Written by: Steve Hall

Dealers know you must provide fast, convenient, and competitively-priced service in order to retain your customer base. They also know that oil changes and light maintenance are the most requested service items by customers. Knowing this, why do dealers continually fight express service?

I’ve heard all the excuses: it hurts my hours per repair order; it hurts my gross profit percentage; it hurts my effective labor rate; I can’t make any money in express…

DID YOU AUTHORIZE YOUR INVENTORY TO BE POSTED ON ANTI-DEALER OR HOSTILE WEBSITES?

5:00 AM and the Alpha Dawg is on the…

I ask myself this often: What are we really trying to do on the internet?  Let’s start by looking at an extreme. Say a Dealership like that one in Northern, Idaho.  Here’s a dealership that is in a mountain town (2400 pop.) they advertise in those magazines you find in the pouch behind the seat in front…

Written By: Garry House

In the second quarter of 2012, the NCM Institute (NCMi®) formed a training partnership with Automotive Internet Management (AIM). AIM has conducted five “Bridging the Internet Sales Gap” training workshops under NCMi sponsorship. After personally auditing two of these sessions and receiving client-dealer feedback from all of the sessions,…

An additional area of concern is within the CRM Inventory Tool. In our experience, not every store uses the Inventory Tool to its fullest capability.  The basics of having pictures, custom comments, pricing, aged inventory, hits, leads, etc etc, should excite every dealership sales manager within a store.  All of this extremely valuable information is essential to not only helping drive leads to your store, but also managing and caring for existing leads and converting them to…

I read an interesting quote the other day. Its a quote that I have included several times in many of my post's but for some reason this time I actually took it upon myself to meditate on it. It is found in Tim Tebow's autobiography, and it says "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard". One thing that I always found fascinating about Tim Tebow was his amazing work ethic. Here is a guy who is not built for the position of a quarterback, but adopts a take no prisoners work ethic…

Written by: Keith Shetterly



We talked for years in automotive retail about “The Road to the Sale,” and I’m clearly one of the many supporters of that path to sales success. However, too many of us are still on "The Road Less Profited." Why? Because we are not getting more sales (and profits!) from "The Road to Retention”!



Retention sales link the positives of variable and fixed operations together, and their teaming allows each part of the dealership to amplify the other.…

In the automotive business, we expect there to be critics. We understand that there are detractors to our business. No one understands the value of “the voice of the customer” better than an automotive dealer. In fact, there’s been a whole business built around “relationship management” specifically for the…

Over the past three years I have spoken with many dealers about selling cars to service customers... One of my best friends, Daymond Decker spends a good portion of his work time traveling from dealership to dealership all over the country training and implementing a process for converting service…

If you haven’t already done so, it’s that time to review your 2012 performance in detail. In what areas did you fall short of your goals and why? Where could you have generated greater gains and how? Don’t allow January to slip by without these facts in writing and a discussion of how you can best move forward in 2013.

A common F&I pay plan in the automotive industry is known as the grid. It compensates managers based on their per vehicle retail performance and products sold…

Rarely do we come across a dealer today who claims to have a sufficient number of vehicle sales personnel. When adding the word “quality” to “vehicle sales personnel,” the dealers’ claims of staffing success turn pretty ugly. Why is it so difficult to attract quality people for automotive sales positions?

Several years ago, I was working with a client in Southern California and conducting one of my rare sales training meetings. The subject of the meeting was "Developing and Engaging…

It’s Time To Go Social. We’ll Make it Simple.

Now that 2013 is upon us it is time to get the lead out and start pushing early and often. Do not let your success or failures of 2012 determine how hard you are going to work this year. Time flies and it is easy to sit back and let the time slip away, but the real pro's in the business take care of their business NOW.  Don't wait for something to happen...DOMINATE

Good Luck

Be Safe

Kick Butt!

Wayne 

Since it is that time of year, here are some ideas for commitments you may wish to make for 2013. As you’ve heard me say many times, “If you measure it and then scoreboard it, performance will improve!” Many of you are probably measuring and scoreboarding some of the following key performance indicators, but I doubt if any of you are measuring all 11 (a “lucky” number) of them:

1. Actual flat rate hour Productivity per Technician against objective on a daily,…

I have repeatedly been told by sales personal that they do not need to mark there deals sold because the system automatically does it. I have also heard this is why some customers are not logged.

This is on premise a horrible idea that you are relying on technology alone to give you one of your best contacts you will have.



I want you to consider something. This person liked you, the dealership, and the deal so much that they invested thousands of dollars with you.…

There are plenty of ways to use mobile devices to promote a business. The merging of social, local, and mobile into the SoLoMo buzzword of 2012 is starting to became a reality for 2013. With YouTube's latest app for iPhone and iPod Touch, the video giant has given a powerful tool to businesses who rely on showing people their wares before they make the…

We teach,closing, if i could would you, build value, demo demo demo!, Well they are going to take what they are told and apply it in the least painful way for them. We need to make sure that they are well rounded and skilled at all of the steps in the sale not just certain sections. The rah rah meetings are not building skills.....and Skills make the dealership profit, Good CSI, and make life much easier for them and us!

Most of them are good people who really try hard, but in…

This time of the year was always interesting to me, I would get to sit back and watch the salesman cruise through December because they are all convinced that everyone is on vacation or they aren't buying cars becuase they are out Christmas shopping and that this was a month to just get what you can get and move on. Well I changed all that by  taking the philosophy that they will not work on GOALS anymore. Instead we implemented a system of monthly Expectations. The difference being that…

I have the honor and privilege of traveling this great country of ours and working with all types of BHPH dealers on a consulting, training, and 20 Group basis. I am a firm believer that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. When I first started to put this article together, I made a list of the most prominent mistakes I see BHPH dealers make. Problem was, the list was about 1,001 mistakes long. Most if not all of which I had made as a dealer myself.

After looking over…