I manage our relationship with several of our digital vendors. For many years we did not really do very much at the dealership to hold them accountable for results. Here are few examples of what I do to hold a few of them accountable. 

 Digital marketing vendor.(launch) While we talk on a daly basis as needed we have a monthly call and go over a baseline report for both of our stores. In this report I always look for highs an lows in this report. On this call they are required to give input on the previous months stats for both stores. The data that we use is straight out of google analytics. we also look at the upcoming month and adjust our spend/strategy accrdingly. 

Auto trader. I have a meeting once a month with my Autotrader rep. We go over the reports from the previous month and adjust accordingly. From a marketing standpoint we go over the pct of pictures, comments, price etc. The main measurement that I use for them is cost per vehicle details page. We try to keep that below 80 cents per vdp. We also spend time going over the scarcity report. 

Website provider(CDK) I have a call once a week with our website provider. I go to a room without distractions and my rep and I surf our website like shoppers. We also have our rep on the monthly call that we have with our Digital marketing vendors. This creates a bit of checks and balances between the two. 

CRM provider. (dealer socket) I meet with our rep once a week to discuss the stats within the crm. This is an extremely helpful meeting. We also discuss our data mining efforts at this time. 

While this is just a few of the vendors I work with, it should give you an idea of what we do with them. We (as all of you) spend a ton of money with them and I try t make sure that it is being spent wisely. What are some of the things that you guys do to manage your digital vendors?

We have two franchise dealerships in Florida. A Hyundai store that has been open for some time and a Chevrolet store store that the owner has had for a year and a half. We have used Cars.com and Autotrader for both stores for some time. We are contemplating dropping both of them or one or the other.

We are even thinking of having Cars.com at the chevy store and Autotrader at the Hyundai store. The results for both are very similar right now. We get more leads off of Cars.com, but the leads dont seem to be as good. We actually get a lot more b-line car inquiries from them. On the flip side the VDP activity is better on Autotrader. We also feel that the supprt we get from them is better.

I am looking for input from the community on this. Have any of you dropped both? How about input on one vs. the other? The thing that really concerns me is that used car sales for us have steadily decreased the in the last few months. 

Here is an overview of this years driving sales executive summit. I feel that this year’s conference was a huge success. It was extremely well organized and the energy level was high. This years attendance was up by 20 percent. These are some of the items that speakers had to say that really stuck out to me

Sunday

Jared Hamilton

Jared opened up with a speech that was very motivating. DrivingSales has a new platform coming out that will be a lot easier to use. The vendor ratings section will also be a lot easier to use. DrivingSales will also start making outbound calls to dealers asking them for vendor ratings. Spec sheets for vendors will also be implemented.

Professor Frank Cespedes

Professor Cespedes from Harvard University was our first keynote speaker. He acknowledged how big of an impact that the automotive industry has on the world's economy. He discussed how much we spend on our sales force vs. advertising.  This is 3 times more than the total media advertising, 200 times more than online ads, and 100 times more than social media spend. He inferred that we should spread this around a little better. Something that really stood out to me was, "If you put a lot of eggs in one basket you better keep an eye on the basket."

Less than 50 percent of employees understand the complete strategy of your business. This percentage drops even more in the sales force.  He also mentioned a few things that cause problems in our business. Most businesses have no strategy and those that do not communicate That strategy to their employees.  Also sales metrics are not communicated properly.

Here are a few things that he had to say about the current sales force.

Sales forces are not disappearing (or shrinking).  Sales tasks are changing due to information revolution and impact on buying behavior.

Selling is about personality

BORN salesperson is a myth…..selling effectiveness depends upon on the specific sales tasks and the fit between skills-personality and sales tasks.

There is no such thing as effective selling if sales behaviors are not connected to your firms profitable growth strategy and Business goals.

Best Idea Contest

The best idea session was good as always. It was different not seeing Robert Karbaum up there. All of the ideas were good, but I felt that the idea that Josh Pogue presented on his search results page idea was the best. It will be easy to implement and will cost nothing. He also did not pay a vendor for the idea! He did end up winning as well.

Customer experience and marketing strategy break out session with Joe Webb  and Ty Bullard.

This was a very interesting breakout session. The dealer and vendor decided to try having focus groups with customers and documenting it. They had a very broad mix of customers in the group. They went to great lengths to make the customers feel comfortable and not threatened during the sessions. They came up with some interesting information that we as dealers should listen to. The clients said that the best form of communication for them was texting than e mail and lastly via phone. They also said that we should attempt to find out which method is best for each person. They did not like filling out forms on the site. They also felt that when they did submit their info it did not make things go quicker. They also liked to be armed with price and car knowledge before visiting the dealership . They also said that we force them to play the game. In regards to time at the dealership they felt that he process should take more than an hour but less than two. They quite felt emotionally drained after the process. Overall this was a great breakout session.

Monday

Jared Hamilton’s keynote speech was very informative and insightful. Here are a few things that I took away from his presentation.

There are three factors to human capital optimization.

1. There should be a balance between labor and technology. Sales people sell about he same amount of cars per person as ten years ago. Today’s technology helps them but it should up their productivity.

2. We should align our team for greatest impact. We tend to take the path of least resistance.

3. We must manage labor costs.

Jared also brought up a few things from a survey that driving sales had done. I took a few things away from this. Some of the factors that had the biggest impact on the sales process were that the customer liked the sales person and they liked transparency as well.

Ron Henson

Responsive selling

This was my favorite breakout session! Ron spoke about how we should hire for attitude in the sales force and train for skill. He also brought up some more information from the customer experience research study DrivingSales has done. Two things that he said really stuck out to me. 99.3 percent of shoppers expect the sales process to be a hassle and 56 percent of purchasers said they would buy more often if the buying experience was better.

All in all this was a great conference. It gets better each year. Any dealer that is trying to make it in the car industry should try this next year.

Our dealership has always been somewhat active in our local community events. We have always supported local charities. we made a decision a year ago to continue this and actually ramp it up. We also decided that every event that the dealership supported should have one of our staff members present. we purchased a tent and lots of swag to give away! We also decided to make sure that we play this up in social media.

 We feel that our efforts have been a success. This is however extremely hard to measure! Our Facebook audience has grown a lot but I can only tell you of a few people that we have sold cars too that we met at an event.

 This a link to a landing page that we created to hilite some of the  events that our Hyundai store has been involved with.

http://www.allenturnerhyundai.com/Community-Involvement

This is a link to our other stores community event page https://www.allenturnerchevrolet.com/Community-Involvement

 We feel that it is important for us to be involved in these events. Please take a moment to share a few community events that your dealership has been involved with.

 Eight years ago we started a business development center at our Hyundai store. That store currently does a great job on internet leads. They are closing the internet leads at 18 percent and the leads from our web site at 21percent. Most of our leads are given to sales people and they are backed up by bdc representatives. Some of the lead sources go directly to the business development center reps. We attribute those good numbers to a change in the dealership that we made several years ago. We decided at that time to sign up with the internet training that driving sales offers. We also implemented a certification process for the sales reps. This process involved ongoing monitoring of the sales reps handling of the internet leads that they received. We used a version of the scorecard that driving sales refers to in order to do this. While this was very time consuming for me to do on twenty sales reps it paid off. 

About a year ago we purchased a chevrolet store an hour away from our hyundai store. We now have a Business development center for them.......however we are only closing internet leads at that store at 6-7 percent. We will be moving the same process that we used at the hyundai store over to the Chevy store. I would be interested in hearing what other Chevrolet dealers are doing in this area. Are close rates lower at a chevy store? 

We have a Hyundai store that has been in business for quite some time. We have always had a straight talk branding message in our advertising efforts. We have also always had a very generous budget to work with.

About four years ago, we really started working on our digital presence. While we started these efforts a little behind everyone else, we have outpaced most of the dealers in our area. We started by looking at the processes we have in place at the dealership. In other words we needed to be sure the leads were being handled correctly and if not what needed to be fixed. Once these were in place we started working on our SEO. We took a long term approach to this along with our digital vendor. We also started working with our website vendor and tweaked our website. Once we had the site looking good, we started spending money on SEM advertisements. Originally all of our efforts were directed at Google. Once we started succeeding on Google we started to tackle Bing. We also had to figure out how to measure all of this stuff! During all of this time our traffic and conversions continued to grow. Sales have improved a ton as well!

The last few months I have not seen that huge growth continue in our traffic, however the traffic that we are getting continues to convert well! I am looking for any ideas to continue this growth pattern.

I am in a nada internet 20 group. We share lots aof ideas and lots of data at each meeeting. Most of our meetings center around our internet composite. It is much like the financial commposite that nada uses for other 20 group meetings. It has everyones internet data in it and rates and ranks each member under different measurements. It is a great accountabilty tool that we use as a group. One section is dedicated to analytics off of our website. the other two sections are for cars.com and autotrader data.

While there are a ton of measurements in our composite I am trying to figure out which are the most important. Originally we ranked evry page by bounce rate. We have found that a higher bounce rate is not always a problem. If you market properly and get the person to the page that they want to be on it could result in a bounce. Pages per visit fall in to this category as well. So does time on site.

Some of the othe measurements in our composite are thigs such as Number of visits, Number of unique visits, % direct, referral, organic and paid. As you can imagine this can all get very confusing if trying to focus on it all.

 We decided in our group to start focusing on the unique visitors number and rate our pages by that. We came to conclusion that for us this wwas an important number. We do however still realize that we still need to be aware of all of the other measurements as well.

For some time now our industry ha put a lot of focus on social media. We have quite a few different types of things that we promote and post on social media. We highlight communty events, post sold cars, deals of the week and have contests as well. We have also just started to use it to promote service as well. We have often wondered if it truly helps. Well, I got my answer to this last evening in a very different kind of way.

Several years ago, I started running avidly. Once I did this, I started following different running groups on Facebook. This gave me a lot of tips, but also informed about a lot of races that I could spend MONEY on. During this time the Facebook advertising gods figured out that I like to run as well. Then I began to get all kinds of running event ads. Well one particular one caught my eye. It is a series of obstacle races called Spartan. I decided that I had to try one...by the way they are pricey. I quickly became addicted to them and have done 6 of them around the country. So not only are they expensive, but the travel to and from them is as well. So, yes, Facebook worked on me! I realized this last night while having dinner with a friend. He has been friends with me on Facebook for sometime. He said to me....I have been seeing you on Facebook doing these Spartan races...I think that I would like to do one. Now he is also following the race series on Facebook. He is the second of my friends to go down this route due to Facebook.

So how does this apply to the auto industry you ask? It should be obvious. You never know where a person might be when they decide to make a car purchase. If we leverage our social media correctly to the followers that we have we should be the first person that they try to buy a car from. At the same time if we do it wrong it obviusly can hurt your chances with them.

I recently had the oppurtunity to attend the DrivingSales Presidents Club again this year. While it is geared towards general mangers and dealer principals, I still got a lot of great information out of it. Here is a small part of  what I took away from the conference:

The consumer experience both on our website and in our store has to become the main focus for our dealership. While we are pretty good at that already, consumers are demanding an even better job in that area. A lot of scenarios were discussed in Jared Hamilton's presentation. Here are a few of my takeaways.

Consumers don't want to be involved in "the old school" dealership processes.

Most consumers still do not trust the dealers.

Consumers value what they are hearing from friends and family more than anything else.

The transition from online to showroom must get better.

I have felt for some time that these things are important but this verified that for me. All in all this was a great conference that I would recomend.

We are really pushing to get reviews on the sales side. We use Dealerrater and also push people to do reviews on Google +. We average about ten a week. We do the ocasional spiff for reviews, but do not do it all of the time.

My question for the community is does this really help the dealership? We have a person that is responsible for responding to every review....good or bad. We recently won dealer rater dealer of the year for Florida (Hyundai).

I am also wandering if these have any SEO value as well?