Dealer OPS & Leadership
Losing Them One at a Time – A True Story
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-loaded each...
Count Your Blessings: Success Begins with Being Thankful
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 dealerships went...
Is your Service Department Convenient?
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 how the employees...
A Fresh Look at Internet Leads
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 intelligence about the...
One Year from Today
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...
Taking the Business Back to its Roots
It is no secret that customers are using the Internet to broadcast their buying experiences, and in doing so, directing customers toward or away from your dealership, many times without you knowing. More and more prospective customers are using feedback left online...
Systems: The Backbone of your Dealership
It is stating the obvious to assert that core systems such as your Digital Response Management (DRM) system, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, dealer web sites, inventory management system, vehicle locator system and dealer management system (DMS) are...
Sales Management – 500 Million and Growing! Why Wait?
Whether training recruits or re-training “old school” folks, we always warn them of who to avoid, including the waiters! I mean that in two ways: The sales rep out front waiting on a deal with incomplete tasks on multiple fronts in your CRM right now (and the mini...
Google Places – More Important than your Web Site
There is a place on the Internet that the largest search engine in the world sends people before they get to your website. It is called Google Places and reflects the importance Google is placing on local search. Google Places is a profile for your business on Google....
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