Recently, I went Sporting Simo Clay Shooting with my sons. The trapper sends out a pair of clays simultaneously. It first appears easy but actually is quite difficult because they fly fast and your senses become so magnified in making sure you hit bo

After speaking with a group of dealers on the benefits of incorporating social media into the marketing mix, one dealer posed this question: “From your perspective, what role does a web site play in advertising?” My response? “Your website is y

Remember that time when you were driving down the freeway? On auto pilot, not paying particular attention to the satellite radio, no text messages to respond to, no one in the passenger seat blabbering away. Your mind meanders through a thousand diff

As I wrote last month, we all something we’re good at. Perhaps by now, you’ve figured out after all these years I’m not a very good writer (blame the editor) but I’m pretty good at taking the questions I hear most from dealers and helping the

I was consulting in a mid-sized GM dealership one evening. The service manager and I were looking through carefully prepared pre-write packets (menu, history, pre-write, recalls, MPI, and notes), to determine how well the service advisors had pre-loa

The past two years have been the roughest time in the history of the automotive business. The number of car dealerships in the United States has been declining for decades. Roughly 200 dealers close their doors every year. Last year, however, 2,000 d

We are a time-hungry society. We need and demand more – period. As consumers, we are no different than our customers. We demand convenience in what we do, as well. We have developed a dependence on it everywhere we turn. It never ceases to amaze me

My first GSM told me that customers would tell me how to sell them – I just had to listen.  I’ve carried that belief with me throughout my career and continue to find that customers – both sold and unsold – are the absolute best source of in

In October, I unveiled an updated ACES (Automotive Continuum of E-commerce Success) chart at the well-attended 9th Digital Dealer Conference in Las Vegas. With the 2011 edition of this popular chart, we asked dealers to focus on thirty core activitie