After 24 years in this business I've learned that there are many things that are ego driven.  Ego is great as long as its Super Powers are used for good instead of evil.  From the title and after reading the first two sentences you are probably picking up what I am putting down and already no where I'm headed.

We've got a nice little store that is about to undergo a facelift and I'm thinking we can improve our design efficiency.  If so, we are all the better for it.  My sales managers have an office.  They spend a lot of their time in there unless they are on a smoke break.  (that'll be another post)  I spend time encouraging them to spend more time on the floor monitoring traffic and paying attention to customers that come in and sale people activity.  Maybe a little design change would help me accomplish our goals and feel more natural.  We all design pay plans to give what we think is the proper incentive to accomplish our goals.  I think efficient dealership design can be just as powerful.  Silent, always there helping business flow the way the you want.  The danger is brick and mortar are expensive and that makes a mistake expensive.

I think this would be a perfect chance to build them a nice station right on the showroom floor.  Right in front of the dealer's office overlooking the main parking lot entrance and on the showroom floor right in the open. 

I can tell you they are not going to like it at first.  The mighty EGO runs strong in the car business.  My office is important...  I say things I don't want the customer to hear...  I can't be a boss without an office... 

My response is Yes, Why? & Why? in that order.  If we can be more available, efficient and attentive to our customer wouldn't that be best?  I know sometimes conversations should be private but I think if there is a possibility that something could be said that is inappropriate for a guest to hear then just maybe we would be better off not saying it and should choose better words to convey to our salespeople.  Sometimes people only do the right thing when left with no other option and I think that I like the idea of being more open.  It will definitely be a learning curve.

I'm looking for input.  What am I missing?  What are the other things my guys are going to bring up?  Change is hard.  Are the risks worth the reward?

 Boy does my head ache and it is not for the reason you would think from someone spending a few days in Vegas.  I show up at the brain child of Jared Hamilton not knowing what to expect.  What I got was a hangover of tremendous proportions.  My head is so full of ideas now that I haven’t been able to sleep for two days!  If I can put into place just a portion of things spawned from DSES it will take me the better part of a year!  I do think someone slipped me a Roofie though.  I will get to that later.

There are things that I get and things I just plain don’t.

Let’s get started with what my brain can grasp at this point:

The eXteresAUTO guy has verified what I have felt in my gut by proving how important Reputation Management really is.  Also, how important obtaining 5 star ratings in an honorable fashion.  My stores will never be on the 10:00 o’clock news.  93% of people go to the internet before they hit my brick and mortar.  What I need to make sure of is that the 93% go to my website and what they find there is head and shoulders better than the other sites they visit.  You didn’t think they were just going to look at my site only do you?  65% percent of those read reviews (I think this % is correct but having trouble finding it in my notes).  Wow, I need some reputation management.  Why doesn’t my “external” CSI match my “Internal” CSI?  Hmmm.  Better get started on putting a process in place for getting some reviews.  Real reviews.  My NetBizCoach Mike Fitzpatrick and I have a few things in the works to really maximize this.  Some real Super Secret Secret Squirrel stuff, so stay tuned.

Brian Pasch from PCG had brought to light the power of WordPress website platform.  Guess I made a good decision choosing DealerTrend for my new websites 6 months ago!  My NetBizCoach has fed knowledge to me as my mind can absorb and make sense.  Brian confirmed the need to constantly add relevant content to my site(s).  I am now feverishly searching for .pdf files to convert to text and place on my site.  My WordPress site rocks!  It is easy for me to add content.  Because of the platform that DealerTrend has provided, we are ahead of the game.   

Here’s a softball for content.  What is your franchise pushing in the media?  Build a page for it and see what happens.  Toyota recently began providing a 2 year maintenance plan with the purchase of any new Toyota.  I built a page describing what it is and guess what?  People were searching for, “Free Toyota Maintenance”.   Let’s see, we have Toyotathon coming up.  Wonder how that will work?

Brian also turned me on to cardealerwiki.org.  Because DealerTrend provides an RSS feed this will be an excellent back link source.  I wonder if I can find some local sites to link to that may rev up my organic relevance.   Does anyone have link ideas for the Dallas Ft Worth area?

PPC is one of those things that is/was sketchy to me.  Matt Murray explained PPC to me in a way that I get it, for the first time.  Why would I pay for a handful of clicks when I was finding hundreds if not thousands of clicks by improving my organic?  Well, the low hanging fruit is gone and I am now climbing the tree for fruit.  The real question is, “Do I have the stones to pull money from newsprint that everyone knows is dying if not dead already".  Am I beating a dead horse with news print?  Maybe that was a little harsh.  On life support may be a better description.  I have now firmly placed putting pay per click in our marketing plans for all the right reasons.  Another excellent point was the need for more Service Department content on our sites.  I recently put up service coupons for one of our stores and did an email blast of 2500 letting people know that we now offered them with a link to the page.  Over 300 people clicked through to the page the first day!  It is now our 3^rd most visited page.

This is the part that I don’t get:

Brian Pasch also said people are saying to him, “I am going with a different website provider other than my factory site.  I am going to abandon the old site and focus on my new site.”  My ears perked up and I wonder did he just reach in my head and pull that out.  That is EXACTLY what I have been thinking.  Pasch says No, do not do that.  Work both sites.  You have traffic history and more people will see your site(s).  I don’t get it.  I always try and put myself in my customer’s shoes.  I am very sensitive about going with data over customer experience.  Let me explain it like this.  I basically fired my factory site provider and went with a company that will allow me to build a site with our personality built in.  One that I feel offers a better customer experience.  It’s not all about SEO.  Now suppose you are a customer and you Google something and our new site comes up and you decide to come over and meet us.  You like what you see and decide to put us on your short list of places to purchase.  A week later you go back to Google and search again and you click what you think is our site and you go to an unfamiliar place.  One that looks different, with different links and information.  Wouldn’t that be confusing to you?  I’m confused.  I don’t want to make a mistake.  Is there some other input I can get on this?

Here is where I think someone slipped me a Roofie:

SOCIAL MEDIA.  I don’t get it at all.  Yeah, I have a personal facebook page and use it regularly.  Wanna be my friend?  What pisses me off (it’s ok to say pissed because one of the other speakers at DSES said, “Shit” and I like being real) is when one of my friends from school that owns a jewelry store is constantly shouting, “Hey facebook friends!  Come get your ring resized.”  I have now blocked him.  We do have a nice facebook page for our Toyota store at www.facebook.com/JimMcNattToyota that GoSo is helping us with.  By the way, another benefit of WordPress is there are widgets that will do almost everything I use GoSo for FREE.99.

AND THEN THERE IS TWITTER and the BIG OLE DSES twitter screen with all of that @ and # business.  And who the heck is Bitly?  I don’t get it.  We have a twitter account with a bunch of followers but most are vendors who want to sell me something.  I need to understand how something works at its core to really get behind it and push.  I’m the guy that when he decided to try and learn how to play golf, instead researched golf clubs and then custom built my own set.   Someone please help me understand how this will help me sell cars!

Talking about golf reminds me of the guy from Australia that teaches golf and played on the tour that spoke after breakfast.  Good stuff from him too.  Here’s a picture of my dog.  (You had to be there. It’s not a fish but it is random.)

Your input is wanted and very needed!

The take-away is I have set a goal to take our websites from an average of 3600 visits per month to 12000 per site.  We are at 5000 now with just barely launching the sites.  I believe once long-tail search for inventory kicks in, we should get another boost.  I am not just looking for long-tail, but super duper multidirectional double throw down long-tail search!

Let’s hope what happened in Vegas DOESN’T STAY IN VEGAS.

TJ Houghton
Corporate Director
McNatt Auto Group
tjh@mcnattautogroup.com