The struggle is real! It’s hard to find good people. Or is it? Dealerships know how to find customers, overcome their fears, build trust, and offer solutions to their problems. Finding the right people to work for you is no different.

Jason Volny’s session, “The Struggle Is Real: How to Find a Higher-Caliber Salesperson Today,” will offer a modern-day recruiting approach based on using what you already know how to do (sell) when recruiting for talent. He will help you move from traditional recruiting tactics that barely work in today’s market to modern-day approaches that will attract and hire top talent. Jason will share the steps that managers or HR directors must take and do consistently to attract and successfully hire the right people.

Primary Learning Objectives:

• Identify what’s holding you back from getting the people you want.
• Understand what you can do in just one hour a week that will get you more applicants than you’ll know what to do with.
• Increase the likelihood that top talent will choose to move forward with accepting a position at your organization by addressing an applicant’s fears and concerns during the interview process.

Today’s automotive retailers are facing more competitive pressures than ever. Profitability is always challenging, even when times are good. But, with sales projected to recede this year, dealers need to unlock every sale opportunity possible.

Utilizing real-world data is the key to finding these sales. For example, most dealer marketing assumes an off-lease customer would buy new. But recently Experian looked at a group of 1,300 off-lease customers and found that only 400 bought new, while 900 bought CPO or used. Dealers can now put information like this to use, providing the right deal to the right customer at the right time.

During this session (“Doing the Data Thing”), Amy Hughes will help you to learn how demographic and psychographic information and life events for current customers can help you to better target customers. You’ll walk away with a roadmap for how to use these techniques for a sales boost of approximately 10 percent.

Primary Learning Objectives:

• Learn how leveraging local market data leads to more profitable sales.
• Learn quick and simple measures to start leveraging data immediately in your store.
• Learn how to find customers higher in the marketing funnel and create a relationship earlier in the sales process.

Over the past decade, margin compression has been a leading challenge in the automotive industry. According to the 2018 mid-year NADA report, franchise dealers’ new and used gross margins are down compared to five years ago, with an estimated gross loss of $300/unit.

While there is no single culprit, this major loss is the result of a combination of what may seem like insignificant or infrequent sales sacrifices. Having a stronger understanding of inventory opportunities can help you set proactive strategies focused on promoting vehicles on your lot, meeting sales objectives, and preventing margin compression.

John Gottschalk’s session “Uncover the Answers to Margin Compression Living on Your Lot,” will pull from industry data and headlines to outline the current climate of the automotive industry, touching on fluctuating floor plan and used car reconditioning costs, as well as overall gross margin compression. You will learn the most important metrics to use to understand the health of your inventory and the likelihood of specific units to sell in a timely manner.

Primary Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the factors to consider before reducing a vehicle’s price.
• Understand what metrics to monitor to assess the health of your inventory.
• Gain insight into how to get the most profit out of a vehicle.

Intelligent messaging has opened the door to better engagement – allowing consumers to do more than chat with dealerships on their websites. It’s now the go-to solution for businesses wanting to engage their customers and move them further down the sales funnel on multiple channels, including websites, social media, messenger apps, and text messages – 24/7.

The technology capabilities are beyond just simply capturing contact information. It brings car buyers closer to the purchase by allowing them to discover inventory, get vehicle quotes and trade-in values, fill out soft-credit pulls, and more – without ever leaving the messaging conversation.

In Jeff Cole’s session, “Intelligent Messaging – The Smarter Way to Sell,” you’ll explore the real ways that innovative dealerships are using intelligent messaging to solve staffing challenges, increase website visitor-to-lead conversions, and ultimately sell more.

Primary Learning Objectives:

• Learn how AI can work on multiple channels and provide a better customer experience.
• Learn how to implement AI to solve staffing challenges.
• Discover how to use AI to better capture and convert leads 24/7.

Around 50% of a dealer’s ad budget gets spent on third-party classifieds websites, designed to drive store visits, website traffic, and leads for a dealership — making third-party classifieds one of the largest expense categories for automotive digital marketing.

Ensuring the success of your third-party classifieds efforts means you must have a framework in place to evaluate your investment and know which providers will work best for your market and inventory.

During George Nenni’s session, “A Proven Framework for Auditing Third-Party Classifieds,” he will help you to build a framework for measuring the ROI from third-party classifieds. You will learn how to quickly identify if you’re overspending. You’ll walk through how to aggregate data from the classifieds sites into a consolidated dashboard to effectively measure your investment. This session will also break down how to use Google Analytics to measure the quantity and quality of referral traffic that classifieds sites send to your website.

Primary Learning Objectives:

•  Learn the most important success metrics and benchmarks to look at when analyzing third-party classified site performance.
• Learn how to easily consolidate the reporting data from the classifieds sites into a dashboard that will help you compare your effectiveness.
• Learn how to use Google Analytics to not only measure the effectiveness of referral traffic but also how to measure assisted attribution as well as last-click attribution.

For more event details, visit digitaldealer.com