We’ve gotten your questions, your emails, and your comments. We love that you’re engaging, and I assure you, we want to give you the answer to every question you have in this business. What’s mine is yours, friends! I want you to know everything I do, I want to help you in any way I possibly can, and so does Ali Reda! Keep sending in…

Over the last several months, it’s been refreshing to see more and more automotive leaders shifting their focus from quantity to quality when it comes to their website traffic and overall marketing. Rather than holding value in the number of site visits, the value has shifted to the…

News for the Week of 2.4 

Snapchat Add Me URLs

Snapchat recently rolled out Add Me URLs to make adding people even easier. Users are now able to copy their own unique URLs and instantly share them via apps like Twitter, as well as add them in places like signatures.  When the URL is…

December is here, which means the holidays are right around the corner. When we think of Christmas, several things come to mind, one of them being good ol’ Saint Nicholas—or Santa for short. 

The holidays are the perfect time to appeal to consumers and find innovative ways to bring in-market shoppers into your dealership. A simple way to attract more business…

4 Reasons Marketing to Your Employees Matters

Employees are the lifeblood of your dealership and have the most impact on your customer loyalty. If that sentence made you cringe, you probably aren’t doing all you can to ensure your employees are actively engaged and have the tools and guidance necessary to fully do their jobs.…

Take Back Your Brand: Secret Strategies for a Thriving Dealership

Every dealership depends on certain resources to be successful, but thriving dealerships know the secrets to long-term, bottom line success depends on investing time and money in core areas of the dealership to stay on top and build a solid, recognizable and…

Take Back Your Brand By Building Trust

The success of your business depends on the trust you are able to build for your brand. After all, consumers with confidence in specific brands will not only return and provide repeat business, but…

Way too often we see dealerships handing over databases to vendors to facilitate a mass email campaign to an entire unfiltered list of customers. Vendors certainly have a stake in larger email campaigns since the odds that a dealer obtains business from the campaign increases - due to sheer numbers. A smart dealer will analyze their open rates and have tools set up to track…

The most amazing part about the internet and social media is that it has opened up communication between people and businesses that was never possible before. We now have the ability to talk to our customers and for them to talk to us in an interactive fashion, allowing for clear lines of engagement that can be both public and private.

For car dealers, this…

Written By: Robin Cunningham

For the last sixteen months I have had the incredible experience of being a lead instructor with the NCM Institute.  I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of dealership managers in our multi-level classes for general managers, general sales managers, used vehicle managers, service managers, financial managers, and some private dealership training, as…

A top 10 nationally-ranked auto dealer called me recently and asked me to do an assessment. I said no problem, I’ll send the list of schedules that I need from your controller and we can get started. The dealer responded no, not that assessment, the management assessment that we did two years ago. Based on the urgent tone in his voice, I asked, “Tell me what’s going on?” The dealer explained that in 2011, the store had a record year in volume, market share and net profit. Based on that year,…

Today's Up To Speed article is contributed by Dave Anderson, president of Dave Anderson's Learn to Lead, an international sales and leadership training and consulting company. Prior to beginning Learn To Lead, Dave enjoyed an extensive and successful career in the automotive retail industry

Self-esteem is defined by the dictionary as: a realistic respect for or…

At the NCM Institute Center for Automotive Retail Excellence, the training that we provide in our Service Management courses focuses primarily on strategies and tactics. However, we have discovered that the effective execution of the strategies that we teach is most often hampered by an important missing ingredient:…

One of the questions on the NCM Institute post-class surveys is, “Which of the trainings presentations or topics were the most useful to you?” One of the most prevalent answers we see is “Time Management.” This is interesting because the subject seems to be of a lot greater importance to dealership managers than those of us involved in retail automotive thought leadership have always believed. The quandary I’m…

There is a very distinguishable difference between SEO content and content that brings SEO value.

The easiest way to look at it is that SEO content is what you put on each page of your website to let both visitors and the search…

Photo sharing has been around a long time now and though the modes of capturing and sharing a photograph may have changed, the idea behind photo sharing still holds true. Photos spark an emotional connection in a way that text cannot. How many of you remember your family’s old photo album? It either lived on your living room table or resided on a shelf next to some other…

Here’s your dilemma: One of your top performers--maybe a vehicle sales consultant, maybe a service advisor, maybe a technician, maybe an F&I producer--just advised you that he really wants to become a manager. Although you don’t really want to lose his production, you know that if you don’t appropriately address his request and desire, he might quit and leave, or maybe worse, he might quit and stay.

Here is what else probably bothers you about this situation;…

I’m sure you’ve heard this theme over and over: the automotive retail world we work in today is in continual flux, requiring continual adaptation and an unprecedented acceptance of change. At the beginning of each of our NCM Instituteclasses, we ask the attending dealership executives and department managers, “What is your biggest single challenge?” Although it may not quite come out of their mouths this way, the answer we…