A hot topic of much discussion today is the decrease in the sales process. There are many opinions on whether shortening the time it takes consumers to buy a vehicle is the answer to providing a better customer experience. There’s no doubt that it can be arduous and exhausting for a consumer to buy a car - from finding the right one, to filling out paperwork,…

Albany, N.Y. – October 26th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today the release of a free eBook titled "The Auto Dealer's Ten Step Guide to Hiring the Best Employees." The eBook reveals the bottom line costs…

In B2B marketing, there’s no scarcity of brand messages from vendors to dealers. Increasingly, those messages now tend to market how the vendor’s products and services help dealers create a better customer experience, rather than focus on the products or services themselves. But is that a good thing? Certainly dealers now recognize that customer experience is…

Albany, N.Y. – October 19th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that more than 100 of its customers, including dealership executives and managers, attended its annual User Summit. Ten industry vendors also exhibited at the event that was held in Oak Brook, IL near Chicago on October 12th and 13th, 2015. Auto/Mate's User Summit is designed to share the latest features and give in-depth training on…

Mimicking customer behavior is one of the oldest sales techniques in the business. So is finding common interests and building rapport. However, with three generations of car buyers in and out of dealerships daily - Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y - it’s harder than ever for salespeople to accomplish this convincingly, let alone understand what type of experience each…

If you have a smartphone, chances are you have Apple Wallet (formerly Passbook) or Google Wallet. These applications are mobile wallets that store, among other things, applications like Apple Pay that enable people to purchase things with their phones. Of course, it's very unlikely that anybody is going to purchase their vehicle by swiping their mobile device. For that reason,…

Loyalty programs surround us. We live in a world filled with keychains on which multiple little plastic mini loyalty cards dangle. There aren’t many places where we spend our money that don’t offer a rewards program or, at the very least, track our purchases via a quasi-rewards program that only allows us to purchase items at the “loyalty” price, versus the…

Based on recent J.D. Power Automotive research, this year, the automotive industry is going to retail over 14,070,000 vehicle units, which is the second best retail sales performance ever.

However, this rate of growth, though positive, is slowing. This year, retail growth will be 510K vehicle units over last year, versus over 710K units of growth last…

Albany, N.Y. – October 12th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that StoneEagle has completed integration with Auto/Mate's Dealership Management System (DMS). Auto dealership groups using Auto/Mate's DMS and StoneEagle's web-based applications will benefit from seamless and real-time data updates in both systems.

"Auto/Mate…

There’s no doubt that people are in love with their phones.  As a result, memes and jokes constantly circulate the Internet about how some people no longer participate in “normal” activities because they simply can’t put down their phones. People aren’t reading newspapers anymore - at least not in print - and they’re fast-forwarding through commercials. So where are they? You…