This worked real well and we were able to measure it. The roi was great!

 I would suggest that dealers that are wanting to market for service from a service standpoint use this method!