It's the Christmas season and Santa Claus is everywhere you look. It's also the time of year to reflect on the year past and look forward and plan the new year. Santa Claus is a great sales model in both cases.
First of all, Santa Claus rewards you based upon the past year. If you were a good boy or girl you get rewarded. Ask yourself if you were a good boy or girl…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 21, 2012 at 12:30pm — 1 Comment
Do you hustle? I mean really hustle. As a kid growing up I was a huge fan of the Big Red Machine, Cincinnati Reds baseball team. Pete Rose became my favorite athlete. Forget about Pete Rose as a man and all his personal shortcomings, Pete Rose gave it his all every time he stepped on a baseball field. Pete truly earned his nickname Charlie Hustle.” If you want to be successful, no matter your looks, talent, connections or anything else have going for you, you have to learn to…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 19, 2012 at 9:30am — No Comments
Surveys continually show that people dislike buying a vehicle. Although the numbers have gotten better over the years, people still dislike the car-buying experience. The key word here is “experience.” Everything you do is sales and selling. Every person in the dealership is in sales. Everything the customer sees is selling. What message is the customer receiving?
Selling today is not about feature-benefit selling alone. Any dealership that is being trained primarily on…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 17, 2012 at 4:00pm — 5 Comments
“The more things change, the more things stay the same.” This quote can be an accurate reflection of most industries. With all the massive changes underway in the automotive industry, the majority of the industry operates in much the same way as it did 50 years ago.
One small part of an industry begins to change and reaches what Malcolm Gladwell termed in his book the “tipping point.” That tipping point allows the change to gain momentum and become norm for an industry. This…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 13, 2012 at 10:00am — No Comments
Everyday managers walk into their dealerships in the morning and start their day with tasks or TO-Do list items. Unfortunately, those items rarely involve direct interaction with their sales team. The ultimate place for managers to be is in front of customers and salespeople.
Salespeople need interaction and input. If a manager allows a salesperson to direct their own day by their own design without input and coaching, the results will often be lackluster and will lead to…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 11, 2012 at 4:30pm — No Comments
The average dealership hires a salesperson and, after a brief introduction of paperwork, allows the salesperson to begin talking to and selling to their customers. Some dealerships may send the salesperson to a meeting room to watch a series of perfunctory training videos and then cut them loose on the showroom floor to sell. Either way, the day of unleashing an untrained salesperson on a well-trained customer is dead.
The days of counting on a steady stream of traffic and…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 7, 2012 at 11:00am — 3 Comments
Everyone talks about change, but few people embrace it. Change is growth, and growth is positive and unavoidable. If you don’t change, the world will change without you and leave you behind. In business today, change is occurring at a rapid pace and is causing the death of traditional salespeople as we know them.
In the age-old process of selling, the emphasis has been on a linear “road to the sale” process. Step One leads to Step Two and so on. The Internet information age…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 5, 2012 at 1:30pm — 7 Comments
Every year at the NADA Convention, the exhibit hall is full of CRM and BDC companies displaying their wares. Dealers spend massive amounts of money in a frenzy to buy the “magic button” CRM or BDC solution for many reasons. Unfortunately most of those reasons aren’t valid. Putting great tools in the hands of below-average people with below-average processes and little-to-no accountability equals a waste of money.
Let’s look at some of the underlying reasons why dealers buy…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on December 3, 2012 at 10:30am — No Comments
Do you feel like you are missing out on something? Are you confused as to what the next step is in making your dealership successful? It’s a different ballgame than it was even just a few years ago. The traditional dealership is dead and you must bury it to prosper in the future.
For years, the car business could be a forgiving business. There was room for a lot of error in a dealership, and yet a dealership could still be profitable. Those days are gone. Dealerships…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on November 29, 2012 at 1:00pm — 4 Comments
The traditional dealership is dead but some have not had their funeral yet. It seems as though as much as some things change in the auto industry, as many things stay the same. Every week our trainers observe things in dealerships that look and feel like the 1960’s.
Let’s take a look at some things still commonly observed in dealerships that are outdated and should be changed.
1) Manager Towers – High towers built for…
ContinueAdded by Mark Tewart on November 27, 2012 at 2:00pm — 8 Comments
There is a rise in niche-level outsourced social media that is refreshing on one hand and discouraging on the other. It's encouraging because when agencies take the stance of focusing on a single niche such as automotive or entertainment, they are able to build up several resources to make their jobs easier…
ContinueAdded by JD Rucker on November 23, 2012 at 3:50pm — No Comments
Auto/Mate Dealership Systems is conducting a survey about CRM and desking solutions. We want to know what the most important features are and what matters most to users when considering purchasing a new solution. We would greatly appreciate your time and help with this survey, which is only three questions and should take approximately three to five minutes of your time! In two weeks, we will choose one random entry from our survey respondents and award that winner a $200 Visa gift…
ContinueAdded by Mike Esposito on November 15, 2012 at 4:49pm — No Comments
Lets keep it as "real" as possible... We are in the car business for one reason... TO MAKE MONEY!! If you want to hug trees and save the earth, you are in the wrong industry. Don't get me wrong, you can make a ton of money…
ContinueAdded by Sean V. Bradley on October 19, 2012 at 12:00am — 2 Comments
On August tenth of 2012, we wrote about the movement to Boycott Clay Nissan (you can read that article here.) As a quick refresher, a woman–named Jill Colter–was fired from her position as a service writer at Clay Nissan of Norwood. Jill has stage 4…
ContinueAdded by Timothy Martell on September 12, 2012 at 9:00am — No Comments
Added by Arnold Tijerina on August 20, 2012 at 10:51am — 2 Comments
You might want to re-think the ask
You want to increase the number of reviews written about your dealership on online consumer and automotive review sites, right? The first step in any review-building initiative is developing a system or process for consistently asking satisfied customers to write reviews. But if you want to accelerate your results, maybe it’s time to take another look at how you are positioning the…
ContinueAdded by Kristen Judd on August 17, 2012 at 8:13am — No Comments
If you can't tell, I wrote this on an extremely empty stomach. But enough about me, let's talk about you and your success!
As a provider of dealership website solutions, it almost seems that there are two different categories of clients that I work with. Those that utilize the tools and resources made available to them to which…
ContinueAdded by Michael Cirillo on August 11, 2012 at 4:08pm — No Comments
Social media represents a new dawn for the marketing industry. The level of interaction it enables between business and consumer is nothing short of revolutionary. Most would agree that this is a step forward; more communication is always preferable to less. However, it is not an avenue of communication that businesses can control, or even truly mediate.…
ContinueAdded by Timothy Martell on August 10, 2012 at 10:00am — No Comments
Where have all the cowboys gone?
That was a great song from the ninety’s right? Well maybe not such a great song but it was the song played over and over and over. For some reason on my way to the dentist this morning this song popped in my head because I’ve really been wrestling with the fact that the cowboy…
Added by Mathew Koenig on August 2, 2012 at 10:14am — 3 Comments
When I lived in Okinawa, Japan for four years I learned a significant amount of how their collective culture works. In particular, their management style is vastly different from that of the Western culture. Things like verbal arguments, tantrums, and egos were non-existent in the workplace. How could that be so? One word--kaizen. Read …
Added by Ketty Colom on August 2, 2012 at 9:54am — 2 Comments
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