Day 3

2 Major Topics :

Sales Workbench
If you think your sales process takes too long, contains too much duplication of efforts, has too many chances for mistakes (especially with all the incentives, stackable and not) Sales Workbench is here to save the day. omg, the things you can do here are great. AND, specific access to parts and pieces of the tool can be customized for every single employee who you want to give access. Don't worry if you have an employee you don't want in vehicle locator, just customize his profile for whatever portions of the process you want him to have. It's is so great though that once you find out a customer name, you can start building their profile and you only have to do it once, no need to ask and ask for customer data throughout the sales process. You can build or find a vehicle, price it, see what incentives he is eligible for, apply incentives and not accidentally stack one in there that isn't allowed, enroll in OnStar and XM. Whew. Love the productivity possibilities. And just think how impressed your customers will be when your sales consultants are using technology to capture their data and build their deal. Cool. Very cool.

Digital
The presenter was David Kain of the Kain Automotive Group: how to sell successfully on the internet. Thanks to the internet, your inventory is spread everywhere, shoppers consider the internet the showroom, shoppers value anonymity and access, and they want to see and not just hear about why you are the place to spend their money. You don't have to be a research junkie like me to appreciate his statistics, because they were few, but powerful.

• 92% of shoppers purchase from a dealer OTHER than where they started
• 24% bought the model they intended to buy when they started shopping
• 42% bought a pre-owned vehicle even though they started out shopping for new

The opportunities await us to contact our shoppers quickly, artistically well, continually, and with options. Have you heard me say this before? Yes, of course. Because that's what sells vehicles.

Marching order #1 is perfect your phone skills. Wow, did he make his point here. The phone's got to be your primary tool. When we get a lead, we have to electronically respond and it better be quick and good, no great. But mainly, we have to skillfully make a phone connection with that shopper. And that is where our opportunity for winning is. The opportunity is there because we really stink at it. Here are some more powerful statistics from 8000 dealerships surveyed by NADA:

• 74% of inbound phone calls, dealerships did not ask for an appointment
• 84% quoted a price, discounts, or price for a trade on an incoming phone call
• 66% didn't ask for the customer's phone number
• 42% didn't ask the customer's name
• 68% told the customer to sell vehicle themselves and NOT trade it in at the dealership

The great news is that this is achievable, it is not hard to figure out, it is made up of things that we know we should be doing, that we can do... I will help you. Let's get busy.

Day 2 - new GM and SFE

What a cool unveiling today!  I saw the revised, no, overhauled DealerPulse Pro 2.0 today.  You are going to love this tool for tracking your customer retention.  It is so simple.  It is so deep.  It's really got it going on.  
Up to now, all I really knew was that the retention metric was changing from 2 customer pay visits within 12 months to 1 customer pay visit within 12 months.  That's a good thing.  It is more realistic to track that way.

What I saw today was how completely streamlined the navigation is.  Right when you log in you have a dashboard of your stats.  You can print a 2-page executive summary that shows all the stats in graphic form.  You can quickly and easily pull customer lists with a huge array of criteria.  Who's spending money, how often, on what, who isn't spending money, how can we target customers to market to, which employees are successfully retaining employees.

This is a tool you can use to make decisions and take actions that can really hit your bottom line.

And guess what?  You get it for FREE!  

If you have DealerPulse Pro 1.0, just by enrolling now you can eliminate your monthly fees.  

If you don't have DealerPulse Pro enroll now for free.  No set up fee, nothing.

Watch for your sign up letter containing your password and let's get this thing started.

new GM and SFE

I'm in an old hotel in Cleveland... beautiful and historical, but a really R E A L L Y slow internet connection, so I will keep this short.
Day 1 at the National SFE meeting - good news about new GM and new SFE:
* SFE is operational even through the bankruptcy of GM
* I've told you this before, but it's really special, so I'm telling you again; Maritz has Critical Vendor Status and so continues to receive payments from GM
* SFE payments continue for all brands/dealerships participating in new GM
* Q3 & Q4 SFE payments will be made
* VERY EXCITING - plans, BIG plans are being made for SFE for 2010
* SFE will be new - it is evolving, BUT the fundamentals that are our strength will not change; i.e. dealership presence of facilitators, focus on customer experience and dealership profitability.
* VItal for us all to embrace change AND perform. Think sales, CSI, customer retention, and digital.

What Windshield Time Does To Me

Check out my latest yard art acquisition: rusty barbed wire ball! (Actually I brought this home in April.) I've been coveting one of these for 3 or 4 years but they are always out of reach behind some farmer's fence... besides, how am I gonna hoist this bad boy into the trunk of the Saab all by myself. Not to mention wearing a dress or sandals or whatever. I finally got serious when I actually drove past a shop selling these down in southeast Kansas one day only to be disappointed that the shop was out of business and up for auction.
All the way home I schemed on how to get one. I went online and searched for rusty barbed wire, barbed wire balls, pasture art, but I couldn't find anything. Finally I decided to try Craig's List asking for my prize. Not even one hour went by when I got a response from a fellow with several in his field mine for the taking.
I lured my husband into bringing his Colorado out to a Burns Kansas pasture where he and the farmer hoisted my selected prize into the bed of the truck.
Cool. Love my trophy. And it was free except for the hauling.
It was so cool that my request came back so quickly.
What's this got to do with excellence? Everything. I was a consumer, I was a shopper, even though I gave the farmer no money, I got what I wanted and he got what he wanted. The excellence part was the quick response, the ease of dealing with the merchant, ease of acquisition. Honestly, this transaction set some standards for me. I'll be subconsciously measuring other transactions against this one.
Moral of the Story: your customers don't simply compare you to other car dealers, they compare you to every other vendor and transaction in their experience. Do yourself a favor and harvest excellent actions from your experiences. Learn and borrow from Disney, Starbuck's, Dillon's, eBay, Facebook, and every mom-and-pop favored business you come across.

Lessons Refined

I noticed a presumptuous little list of learnings from a babe trumpeting his wisdom on his 28th birthday. No wait, it was his impending 28th birthday. He isn’t even 28 yet. Not to be a snob. Not to be one of those old people everyone hates who walked 4 miles to school everyday in the snow and has seen it all, but it was just funny to me that a not-yet-28-year-old was dispensing life lessons.
Then I read them and some were pretty good. Being the perfectionist that I am, I have added my own 40-something-year-old comments and hope that Marc will forgive my audacity (he does, after all, run a really cool blog, so I have masses to learn from him.)
1. If you’re smiling right now, you’re doing something right.
2. The biggest mistake you can make is doing nothing because you’re scared to make a mistake.
3. No matter how it turns out, it always ends up just the way it should be. Either you succeed or you learn something. Win-Win. Sorry Marc, but this is just not so. Experiences sometimes are bad, really bad and through no fault of our own. The one correct point here is that if we are wise we will learn something, but it has that caveat. There are still areas at which I, all of us, continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over, we don’t learn, so that’s why I say if we are wise. Maybe it should be if we can stop long enough, step back, and think about things, THEN we will learn from them.
4. If you catch yourself working hard and loving every minute of it, don’t stop. You’re on to something big. Because hard work ain’t hard when you concentrate on your passions. Baloney. Don’t confuse hard with difficult or unpleasant. Hard is okay. Loving every minute of it? I am unconvinced that anybody could ever do that, but I’m all for trying.
5. It’s not about getting a chance, it’s about taking a chance. You’ll rarely be 100% sure it will work. But you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won’t work. Sometimes you just have to go for it! This is a repeat of #2. The concept is good, stop sitting around on your duff and do something. I just don’t think it bears repeating within such a short list. Look out, #6 is another take on it… I am seeing a theme here, I think we've uncovered Marc's brand.
6. Complaining is like slapping yourself for slapping yourself. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just hurts you more. Again, I have to refine the term, although I love the slapping analogy. Complaining can be good when you have an improvement in mind. Now whining is another thing. Whining does not solve the problem.
7. There’s a big difference between knowing and doing. Knowledge is basically useless without action.
8. You can’t change who you are. You can only change what you know and how you apply this knowledge.
9. It is okay to be angry. It is never okay to be cruel.
10. Remember, change happens for a reason. Roll with it. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Change happens regardless of whether there is a reason that we realize or can fathom. Sometimes time is just going and that’s why things are different, you know, decaying. Anyway, my opinion is that “rolling with it” is kind of like being unconscious and sort of keeping on with what you’ve been doing. It’s conventional. It is not living intentionally. A more fitting final lesson to me is anticipation. Imagining where the “puck is headed” rather than waiting for it to land in the goal. That interest in looking forward and deciding how I intend to act, not always just react, is a big powerful piece of wisdom.
I deleted some of the “light” lessons, so click here if you want to read Marc’s complete list.

Don't Be Stale

I can't believe how much shopping and pre-shopping I've been doing on the internet lately. The reason I can't believe it is because I'm already an avid internet user, but I've never done so much comparing as it seems I'm doing now.
Guess what? So are your shoppers. The first way to turn me off on a vendor is a crummy web site. Don't be guilty of it or your shoppers will never be your customers or clients or whatever you want to call those who actually spend money with you. Over 80% of your customers are shopping your web site before they ever contact you. Don't assume that the number of official leads is an accurate count on who's looking you up on the internet... that's so 20th century.
So anyway back to the site... sure, the obvious things like a service special for winterizing your vehicle when it's now June stands out like a really dumb thing to have posted on your site. And believe me, I could look at a dozen dealership websites today and half of them would be committing this sin.
But also, how about being relevant? How about using this fantastic tool to REALLY, affordably, communicate directly with your shoppers? Have you let people know what you are doing to keep your doors open? How 'bout adjusting your marketing pitch? How relevant are you and your product? Here's a non-vehicle example: the iPhone. With the change in the economy, it's evolved from a status symbol to a money-saving replacement for multiple devices--a home phone, a media player, a game console, and an on-the-go computer. The "cool factor" is still there, but the change in messaging allows consumers to feel responsible while buying what was once perceived exclusively as a luxury item.
Put your thinking cap on! Be flexible. Be a designer. Tune into the world and entice them to you with what's "green", what's patriotic, what's a wise purchasing decision, what's efficient, etc. Don't let the environment create your message. Put your own optimistic and engaging message out there.
Oh yeah, if you haven't shopped your site lately, shame on you... take a look and try to see it as your shoppers see it. I know you'll see an opportunity that is crying to be addressed.