Do your sales people know how to fish? They should. I ask you, when was the last time that you wished there was something you could "personally" do to increase your selling opportunities? Have you every thought "just if we could spend more money on radio or TV advertising to increase walk in customers?" Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday to see where you should be fishing to get more sales than you could ever handle!
Sales people provide life for all companies. If everything starts with sales people, it only makes sense to make sure that you are recruiting the best potential sales people
Tip 1: Recruit from want, not need. Make recruiting an everyday activity, don’t wait until you need it.
Tip 2: Have a strategy to recruit people all the time. To orchestrate a successful ongoing recruiting program you must first have a game-plan. Plan and develop a flow chart of your desired results. Write down the obvious. You must know why you are looking to create a recruiting strategy. “When the why gets strong, the how gets easy.”
Tip 3: Know who is in charge of recruiting and his/her qualifications. People must be educated on creating and orchestrating a strategy that works. Don’t leave the who and how to chance.
Tip 4: Newspaper ads – the Sunday paper is full of ads for sales people. If you plan on using help wanted ads as part of your recruiting, you must write the ad with the mindset of the good sales person you are looking to recruit. Use two age-old formulas: WIIFM – “What’s in it for me?” and AIDA – “Attention, interest, desire and action” when creating your ads.
Tip 5: Try using several avenues to recruit such as full color newspaper inserts, business journal classifieds, a banner ad on your web site, local colleges, Internet job postings, radio ads, military bases, job fairs and employee referral program. Never leave the vitality of your company to just one avenue of marketing. You must build a marketing web that has many marketing branches to attract good people.
Tip 6: Have an “ideal employee” profile. Know who you are looking for before you find them. When you’ve developed a precise guideline of what the perfect recruit looks like, you can begin your process with that in mind and then remove the emotions involved in interviewing.
Tip 7: Payment plans satisfy base-level needs of the potential recruit. Pay all recruits during training and guarantee them a living wage during their learning curve. Many potentially good sales people are not given the chance to ever enter the business. Lower the barriers of entry in order to find the best people.
Tip 8: Have at least 50 written interview questions. Don’t you show a sales person how to profile customers? Preparation is key to a good interview. Be ready with sub questions to the interviewee’s answers that allow him or her to elaborate and communicate in detail. A good interview will follow the 80/20-rule and allow the recruit to speak 80% of the time.
Tip 9: Test and profile a potential sales person. Anyone who has interviewed people has come across a great interview, horrible employee. A good recruiting strategy must utilize many tools to reduce the emotion and help to make a more logical and quantitative selection. There are many tools today that can be used to gauge the personality, sales aptitude, emotional IQ, intelligence and just about anything else you want to know about a possible future employee
Tip 10: Don’t hire people based only upon resumes. If you want to hire good sales people, recruit and hire based on talent and attitude and teach them the necessary skills.
Recruiting and hiring effectively is a continuous process that is both part science and being creative. Having a consistent plan will make your recruiting a success.
As we approach the end of this month let's finish strong and remember to:
1. Follow through and follow up with any leads that you haven't reached within the past 30 days.
2. Look over any deals you were working that came in this month that you weren't able to put together for some reason or another and bring it back to your desk and see if there's any life left in it. I always would say to my team, "You can't lose something that you don't have! So you have nothing to lose by working further and asking if there's anything else that can be done both to the customer and your management team!" Ask your manager these questions:
3. Managers get involved and follow up with the people who were in your store but didn't buy this month. See if there's anything you can do to influence moving this forward.
4. Managers confirm any set appointments for the weekend. This is what my one GM had said, "Puts Glue On Them!" This helps the appointment stick more when a manager confirms it.
5. Send out a blast email to all your active leads inviting them in for an end of the month Sale! Make it seem as if it's exclusive to them and time sensitive.
I trust this will help you in finishing your month with a strong finish!
Content has been the big play for over a year now in the world of marketing. It’s the glue that holds social media marketing and search engine marketing together and it’s becoming so prevalent that the old ways (the ones everyone started using this year) are already starting to become obsolete.
Don’t get me wrong – the techniques themselves still work. The problem is that everyone is starting to get it. The competition level for content marketing at the small business level has gone from non-existent at the beginning of 2013 to hyper-competitive before the end of the year. It’s too easy, too important, and has too many people talking about it for most companies to miss.
Perhaps as bloggers, we did our jobs right. Now, we’re faced with a dilemma – taking it to the next level. Thankfully, the strategy is pretty much the same with an expansion into a two-style mode. By going with this format, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition that is starting to catch up to you.
This is the easy part. For localized small businesses, it’s all about talking to to and about those in the local area in order to build buzz. The concept is this: post content that is enjoyable or useful to your potential customers and they will share it on social media as well as generate an occasional link or two.
It’s the style that everyone’s starting to get. Just in the automotive industry alone, we’re seeing multiple dealers in the same city making videos about how to change a Mazda key fob battery, writing articles about their first shipment of Chevy Corvettes, and bringing in local celebrities for interviews and discussions.
Just because so many are starting to do it doesn’t mean that you should stop. It means that you have to step up your game. You have to make your content better, get more people to share it, and post more often than your competitors. It means that you have to work harder than everyone else, but that’s one of the things that are necessary in order to stay ahead of the game.
The goal with all types of content is to become the authority on your topic. We have known for a while that localized content works, but it’s not able to stand alone anymore in most industries because of the competition level. To make it stand out ahead of the competitors, you need to hit the national arena.
This means that you can no longer just be the local authority. You have to get the type of content out there that can resonate with a broader audience. This is only possible if you’ve already mastered the local content style and you have a strong following for it.
Going broad is harder. It requires that the content have a more general appeal. It means that your local following will share it as well and that their friends and family from the rest of the country or world will see it and find value as well.
It could be reactions to national news about your industry. It could be universal help items that are not localized. It could be great videos, images, or infographics that anyone anywhere in the country can like.
It also requires a bit more professionalism than the localized content. An iPhone video might work for a quick walkaround of a new inventory item, but to get the national appeal, it has to be better made than that.
* * *
This is the type of thing that many people fear. Just when you thought you had localized content mastered, hearing that it won’t be good enough to keep the gap large between you and your competitors in 2014 can be disheartening. However, if you really think about it, every new challenge like this is an opportunity to shine above and beyond them.
Change is good as long as you’re on top of it.
This is a great article I first read a few months ago about how LinkedIn is the best tool used by top sales reps to gain great leads.
I recently interviewed 54 top salespeople about how they use LinkedIn to research accounts, prospect for leads, and generate sales. All of the study participants sell technology-based products to the IT departments of mid to large size companies.
The study included three types of salespeople: 33% were inside salespeople who sell exclusively over the phone, 41% were outside field reps responsible for acquiring new accounts, and 26% were outside field reps who managed existing client account.
The results suggest there are four basic LinkedIn user classifications:
Enthusiasts: Twenty-five percent of the study participants would be classified as “Enthusiast” LinkedIn users. Enthusiasts have fully developed LinkedIn accounts and use LinkedIn continuously during the day. They believe it is an important tool for generating product interest and promoting their company to potential customers. Enthusiasts were more likely to be outside salespeople responsible for acquiring new accounts. The average Enthusiast has around 700 contacts, and one had over 1200. Half of Enthusiasts have paid for an upgraded LinkedIn subscription at their own expense.
Casual: Forty percent of participants would be classified as “Casual” LinkedIn users who access their account on a regular basis. They consider LinkedIn a useful tool to research and learn more about prospective clients. Casual users have about 250 contacts on average, and all use a free LinkedIn subscription.
Personal: Fifteen percent of participants would be classified as “Personal” LinkedIn users. Their LinkedIn accounts have ample information about their job history and past accomplishments. Their main purpose for having a LinkedIn account is for job-related networking and they rarely, if ever, use LinkedIn for work-related purposes. Personal users averaged around 300 contacts.
Non-Participants: Twenty percent of the salespeople were “Non-Participants.” Non-Participants don’t have a LinkedIn account or their profile contains very little personal information and fewer than 20 contacts. They don’t consider LinkedIn a priority and seldom log-in to their account. These people were more likely to be older than Enthusiasts, and the majority worked in the same position or at the same company for many years.
Here’s how data from the first two groups breaks down:
Contact Types
The composition of contacts varied greatly between Enthusiasts and Casuals. About 30% of Enthusiasts’ contacts were with existing clients, compared to only 5% for Casuals. Over 85% of Enthusiasts indicated they use their LinkedIn account to engage prospective customers during the sales process, while only 20% of Casuals did. Twenty percent of Enthusiasts contacts were prospective customers, on average, whereas it was less than 4% for Casuals. Partners (resellers, consultants, industry influencers, etc.) who affect customer purchasing decisions account for about 28% of contacts for Enthusiasts and roughly 17% of Casuals.
Customer Research
Every Enthusiast and nearly half of Casuals use LinkedIn to find out who they should contact in order to secure customer meetings. Over 90% of Enthusiasts and 65% of Casuals use LinkedIn prior to customer meetings to find out more about the people they will meet. Specifically, they are interested in where they have worked in the past and who they might know in common. Both groups also use LinkedIn extensively to verify a person’s title. About 55% of Enthusiasts and 10% of Casuals use LinkedIn to research their competition. In addition, Enthusiasts mentioned they will monitor a prospective customer’s connections to find out which competitors and salespeople are working on the account. Overall, LinkedIn was rated as a research tool (on a scale of one to five with five being highest) by Enthusiasts at 4.1 and 2.5 by Casuals.
Account Prospecting
Less than 15% of Enthusiasts and none of the Casuals ever reported making an unsolicited initial customer contact directly through a LinkedIn invitation. Nearly all salespeople commented they were fearful this would be perceived negatively by the prospective client. Instead, over 85% of Enthusiasts and 50% of Casuals indicated they would use LinkedIn to ensure they were contacting the right person but make first contact via email. The majority of both Enthusiasts and Casuals indicated their companies supplied better prospecting tools than LinkedIn. Overall, LinkedIn was rated as a prospecting tool by Enthusiasts at 3.8 and 2.1 by Casuals.
Use of Groups
On average, Enthusiasts belong to 12 groups and Casuals to four. Both Enthusiasts and Casuals indicated their main purposes for joining groups was to keep in touch with colleagues they worked with in the past, follow companies of interest, and to improve industry related knowledge or sales-skills. About 40% of Enthusiasts and less than 20% of Casuals responded that they belonged to groups that their prospective customers were part of. No one indicated they had generated an initial customer meeting based upon a group membership.
Existing Client Communication
Seventy percent of Enthusiasts and 18% of Casuals reported they had used LinkedIn to keep existing customers informed about their company’s offerings. Those who did used LinkedIn to send short messages that contained links to press releases, white papers, analyst reports, product announcements, and company produced videos. However, both groups overwhelmingly preferred to use e-mail to stay in touch with existing clients. LinkedIn was rated as an existing client communication by Enthusiasts at 2.1 and 1.5 by Casuals.
LinkedIn Generated Revenue
Over 40 percent of Enthusiasts indicated they have successfully generated revenue based upon LinkedIn-related efforts. Conversely, less than 20 percent of Casuals successfully generated revenue directly attribute to LinkedIn.
Overall, 18% of all survey respondents indicated they have generated additional sales as a direct result of their LinkedIn activities. However, this number is deceiving. In order to truly measure LinkedIn’s effectiveness you must take into account how many salespeople are Enthusiasts, Casuals, Personals, or Non-Participants.
SOURCE: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/04/top-salespeople-use-linked/
My review on Yelp
I'm relatively new to the car business. There are certainly a lot of situations that are new to me and so much to learn about the pretty much every aspect of my job. Despite all of that, I have found that my inexperience is one of my biggest assets. Confused yet? Let me explain.
It is because of my inexperience that I am willing to take more risks and try more new ideas than my peers. I have no idea “how we've always done it”, so I am not limited in my beliefs. If I see a new approach to helping a customer solve their problem, or a process that can be improved upon, I don't have any old habits that keep me from taking that first step and trying something different. To me, it's all different.
My inexperience also allows me to make mistakes without fear. Hey, I'm the new guy...I'm supposed to make mistakes. That's how you learn. I have found that this allows me to move forward with my day without worrying about the optimum course of action. I don't have the paralysis that comes with knowing exactly how things should work and being afraid they won't work out that way. I do the best I can with whats in front of me every day, take the best actions that I can and learn from the results.
Speaking of learning, being inexperienced keeps me teachable. To my mind this is such a gift that every new, inexperienced person in any field gets. When you first begin learning a skill your mind is completely open. You don't know very much about what you're learning so you absorb as much as you can. It's only the voice of experience that tells you to say “Oh yeah, I know that already, I don't need to pay attention to that.”
I say that I'm relatively new to the business, but in reality, I've been selling cars for almost a year. I've been selling something for my entire adult life. Despite that, I keep myself in this inexperienced frame of mind because I believe it keeps me unafraid and teachable. When I remain teachable, my peers and mentors can help make me better today than I was yesterday. More importantly, when I remain teachable, my customers can teach me how to best help them. This changes our relationship into something much more personal and effective then the same old “Hi, can I help you, if I could, would you” junk that everyone else does.
Embrace the part of you that is entirely inexperienced. Try working today as if it is your very first day all over again. I think you might be surprised the insight you gain into your work habits and how you relate to your customer. You might even reclaim some of that beginners luck we all start with.
No matter what, have fun.
Being in the business for my short time, I've realized this one thing. Most dealerships are doing the same thing. Now I didn't say, "ALL Dealerships are doing the same thing" because I realize that there are some that really have set themselves apart from the masses of mediocrity. However, most dealerships are working to be the best of the worst instead of creating a different culture, a different atmosphere and a different experience to the customer and employee.
I heard a dealer principal say, "Our problem as a dealer, is that we set our standards based off of what other dealers are doing, rather than setting a higher standard to doing what's right and different whether other dealers are doing it or not! If we keep using each other as a standard, then we will only ever achieve being the best of the worst!"
I love walking into dealerships that could care less about what the other guy is doing, because they are so focused on doing what they're supposed to be doing that they have no time to WASTE TIME watching the other guys. When you know your purpose and when you are attacking your mission to serve your community and client base, then you are focused and driven to reach your targets.
When you're watching everyone else, all you're doing is simply reading the temperature. You're never setting the tone or adjusting the thermostat to set the temperature because you're too busy studying, examining and watching the thermometer go up and down based on the market and the competition.
You can't change the temperature of other stores that you are not in, but you can certainly change the temperature of the store that you're in. You can make a difference in how your customer base and fellow employees experience life in your store. Here are some easy ways to adjust the thermostat and change the atmosphere and culture of your customer employee experience:
1. Evaluate your current processes.
You can do this by asking some very simple questions regarding them.
If employees and their family members are not buying vehicles from your store for other reasons beyond not liking the inventory make or models on the ground then there may be some digging that needs to be done. I can come up with a bunch more but I'm sure this helps get the juices flowing.
2. Educate & Train Your Team.
Dealers spend thousands of dollars a month to beautify the grounds, the buildings, the appearance of their inventory, to advertise their inventory and bring as many people as possible to come in online, on the phone or on the lot and fail to spend any further money on training, educating and building their sales team. Many times the people are the right people for the job, but they just haven't been PROPERLY trained. I emphasize PROPERLY because if you've been in the car business for any amount of time training has always been a majority problem for dealers. The greatest asset to your store is YOU! Without you and the people you have serving and selling the products, the products can't be sold. So instead of having them shadow other salesmen, and instead of having them watch VCR tapes of training from 20 years ago, invest in a current up to date trainer and training materials to help aid them in becoming a success in their positions. As they're successful, you'll be successful!
3. Lead From Your Feet Not Your Seat
The success or failure of a department and store falls on the leadership. Don’t hide behind your computers in your office counting beans, analyzing charts, numbers and averages all day. Get up and touch the people who are working with and for your success. Get involved. Ask questions. Interact. See and hear what your people are saying and what’s being said. Stay touchable, accessible and seen.
I trust this will help you. Have a great finish to the end of your month and if you'd like to contact me please do so at any time. Have a great day!
All sales people need to have a monthly sales goal for themselves. They also need to know how they arrived at that specific goal. Many times, these goals are based upon their past sales performance, but past results may not be indicative of performance.
You can increase your sales by 25 percent or more. Identify what causes mental barriers that produce limited results and how to overcome them. Many barriers are caused by conditioning, circumstance and emotions. Many people associate money with the following phrases: “Do you think money is grown on trees?” “Do you think we are rich?” “You can’t afford that.” “Money is the root of all evil.” This is why many people have limited and negative beliefs about money.
Examples of the three limiting factors are:
Conditioning.
The US is the richest country in the world. Money is printed every day here. So in reality, what’s the difference between it growing on trees or on a printing press?
Circumstance.
All people have negative experiences and setbacks in their lives, these experiences can lead you to let circumstances limit your beliefs about success or money. When you anchor your future to the past, that’s exactly what you get. History is meant to be a rudder not an anchor.
Emotions.
Emotions are some of the most powerful sources of energy in nature. Negative emotions are also caused when your conscious mind and subconscious are in conflict with one another. Example: If you set a goal to lose five pounds, it is done in your conscious mind. If later that day, you walk by a bakery and smell cookies and walk in and eat a half-dozen, that action was controlled by your subconscious mind. Can you see the conflict? Your subconscious reacts to information and emotions given to it without regard to your goals. If not properly directed, negative emotions limit actions, habits and results. If rejection dominates your emotions, you have lost the war before the battles began.
What you can do to explode your results. First of all, you must change your questions. Your life and your results are a direct reflection of the questions you ask yourself. Don’t ask what you want based upon what you have or what you have done. Ask bigger and better questions. Many trainers who teach goal setting say to make your goals believable. All goals are simply choice. You can make almost any goal believable if you change your questions.
Use this exercise to help you get your conscious and subconscious mind going in the same direction. Write down your goal in a positive present tense paragraph without any limiting beliefs.
Example: I am happily and easily selling 20 cars or more a month without struggle or conflict. My sales and other resources are creating an abundance of money for my family and me.
It’s easy to dismiss exercises like this. However, one trait found among massively successful people is their open-mindedness in pursuit of success. Skeptics rarely are successful, let alone happy people. Ask yourself, “What have I got to lose?”
Three things determine your path in life: philosophy, free will and choice. Your own personal philosophy is determined by your questions. Everything is determined by your free will and choice. Ask the right question, and they will lead to the right thoughts. Have the right thoughts, and they will create the right emotions. Feel the right emotions, and they will lead to the right actions. Take the right actions, and they will create the right habits. Having the right habits will create the right results. Your results will form your destiny, and yes, you can increase your sales by 25 percent or more.
If you do a search on Google for “search marketing” and compare it to a search for “social marketing”, you’ll see that there are pretty much no similarities. The two disciplines have been separated for a long time and companies usually focus on one or the other (though it seems like everyone offers a little of both). As 2014 draws nearer, the need to keep these two disciplines separate is starting to fade.
In fact, talking about them separately is starting to become a huge mistake.
Search is getting more social. Anyone who is watching the way that Google and Bing present their results and determine rankings on keywords can see this. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest (not to mention Google+, which is trying to seamlessly tie in search with social) are all becoming more prominent in search while continuing to improve their own internal search engines. These two facts are pushing us towards a collision course where search marketing and social marketing are becoming the same overall concept.
It is already a best practice to consolidate strategies around a singular overarching goal. That has been the case for years, even before the rise of social and the true harnessing of search. The change that is happening today and looking to intersect completely in 2014 is geared more around the activities that are required to make both sing properly for a business.
All that one has to do to truly see the importance of social signals from a search engine optimization perspective is to look at the most recent Search Engine Ranking Factors analysis from Moz. As you can see in the image above, three of the top are social. One may think that it’s a small portion compared to the number of factors, but with the majority at the top of the list having to do with inbound linking, it’s clear that those are all individual portions of the same basic factor.
In other words, if you break it all down properly, you’ll understand that page authority is #1, Google +1s are #2, inbound links are #3, and Facebook sharing is #4. Page authority is an abstraction of the following three plus the domain authority itself, so the actual actions that are at the top of the list would look like this:
Two of the top three ranking factors that one can act upon to improve rankings in Google are social signals according to the survey that gets the opinions of the best of the best in search marketing. That’s significant.
It’s hard to do a search on either Google or Bing that does not pop up something from a social perspective. Bing recently integrated Pinterest directly into their image listings. Google+ pages are instantly added to any search where a business is associated.
Searching for companies by name will yield the company website first followed by a flurry of social and review sites. If the Facebook and/or Twitter accounts are active, they’re almost certainly listed on the front page of search results.
Taking it a step further, most social sites are working their own variations of internal search engines to make content on the sites themselves easier to find. Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are constantly tweaking their search engines to show more, more, and more.
There can no longer be two separate strategies for search and social. To try to separate them is like trying to serve portions of a meal at different times. Instead of giving them spaghetti and meatballs, you would be serving the spaghetti noodles first, then bringing out the sauce and meatballs on a separate plate when they were done with their noodles. It’s an odd analogy, but that’s really what many businesses and marketing agencies are doing with search and social.
The strategies must be unified. It has worked okay in 2012 and 2013 but as we draw near to 2014, the distances between the two disciplines must be removed. We cannot treat them as two different disciplines. They should be worked together with an overall strategy that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Many times people say they don’t like to negotiate; yet, they still shop around and never pay full MSRP. Most people act in their own best interest. And most people who say they don’t like negotiating, actually still want to.
There are three things you should always listen to in this business:
1. What people say.
2. What people are trying to say.
3. What they really mean.
Often, what people are saying is they ‘hate’ to negotiate. What people are trying to say is they could do without the way auto dealers negotiate and what they really mean is they don’t want to make a mistake.
When people say they don’t like to negotiate, they are trying to say they don’t like the feelings of manipulation that occur when auto dealers overuse the ‘higher authority principle’ of negotiating. In other words, they dislike an improperly used desk system. You can still use a desk system, but you can decrease the back and forth, and keep the customer from feeling manipulated.
The first step is to have a written process that everyone understands. The second step is to make the process the same for each manager and each deal every time. The third step is to train your sales people how to negotiate, handle objections and assist the buyer to finalize a buying decision.
A written, detailed negotiating process that all sales people and managers understand is essential. Many dealerships seem to operate by the seat of their pants when dealing with the negotiating process. All proposals should be started in the same fashion. Although each deal can vary differently as you begin to negotiate, they should all start the same way to eliminate emotional, bad decisions. Having a precise, written and clearly understood process can eliminate different managers from working proposals in completely different directions that confuse sales people. Sales people should know how to handle any and all objections, verbally and written, without having to think or blink.
Sales people often give a proposal and when a customer objects, their first reply is, “Mr. Customer, what figures where you thinking?” Unfortunately, it may be the worst thing that could be said to a customer. Asking a customer what they are thinking without verifying and validating why you asked for what you proposed, will bring an uneasy feeling to the buyer and usually result in one of two answers, both of which aren’t good. The buyer will usually respond with a low-ball offer or say, “You’re the sales person, you tell me.” In this example, a sales person has violated simple rules of negotiating by asking the customer to set the bottom parameter of the negotiations. This usually will create a shopper from a potential buyer, because they can no longer have confidence that they have reached their best and lowest possible deal. Confidence creates the feeling of ‘hope for gain’ and eliminates the emotional fear of making a mistake.
When a customer asks for a lower price, the sales person must validate the MSRP by explaining the value pricing policy. “Mr. Customer, the vehicles are value priced today, which means they have a much smaller and more reasonable markup than in the past, to eliminate the back and forth and bring a more realistic pricing value to the customer.” If the customer persists for discounts, you can offer the potential of an additional percentage discount on the optional equipment of the vehicle. This validates your MSRP proposal and allows the customer to have feelings of victory by gaining a concession while establishing the bottom parameter of negotiations.
All customers are looking to satisfy certain emotions. Knowing how to professionally negotiate can satisfy all the emotions a customer desires and eliminate the negative feelings of manipulation that are prevalent when many customers leave a dealership after a negotiating process.
http://www.automotivedigitaltraining.com 856-546-2440
Make Money Mondays with Sean V. Bradley - Social Media & Video Communication
There’s a misconception that has been permeating across many industries over the past couple of years. It’s the thought that “reputation management” is about getting positive reviews on sites like Yelp, Google+, and Merchant Circle. While that’s a portion of it in theory, the practice of it has turned into a huge monster that is ready to burst… possibly before the end of 2013.
It’s not the fault of the businesses nor is it really the fault of the reputation management firms. It comes down to the review sites themselves that have found themselves in the predicament of needing more reviews to gain relevance while also wanting those reviews to be legitimate. Some, such as Yelp and Google, are taking steps to eliminate the fake reviews, but even then there’s a challenge. It isn’t always easy to tell what’s real and what’s fake.
The bubble that’s going to burst surrounds two components of many reputation management services: automation and filtering. With automation, the same responses are made on dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of reviews. These are the businesses responding to people, but they’re canned and the review sites don’t like that. Google recently removed thousands of these automated replies spread across hundreds of Google+ pages.
The other aspect is much more nefarious. It is called filtering. In it, a company uses a 2-step process for soliciting reviews. In the first email, they ask the customer to take a quick survey about their experience. If the survey comes back positive, they then receive an email asking them to let the world know about their experience on the review sites, often with links to the appropriate ones.
If the first response comes back negative, the second email is much different. It is consoling. It is apologetic. It declares a need for something to be done about it and normally promises that the response is going straight to the top to be handled by the manager or the owner.
At no point in this second situation are the customers told to post a review. This friendly/unfriendly test before soliciting reviews is filtering. It’s frowned upon by most review sites and is a breach of terms of service in some. What’s worse is that if a major publication knew about it, they would certainly come down hard on the parent companies or the individual companies themselves for trying to manipulate their public reputation.
The right way to solicit reviews is through a transparent, single step process. Businesses that take pride in their service and boldly ask for reviews regardless of the perspective of the customer is the only way to get reviews the whitehat way.
That’s not where it ends, though. Getting more reviews is important, but handling the reviews – good and bad – in an appropriate manner is the real juice in reputation management. This isn’t just about getting a higher star-ranking. It’s about being gracious and humble to those that leave a good review and being helpful to those who leave a bad review.
The responses to bad reviews can be more powerful than a positive review. Nobody expects a business to be perfect. They make mistakes. When these mistakes are made, the willingness to listen to the challenges, try to offer solutions, and be sincerely sorry for the bad experience can go a long way towards helping a business improve their chances of getting more business.
In other words, negative reviews can be more helpful than positive ones in many circumstances.
The other component of reputation management that few companies explore is the search engine reputation component. Review sites are almost invisible if they’re not found on search. To see what people will be viewing, do four searches:
The results on the first page of the search engine results pages will be what people are seeing. The things that appear on page two are threats or opportunities. The things that appear on page three or beyond are invisible.
The absolute most important part of reputation management is service itself. If you’re getting bad reviews, it’s not a random occurrence. It’s not “those damn internet folks” trying to ruin your business. It’s probably not your competitors or former employees being vindictive.
If you’re getting a lot of bad reviews, you might just want to improve the way you do business with your customers. As strange as it may sound, your reputation management issues may be justified. Fix those first. Everything else is just strategy and technique.
“Social Media” is without question the most talked about thing in online marketing right now. But how does it apply to your current marketing strategy, and why should you get involved? Social Media is an incredibly powerful way of speaking to your customers. When you enter their Social Network you are entering a circle of trust – these customers want to hear from you.
One of the most time-consuming tasks within social media is finding, reviewing, editing and posting relevant content your fans/followers will deem valuable. Taking the time to consistently post quality content frequently each day is an important factor to building followers and relationships. If I could take a moment of your time and ask if you would “Imagine This”…..
Here at Bleecker Automotive Group we manage the complete development of our pages, applications and functionality of our links, a real-time virtual community of our customers from our DMS, employees, neighbors and friends all collaborating and interacting online in real-time, sharing ideals, photos, comments and more!…..sounds a lot like Facebook, LinkedIn or even Twitter?….Well It’s not, It’s Facebook & Beyond!!
We currently utilize team management solutions, which reduces the time required for this function by implementing content syndication and automatically pulling our tweets, blogs, news streams, Google alerts search term and any RSS feed content directly into a database with headings, links and descriptions. The Bleecker content can be reviewed, edited, grouped and appended to date/time posting schedules that can be exported and immediately uploaded into our social media management system for syndicated posting…..Change The Way You Increase Business, When You Change The Way You Do Business
Not From the Good Doctor
Over the last couple of weeks, my exploration into the world of effective automotive social media has turned more towards pitches and consultations. We’ve spent 9 months now digging deeper than ever before into what constitutes success and we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s pretty simple – if you aren’t selling cars and driving business to the service drive through social media, you’re not doing it right.
The posting strategies that have proven to be successful are a whole other topic that couldn’t fit into a single blog post, so for now I just want to explore the quick and easy methods that I’ve used to tell if a Facebook page is working or not. It comes down to reach, which means that the answer has absolutely, positively nothing to do with fans. I’ll demonstrate that in a moment.
First, let’s take a look at what you want to see on your page or other pages to determine if they’re posts are actually being seen and having an influence on local people on Facebook.
All of the examples above have varying levels of likes, many of which are higher than most dealers. This is used to grade how well a page is doing, but it’s a false positive. The real number to look at rather than likes is the number to the right – “talking about this.” You can determine how many people are actually being reached based upon this number. For example, look at the second example from the top. It has a ton of fans so it must be doing well, right? Wrong. With only 67 people talking about it, that means that the vast majority of the “fans” are not seeing the posts at all in their news feeds.
Keep in mind that it’s a small ration of reach. In other words, the bottom example that has 70 people talking about this is reaching much more than the one above it that has 14 people talking about it. As a rough estimate, you can multiple the number of people talking about it by 20 and that’s approximately the number of people being reached by the page in a given week. In other words, the bottom example is reaching around 1400 people per week and the one above it is reaching around 380 per week.
Here are some examples of what pages should look like after a few months or even weeks of doing the right things on their page:
As you can see, the engagement ratios (determined by dividing the number talking about this with the total number of likes) are much higher in this batch. Even the page at the bottom with a mere 267 likes is talked about by nearly three times as many people as the page above with over 73K fans. The number of people reached by the dealerships’ messages through use Facebook news feeds is much, much higher for these properly managed pages.
It’s not just about how many people you’re reaching. It’s also about where the people you’re reaching live.
Here’s an example of a page that is reaching a lot of people:
As you can see, they have 2,769 people talking about the posts. They have a good engagement ratio relative to their fans and they’re growing nicely. They are very popular in New York City and reaching more 18-24 year olds than any other demographic. You can easily tell when they started targeting more people with Facebook ads based upon the graph.
It all looks great, right? Well, considering this is a dealership in California, it’s likely that they’re focused on getting nationwide popularity. This is a very bad idea.
I went through 74 people who had liked, shared, or commented on their posts. I could not find a single person engaging with the dealership that was within 30 miles of the store. You cannot easily sell cars to people when you’re targeting the whole country. Is it possible? Sure. Is it much less likely than if you maintain a strong local following and target the people who can actually drive to the dealership and buy a car or get their transmission serviced.
In thirty seconds and two clicks of the button, you can tell very quickly if your Facebook presence is working even without seeing the Facebook Insights. I’ve shown dealers how to dig deeper into their insights to prove it even further, but these two telltale signs are very clear indicators of a page’s presence and how well it is working.
Facebook should be localized. The number of fans is a much less important indicator than the number of people who are actually seeing your posts. The sooner you understand the way that Facebook marketing truly works, the easier it will be for you to find success and start selling cars as a result.
There are two basic types of advertising: branding and traffic now. Each has its own objectives and potential pitfalls. How can you avoid common mistakes made in each form?
In a world where everyone is in search of the magic bullet that will increase both sales and website traffic, what if I told you that all you had to do to start immediately performing at a higher level is to differentiate yourself from your competition?
To paraphrase Seth Godin, there are a lot of brown cows out there – but nobody notices brown cows. If you want to get noticed, you have to be a purple cow. A purple cow in a field full of brown cows is sure to get noticed.
Want to be a purple cow? Read on to learn how to stand out from your website’s competitors:
Know Yourself
The best brands in the world know themselves. They know their strengths, their weaknesses, their successes, their failures – and they know not only where they are now, but also where they’re going in the future. A successful brand is one with one foot planted firmly in the present that also knows where to place the other foot in the future. You only get to this point by taking a true audit of everything you do – right and wrong.
Know Your Competitors
What do they do right? Is there anything they’re offering that you aren’t? When thinking in terms of consumer experience, what can your competitors offer that you can’t?
Once you understand the reason behind why people aren’t choosing your company, it’s much easier to fix any holes in your website or product offerings that are holding you back.
Create a Differentiator or a USP
Great websites and great brands do things differently than others. They offer what’s called a “unique selling proposition” or USP. Finding your USP requires serious introspection and keying on that one item or trait that separates you from your competition. If you don’t have one, create it.
Specialize
There is a time and place to be a jack-of-all trades, but the web isn’t one of them. In a place where consumers can find just about anything from the companies that specialize in these items, they aren’t going to want to purchase one item that you really excel and several others that are of a mediocre quality. Find what you’re good at it – additional offerings are just noise.
KISS
Keep it simple, stupid. There are two basic principles to the KISS method when it comes to online business…
The first is making your product or service easily understandable at a glance. If the average consumer needs to watch a three-minute video to understand what it is you do, you’re losing customers.
The second KISS method revolves around user experience. GoDaddy might make a ton of money selling domains and upgrades, but their checkout process – with all of its upgrades and add-on options – is maddening. KISS!
Invest in Your Brand
Too often, online business owners make good money, but fail to put enough of it back into their brands in order to grow. There are always things you can make better, whether it’s enhancing your product design, user experience or additional product offerings.
Identify Consumer Pain Points
The best products and services are those that make somebody’s life easier. No matter what niche you’re in, there are pain points that you must document in order to create the products or service offerings that will make your customer’s life easier. Solve the problem; cash the check.
Hire the Best People
At some point, your web-based business is going to need additional help. And when it comes to hiring, you need to ask yourself whether your candidates truly have the potential to bring needed value to your position. If not, they aren’t for you – the world doesn’t need more mediocre employees.
Retain Them
Keeping your employees happy has been shown to increase workplace productivity, as well as decrease stress and turnover. Once you find good employees, it’s always cheaper to retain them than to go through the process of finding others, training them, and hoping they stick around.
Make Bold Guarantees
“First page of Google in 90 Days!!!”
“100,000 Facebook Fans in 6 Months!!!”
These are the kinds of guarantees that get people’s attention. While you shouldn’t offer empty promises or guarantees you can’t meet, bold statements like these are undoubtedly powerful. Remember, though, if you can’t deliver, don’t say it.
Over Deliver
Following the above examples, what if, instead of just getting a single web page to the Top 10 results in Google, you got the client a second result in just 55 days? How about 150,000 Facebook fans in just five months? People never complain about someone who over-delivers on a promise. In fact, they may just share how happy they are with others.
Track Success and Failures
It’s easy to document the things you did well. What’s much harder – but much more important – is the ability to document your failures. Having a list of things you did wrong makes you more likely to learn from the mistake, rather than repeating it. In fact, mistakes are often the best thing that could happen to a business. Success doesn’t teach the way failure does.
Be Transparent
The days of private operation of a business are all but over. Let your customers take a peek behind the screen, and show them that you’re willing to share how you do things. Customers feel safer and more loyal to brands that they feel aren’t hiding anything.
Be Innovative
Go ahead; re-invent the wheel. This goes back to the purple cow idea. If you do something differently, you’re bound to get noticed. Apple revolutionized the way in which we listen to music. What’d it get them? A bump in revenue so large that they became one of the most successful companies on the planet.
Test, Test, Test
Great companies are always testing new ideas. Even if you’re just rolling out a specific feature to a certain segment in order to gather feedback, you should always be testing. You can’t be innovative if you’re afraid to fail, and you’ll never know if a feature will be a success unless you put it out in front of your market.
Don’t Skimp
It’s easy to grab a freelancer from Elance, Guru, or oDesk to do your SEO, content and social media. Does that make it the right way? Probably not. One small flub can seriously tarnish a business’s reputation. A few shortcuts in the SEO process could lead to huge penalties from Google or being de-indexed from the SERPs entirely.
The key here is accountability. Find people that have something to lose if they make huge blunders and they’re far less likely to make them. Cheaper isn’t always better.
Get the Referral
This is “Sales 101” stuff, but online business owners often forget it. Get the referral. It’s easier than ever to get a referral online. The sale doesn’t stop with the current customer. Ask for a Tweet or a Facebook status update in exchange for a freebie or discount. It’s that easy.
The web opens up new doors that we’ve never seen before. These doors have the potential to lead to huge successes or monumental losses. Those that are making the money are those that are willing to be different from their competitors in order to deliver a better product or service than those around them. Listen to your customers, respect them, and find ways to differentiate yourself from everyone else. Follow these rules and you’ll be counting your cash in no time.
Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/17-ways-stand-websites-competitors/67977/
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