When you consider the most valuable player at your dealership, who comes to mind? The dealer? The GM? The top-performing salesperson? What if I told you it's your receptionist. Yep, the person who is probably at the low-end of your pay scale. They are potentially working part-time, and maybe even new to the job, and you might even have a hard time remembering…

This is a real question you have to ask yourself if you want to survive the automotive industry. Are you willing to do what it takes to be successful each and every day to not just work a job, but to build a career? There are many people who started in the automotive industry as a crutch until they found a “better” job. Only a small percentage, however, end…

Sometimes you just need to get punched in the face to wake up. For too many days in a row, I went to work doing the same thing over and over like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day.

There are two routes to achievement in your life. The first is conformity in which you follow the crowd down a conventional path and maintain the…

You're gonna have your whoa-mentum days- those days where no matter how hard you worked, the wheels wobbled and maybe even flew off and you skidded into the end of your day saying, "Whoa!"  Whoa-mentum days jack you up mentally and the next day you have the choice to either carry yesterday's whoa-mentum forward, by…

After losing 70 lbs many people ask me how I lost the weight and although I was excited to tell them all of the thoughts and methods that went into my no pill, no surgery weight loss, I found that I would lose them in mere seconds. At first, they were eager to hear, but when I exploded into my passionate ordeal, their eyes would glaze over with information overload.…

As there are several different departments in dealerships, each with their own goals and targets, it is quite common for inter-departmental fighting to occur – a woe of many a manger. This happens because each department attempts to preserve revenue within their own department – other departments be darned!

For example, the used car manager will complain…

If everyday you woke up and weren’t tired….

If you were never sick…

If you never suffered the death of someone close to you…

If you never hit life’s walls- the sudden loss of a job you gave nearly half of your life to, the forced bankruptcy because the economy tanked, the 15 year ride or die marriage ending in divorce, watching your car get repo’d while you hold on to your 5 year old son for comfort, and/or the foreclosure of the only home your children…

As negotiations are an expected part of the vehicle buying process, there are three strategies we advocate doing often and consistently to increase your sales gross and reduce many of deal-cutting concessions.

Depending on how you respond to a customer will determine if you get the deal and how comfortable the customer feels about their experience.

By…

Someone's always coming by the dealership selling "plate lunches." Good ole', waist-busting southern cooking such as Smothered Chicken with rice and gravy or Fried Fish and Crawfish Etoufee-these plates are so loaded down with food, you can literally hear the Styrofoam cracking when they hand it to you. 

Most vendors sell their dinners the same…

My 13 year old son has not had the best relationship this year with math. In short, math has kicked his butt so much so that he's almost given up. Last night I saw him sitting on the couch just staring at his math worksheet. Watching him out of the corner of my eye, he kept staring at it, but never would put pencil to paper. Noticing this, I sat down beside…

January 1, 2017 — The Mar-Kee Group announced that 10-time National Automotive Dealers Association speaker and President of the Mar-Kee Group, David Martin, will present a sales training workshop, “Marketing Opens the Door: Closing Seals the Deal” at the 2017 NADA Conference & Expo. 

"Yesterday's closing techniques will no longer work with the tech savvy buyers,…

Imagine your salespeople starting each day with the most important sales training program available? With The Mar-Kee Group’s new, revolutionary 90 Day Boot Camp, training just got a lot easier for managers…

Role-playing with your sales team will give them the confidence and inspiration to know what to say when handling objections from potential customers. Just like in sports or the fine arts, honing your craft involves practice. Through role-playing, your sales team will master professional and effective responses to the most common objections.

In …

As we’re helping people with some of their biggest investments, it’s our moral duty to be there for our customers by following up on services they’ve initially declined. Ethical practices in the car business go a long way in retaining customers and increasing referrals. 

You won’t be setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s not a lost cause. Here’s…

Is your sales team committed to giving it their all 100% of the time?   Read how to create and sustain an enthusiastic, professional and committed staff to inspire excellence and close more deals. 

Our dealership motto:

100% of the customers will receive

100% of what we have to…

Loyalty programs are nothing new to retail. In the beginning, most consisted of simple punch cards or other basic means of tracking customer transactions. As technology improved, many programs became digitized with key tags, cards and other ways for retailers to keep track of these transactions, aside from purely manual means.

Then came big data, enabling…

Women purchase over 50% of the cars bought and play a major role in over 85% of car purchases. 

Women are not only coming in more armed with researched information, but they are practical, savvy, and open to change. They want to develop a relationship of trust with a dealer and it’s up to us to rise to their…