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Wow, this could mean big money for dealerships all over the State of New Jersey. It doesn't make any sense to have a law like this, especially when there are numerous other types of businesses that are allowed to conduct business on a Sunday. Not to mention how much tax revenue the State is losing by people crossing state lines on a Sunday to purchase vehicles in neighboring States such as New York or Delaware. Thoughts Anyone?http://www.northjersey.com/news/bergen/Proposal_would_allow_car_sales_in_Bergen_County_on_Sunday.html

http://www.dealersynergy.com Http://www.internetsales20group.com

Make Money Mondays With Sean V. Bradley - Special Guest, Joe Cala - Better, Not Bigger

This is truly a "Special Edition" of make money mondays! This week's episode is of a great friend of the Bradleys... Joe Cala. Joe has over 11 years of Automotive Sales and Management experience. Has been part of two nationally successful Internet Sales departments. And Joe is currently an Autotrader rep! 

You have to watch this video!!

And just like that... all your emails fall into the "promotions" box. 

That's right... the promotion box. The same box that will soon land all your email blast, your special offers, and anything else sales related that you wanted to get across to your customers. Google just said - "ACCESS DENIED" Now what? I can your dealer principle now... "OH NO! Its Friday and I want to do an "eblast" to over 30k customers to let them know that we have 0% and we have leases starting at $99 a month. Our customers and prospects need to know this!!"

WRONG...

They know we sell cars. They know we move metal. They know all of the above. They know the programs just we do, they know the interest rates before they walk into the dealership... They are well armed.

The game has changed again. Anything with any kind of "promotion" content will not reach your "primary" inbox. So what now??

SEND SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Like JD Rucker talks about his "content burger" send people something that they want to see. The most successful email that we ever sent out was a blooper reel. People loved it. They emailed us back "WOW, that was great. By the way, i still didn't get the Altima, can you shoot me a quote on a 24 month lease?" 

Marilyn Monroe once said "If you can make a women laugh, you can make her do anything." The same thing applies to our customers. Right now our customers are defended by their gmail shield. Best Buy just emailed me and IF i clicked on the dreaded "promotions" box... That is the only way I would view their offer. 

Break the Game open and get away from sales. Make your customers laugh, email them about an event you are having or a charity you are working with. Remember, they contacted you in order to get this "email blast." They know the deal... 

Share any and all thoughts, I would love to hear it. 

Do You Know Your Residual Flow Factor?

Guest Post By Sean V. Bradley, CEO, Dealer Synergy

Question: What is your Residual Flow Factor?

No idea what I’m talking about? Don’t feel bad. There are thousands of dealerships in this industry that have no idea what I’m talking about when I ask that question. Even worse, they’re not tracking this very important variable of their Internet Sales department.

Residual Flow Factor is the amount of leads that carries over from month to month.

For example, let’s say your dealership generates 500 leads in the month of August. You close 10 percent of those leads and deliver 50 units. How many leads carry over on September 1? That’s right, 450.

The average buying cycle is between 45 and 90 days. So some of these carry-over leads are “dead,” inactive, non-viable opportunities for any of the following reasons:

• Bought elsewhere
• Changed mind
• Can’t afford the vehicle
• Credit challenged
• Upside down on trade
• Unrealistic
• Bad lead
• Etc…

However, dead leads should only account for about 200 out of the remaining 450 leads (about 45%). That means that on September 1, you will have a Residual Flow Factor of 250 leads.

So you’ll start the month of September with a minimum of 250 carry over leads, plus you will have another 500 fresh leads for a total of 750 opportunities for the month of September.

Now for the important part: Dealers need to respect the Residual Flow Factor, because it literally cripples dealers every month. Many dealers do not understand the concept of the Residual Flow Factor and in turn do not plan accordingly. They do not have enough sales consultants or appointment setters to handle all of the total opportunities. So dealerships wind up only doing “the best they can” with the leads. They are not able to put enough attention or focus on the leads. They are simply spread too thin, so they covert only the low hanging fruit and let other opportunities pass by.

Let me share an awesome, easy formula you can use to track your department’s reality:

Create a spreadsheet for all SOLD units. Then create three additional columns:

1. Date the lead came in on
2. Date the lead closed
3. Window period

For example:

1.  Lead came in: August 5^th 
2.  Lead closed on: August 8^th
3.  Window period = 3 days

So, if you sold 50 units in the month of August, you will have 50 “window periods.” Add them all up and divide them by 50. This is your dealership’s “gestation period” (average selling period).

My prediction is that your dealership’s gestation period is between seven to 11 days. And that is NOT GOOD! Remember, the average buying cycle for Internet prospects is 45 to 90 days. If your average selling ratio is only seven to 11 days, it means that your dealership is leaving a lot of money on the table.  Chances are you are not maximizing your dealership’s Residual Flow Factor.  Armed with this knowledge, you can change this today!

If you have any questions about this article or if you would like me to evaluate your dealership’s Residual Flow Factor, please email me at sean@dealersynergy.com or feel free to give me a call at (267) 319-6776.

Sean V. Bradley is the founder and CEO of Dealer Synergy, a nationally recognized training and consulting company in the automotive industry.

http://connect.carsdirect.com/do-you-know-your-residual-flow-factor/?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=

http://www.autotrader.com 

http://www.internetsales20group.com 

Automotive Internet Sales.com Interviews Internet Sales & BDC Expert Joe Cala Of Autotrader  

The next time you turn on your television, do me a favor! Watch the commercials and see if you can identify what target audience the advertisements are intended for, and what calls to action are included to entice that audience to buy.

Once you’ve had a chance to complete this little exercise, take a look at the advertising and marketing materials produced by your dealership. Can you identify the target audience and call to action?

If you take a look back over the articles I’ve written over the past year or so, you’ll recognize a consistent theme. I tend to focus my articles on the importance of creating customer segments and ways that you can reach out to them more effectively.

While I won’t get into it too much in this article, I wanted to show you a cool Audi Australia commercial that I found online that features famous Beatboxer Tom Thum. Take a look at the video and let me know in the comments what audience Audi Australia intended this commercial for and what action they hope is accomplished.

What do you think? Comment below!

Throughout my entire career, and even today, I’ve always been accused of “drinking the Kool-Aid” or “brown-nosing” the owner, etc. I’ve always been lucky enough to love where I work. Sure, I’ve left jobs but always to better myself and for greater opportunities. I don’t have one bad thing to say about anyplace I’ve ever worked. I’m still in regular contact with almost all of my former bosses/owners. As a green pea sales associate I remember paying for personalized license plates that advertised our company slogan. And today, my license plate says “iMagic” because I’m proud of where I work. For the last 8 years of my career I’ve worn a company shirt 80% of the time and that includes nights and weekends. Again, because I’m proud of where I work.

My owner and I were traveling for work one day and we went out to eat, both of us were in store shirts and the person we were talking with commented on it and without hesitation he responded that he wanted everybody to know that he was “a company man” and I did too. I can’t remember how many cars I’ve sold by somebody coming up to me because of my company shirt but I’d guess around 100. Some of them even started off as complaints and eventually turned into a sale. I card everybody, even today, if somebody is interested in a vehicle I card them and when they contact me I set them up with one of our partner dealers. This past weekend I sold 3 cars for a partner dealer in Cleveland and had only met the people in a restaurant and they were actually upset with my service department. They saw the shirt, came to complain and realized I was the General Manager and we joked about me being the right guy to complain to. 24 months later, a 3 car deal…

Being a company man pays me dividends and it’s done so my entire professional sales career. I simply won’t work for a company or an individual that I don’t respect. There’s nothing I hate more than the “doom and gloom” Chicken Little types that think the world is coming to an end every single day. They always find bad in everything. Here are the funnier ones I’ve personally made terminations over:

• We had a killer sales weekend and Monday morning the gas card hit its limit so it’s declined, Chicken Little spreads the rumor “we’re going bankrupt” in less than 45 seconds!
• We have a billing dispute with a vendor (their mistake as it turns out) so we hold off paying the bill until it’s settled which we’re diligently working on and Chicken Little asks in a sales meeting “why don’t we pay our bills?”
• I interview one candidate as a favor to another General Manager and Chicken Little immediately spreads “we’re all getting fired and being replaced!”
• I can’t get a signal on my cell phone inside the store so I take a call from my owner outside and Chicken Little announces “I’ve seen this before, when the GM starts looking for a job, we all better start looking!”

In closing, I suggest hiring as many company men (and women) as possible. They’re a positive catalyst, hardworking, hard charging and truly and deeply care about your customers. They also don’t pay attention to the store/office rumors and are never seen whispering around the coffee machine. As for the “Chicken Little’s” of the world… Eradicate them from your organization with extreme prejudice. Their negativity is deadly and contagious and will ultimately impact your clients. I recently asked somebody “if it’s so bad, why not quit?” the response: “I need a job.” Ah, yes… a job. DOOM AND GLOOM NEED NOT APPLY!

*Chris Vitale is Vice President of Sales atiMagicLab.  He has over 15 years of in dealership experience and is quick to call it like he sees it.  Follow Chris @thecrmgod on Twitter.

Find out what "It" is in this week's Think Tank Tuesday, and how to best use Remarketing Segmentation to help you take steps towards reducing the likelihood of IT happening to you!

Car Sales / Automotive Sales Is NOT About Selling The Car In Internet Sales Or Phone Sales...

http://www.makemoneymondays.net
http://www.dealersynergy.com

Make Money Mondays With Sean V. Bradley - "Twitter Jacking"

You will be shocked to find out that you can convert your competition's clients and prospects to yours by "Twitter Jacking". Thats right you can use Twitter to sell cars! 

http://www.dealersynergy.com

Sean V. Bradley Trains The Entire Honda Showroom Sales Team On "Selling 30+ Units Per Month"

http://www.hindererhonda1@gmail.com 

2014 Honda Odyssey is BETTER Than Toyota Sienna Columbus Ohio - Minivan Review 

Sean V. Bradley, Writer For ALL Major Automotive Industry Publications Like AutoSuccess & Wards

Often times I’m asked my opinion on certain store personnel outside of their CRM utilization (and off the record) by owners. This is undoubtedly due to the number of stores I visit as I travel across the country. What’s always impressive to me is when I find a manager actually willing to work. What I hate to admit is that there are far too few. I coined the terms Airborne Manager and Chairborne Manager to differentiate between the excellent and the terrible.

In my years at the dealership I can remember all the Airborne Managers I’ve worked with and I also remember all the Chairborne Managers I’ve despised. Below are some (definitely not all) personality traits you may attribute to each:

Airborne Manager

• Takes T.O.’s – isn’t scared to death of talking to a customer
• Meets and Greets – engages clients and doesn’t just page a sales associate
• Presents Pencils – isn’t worried about the pencil that they’re asking you to present, they’re actually confident
• Jumps on heat cases in the Service Drive – doesn’t look the other way just because the sales to service handoff happened
• Plows the lot and will snow broom the front line in the winter
• Is at work early and stays late
• Is both a proponent and a practitioner of Early Manager Intros and Customer Exit Interviews
• Handles dealer trades quickly and efficiently
• Walks quickly
• Doesn’t just tell you what to do but allows you to watch while he/she does it

Chairborne Manager

• NEVER takes a T.O.
• When a customer approaches they usually hide or pretend to be on the phone
• When a customer walks through the front door they immediately page “available sales” rather than engaging the customer
• Writes totally unrealistic and insulting pencils and never has the guts to present them himself/herself
• Gets in late and leaves early
• Avoids Service customers like the plague
• Never talks to a customer unless it’s absolutely necessary (owner is watching)
• “Loads your lips” because that really helps
• Never leaves the building in the cold because “that’s why they got into management”
• Their response to dealer trade calls is always “we’re working somebody on that”
• There is rarely a separation between their chair and their arse
• Offers a ton of advice after the fact… Never in real time and not once in advance

I can’t believe anybody accepts Chairborne Managers in today’s hypercompetitive environment. I wouldn’t work for them as a sales associate, next to them as a counterpart and would never allow them to work for me as a GSM/GM. There’s just too much at stake. How many of us learned bad habits because of a terrible Chairborne manager? Sure, a fellow sales associate probably introduced us to the bad habit but it was repeatedly reinforced and accepted by the manager! 

Everyone knows that im a big advocate of all things Google.  Heck, I even rooted my brand new Galaxy s4 so I could get the Google edition ROM.

This morning though, I received an email with a title that I feel may be intentionally misleading.

The email linked to a blog post by Google AdWords Titled:

New research shows that 88% of ad clicks from mobile search are incremental to organic clicks
Posted by +Mark Burke, Google Engage Ireland
(Link is below)

http://adwords.blogspot.ie/2013/07/new-research-shows-that-88-of-ad-clicks.html?m=1

This article basically says that when companoes paused their pay per click campaigns the clicls were not replaced by clicks in the organic search, so basically if you stop your adwords campaign you are in effect losing all those clicks.

It even showed a pretty infographic with Automotive being one of the biggest areas of loss with 86% of adwords clicks not being replaced by organic.

Here's why the post is BS

If you have an adwords campaign that gets 100 click per month [random number for easy math] you are usually buying that campaign because you want to be visible on Page One of Google and usually you resort to ppc because you're not on page 1 in the organic results right?

Everyone's research,  including Google research, shows that above the fold page 1 organic results get more clicks than any ppc adwords ad which is why this latest blog post by Google is so offensive.  It shows that even the great Google is willing to mislead us good old automotive industry folks if it will help keep the revenue flowing.

The problem that car dealers have is that companies lile Cars.com amd Edmunds and AutoTrader have millions of dealership vehicles they are using to optimize search for each market, plus they have your dealership name amd address in those listings too [obviously they should so a consumer knows it is your car and that they need to contact you to buy it] but what is happening by listing your cars on these sites is that  organically their links are competing with yours and in many cases you lose.

Well,  you dont necessarily 'lose'because the consumer may go through the third party to contact you but let's face it,  the third party wouldn't be in existence without your inventory and if they didn't exist you're more likely to be visible on page one because you would be a more likely relevant search result. ..I digress.

The other challenge with AdWords is that you are competing with 3rd party sites like Cars.com AutoTrader and Edmunds there too.

When I worked at Cars.com, I was told internally that we were spending as much as $20,000 per day on AdWords / pay per click to make sure we were visible when people searched for cars in local dealer markets.

Of course this was in the dealership's best interest because the more shoppers on Cars.com means more opportunity foror dealers right?

Sort of, except for the fact that they bid to grab the brand names, models and in some cases the dealership names which means dealers have to pay MORE to Google to compete with the 3rd parties that theyre already paying too much for as it is.

I say F that!

Be smart, organize, optimize, visualize and work on conquering organic results and see if you really need that adwords campaign after all.

If you're going to invest inan adwords campaign, Ask your local cars, autotrader and esmunds and CarGurus rep to get you a list of keywords they buy in your market (they have it in their adwords dashboard so their boss can get that list easy enough) and see if they are edging you out by bidding on your own name so b yiure not spending a pile of cash bidding against a company you're paying to advertise with. Heck,  if you're already paying cars.com it doesnt make sense to pay more money to compete with them via ppc.

Obviously If you are visible above the fold on page one in the organic search as it is, with relevant results of course, the chance of consumers clicking someone else's adwords ad over you is greatly reduced anywaybso let the other guys spend their money on PPC while you sneak in and crush them all using organic search. Heck, go click their ads a bunch of times so they waste budget, that'll teach them not to compete against their own dealer customers. [Just kidding, they never learn]

While I spend zero on ppc amd organically dominate my soace, I do believe at the end of the day there are great ways to use adwords as a dealer but I recommend partnering with a company that does more than just spin out an ad for you. The guys at AdSmart Online do a good job and actually create inventory level ads and my clients who use them are happy so you can see their info at www.adsmartonline.com

I would love to hear other thoughts and comments.

Helping the best get better,
Mat Koenig

If you enjoyed this post please share it, tweet it and +1 it

There's an exciting thing that can happen when you first start advertising on social media. The organic measures of exposure are quickly fading away, so when you get that first boost of exposure as a result of spending very little money, it can become addicting.

It's a trap. Overexposing at the wrong time to the wrong people can prevent you from being able to reach the right people in the future, particularly on Facebook. As I've mentioned many times, social advertising is very different from other forms of online advertising as the performance of the content being promoted has a dramatic and often instant impact on subsequent posts.

In other words, done wrong, you can do real damage.

The story of the tortoise and the hare is one that few want to hear. They don't want their advertising to resemble that of a slow tortoise in any way, shape, or form. However, the reality is that it's the best way to reach the most people in the long term as well as in the short term. Look at these statistics:

As with nearly every attempt at social media, there's a quick spike. Just about everyone who is not using advertising in their social media is having a hard time truly reaching anyone, particularly at the local level. Even with a strategy grounded in consistency, there is still the initial spike and it's almost always a noticeable difference.

The problem is that with many of the pages I check out that are using social media advertising, the view is much different. It's high peaks and low valleys. The overall reach early on is great. The problem is that the spikes are damaging. There's no consistent growth of active fans. There's no steady engagement being built up. It's happening all at once.

There are plenty of reasons why slow and steady after the initial burst is preferable to spikes and low points, but the biggest reason is that the overall number of people reached is much, much higher when it's done with a sound steady strategy. It's not easy to see because Facebook doesn't offer the proper tracking and because it's somewhat counter-intuitive, but once you really dive in and see what's happening it makes sense.

You see, the 10,000 people reached one week are not the same 10,000 people reached the following week. Sure, there are plenty of people (if you're doing it right) who see most of the things you post, but a consistent strategy aimed at spreading out the reach is much more effective at reaching the masses. Facebook insights don't portray this properly which is why you see so many who throw money at Facebook to see the big spikes. It feels like you're reaching more people that way, but you're not.

The only time there should be spikes is when there's something extremely important to get exposed. These should be rare. Sure, there's always something really important going on - the big sale, a new model rolling out, incentives, etc. - but it has to be social gold as well a being important. Otherwise, standard promotion will do the trick.

Unfortunately, it's very easy based on the fallacies in Facebook Insights for a company to demonstrate their effectiveness using inflated numbers. The biggest problem is that it cannot be sustained that way. Social media advertising is the easiest thing to do. It's also the easiest thing to do wrong.

* * *

Article originally appeared on Soshable.

http://www.dealersynergy.com
Automotive Internet Sales Coordinator (BDC Rep) Sells 49 Units ONLINE & Tells Us How!

Your website can produce up to 600 more leads every month. I'll show you how to get customers who may be on the fence to contact your team in this week's Think Tank Tuesday. There's no reason you shouldn't be using this tool on your website. Don't miss out on hundreds of quality leads and watch Think Tank Tuesday right now!