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All businesses are built on two areas of competency – people skills and marketing skills. Many sales people who are more than adequate in their sales and people skills are struggling today. The reason is most sales people lack enough opportunities with customers. Lead generation = dollar creation

As a sales person you are in business for yourself. Having a mentality of being the CEO of your company is crucial to developing your business. The dealership signs your check, and you fill in the numbers.

You have a better opportunity than ever to be successful. The key to your long-term success as a sales person is the creation of a dynamite marketing strategy that dealers overlook and most sales people are too lazy to do.

Your first step is to create a marketing web. Take a sheet of paper and list every way that you receive customers. The first two ways you probably listed were from walk-ins and phone prospects. These are produced by the dealership and are therefore the ones over which you have no control. Begin to control your destiny and think of ways to produce customers from other resources.

What other sources of leads did you list? Here are some suggestions: referrals, service drive, service tickets, be-backs, affiliations, repeats, targeted phone calling, database marketing, targeted list mailings, orphan owners, lost customer marketing, coupon swaps, joint-venture advertising, community board flyer, door-to-door flyers, Web site and many more.

For each source at least one strategy of creating leads should be chosen. If you execute one strategy a day on 10 ways to create leads, your leads will grow exponentially over time. Your business will hit a period of critical mass and explode.

At that point, a sales person has the best job in the dealership. Your pay, hours, stress and job security will be better than the managers’. Your risk will be zero, your investment minimal and most everything is supplied for you.

Why don’t more sales people take this road of action to success? Usually, it’s a lack of buy-in. If you haven’t begun to create a business of your own, it’s because your belief system doesn’t buy into the idea of a self-created destiny in sales. Either you have “Manageritis”, don’t believe you will be selling vehicles for a career, don’t believe you will be at your current dealership in the future, don’t believe it can be done or you’re lazy. The truth sucks sometimes.

Success and failure are all about belief systems and habits. You have to believe and live it everyday for it to work. Speaker and business philosopher Jim Rohn once was asked if you had to take successful actions everyday to be successful and he replied, “Only on the days you want to be successful.” Actually, if you only take successful actions every once in a while, you can’t even be successful on those once-in-a-while days. It takes sustained effort.

If you begin to execute a strategy of marketing and don’t have immediate success, you can’t quit. It’s easier to say something doesn’t work than it is to use the lack of success as a path to figuring out successful actions. Marketing in itself is a series of miscalculations to figure out what works. The greatest marketers of all time have failed more than they have been right. To great marketers, all failures are just tests on the road to figuring out the right formula.

As a small marketer in the Internet age, you can appear to be bigger and more successful than you really are. You can create a successful brand. You can be more agile and target more than larger businesses such as dealerships can do with traditional advertising. The over-hyped, over-competitive marketplace is perfect for the dedicated and creative sales person of today.

Learn how you can double your income digitally by choosing a positive attitude. Find out how you can market yourself with out any cash. Stop waiting for outside forces to change your future use your positive energy and develop your own personal marketing strategy. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and learn how to focus that positivity into productive leads.

Each year at the start of football practice, Vince Lombardi, the coach of the Green Bay Packers started his season the same way. His opening statement to his players was, “This is a football.” Every year, John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins started his first practice of the season by demonstrating to his players how to properly put on their socks to prevent blisters. Pretty basic stuff, huh?

Notice the similarities between Wooden and Lombardi in the educational formats. Whether it’s athletics or business, you must start with the fundamentals first. Just as if you built a mansion on a weak foundation, a business built on a weak foundation will crumble. Bill Walton the former star basketball player for UCLA was interviewed about John Wooden and he recounted his first practice with Wooden and how the coach talked about putting on socks properly. Bill Walton remarked that he expected incredible wisdom to come from his legendary coach in the first practice and was disappointed that the practice started with how to put on his socks. When Bill Walton questioned Wooden about the first meeting, Wooden’s reply was simple. If he were to teach Mr. Walton everything he knew about basketball but he could not do any of those things because he was sitting on the bench unable to play because of blisters, then all those teachings would not matter.

How many times have you experienced or witnessed yourself, sales people, managers and owners looking for miracle cures without taking care of the fundamental basics? Massive advertising campaigns, computers, software, business development centers, new facilities or cure-all sales approaches won’t matter if you don’t have the right foundation in place. What are the components of a solid foundation? First, you must have the right team members. Everything starts with people. I encourage every manager or owner to raise your expectations and requirements for the team members you recruit. Concentrate most all of your efforts into getting the right people before you move on to anything else.

Make sure you have the talents of those people matched to their positions. Many baseball historians have reviewed the “Big Red Machine” of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team in the 1970s and noted the improvement in the team that was made when Sparky Anderson, the Reds manager, moved Pete Rose from the outfield to third base to allow the insertion of George Foster to the outfield. At the time, the move was considered by many to be risky and even ridiculous. In retrospect, the move was genius because it allowed the right people to be in the right positions. In the book, “From Good to Great” by Jim Collins, Collins noted that great companies not only must have the right people on the bus, but that you must have them in the right seats as well. An example would be that great sales people don’t always make great managers and vice versa.

Next, make sure you give your team members the processes to use their skills. Talented team members going in different directions will still create bad results. The proper education of process should include what to do, how to do it, when to do it and, just as important, why. Talented and intelligent team members will also provide beneficial feedback to strengthen your process. It can even be argued that the process should come first. Talented and bright team members recruited into a bad process with limited flexibility to improve the process will just create heightened turnover problems. In other words, if your business model is bad, the better the recruit, the quicker he or she will leave.

When looking at a big task like creating a winning team with a winning strategy, it is natural for it to seem daunting. Remember that all big goals are accomplished one step at a time. Break down your strategy into small steps. Create a simple flow chart that utilizes a visual guideline for your goal. Put estimated timelines next to each stage to create urgency in creating your success. However, don’t be tempted to reduce your level of expectations to just say you made your deadline. Remember your end destination and take action every day, the time of achievement will take care of itself.

If you were to follow around the most successful salesperson you know for a week and then follow a failing salesperson for the same amount of time, the differences would be glaring. It boils down to successful habits. What you do habitually in small incremental actions adds up to huge differences in results by the end of just one week.

Recently, I was visiting a dealership where some of the salespeople had attended a sales seminar I had conducted. One of the attendees of my seminar was their top salesperson. He has been in the business for only a year and a half, but was selling more than 20 units a month, with a large portion of the sales coming from referrals and business from his database of customers.

The salesperson was showing me his daily plan and the system he was using to produce the success he was achieving. As with most things, it was not rocket science, but rather simple in nature and just required habitual execution. The eye opener was in observing what many of the veteran salespeople were not doing, and the lack of results they were getting as a result of bad habits.

It’s simple to discover the foundations of success. You can break success down into the categories of goals, game plans, execution, review and attitude. All of these items seem to be intertwined. One tends to beget another.

Do you believe in yourself, and do you have faith in your actions? Successful people may have, as the song says, “moments of doubt and pain,” but they still keep believing that they are worthy of success. Successful people take action based upon their beliefs and keep at it.

Try this checklist:

1. Do you have written goals for you and your achievements for the week, month, year, five years and even your life? If not, stop making excuses and sit down and write them out. Your brain is a natural goal-seeking computer, so use it.

2. What is your daily game plan on how you will spend your time? How will you break down your day based upon self-education, practice, customer acquisition/marketing, customer follow up, face-to-face selling time, etc?

3. What are all the ways you market yourself? “Lead generation equals dollar creation.” I had expressed in my seminar that all salespeople should have refrigerator magnet business cards and personality-based business cards with pictures or caricatures, call-to-action information utilizing both sides and different ways to enter your marketing web, such as your own Website, social media sties, etc. All cards should also offer something informational for free. The top salesperson had already created the business card tools and was using them to get results. “One” is a horrible number in sales; if you rely on one method to acquire customers, you will experience uneven to bad results.

4. What are your personality-driven methods to follow up and engage with customers? The top salesperson was using a software program to follow up sequentially with all sold customers prospects, unsold customers and referrals. He had a game plan and executed. The top salesperson is a not young man born in the computer age and has no outstanding technical skills, and yet has set up his own CRM system that benefits him. He is open to using any and all technology that benefits him. I showed him a simple but robust e-mail system to add to his plan and he immediately invested in it and began a plan to use it.

5. As noted above, the salesperson was immediately willing to invest in his education, tools and anything else that would advance him. The universe will not move towards you until you move towards it. In any economy, the single best investment you will ever make is in yourself. Successful people practice this habitually and unsuccessful people make excuses, such as “I cannot afford it.” The reality is that you cannot afford not to. Successful people never say they cannot afford; instead, they ask “How can I afford…” and find the answer.

There is a Hindu Proverb that says “Pray, but move your feet.”

6. Have faith, but be willing to adjust. You cannot quit taking action because you did not get results in a week or a month. Persistent equals consistent. However, you must monitor and measure everything and adjust accordingly. Do not quit, but adjust.

7. Be aware of the intentional congruence when you add goal setting, game plans, actions, reviews and attitude together. One feeds the other. When you set goals and seek them habitually, you will have a better attitude. More options will reveal themselves and allow you to review what you do and how you do to become better. The more results you get, the more you want to quantify and qualify your actions. Action begets more action, and good habits create good attitudes that create success. Everything is intertwined and dependent upon another.

There is an old saying that I call the “Tree of Success.” Thoughts lead to words and words lead to actions. Actions create habits and habits create results. Results shape your character and character creates your destiny. Examine this daily to create your habits of success.

Last post, we took a look at programming your subconscious to be the best supercomputer you’ll ever need to achieve success. This month, let’s take a look at some other ways to survive and thrive in your situation, and find the joy in your career and life.

First, you must quantify to qualify. You have to get a handle on what you are currently doing, and be honest. I have consulted with thousands of businesses over the years. I have found few, who are currently unsuccessful, willing at first to be honest about the reasons for their lack of success. There are almost always tons of excuses and a shocking lack of self-awareness.

Have you ever watched the reality TV shows about unsuccessful restaurants, bars, hotels, etc? You will notice it’s always the same elements in their lack of success. It also does not take a genius to discover it and fix it, but it does take self-awareness and honesty.

Self-awareness and personal responsibility are cornerstones in creating success or moving to another level. Programming your autopilot with successful habits is essential to success. Be ruthless with your time, because you cannot get it back.

Another cornerstone of success and goal attainment is to utilize what I call the “Polarization Effect.” This has taken me decades to truly understand and something I must be mindful of every day to experience ultimate success. Ultimate success is not only measured by the goal attainment, but in also truly enjoying and breathing in all that you have while you go for what you want.

Let me be more specific. Pain can be a tremendous motivator. Pain in your current position can move you towards getting what you want. You may have great pain about your income, financial position, weight, relationships, etc. This pain leads you to a defining moment. To quote the line from the movie Network, “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.”

Some people may use this pain to motivate them for the rest of their lives. However, true joy and success comes from not only using this motivation to drive you, but also taking a deep breath every day as you drive yourself and realizing the joy you are receiving from the doing.

Attainment of goals without the enjoyment of doing is hollow. In this case, nothing can be good enough and no goal, no matter how big, can fulfill you. Begin to truly enjoy the moments of what you do. Strive to find absolute amazement and wonder in excellence.

Recently, I went to a concert featuring The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Little Feat and Delbert McClinton. I have been listening to their music and watching these performers for decades. I watched in awe at the magnitude of their skill. These performers are better now than ever. Their passion was evident. I have also sat and watched a man shine shoes for 20 minutes and found myself amazed at his skill, communication and passion.

To be an expert and to be truly amazing at anything takes passion and dedication. Every day, look for examples of that passion and dedication in others and in you. Although it takes honesty about what you are doing right, it takes grace to give you and others credit for what you are doing right. Recognize and enjoy the performances.

There is a scene in the movie The Hustler with Paul Newman where Newman’s character, Fast Eddie Felson, is grousing about being a loser in life, but also talking about how he feels when he has a pool cue in his hands and his feeling of something truly amazing. His girlfriend in the movie, Piper Laurie, passionately tells him that most people go through life and never feel that kind of passion or excellence, and that he is anything but a loser.

Just remember, on the days that are not easy and the days you feel down on yourself, you are excellent and that you experience passion like few ever experience.

Go to work on seeing, doing and feeling that excellence as much as you possibly can. When you utilize the pain to motivate and the passion and feelings of excellence to saturate, then you are using my “Polarization Effect” to the fullest. You are using polar opposites in a way to maximize your skills, time, energies and enjoyment. The good news is that it does not take more effort to get to the next level. It is just a different type of effort and awareness.

Watch Think Tank Tuesday this week to see the final key touch points to keep your service bays full and clients coming back for more!

If you are not getting better, then you must be getting worse. In this age of instant information and transformation, speed is the new weapon of choice for top performers. To survive and thrive today, you must be willing to learn, change and implement faster than your competition. In this and next month’s articles, we’ll examine some ideas on how to adapt to the environment you find yourself in, and how to thrive within it.

First, you must focus on things that can move you to another level. If you do what you have been doing, you will get what you have been getting. No longer is it acceptable to just show up, do your job and go home. No longer is it acceptable to wait and see what the competitors do, or let someone else be the first to implement something. In today’s market, the first to the show wins the prize.

Daily education, keeping up with changes in your industry and trends in other industries are basic daily activities today. It’s no longer something you do “every once in a while” or “when you get around to it.” Self-education, improvement and adaptation to technology and other changes are the keys to winning.

Winners today make faster decisions than ever before and consensus decision making is dead. If you take the time for everyone to agree on what should be done, you are too late to the party and your competition is already ahead of you. The winners today are visionary leaders who leave their ego at the door and are willing to be humble learners. Learn massively every day, make decisions, make them quick, make mistakes, take the heat, self-correct and move on.

Old-school entrepreneurs who fill their day with emergency activities and bloat their ego by cramming their day with time-filling but not business-shifting activities will be crushed. Those who are disciplined in massive daily education, rapid decision making, implementation and adaption will grow exponentially over the people and businesses used to doing business the old way. The winners of today do not scare of making mistakes, but of not making decisions quick enough.

To get to another level of success, you must understand and master your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind works on autopilot. This autopilot moves you towards what is easy, fun or provides short-term gratification. The subconscious deals only in the moment. When you start work in the morning, your autopilot guides you to talk with fellow employees about things you like, to read the paper and to surf the Internet for topics you enjoy. Managers spend the day doing mundane clerical chores. In other words, you are simply hanging out. The day is filled with filler. You are essentially wasting time and majoring in the minor.

I once made a post to Facebook about keeping a daily journal of what you do with your time for one week. I suggested that a good way to start is to review each hour of the day for a week and write down what you did for that hour. I received a comment from a dealer stating sarcastically they had wasted time just reading and thinking about what I had wrote. This same dealer is one who lost their franchise for a lack of sales and non-performance. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so. For you to move forward, you must unlearn your habits of the past.

It’s not natural for you to do in-depth planning, detailed work, long range work, be vigilant of your actions in your time and make big, tough decisions quickly. What is natural is for your subconscious to put you on autopilot. Unfortunately, your subconscious without the right program is a huge waste of your very own supercomputer — your mind.

Fortunately, your subconscious is also a goal-seeking monster. You give your subconscious a goal and it will work diligently towards that goal. Give your mind a goal, followed by habitual actions of concentrated effort. The wonderful part of this is that once you start your concentrated effort and create habitual actions towards your goal, your subconscious gets addicted and wants more. Boom! You have reprogrammed your computer.

Decide what you want, why you want it and create habitual actions that move you towards that goal. Release any anxiety about the eventual attainment in that goal and be fulfilled with your actions and forward momentum. You can always adjust your actions if need be.

Next post, we’ll look at some other methods of allowing yourself to get a jump on the competition and get you to where you want, and need, to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nOMGN2jIQvs

This week's Think Tank Tuesday dissects Service Retention, and reveals to you the 6 key touch points discovered to raise your Service Profits and keep your service bays full.

The biggest blockbuster of the summer has all the dealers ranting and raving:

Done in 60 Seconds...

Forget about Nic Cage and Angelina, the only dynamic duo here is the salesperson and the sales manager. For those of you who have yet to see the trailer, let me set the scene. You just took a customer out for a test drive. The next moments coming back are crucial to finishing the sale, yet it’s a difficult situation to navigate. If the customer hasn’t yet made up her/his mind, being overly aggressive can easily backfire leading to a jaded customer. Or, the customer can have her/his mind totally made up that she/he wants to drive home in that car today, and your own apprehension and weariness could blow the sale. You can make the world of a difference in just one minute, and be Done in 60 Seconds!

Assuming you’re with a customer who crossed over from looking to buying, you must keep up the pace and softly move from showing to selling. The transition comes with increased tension and a bit of fear, on both sides of the bargain. You begin to feel the pressure from fighting back the urge to (prematurely) ask for the sale and the fear of the lost sale (before it even happens) also known as the “I have it but I don’t want to lose it” syndrome. While you’re wondering whether it’s the right time to move forward with the sale, buyers get caught between the fierce desire to buy and the creeping fear of making a mistake.

The next 60 seconds is paramount to making or losing the sale.

First, you need to set the stage. As you approach the dealership on the way back from a test drive, text your manager to be ready to receive you and the customer. The manager can then in position to greet you warmly: “Welcome back! How was it?”

Think of it like you were back in a high school dance. You see someone across the room that you think has been looking back at you too. Your fear of rejection could totally kill your chances of dancing away the night with your high school sweetheart, and at the same time your premature confidence might backfire and ruin it for good. That’s when your buddy saves the day, walks over and tests the waters for you. Let your manager be your wing-man! All your manager has to do is invest a minute to converse with the buyer:

“Welcome back, how was it?”

“Is it the one you like best?”

“If we can work it out to your satisfaction, can wrap it while you are here?”

“Great, let’s start the paperwork and lets see if we can make everyone happy.”

The above should generate an exchange that would give everyone the green light to start the write-up process and would only take an extra 60 seconds but it will keep the salesperson out of the monetary conflict: the source of tension in every buying and selling situation.
It will produce a verbal commitment from the buyer before it goes on paper, and it will make it so much easier to secure the 5 elements of a solid offer:

1.     Specific car to be delivered.
 
2.     Specific time to do business.
 
3.     Conditions and contingencies.
 
4.     Customer consent.
 
5.     Source of funding and appropriate documentation.

So now that we’ve confirmed that the buyer is ready to buy and we know sellers are always eager to sell… it looks like we’re almost DONE!

Done in 60 seconds: Coming soon to a showroom near you!

Can you think of what marketing opportunity has low competition, high ROI, a lot of traffic, and will build customer loyalty? Many dealers are ignoring this aspect of their marketing strategy, and you need to start paying attention to this opportunity.

Potratz was selected as a member of the inaugural Auto Remarketing Canada Power 100, an elite collection of the most influential companies in the used-car and remarketing business. The businesses selected as members of the Auto Remarketing Canada Power 100, will be featured in the fall issue of Auto Remarketing Canada Digital Magazine.

“We at Auto Remarketing Canada are very excited about the chance to highlight some of the remarketing industry’s biggest players in our upcoming inaugural Power 100 issue,” said Publisher Bill Zadeits. “These top companies make the remarketing industry what it is today”

Potratz, an automotive advertising agency located in Schenectady, New York, represents auto dealers across the Unites States and Canada. While the agency’s reputation is based in digital marketing, it’s philosophy is to help dealers connect with people.

 “We’re very aware of the temptation to depend on statistics and metrics to measure the success of a digital advertising campaign,” said Nan Mossey, Potratz’s director of digital marketing. “But the real measure of success is the number of cars sold. We help dealers to think like customers, and deliver what customers really want. It’s proven very successful.”

Potratz Partners Advertising is a full-service automotive advertising agency specializing in digital marketing. The agency was founded in 2003 by Paul Potratz in Schenectady, NY and received a Dealer Satisfaction Award from Driving Sales for Search and Behavioral Marketing every year since the award’s inception. Paul has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and CBS and has been a featured speaker for NADA, Driving Sales, Auto Dealer People, Dealer Elite, and Automotive Digital Marketing. You can see Paul every Tuesday on the Think Tank Tuesday series available on iTunes.

1. Educate Yourself

Don’t wait for managers or anyone else to give you the sales education you need. Unfortunately, the automobile industry has been stuck for years in a, “Throw them in and see if they can swim mentality.” Some dealerships take new recruits to a meeting room and have them watch training tapes for a day and expect them to be trained. Neither of these options will increase your odds for success.

Begin a massive self-education program that will continue your whole career. Combine visual, auditory and experiential learning. Listen to sales and motivational material every day on the way to and from work. Read, watch DVDs and then put it all together by role-playing with a manager or fellow sales person. Education Creates Motivation - Motivation Breeds Perspiration - Perspiration Creates Elevation.

2. Avoid Cancer

Attitude is everything in sales and life. All companies are full of people with negative attitudes and limiting beliefs. These beliefs and attitudes begin to perpetuate into a culture that is counterproductive to all sales people and potentially deadly to the new sales person. You can insulate yourself from the cancerous attitudes by taking the following steps. 1. Avoid smoke-and-joke circles. There has never been a positive conversation in one of these pity party circles, and there never will. Avoid them like the plaque. 2. Utilize motivational material daily. Nobody can be fully self-motivated all the time. You need tools to assist you. CDs, DVDs, pictures, music, books, quotes, spiritual material, mentors and mastermind circles are all tools that you should use.

3. Utilize a Follow-Up System Religiously

Pick a manual or software system that you will use from day one. Every customer, every prospect, every time. When you start with an organized system, you will be focused on the fundamentals that will make you successful both short- and long-term. Collect as much data as you can on each prospect and customer and organize your follow-up by using post cards, letters, gifts, newsletters, e-mail auto-responders and sequential auto-responders. Persistent = consistent.

In sales and marketing, you must always remember the order of importance of potential sales. Your current customers will always provide you the most return on investment. So often, new sales people are in a constant mad dash for new customers and forget to maximize the potential of the ones they just sold. It’s easier to maintain a good system that was created from the beginning than it is to start a new one later on.

4. Take Massive Action

It’s all about action management, not time management. You have 1,440 minutes in everyday. Success is determined by the actions you take in those minutes. Avoid the time trap of getting caught up in the stuff. Stuff are the things that are minor in nature that we spend most of our day in that create little results. Don’t major in the minor. Continually ask yourself if what you are doing will contribute to a sale either now or in the future. Keep the main thing, the main thing. Each day you must evaluate your actions and create a stop-doing list. After reviewing your day, determine what actions you should lessen or eliminate. Start your day with major actions so it sets a trend for the day. Jump in, don’t wade in.

5. Be Your Own Marketing Manager

Don’t expect any business or anyone to bring you customers. You must take the mindset from day one that you will provide 100 percent of your own customers and anything your company provides is extra. Start by creating your own brand. What will your slogan be that defines you? Utilize your picture, caricature and slogan on all marketing materials and business cards. Create your own Web site as a benefit to the customer that can be integrated with all marketing material.

Next, determine your ideal customer base that buys your product. You can purchase lists of people who drive your brand of product from one of many different list providers. Begin a multi-step marketing approach to these potential customers. Read as many books on copy writing as possible to learn the secrets of getting people to take action from your words. Educating yourself on marketing and copywriting will pay you more dividends than any other single thing you can do.

Sales people are made, not born. It’s the people who do the work, who learn to market themselves, follow-up, handle rejection, persist and maintain a winning attitude that win in the sales profession.

http://www.internetsales20group.com

General Sales Manager Gives Some Advice From His 18 Years In the Automotive Sales Industry.

JP Hocking, the General Sales Manager of Bill Dube Hyundai in Wilmington Massachusetts
was kind enough to sit with Automotive Internet Sales.com and give an interview. JP has been in the automotive sales industry for over 18 years and he shares some of his wisdom and experience with AIS.

1. Manage things and lead people.

Processes should be defined and managed daily. People should be lead by example daily. Management by strict control inhibits star performers and eliminates creativity of intelligent people. Feelings of manipulation are caused by strict control. Control, manipulation, and disrespect keep many dealerships from moving to another level of performance.

2. Speed of the boss = speed of the team.

If the boss has a sense of urgency, the team will, too. The leader sets the tone. Great leaders create an attitude and atmosphere of winning. The leader sets the stage for the proper belief systems necessary to succeed.

3. Coach people more than you manage deals.

If you spend your time coaching people through training, one-on-ones and positive feedback, your people will become less addicted to you. Spend 80% of your day with your team and your customers. The rest can wait.

4. Create a .Stop Doing List..

To find out what to do, you must also define what not to do. What are you doing everyday that you should either, stop doing, delegate, or do less of, or at a different time?

5. Practice the 4 D.s of action management.

Dump it, Defer it, Delegate it, or Do it. With proper action management, you will spend less time in crisis and emergency mode.

6. Recruiting is an ongoing process.

Determine an ongoing action plan for recruiting. What channels will you use to recruit and how much time each week to do it. What automated systems can you set up through web sites, job boards, college placement centers, military posts, etc. can you set up to increase potential candidates? Don’t wait until you need people to dig through the drawer to find the help wanted ad that everyone else uses.

7. Set clear expectations.

People need and desire clear expectations of their job functions, behavior, and performance. The days of hiring people and showing them the inventory, their desk, and telling them to get busy are over. For a greater chance of success, people cannot succeed without written and communicated expectations.

8. People don’t change that much, so stop trying.

Do not try to put in what God left out. When a person has reached adulthood, they primarily tend to repeat the patterns either they have created or that are based upon their nature. Grow a person’s strengths, and stop trying to fix their weaknesses.

9. Educate and motivate daily.

Good people want continuing education. Educate and motivate every day. Educating daily creates results; periodical training never does. If you have people rejecting education, then you must reject them. Would a great coach allow certain players to not practice because they didn’t want to?

10. Listen, listen, listen.

Nothing inspires people more than when they feel a manager will actually listen. People need to be respected and heard. A manager’s best customers are the people they coach.

11. Get out from behind the desk.

Lead the team. People want to know that their leader is one of them. Desks can become huge barriers to communicating.

12. Don’t forget emotions.

Behind all goals, dreams, achievements, and failures are emotions. Learn to tap into each team member’s pleasure and pain motivators to better guide them. Coach each team member with this in mind – thoughts become words, words become actions, actions create habits, habits create results, and they are all seeking emotions.

Great leadership is essential in creating great teams. Expect more of yourself and your team will follow. The leader is the final reason for success or failure.

There are 3 types of personalities, and your personality could be affecting your income. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday now to find out which of the 3 personalities you have, and how you can make it work for your team to boost your sales.

The worlds of automotive social media and automotive search marketing are converging. We've known this for a while and I've been preparing for the collision in order to help our clients make the most out of the changes. The only thing I wasn't expecting was how tremendously complex it all was going to be.

For the last month, we've been pushing hard to help educate and assist dealers on both fronts, but social media has been my primary focus. Most know that I spent the early part of my career focused almost solely on search but the transition from search to social has been happening for a couple of years now. Today, I'm happy to say that the transition is complete and I'll be discussing more about the merging disciplines over the coming months.

To those who inquired, who were checking to make sure I hadn't fallen off the face of the earth, thank you for your concern and all is well. In fact, it's all very well. I'm continuing to explore new and innovative techniques that dealers can use to enhance their social media presence.

This leads me to the point of this post. I'm looking for participants, those willing to engage in case studies and discussions about the merging search and social marketing future that we all face. It can be dealers or vendors - I'm not picky. I just want to get some people together to bounce off ideas over email, at the upcoming conferences, on Google Hangouts - anything that works to make the industry better at the two most important components of marketing for 2014. If you're interested, contact me or leave a comment below.

The goal is to put out the best educational content available on the subjects. I'm not being completely altruistic with this - the more I learn, the better I can make our products. I've spent the last six years honing my skills in a bubble. Now it's time to take what I've learned and enhance it with what you all know. I look forward to seeing this move forward.

http://www.internetsales20group.com

New Automotive Sales Consultant Inspired By "The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People" Book Creates His Mission Statement...

Joseph Argento Just took the leap of faith and started a career in the Automotive Sales industry, but before he did he went through a rigorous training curriculum. Part of his education was the reading of Dr. Stephen Covey's "7 Habits Of Highly Effective People" Book. Joe was so inspired by the book, he not only created an amazing Mission Statement, he also then created this video in it to the industry.

I know a rising start when I see one. This kid is one to keep your eye on-

http://www.dealersynergy.com

Ken Pollock Auto Group was tired of traditional and digital means to recruit. They NEEDED Good people and FAST, so they had Dealer Synergy create a TV commercial to use broadcast and cable to generate a lot of resumes.

If you are struggling to find the right people for your team, I suggest that you consider using broadcast television as a resource to drive lots and lots of resumes!

Is your website constantly asking for or taking information from visitors? By providing information to visitors rather than requesting information from them, you can expect to see a rise in conversions and a decrease in bounce rates. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and find out how to rethink your web strategy.