The arrival of a lead is the moment of truth. Best practice is to execute a multi-vehicle price quote right away every time, followed by a phone call in 10 minutes. The dealer who consistently delivers his customer a 10-minute call in response to an

Cross training and team building are critical Are your business development and Internet sales teams integrated with your experienced sales team, as documented in your store’s playbook? If you do not have a defined process with a back-up plan for e

‘Tiny’ wrote me a great letter recently on the ABCs of common sense advertising. ‘Tiny’ is a lawyer-turned-car dealer who married into an ‘automotive’ family in 1985. His real name is Pete but most of the world knows him as ‘Tiny’ fro

Business development seems to have many perceptions of its functionality. From my experience, Business development is more than a department. It is a mindset translated into a team’s actions or process. The foundation of business development is bas

Today’s progressive auto dealer faces three difficult challenges: limited scale, broad span and significant marketplace shift. How he responds to these three challenges will determine how successful his dealership will be. First there’s the issue

So, you’ve been assigned the responsibility to write the vehicle comments on behalf of your store. While this may be Internet Sales 101, it is more than apparent that dealers can use a refresher course now and again. As I research dealership after

With the end of 2010 in sight, it’s time for proactive dealers to begin finalizing their plans for 2011. Where will you be this time next year? What new products, services, processes or procedures will you pilot? What will be the makeup of your tea

One of the first tasks that I had in a dealership was typing the daily heat sheet. The fact that I “typed” the heat sheet indicates how old I am and that I still remember this task shows how much of an impact this daily heat sheet had on me. For

Prior to becoming a dealer, Mike Reichenbach was a factory guy working at Ford Motor Co. After deciding automotive retail was the place to be and going to work for Tim Stewart Ford, Ford called on him three different times to act as interim general m