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It’s that time of the season when every business owner ponders the next year strategy while buying the presents. Maybe, you are one of those entrepreneurs who can’t focus on celebrating holidays due to the lot of thinking. If it’s true, you are definitely not alone in this. Automotive industry in whole and car buyers shopping behavior have changed drastically during the last years. At the end of 2017 many auto dealers ask themselves two questions:

What to improve in 2018?

How to avoid overspending on it?

There are tons of automotive software on the market, but you definitely don’t want to overspend on redundant technology that won’t improve your business.

Here is the list of car dealer software spending money on which will be worthwhile in 2018.

Responsive Dealer Websites (RDWs)

Responsive design bridges the gap between your a uto dealer website and mobile, laptop or tablet users. The result of this construction is new leads for you and good user experience for your customers. The quality of visitor’s interaction with your online inventory affects the whole impression of your business. If you can’t provide your customers with decent inventory displaying, they will doubt your ability to provide them with good, reliable cars.

A responsive dealer website resizes the layout by using fluid, proportion-based grids and flexible images. Regardless of the device your inventory is being viewed on, customers won’t have to “catch” the images and vehicle description. Every page of your website will be adapted automatically.

Responsive web design was already a must in 2017, but you still have time to switch to it. Include this investment into your 2018 budget and you won’t regret it.

Vehicle condition reports

Every dealer has a list of wishes for the upcoming year, we bet you have it as well. One of the wishes is to widen the reach and attract non-local buyers. Such kind of prospects differs from the local one and requires different approaches. On the one hand non-local buyers can’t visit your showroom to inspect the condition of the vehicle thoroughly, but on the other hand very few people would buy a car in ignorance of its state. This dilemma can be solved by online vehicle condition reports. It is the car dealer software that allows dealers to upload the detailed information about the each part of the vehicle with respective photos attached. Customers can see the vehicle general grading and the minor grades of its separate parts and areas marked with the color. With vehicle condition report customers will see the car from all its sides and get the evaluation of every part. They will be able to compare not only the exterior and interior of the car, but the condition of its every detail.

By putting your money into condition reports, you build consumer trust — the first step towards long-term relations.

Live Video Streaming

Video is one of the most powerful marketing tools for auto dealers, it retains customer attention longer and leaves a trace in his memory. As the proverb says, a picture is worth a thousand words. We can add, that a video is worth a million of them. Instead of only talk business, you can show it to your customers.

Live Video Streaming™ is an automotive software that enables you to give your customers the live video tour of any vehicle at your dealership. During such tours you can answer customer questions, give additional information and show any car detail on viewer’s demand.

You can set the camera into the cabin and showcase the live test-drive to non-locals. Customers will be able to make their decisions online without showing up at your dealership.

Closing words

There are a lot of changes ahead of us for sure, and nobody can tell what 2018 is going to bring. However, with responsiveness, online vehicle condition reports and video streaming software dealers can future-proof their business and improve their sales in the upcoming year.

Source: https://www.autoxloo.com/blog/which-automotive-software-is-a-good-investment-in-2018.html

As we gear up for 2018, we’re providing you with a powerful white paper. While everyone knows the power of women buyers, are you aware of how women are impacting your business?

• What percentage of your business is generated by women?
• What percentage of your leads are generated by women?
• What percentage of your service drive business is generated by women?

Clearly, you can’t grow what you don’t know!

The average new car dealer sells 819 vehicles annually to women. But if you don’t have a benchmark for tracking this, how can you improve sales to this growing segment that now buys 4.5 of every 10 cars, especially in a more challenging retail climate?

The white paper Behavior Economics: Increase Sales to Women by $2 Million provides a clear road map to crack this code in two key areas:

1. Five easy steps to train your sales advisors to adapt, coach, and motivate them to adopt new attitudes and behaviors to engage this buying segment.
2. New tracking metrics to gauge and propel your store to cultivate sales to women and families and be a destination dealer.

DOWNLOAD YOUR WHITE PAPER NOW

https://www.amazon.com/Driven-F-I-R-E-Success-Intensity-Re-Invention/dp/1483587916/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1482278634&sr=8-3&keywords=driven+by+fire 

Dealer Principal, Louie Herron Writes Powerful Book "Driven By Fire" 

Dealer Principal, Louie Herron writes a powerful book on How to do more, be more and achieve more. If you are in the Automotive Sales industry and want to truly take your career to the next level, you must read this book. You will learn how someone went from being lost to getting into car sales, climbed the ladder from Showroom Sales Consultant to Dealer Principal in a short amount of time! You too can achieve profound success and effectiveness. All you have to do is read Louie's book! 

About "Driven By F.I.R.E." 

If you are rich, poor, a man, a woman, an entrepreneur, unemployed, successful, struggling, confused. God-fearing, or not, this book is for you. Within these pages you will learn how to stay the course, how to deal with failure, and how to meet your goals. You will also learn the true definition of success and what personal achievement really means. It could be completely different than what you initially believed it to be. The importance of faith plays a major role in any success story. You will learn how to focus and stay grounded with the help of a power higher than yourself. I will show you how I used all these things to learn from my mistakes and accomplish my goals. Going from a high school grad with dreams of playing professional football to a college dropout facing setback after setback to CEO of a franchise dealership is unheard of and extremely difficult, but not impossible, as I will explain. Adversity will always be a part of life. Bad things happen. Finances get low. Relationships fail. Expectations fall short. You feel like giving up. Experience has taught me that no matter who or where we are in life, we will, at some point, come upon challenging circumstances. Most of the time it feels as though it is the end of the road, but through your Faith, Intensity, Re-Invention of self, and Enthusiasm, you will find that your new journey is only beginning. Keep going…

http://www.BradleyOnDemand.com 856-546-2440
Dealer Principal Of 2 Car Dealerships Shares Some Secrets Of Success

http://www.BradleyOnDemand.com 856-546-2440
The Secret to Making Big Money Selling Cars with Sean V. Bradley - Dealer Playbook Podcast

http://www.ezreferralnetwork.com
Dealer Principal, Paul Sansone Jr. Just Back from Sean V Bradley's Internet Sales 20 Group in Boston

Facebook Offers For Auto Dealers

As an auto dealer, you are probably used to hearing that you should be on Facebook. It gives your brand more visibility, it's an opportunity to connect with customers, and so on. But you might also be frequently reminded that, when it comes to selling cars, Facebook is anything but effective. Experts claim that only a small percentage of car shoppers use social media as part of the car buying process. But what if there was a way to change that?

There might be a real solution, and it's called Facebook Offers. Read on to find out more about this new tool, and how it can bring more sales to your dealership.

How Do Facebook Offers Work?

ddpavumba/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Facebook Offers is one of the ad tools offered by Facebook to owners of business pages. Currently, Facebook is lagging behind Google when it comes to online ads, so Facebook Offers is clearly a way to gain a bigger share of the market.

The way Facebook Offers work is very simple. Once your dealership's page has at least 50 likes, you can create an offer, which is exclusive to the people you choose to receive it. It's easy to think of it as a modern version of а direct mail pamphlet, which comes with a 20% discount coupon, for example. You upload a photo with a description of the offer, and you can either put a limit on how many people can claim it or you can make the offer limitless. Then you pick a budget, and depending on the dollar amount you enter, you can get an approximation of how many people will be reached by the ad.

Target the Right Audience for Best Results

sheelamohan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But here is by far the best thing about Facebook Offers. What makes Facebook Offers especially suitable for your dealership is that you can be very specific not just about the number of people, but also the type of people who will receive your offer.

Facebook will give you a very specific set of criteria to fill out, with which you can target your specific buyer persona, so your money won't go waste. For example, you can make your offer available only to people with a particular make or model of car, people who have driven the same car for a certain number of years, people who tend to go to dealership with a certain frequency, or many other specifications. Because Facebook is partnering with data brokering companies, the available criteria reach far and wide and can get so specific, that you'd be surprised how useful the results will be! And you don't have to worry about your clients' privacy, because the algorithm works with anonymous data, without revealing their personal information.

How to Use Facebook Offers in Your Dealership: 3 Strategies

Once a Facebook user likes your offer, they can “claim” it, after which Facebook will send them an email containing instructions on how to redeem it at your dealership. In order to tempt the maximum number of people with your offers, make sure you come up with something creative. Here are just a few suggestions:

• Target people with cars older than 5 years, and make your discounted cars available only to them through a Facebook Offer. People buy a lot of new cars -- even though not all of them plan to, a tempting offer often makes them change their minds.
• Offer to do a routine check for free, since your target buyers' vehicles probably have a high mileage by now. How about people who tend to visit service shops rarely? Send them an offer explaining the benefits of regularly changing a car's oil, along with a 25 percent discount if they come to your dealership for an oil change? Or the air filter? The possibilities are many, you just need to be creative.
• Accompany each offer with a curious educational fact to make it more appealing. Or make a contest on your Facebook page, awarding a Facebook Offer to the winner. And this will have the added benefit of increasing engagement with your page.

Conclusion

Facebook Offers is definitely a good way to harness the power of social media for more than just brand-building. If you are not feeling confident about running ad campaigns, you can always use the services of a dealership consultant.

Have you used Facebook Offers yet? Was your campaign successful?

And what other ways are you using to keep your social media audience engaged? Share your experience by leaving us a comment below.

Among Millennials, 53% of Car Buyers Are Female

Cathy Anderson, right, owner of Woody Anderson Ford, a Huntsville, Ala., dealership, discusses a car with
Connie Hicklen. Shawn Poynter for the Wall Street Journal

On a recent hot summer night outside Detroit, a 62-year-old woman sat in a chair watching the Telegraph Cruise, a classic-car parade on Telegraph Avenue in Taylor, Mich., when a stranger approached and began asking questions.

What kind of car did she drive? Why had she chosen that automobile? What did this choice say about her identity?

The stranger, it turned out, was Chris Lezotte, a Ph.D candidate at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio, who was doing ethnographic research for her dissertation on the relationship women have with cars.

Ms. Lezotte is one of a small army of researchers trying to get inside the heads of women who need transportation—"to uncover the various meanings women ascribe to cars in a variety of contexts," as she puts it. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute put out a study in 2012 showing that the number of women drivers in the U.S. had surpassed that of men, 105.7 million to 104.3 million, as of 2010.

Ever since, researchers have been wondering why the car-shopping and buying experience is still such a man's game. The National Automobile Dealers Association says last year some 91% of car salesmen at franchised dealerships were men.

Women accounted for 39% of car purchases in 2013, up from 37% four years earlier, according to J.D. Power. That may not seem like a big change, until you consider that Americans bought almost 15.6 million cars last year. A 2% shift represents more than 300,000 vehicles.

When a man buys a car, there is often a woman behind the decision, according to the buzz in auto circles. Globally, women are "making the final decision on more than 60% of new car purchases," said Carlos Ghosn, president and chief executive of Nissan Motor Co, in a speech in July.

Chris Lezotte, a Ph. D candidate studying women's relationships
with their cars, in her 1949 Ford Coupe. Alan Kalter

Melody Lee, director of brand and reputation strategy for General Motors Co.'s Cadillac division, says she believes women wield influence in anywhere from 85% to 95% of car purchases. "That's what we're seeing in our showrooms and that's what our dealers are telling us," she said.

Here's another statistic, culled from her research: "If 74% of women feel that they are misunderstood [by car marketers] but they're influencing up to 95% of our car purchases—that's a huge missed opportunity there," she says.

Researchers say demographic shifts offer more reasons for auto makers to refine their sales pitch to women. Women earn more, marry later and divorce more often than they used to. And both women (and men) can be formidable customers, arriving at the dealership armed with research found online, so they aren't at the mercy of a salesman.

At the same time, social media give women "a voice that can impact brands like no other time in history," says Jody DeVere, chief executive of AskPatty, a women's automotive-advisory website.

AskPatty.com is a kind of automotive matchmaking website for women. Its panel of female experts, from automotive executives to magazine editors to race-car drivers, give women advice on buying, maintaining and insuring cars. At the same time, it sells services to automotive companies who want to attract more women customers.

By completing Web-training modules, retailers can be certified by AskPatty.com as "Female Friendly." AskPatty also offers webinars on how to reach women buyers who are Hispanic or baby boomers.

A newer company with some similar aims is Women-drivers.com, which serves as a forum for women to discuss experiences at specific car dealerships. It also offers support for dealers with feedback from women, content for social media and its own market research. Even before Chief Executive Anne Fleming founded the company in 2013, she had begun compiling her own research on car buying, by sending a questionnaire to some 500 women. The company's continuing research has found that women visit an average of 1.9 dealerships before buying. And 47.5% of women who bought a new car went to the dealership by themselves.

Experts have found women are more likely to rely on online customer reviews and friends' opinions when shopping, while men are more likely to turn to expert reviews.

Ford Motor Co. has created a program called "Live.Drive.Love," which offers women 24-hour test drives. Chantel Lenard, director of U.S. marketing for Ford and Lincoln, said, "It's an opportunity [for women] to experience the product on their own time, in their own environments, so they can show it to friends."

What's down the road? Consider this statistic, Ms. Lenard says. Among millennials—the young adults all industries will soon be fighting for, if they aren't already—53% of car buyers are female. A 2013 Autotrader.com study also projects U.S. millennials will be the wealthiest generation ever.

"We're seeing a shift where females are becoming the majority," Ms. Lenard said. "It's an important market and we want to make sure we're delivering on their needs."

http://www.internetsales20group.com 856-546-2440

David Blassingame, Dealer Principal of Autoflex Leasing Shares Secrets Of Leasing & Profits 

Today's Women’s Wednesday we are focusing on the new top reason women are buying from their sales advisor. Trust has always trumped price when it comes to buying from a sales advisor, but now, in our latest mid-year #bigdata report directly from women's reviews, “trust” no longer has the top spot.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Aretha Franklin couldn’t define it better. Respect is now the #1 prerequisite to trust in the formula to selling to women.

The top 5 reasons women buy from their sales consultant are ranked as follows:

1. Respectful
2. Trustworthy
3. Likeable
4. Knowledgeable
5. Understanding

Want to Sell More Cars and Distinguish your Dealership to Women?  Click here. 

Did you receive a Free copy of the 2014 Women’s Car Buying Report? Click here.

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440
Sean V. Bradley, CSP Will be Speaking at the 2014 Dealer Profit Summit In Seattle Washington June 24th

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440

Dealer Synergy Celebrates 10 Years of Excellence Serving Car Dealerships 

This photo cracks me up because it looks as if the guy wants to make sure that you've noticed how good he looks in the reflection of the car!

What a stupid, selfish, conceited sounding question, right? "What do you think about me?"...

Yet this is what I see on the majority of dealership websites that I visit. 

A whole lot of "We're so awesome" and "Look at how pretty we are" or "We are the best"...

Okay, so you aren't using those words exactly, but you're using words that nobody cares about like these:

"We're a family-owned and operated facility with 35 years of experience" OR

"We have the best team of professional sales people ready to work with you..." OR

"Come visit our state-of-the-art facility to find out why we're the best choice for new and used cars in [location]"

Man oh man, I'm cringing just writing those phrases.

But why are they so bad?

BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS. 

And then after all of that crap, you have the nerve to put a "Rate us" page or link on your site.

"But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do YOU think about me?" 

Sounds more stupid the longer you think about it right? So let's talk about how to turn things around so that you can kick you dealership website up a notch.

First things first.

You MUST understand that every individual on the planet has a favorite word and letter. Their name and the letter 'i'. 

Why? Because nobody cares about you as much as they care about themselves. 

Now I'm not saying it's entirely bad to talk about yourself, but you need to focus on presenting yourself in a way that demonstrates maximum benefit to your customers. 

"Great, you are an award winning dealership. What does that mean for me?"

"Fantastic, you have the best leasing specialist in the entire state - that benefits me HOW?"

"Wonderful, you have a state-of-the-art facitility - how does that have a positive impact on me?"

The information you present on your website needs to be carefully thought out for maximum market penetration and benefit to your customers.

Think about the message you are conveying about your dealership to the largest traffic source you have. 

Are you presenting yourself as a truly customer-centric dealership, or are you like the rest of the pack?

In my next article, I'm going to talk about how you can take this concept and really ramp up your game. 

It's all about setting yourself apart from what others are doing, and I'm going to show you how to do that through your dealership website. 

Stay tuned...

If you aren't, why not? SlideShare provides an opportunity to upload PowerPoint and Keynote slideshow presentations to their website and share them with friends, colleagues and strangers.  I know what you're thinking, but I could just email them the presentation! You could, but what about those "strangers" it may seem obsolete for strangers to find your presentations, but what if they're looking for them?

With SlideShare you can optimize your presentation settings for great SEO! You can upload presentations on why your dealership is better than others around you, or presentations on specific cars you've got on your lot! You could create a presentation outlining what you're looking for in a specific employee and while people search google for jobs in your area, they'd stumble upon your presentation  The possibilities are truly endless!

AND while you're poking around the SlideShare website, look for a slideshow (or two) that might be able to teach you something new! Learning should never stop happening, so take advantage of all the free resources possible!  

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440

Congratulations Spirit Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep & Ram They Are The June 2014 COVER Of AutoSuccess Magazine &  Dealer Synergy Client!

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440 

Sean V. Bradley Wins The Auto Dealer Live Debate Against Alan Ram, Thanks The Dealers That Voted For Him & Elaborates On His Philosophy

** If you missed the Auto Dealer Live "Thrilla With Villa" Debate with Sean V. Bradley & Alan Ram, then watch the video below: