Stan Sher of Dealer eTraining talks about Lon Safko from AutoCon 2012

http://www.lonsafko.com/
http://about.me/stansher

Stan Sher of Dealer eTraining talks about Lon Safko from AutoCon 2012

 

Stan Sher of Dealer eTraining talks about Lon Safko from AutoCon 2012

http://www.lonsafko.com/
http://about.me/stansher

Stan Sher of Dealer eTraining talks about Lon Safko from AutoCon 2012

 

Transforming The Dealership Part 4 - The Final Straw Case Study (Dealer eTraining)

Welcome to Part 4 of a live dealership case study.  This is the final chapter of a 6 week project.  You can catch up by reading part 3 and previous chapters as well.  In this chapter we will discuss what the dealership is now doing and what they have accomplished in the 6 weeks that I have spent working with them.

CRM

The dealership is now up and running with eLead CRM.  The sales department is bought in and are all using the system effectively.  This was one of the best setups and transitions that a dealership has had.  In fact, the only challenges came from DMS integration.  The dealership uses Lightyear which has had updates that made integration more challenging.  However, the problem is being handled.  One thing that was an eye opener for me was setting up a perpetual workflow for a process to handle internet leads.  This is something that I remember doing when I was selling cars as an ISM back in the day at Courtesy Honda where the system was not setup to alert me when I had an action due but rather I had to follow a calendar.  Initially, I wanted hard tasks like emails and phone calls to be setup.  But I was convinced that with less man power and a smaller internet department it will cause the reps to get behind.  So we installed a perpetual workflow using my Dealer eTraining customized processes and guidelines.  It has been working fine and the dealership has not missed a beat.  I have been getting rave reviews and lots of appreciation for making the power move of getting the CRM in place.  This is one of the biggest accomplishments that we achieved.

Desking

The sales managers are using eLead to desk deals and appraise vehicles.  It is "a breath of fresh air" as they tell me because they are enjoying the ease.  They were doing all desking in Lightyear and thought it was easy until they experienced what this tool can do especially when you factor in appraisal tools.

Inventory Market Analysis

The dealership never had an appraisal tool or let along a market analysis tools which are evident by the 8-10 units per week that I would change on the website as specials because they were over 100 days old.  In fact the store averages 20-30 used cars per month with 40% of the inventory being over 50 days old.  It was a tossup of getting vAuto which I was suggesting.  I really believe that with the dealership being located on car dealer row and with such a nice lot they should be rolling 50 used cars per month.  Luckily, eLead has an appraisal and market analysis tool which will not allow the managers to do a better job working the used car inventory.  I see used car sales moving up within the next 6 months with better inventory turns.  Being that the finance manager does a great job at this dealership, I am confident that the dealership will see big improvements in gross profits.  The managers are happy about this piece.

Reputation Management

While we still did not get iPads as I recommended, we started to diversify how we get reviews.  I placed an emphasis on cars.com being the most important site because they offer a chance to get $100 for signing up to leave a review.  The process that I created involves contacting all customers that bought and serviced cars at the dealership and sending them individual templates based on who their email provider is and sometimes just based on the source that they came from.  For example, if you an email address are a yahoo address I ask for reviews to be written on yahoo or dealerrater.  Another example is a Gmail user; I send them to G+ or yelp.  Some customers will be referred to cars.com and others to other sites.  The whole idea is to diversify a portfolio of reviews so that they are scattered all over the web.  We also incorporated edmunds.com as well.

Social Media

The dealer has been impressed with what has been posted and the increasing engagement on facebook.  We have been actively involved in local community news and events.  We have been taking more pictures and videos and optimizing them to create quality content for the dealership.

What does the future bring?

The future brings me back into the dealership for 1-2 days per month to help with content creation.  In addition, I will be handling phone training because that is the next important aspect of what needs to be improved.  The dealership remains to be number one in the district and is ranked as a top 100 dealer for the OEM.  It comes down to management of the people and maintaining quality control.  I think that we accomplished a lot in such a short time and we will continue to focus on growth.

What can dealers do to get ahead in 2013?

Every single dealership needs to create a checklist of what is and what is not working for them and create a plan to fix or adjust their situation.  Examples of what needs to be fixed:

-Sales Process Training: Train the basics as well as modern day standards in order to help mold your people into modern day sales professionals.

-Internet/BDC Training: The CRM needs to be updated with newer email templates and best practices need to be reviewed for all members that are involved in internet sales and business development.

-Phone Training: Everyone needs to improve their skills on the phone and be able to properly handle outgoing and incoming calls with different sets of objections to overcome.  Every process in the dealership has it's own set of word tracks.

-Hospitality Training:  Managers needs to improve the way their sales staff functions on the sales floor.  Stop tossing around a football or playing games and do something proactive to drive business when it is slow.  In addition, train mannerisms and create a 5 star customer experience so that they are welcome as guests of the dealership.

-Read Books:  Learn to brand yourself and your business.  Learn to motivate yourself and get fired up.  Do the things you need to do to be a success.

Do you need help?

Dealer eTraining has created a limited edition 2 day training program for managers, sales and BDC professionals to "Kick off 2013".  This program brings back the basics of "old school" and integrates "new school" business practices that will condition your staff to move to the next level and start to 2013 on the right track.  Dealers that want to get ahead need to contact me directly at stan@dealeretraining.com or visit me on social networks.

https://www.facebook.com/dealeretraining

https://twitter.com/dealeretraining

Transforming The Dealership Part 3 - A Live Week By Week Case Study (Dealer eTraining)

Welcome to Part 3 of a live dealership case study in which I am working on.  It has been two weeks since Part 2 was published.  I was away in Chicago consulting another client and also handling the Internet Sales 20 Group.  I came home to a major hurricane which slowed things down considerably.  But here is what we were able to accomplish.

CRM:

We have been working on pre-installation processes with eLead by installing email headers, templates, and other important parts of the CRM.  It has been a simple process as the CRM company is accommodating.  eLead will be spending the week at the dealership training and installing the CRM at the dealership which means we will be live in a few days.

Website:

Once again, the major challenge is that it is OEM mandated and certain things are not able to be done while others are being developed as we speak.  As much as I respect what OEMs are doing to make all dealers in the same brand unified I feel that they make it difficult for a dealership to create a unique image to stand out from the competition.

We are in the process of updating employee pictures.  This is a tough task because the owner wants all pictures to be the same exact size.  The challenge is getting the pictures to show up on the website in the same size.  I am still trying to figure out with the vendor what is going on and this is the one time where I feel they are not helping me as they should.

We drastically improved the way the specials pages look with come great content and even more specials.  We started to add video testimonials to the website which was a challenge also because the videos did not want to upload from my end.  In addition, we made proper changes for the new month and any news pertaining to changes.

Social Media:

I have begun to focus on Facebook this past week.  I have been posting engaging content and getting people responding it.  In terms of twitter, I know we have followers but for some reason I am looking for the login which no one can seem to find.  I might have to setup a new account but I will give it a week before I do it.

I have continued to blog and syndicate content.  The content has been getting some views which tell me that people are reading it.  We had an announcement from the OEM that there is a hurricane relief discount available to people in certain areas that lost their vehicles to flood and hurricane damage.  I was quick to post it and promote it on facebook before any competing dealer can think of doing the same, if they normally do it.

Videos/Pictures:

It was disappointing to me that when I left for a whole week and asked sales people to start getting their own videos and pictures that not a single person took an action.  They got all excited about the fact that they can brand themselves but they took no action at all.  I addressed that with management because the process takes all of one minute and I am even here to get the content up.  All they need is to have a form filled out, snap a picture or capture a 30 second video and have me handle the rest.  I hope that they fix the situation and get to it.  However, one person did get a picture for me that is now posted.

I added more content to the Flickr account.

Traditional Advertising:

I have not had to be involved with this.

Online Reputation Management:

I discovered a challenge that I have never had before.  In all of my years doing this I was always able to grow a dealership’s online reputation without problem.  I sat in and listened to reasons why the service department has a hard time getting reviews and I am noticing from the sales department why they are not doing.

The sales department is not pushing for it at all.  The service department explains that whenever they ask for a review to get posted that customers do not want to post it.  The understanding that I am getting is that a lot of the customers here are generally in aged in the mid 40s and range as high as 70+.  They do not want to leave an email address and they prefer to leave a survey in pen and paper.  This raises a challenge to me, a social and digital warrior that believes that everyone and everything should be online.  I am thinking that we need an iPad in service and sales with a 4G connection and we should work closely with the customer to get what we need by guiding them or assisting them.  It is obvious that post cards with links to review sites do not work well for the customers as they do not pay attention to them.

I have never been a fan of spiffing customers for reviews.  However, cars.com has a really neat format of how to generate reviews.  Cars.com offers to place customers into a contest where the customer has a potential of getting $100 for leaving a review.  There is an email template for it.  I am thinking of also creating a process strictly for cars.com to let customers know about the offer not just as delivery but also after delivery where they can be guided through.  I mean, “Who wouldn’t want a chance to get $100?”  It is also my goal to learn from cars.com if the review can somehow be syndicated just like the way DealerRater does it with google.

If anyone has suggestions of how to get reviews from customers that are more mature and not as computer savvy, I am open to some responses on here.

Dealership Process and Operations:

While walking around the dealership looking for things that needed improvement I noticed a binder with parts specials that looked sloppy.  I took it upon myself to let management know about this and created a new professional looking binder with better specials and more transparency.

I have been spending time watching how the sales department functions from how sales managers are managing their people to how they work deals.  I have to say that when it comes to working deals and selling cars they do a great job and they have decent grosses.  The managers get involved in deals and are aggressive to sell cars.  This dealership is generally number one in its district.  The other things that I have been observing are how the one internet coordinator functions throughout the day.  The GSM complains about the coordinator because he finds him playing on his cell phone a lot.  The fix to the problem was that I monitored CRM activities in the old CRM and read comments along with emails that were being sent to the customers.

I noticed something interesting and disturbing.  When an internet appointment comes in the internet coordinator sits with them and talks with them sometimes as long as 20-30 minutes.  When I approached management they agreed and said that it needs to be fixed.  I had the perfect fix for that.  At the Internet Sales 20 Group, Ralph Paglia introduced the “Showroom Appointment Reception Agenda”.  This form is a professional way for the coordinator to meet the customer that they communicated with.  What is amazing about this form is that it explains in a quick and transparent fashion what the customer will accomplish on this visit which is a 4-5 step process.  The coordinator turns over the customer to a sales consultant and moves on with their job.  This takes 1-2 minutes.  We are implementing this as of this week as the new CRM is installed.  There were major changes made to the document that Ralph provided which I will describe in the next section.

Call monitoring is not very strong in the dealership.  The dealership relies on cars.com and their website provider to have toll free numbers.  It is amazing that the newspaper always had a local number.  No one really ever listened to phone calls.  In fact, all sales calls are being handled by sales consultants and not the internet coordinator.  This is a whole other issue that I will be tackling soon if I get the chance to.  The way I monitor the calls is I stand in the showroom and listen to the sales consultants talk to phone ups.  I then log into to my limited tools and listen to the conversation.  My plans are to do the same with service and parts soon.  While taking many notes, I have discovered flaws in phone skills and will be planning on phone training sessions at this dealership after the CRM is installed. 

Ownership Challenges:

The only real challenges in the improvement and transformation of the dealership are dealing with ownership in this case.  The dealer principle is not hands on yet has very interesting opinions to how things should run.  As far as sales and service is concerned, she lets the managers do their thing and make money for the store.  But when a highly paid expert that has built numerous success stories is brought in a challenge is created.  Now, I am not saying that challenges are not fun.  This is a unique challenge where I am working with a personality that involves me trying to figure out how they think. 

Every best practice email installed needs to be edited because the writing does not work for them.  This stalled the processes of installing emails into the CRM by two weeks.  Take website content, wording of some serious best practices just never work and they need to be changed.  My challenge is that I need to change content and write it as if I was this other person.  Again, it is an interesting challenge.

The best practice implemented by Ralph Paglia was another example where 60% of the content was rewritten and another 20% was omitted just to satisfy their feelings.  Now I am not saying the document became a bad document but it had changed the TO process from internet coordinator to sales person in a way that I personally would have done differently.

I respect the challenge and although at some point it is frustrating it is what makes me better at my job and what ultimately brings more success to the dealership.

That is all for Part 3.  If anyone has questions, always feel free to contact me. 

http://dealeretraining.com/

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http://www.drivingsales.com/ratings/companies/dealer-etraining

Where did my Yelp Reviews go?

As I write this article, I am in literally sitting at an Internet Sales 20 Group where my colleagues and I are sharing best practices with over 50 dealers.  It seems that auto dealers are concerned more about their online reputation now than ever before.  While it is great to see dealers place a focus on it there still needs to be a structure in place that will create a strong reputation for the dealership.  Once a structure is in place, managing an online reputation is actually a very simple process.

The big issue that dealers are having is that they are losing their Yelp review visibility.  They have been focusing so much on Yelp those they had a lot of reviews get posted and then taken down.  This is a similar problem to have been going on with Google.  Let me explain the problem.  We all know that our industry has been labeled in negative ways by consumers for many years now.  Well, just like the consumer put a label on us, the review sites have done something similar by being cautious with what gets put out there.  When dealers are getting a lot of reviews coming in within a short period of time, sites like Google and Yelp get weary of the situation and question the validity of the reviews.

Yelp has been archiving reviews and showing very few.  It has been really upsetting dealers and I have heard this numerous times in the last two days.  I am here to tell you that there is nothing to stress over.  There are many schools of thought of how to manage the dealership’s online reputation.  I believe that dealerships need to diversify their reputation.  What do I mean about “diversify”?  Just like when you’re building a financial portfolio to manage investments of stocks, equity, money markets, and your bank account.  You need to have a strategy for managing reviews.  While Yelp and Google are great; they are only a few key players.  Take a look at Edmunds.com, Yahoo local, Cars.com, AutoTrader, DealerRater (it still works), Edmunds.com, City Search, and Merchant Circle just for starters.

It sounds like a lot of sites to be on but hear me out.  Create a strategy where every week or two the dealership focuses on having reviews posted on a different site.  For example, week 1 reviews are to be put on Google, week 2 we focus on DealerRater, week 3 we focus on Yelp, week 4 is for Yelp, and so on.  Now that you diversified your reviews take it one step further, create numerous blogs using platforms like Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, and Google’s BlogSpot.  Once they are created, you can tie them in with facebook and twitter.  Now you can copy over the reviews into the blog format and repost them.  These build a huge buzz online while spreading your content all over the internet and improving your search engine rankings.  Take it even one more step further be developing a strategy to get live video testimonials from customers who buy and services vehicles at the dealership.  That strategy is simple and will go a very long way.  These videos should also be syndicated on blogs after posting them on Youtube and other major video sharing sites.

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Transforming The Dealership Part 1 - A Live Week By Week Case Study (Dealer eTraining)

Welcome to Part 1 of what will be a major real live hands on case study.  Less than 2 weeks ago, I was contacted by a dealer principal of a dealership within an hour from my home.  The owner is a female and a real entrepreneur that is a partner in two other dealerships and also owns a wireless retail business with multiple locations.  The store is a family environment and has been in business for over 30 years under her control.

She was looking for someone to come in and really help the dealership with all of the marketing efforts.  This includes communications, vendor relationship, and advertising budget and oversees the internet sales operations of the store.  This was because she wanted to get a better grasp on things and make improvements.  The person in this role would also be in charge of events for the store as well as local events.

As we make progress in the dealership, I think it would be great to document and write out the changes on a weekly basis.  Consider it like a new chapter of a book to entertain yourself and learn how you can make positive changes in a dealership that bring improvements on many levels including profitability, accountability, a better brand for the OEM, and a better image for the dealership as a whole.  This will include helping to create more proactive employees.

We will not be disclosing names of employees, or the dealership for various reasons.  I want to keep it exciting and new.  When the time is right all will be revealed.

So let's get started...

It has been five days since I got involved with working with the dealership.  Here is what I gathered so far.

The sales department:

1 General Sales Manager (3 Years longevity))

1 Sales Manager (9 years longevity)

1 Finance Manager (few years longevity)

8 Sales Consultants (1-5 years longevity)

1 Internet Coordinator (was 2 but 1 quit during the week) - Here for over 1 year,

The dealership sells around 100 units per month with 60-65 being new and 30-40 being used at around a $2,000 average per car.

Website: Dealer.com (OEM Mandated)
Digital Marketing: OEM Mandated
Social Media Presence: Facebook and Twitter with limited engagement
CRM: A test pilot CRM for this dealership.  The CRM is a new product that comes as an add on to the DMS.  The DMS is not a well known common company.  The DMS works great but the CRM gives nothing but trouble.  It is missing more than 50% of the features that it needs to be fully functional.  In addition, it is server based.

Process: No set process.  No tracking of phone calls, internet leads, appointments, set, show.
Sales Process: Sales works well as the GSM does a great job putting deals

The Service Department

1 Service Manager (over 13 years here)

3 Service Advisors

1 Parts Manager

2 Parts Counter Reps

 

The first order of business:

1) Fix and properly optimize Website

2) Fix and properly optimize CRM

3) Get involved in all marketing and advertising initiatives (meet the vendors)

4) Create plan to measure advertising activity

5) Get sales department on board with reputation management and video testimonial strategy

 

What have we accomplished in the first 5 days?

Website: We did a full scope of the website and communicated with the Dealer.com rep.  We started to make plans to make certain changes and additions based on some best practices that we found from other dealers on a national level.  Right now we are creating content to be approved by the owner of the dealership before we push it to get setup and go live.

CRM: We discovered that the CRM has been holding the dealership back for over 1 year now.  Everyone in the store complains about it and for the first time we see why.  We had internet leads not coming through.  We had server crashes.  The tool does not allow for certain functions to happen.  I was able to convince the owner to look at options.  We started evaluating other options and will soon come an agreement.  Meanwhile, a major conference call with the current CRM Company included the development team and key executives.  This call allowed me to tell them everything that I need; I used examples from VinSolutions, iMagic, eLead, HigherGear, WebControl AVV, and a few others.  I was told that they will build it for me and within months I will see changes while other changes will take place within a days.

Advertising: Had numerous conference calls with OEM, local newspaper representative, cars.com, Digital "Behavioral" Marketing services reps, and CRM to review and learn analytic reports.

Management: Work closely with General Sales Manager to help take his mind off of a lot of advertising issues.  Create a plan to work together and help each other in building the success of the dealership further.  The GSM is fully on board with everything and is also a key decision maker in the store.

Owner: Very open minded and over worked.  She is involved in tell me what she wants to accomplish.  When trying to setup proven email templates and process she got involved and made opinions of her own where some of the templates she was not fond of and others we made changes together as a team.  As the relationship grows she will relinquish more power when she feels comfortable.  Based on our conversations and my actions with vendors she is starting to understand that I am the real deal and I know what I am doing.

Internet Department: Once the CRM situation stabilizes we will be able to get processes in place and know what we are dealing with in terms of lead count, tracking, and performance.  We will then try to build up the department accordingly.  The current Internet Coordinator explains his views and hope for better changes,

Sales People: They are excited to see a marketing initiative come into place that will help them market themselves at a level they never thought possible.  It is an easy going environment and when it is slow no one is being proactive.  As we implement digital strategies and train them on effective prospecting techniques we should see them become better modern sales professionals.  Eventually we will train them to use their digital tools in order to be better.

Social Media: We are creating video channels on various networks (YouTube, daily motion, metacafe, video).  We are also starting to gather images and create a flick account.  The twitter and facebook page is being managed by our graphic designer.  We met and will be creating neat logos and advertising campaigns.  We will soon take over managing the facebook and twitter while planning on creating syndicated blogs in the next few days.

Reputation Management: Created Quality Control Survey that every customer in Sales needs to read and fill out.  The Survey has 7 questions that includes rating dealership experience, commenting on it, recommending the sales professional, and learning what they liked the most about their experience.  In addition, we ask for permission to take a photograph of them with their new car to be emailed to them and used in social media.  We also ask for permission to take a video testimonial.  It comes with a disclaimer notice which the customer will sign.  Afterwards, we will either take a picture and video or we will not based on the customer's permission.  I had explained to the sales consultants how some of the most successful sales people in the business do it and they were very much excited.

So far...that is all we have for the first week.  Stay tuned as we make forward strides in the dealership.

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http://www.drivingsales.com/ratings/companies/dealer-etraining

Create The Be-Back

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Picture this...you are a sales consultant working at a dealership.  You have gone through all of the steps and you are going through the negotiation process.  After all is said and done the customer decides that it is time to leave and a deal cannot be made.  It got down to the customer not being satisfied with the trade or the deal that is being offered to them.

 

Does this sound familiar?  It should.  This is what we deal with the most in our business if we are not making deals.  There are many reasons why customers end up not making a deal on the spot.  In some cases, sales consultants or BDC reps end up trying to get the customer to come back.  In other cases, the customer leaves and never gets contacted again.  This all depends on how the dealership is structured with process, CRM, and management styles.  

 

I remember as a sales person I would have a manager sit down with me just to make sure that I am pounding the phones.  I believe that this can be extreme in some cases.  A sales person needs to be dedicated and care enough about their career as well as their livelihood.  Successful sales professionals still use the telephone and innovative methods of communication to follow up.  A few months ago, I wrote an article about the number one sales person in the country for Hyundai.  The man sells 60 units per month consistently and makes twice what his sales manager makes.  He is dedicated.

 

Now comes the interesting aspect of this article.  How do we follow up with these customers that did not buy?  How do we create a process to ensure 100% follow all of the time?

 

I recently had a dealer client ask me to create some processes for different objections for why people did not buy.  After evaluating their dealership, their product, and how their staff operates I was able to create a custom process for various objections.  It adds a few more calls per day to the BDC but will create more be-backs.  My thinking is that every action needs a reaction.  If they do heavy follow up, make a lot of calls, send properly crafted emails, engage in social media follow up, you will create a big enough buzz to get these customers to come back and make that deal. 

 

It is all about process, process, process, process, and you guessed it PROCESS!!!  Along with process comes the training on handling these opportunities.  Along with the process and handling these opportunities comes effective communication between sales and BDC departments in order to have effective follow up.

 

Now let's think about this for a second.  What do we do when we get a fresh internet lead?  We follow up with a solid phone call, email, and social media engagement process for a set amount of days, right?  If we are serious about initiating contact with the prospect, why are we not serious about getting a bigger interest out of them after we have engaged them and had a chance to build rapport face to face?  Why not create a similar type of strategy for someone who already has your attention?  Shouldn't it be easier to sell them a vehicle at this point?

 

It might be a great idea for dealerships to consider having a process for handling customers that did not buy with a solid, mandatory follow up plan.  Since it is a numbers game dealers will see tremendous results and a better be-back ratio.  This can be done for customers that do not buy due to trade issues or pricing issues.  If the OEM makes positive program enhancements, it might make sense to create a process to engage those prospects that left and did not buy.  Dealers and managers need to remember that persistence pays off big dividends.  Think about it.

 

Stan Sher is the founder and president of Dealer eTraining, a premier automotive internet sales and digital marketing consulting company. For more information, please feel free to call 732-925-8362 or email stan@dealeretraining.com .