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Are You Waiting? Still? Well…..Goodbye!

This is officially the beginning of the end for many. December 27, 2011. There will be a moment over the next couple to handful of years in which you'll reflect back to this post (or others like it) and say "oh crap". Or it may be the longer rendition which usually sounds something like "Why did I allow me to get in my way over and over again? Why did I shut down and refuse to change, giving garbage excuses?"

As time went on from December 27, 2011 Acute Death by Delusional Digital Defiance, we'll call it ADDDD for short, you invested more and more in the comfort zone, allowing vendors to do with you money and brand what they wanted and would essentially squandering opportunities while you were convinced you were actually doing something. Your business was actually disappearing at the same time everything looked the same from your vantage point behind the desk or golf cart steering wheel.

And who could blame you? You read the ads in the trades and took advice from your 20 Group and absorbed the Powerpoint presentations. You wrote the checks. You took the training, however often that someone actually showed up and you attended the conferences. It never dawned on you that everything you relied so heavily on was the white elephant in the room. You took the easy way out instead of asking the tough questions and not believing the hype. Simply put you allowed yourself to fail.

Why did this happen? You didn't take the road less traveled when the paths diverged in the woods. As far as you knew, you believed it wasn't supposed to be about "hard work" anymore: you're senior management or, better yet, a business owner. Add to that the whole "Internet thing" was just too difficult to understand and should be handled by young kids and "people who text a lot and surf the web".

So wind it down now so you don't experience the slow, deliberate march of self-induced death. Ignore the articles from Joe Webb prodding the salespeople that you mistreat (http://bit.ly/rVN66B) and from HubSpot on Harvard Business Review about Google changes (http://bit.ly/ub6iOH) that your website company will not talk about, or some trends to capitalize on (http://bit.ly/rU9VAt) and what's going on with mobile (http://bit.ly/smRSOt) from Search Engine Watch. You've been reading all of these…right?

Nope…"too busy running a business". More like "too ignorant to run a business"

So while you idly wait for the inevitable why don't you ask:

Your website company why:

  1. your pages have the same names and metadata
  2. you don't have model and trim level landing pages
  3. you don't have separate tracking numbers
  4. you don't have original content on your pages (heard of Google Panda?)
  5. you don't have a truly optimized mobile presence
  6. you can't track conversions on Google Analytics or your PPC/SEM
  7. they don't truly offer eCommerce
  8. their proouction team doesn't talk with their marketing team (ie SEO to SEM)
  9. they lack in customer support
  10. they're not up to date on what's happening with Google and social

Your CRM company why:

  1. you can't track email opens, bounces, links, shares, etc.
  2. you can't change headers and footers dynamically
  3. they don't append and integrate for text/mobile delivery
  4. you are still on servers and not on the cloud
  5. they don't offer true mobility
  6. they can't make lead duplication management much easier
  7. data "siloing" still existst (lead based: service/sales/finance)
  8. they're not up to date on what's happening with Google and social

Your social media company why:

  1. they don't actually write content
  2. what they do publish is redundant and automated (ie "Caption this photo" of dogs or cats)
  3. they don't create engagement
  4. they sold you on 20+ "social media sites/platforms" when traffic comes from 4-8 of them
  5. they pitch and don't produce (and not actually active on the networks at all themselves)
  6. they are disconnected from the store
  7. they're not up to date on what's happening with Google and social

Waiting? You've been told your entire life that good things come to those that wait. Well, we're here to set the record straight. Only the leaders thrive. You can wing it today, sure. There will be "those" that still make it with no true effort. However, it is a false existence and leads to ADDDD.

The grim reaper is coming and his sickle has your business' name on it. Are you waiting? Still? Well…..Goodbye!

Thanks to @HarryHaber and @BryanCarGuy for a little insight on the list of dealer pain points… you're great friends and car guys!

 

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

December 27, 2011 by Gary May 1
Powered Webinar: From Zero to Community: Practical Advice for Growing and Nurturing an Online Community

Powered_Logo 

Live Webinar on Thursday, September 17th

Featuring Newell Rubbermaid, The Community Roundtable and Powered

A successful social marketing program requires the same comprehensive,
well-planned approach that traditional marketing programs demand, and it
entails careful consideration of how your company will participate. At the
heart of most social marketing programs is some form of online community that
can help integrate social media elements into a cohesive program aligned with
your marketing objectives – from creating customer engagement to brand
loyalty and advocates. Online communities take dedication, perseverance and
commitment that go far beyond building a site or joining an existing social
network community.

Register to attend to learn:

  • How to drive ongoing, active engagement within a branded online
    community
  • Tips for leveraging social media such as Twitter and Facebook to
    drive awareness of your community initiative
  • How online communities help address the need of your customers at
    every stage of the buying cycle
  • The importance of community management on the health of a
    successful online community

Register here!

September 3, 2009 by Gary May 0
First Of The Month Syndrome: You’re Not Starting Over

Month end is behind you, save for those few deals that are going to be back-dated to August 31. Hopefully with C.A.R.S. you didn't need to do that. Now it's a whole new month and you're thinking "I'm at zero, clean sheet of paper, time to hit my numbers!"  Since we know so many people that do that, there must have been one parent in all of our families that, when we were infants, whispered in our ears "you'll think like you'll get paid, you'll start over on the 1st, you'll scurry like hell to get everything done on the last day of every month". Man, talk about a dysfunctional     family!

So here you are, 20-40 years later, convinced that a calendar determines your effectiveness and runs your life.  While nobody is here to tell you it's not how you get paid, quotas are set, assessments are handled and forecasts are created, quit thinking that way.  You're not starting over.

Especially in today's Internet-based world, the first of any month is just another day to tackle the 30-100 leads in your queue.  You can let the management and executives control the way a company operates but you don't have to be controlled by a calendar.  When you remove yourself from that process, your vision grows and you can see things in better perspective.  Again, don't start a revolt or fight the way your GM runs your store.  Just start to believe there's people (your customers) that work and believe in a 365-day world.

When you start planning beyond 30 days, in reality most folks hope on 30 and plan less, you can better see marketing effectiveness, referrals building, many leads actually taking 5-12 weeks to buy (rather than ignoring them until the week before and finding out they bought elsewhere), track trends and cycles, even bring customers back for parts, accessories, warranties and more!

If you truly believe that your number is 'zero' when the last month expires and the new one starts, maybe look at how you're holding yourself back.  It might just be your condition, but for those that can change, it might be the most fun you've ever had at a dealership…and possibly the most money too!

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

September 1, 2009 by Gary May 1
How to Use Social Media to Attract More Customers – Free Marketing Webinar

Hubspot_logo

Businesses now have the power to leverage the Internet — search
engines, blogs, social media — to reach customers more effectively.
This includes connecting with customers where they hang out online and
engaging in conversations about the topics most important to them.
Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is all about joining the
ongoing conversations our customers and prospects are already having
and not trying to control them. It's realizing that people like doing
business with people they like and love doing business with people they
trust. 

This free webinar will cover:
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  • How to use social media to connect with customers online
  • Creating content to attract more customers to your business
  • Tools to help you manage and measure your social media efforts

Date: Tues. April 14, 2009

Time: 2PM ET (GMT -5)

Duration: 1 Hour

Who should attend?

Marketing professionals and business owners. No technical experience required.

Speaker:

Special guest presenter: Brent Leary, co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials and recognized expert in the field of social CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Enroll_Now

April 9, 2009 by Gary May 0
Taking The Fear Out Of Online…One _______ At A Time

Even though you've already heard it: If you want to succeed in business today, it has to take place online. For us in the auto industry, that's truly more the case than not. But the fact is it's not harder than it looks or sounds if you have the right assistance.

Maybe it used to be much easier, in some sense, years ago when you'd place an ad insertion, sit down on Saturday, Sunday or whatever day of the week your ad would display, grab your coffee, flip the right page open and smile. "There's my ad" and "oh, so much better than their ad!" (looking at a competitors ad). You could touch it, feel it, see it and gloat over it. Somewhere before the newspapers started failing rapidly, you were paying A LOT for advertising there and in other media that is not capturing an effective audience today…in the least.

Now here comes the Internet, offering the ability to reduce budgets by 30, 50, 60 and even 75% percent and get a more effective (yes, more effective) reach and ROI, let alone transparency and accountability. You can hear the dealers backing away from their monitors right now. How (and why) can you have faith in something with no true ability to be tracked, where circulation and impression rates mean practically nothing, then look at the web and say it's not for you?

We are not talking about the "I don't get it" excuse. Let that flimsy fallacy go the way of the Dodo Bird. This is the simple message: In most markets $2,000-$4,000 monthly of well-placed spend after 60-90 days will replace what $15,000-$25,000 plus used to drive. Absorb that…call your website or SEO/SEM company and start, today. And stay in it for at least 90 days before you make any judgment. This is not a 'run and gun ad' world. This is a 'stick with it' world.

So it doesn't matter if it's one ad, one car, one store, one promo, one incentive, one anything. The only way to take fear out of something is to do it. Stop making excuses: you're astute, successful, experienced and capitalistic, even though somewhere along the line fear replaced confidence and the Internet replaced the 'Sunday Times'. Oh, you might even end up building a brand…imagine that!

And by the way, if your website company can't handle it and/or you don't have an SEO specilist, head to NADA in a couple weeks and to Digital Dealer in April and get one (see you at both events!)

Best practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

January 15, 2009 by Gary May 0
If My Ads Won’t Bring Them, Santa Will (and other misguided beliefs)

If the auto industry is living on one thing right now, it's hope. Not that hope isn't good, quite the opposite. But if your plan to drive traffic, sales and retention is based on the hope that people will see your ad, or that people will stop right off the freeway because your sign is there, please stop and think again.

Recently I was at a client, talking with a "non-Internet" salesperson. This person was complaining about the prospect of taking web leads since they were 'already responsible for about 600 orphans' in their system. Talk about kicking a gift horse in the mouth, but game on!

What you believe and what you perpetuate will, like it or not, manifest itself for you. Why is a person who contacts you via an email any less of a customer? Between 15 and 20% of Internet leads buy from the first store they contact. About 70% buy from a subsequent store. What are we doing or better yet not doing with our customers?

In a meeting last week, an OEM National Manager related a story about a neighbor of theirs. This person had submitted leads to all their area stores and was told by everyone that responded (not all did) that the request was for a vehicle that was not available in the entire region due to allocation not being built that way. Well, a dealer about 300 miles away got this person's next lead, found the car inbound to a dealer about 1,700 miles away, traded for it, shipped it in, the person flew in one way and drove their new car home (over 7 hours).

You could have the 'best' ads in the world (even online!), the 'best' inventory and even the 'best' facility, but you can't count on those to deliver customers (especially completely satisfied ones) to you…and neither will Santa (my sincere apologies to the jolly one).

Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

December 1, 2008 by Gary May 0
Build It And They Will Come…

In hospitality, it's the Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and Luxury Collection hotels, in aviation you're talking about the A380 and B787, and in automobiles Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Maybach, Lamborghini, Bugatti and the like. These brands beacon to those that can afford them and those that can't. They represent some of the finest in quality and reputation.

Now would you rather shop at Nordstrom or Sears, dine at Spago's or the Golden Arches and golf at Trump or your local public course?  Fact is more consumers go to the latter but lust for the prior. It's about service, attention and recognition. There is no difference from someone entering a high-line store to another person leaving a mass-brand store.

Some hotels let you rest a little more comfortably at night, fast-flying jumbo-jets arrive at your destination with more room and luxury cars get to where you're going in more comfort and style. What people care about is the experience. Check your surveys, look at your testimonials and ask your customers. They want to be acknowledged, validated and respected. That's why they write about how great the experience they had, and very rarely that you made no money on the deal that they drove two hours for.

In a meeting today with one of the import brands, it was clear that they're still struggling greatly with how dealership staff communicate with, invite and ultimately deliver customers, especially via the Internet. And didn't know how to get the management knowledgeable and accountable.

People, it's not your multi-million-dollar facilities or your top-of-the-line auto flushers in the restrooms. It is entirely the feeling that you give, the welcome that you express and the confidence that you give them that they found the 'right dealership for them'.

Take a moment to think about an extraordinary experience you've had lately…now do whatever it takes to deliver the same experience for your next client..which should be arriving right about now…

Do more…do what it takes…do what you love…do what nobody expects…and do it with a smile!

Best practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results

November 25, 2008 by Gary May 0