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

Changing DMS or CRM providers is hard enough. Your employees don’t like change and it seems like you never get all your data from your old system into the new system. Two things that you might not have expected during the change is a loss of archiv

I find that most disappointments in the monthly financial statement come from a lack of daily reporting. In fact, I’ve been a long-time hater of our whole month end process. We basically shut down all accounting operations for three to five days wh

I recently moderated a roundtable of Internet and BDC managers at the 8th Digital Dealer Conference in Orlando, Florida and one of the objectives of the attendees was to find a good ILM, DRM, ERP and CRM software. For many of us “old timers” out

Probably the best thing that happened to me as a controller was change.  I worked for one dealer that liked to buy dealerships, so I learned about buy/sells.  I worked for a dealership group that liked to move general managers around (and sometimes

It wasn’t very long ago that the social networking sites of today were being hailed as a virtually cost-free medium to reach your clients with your advertising efforts.  “Hey!  You get to put your very same ads and commercials someplace else, b

Effective SEO campaigns are more than just keywords and meta tags It’s not news that search engine optimization has been a hot topic in the automotive industry for quite a while. You have probably spent a significant amount of time throughout the l

For many years, a major DMS provider would sell their system on the claim that if they switched to their system, a dealership could reduce office staff by 50%.  The latest claim that’s been going around has been if you get an ASP solution, you can

If your store doesn’t have it, better get it Coaching an individual by influencing his view of CRM processes into a positive growth potential is one of the most valuable investments leaders can give their team. “Cosmetic managers” (old school)