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…

I had the pleasure of watching a very informative webinar last night that really brought home the importance of having a robust dealership presence online.

I truly enjoy studying the shift in advertising from the traditional way of doing business to the modern way of doing…

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…

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…

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Alexander H. Leighton says..."morale is the capacity of a group to pull together persistently and consistently in pursuit of a common purpose.

Something that has always been apart of the automotive industry is the group of tough love managers and owners... you know the ones that pull the team together for a meeting and all hell breaks loose, Screaming and Yelling and demoralizing the group like that is going to get them pumped up? I know everyone in the industry has seen it at…

I use this term alot with my managers and salespeople...I have this on my wall in my office!

I use this as a way to remind the guys that each and every person on our team has to want to be the absolute best at thier craft!

As managers we have this desire to coach things like Negotiating, or closing, or product knowledge...Now i am all about making sure these tools are…

 “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…

Get In Early and Now… the Market Won’t Wait for You!

November was the strongest November for CPO (Certified Pre-Owned) sales – ever! This continues a string of records in the CPO market, including the best October ever last month, according to Autodata.¹ And what we are seeing at SureSale reflects this surge, with the new category of certified vehicles that SureSale covers (the millions of vehicles that fall outside the…

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…

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I feel that being imitated means the imitator lacks the creativity to come up with ideas on their own.

Virtual Sales Associates (VSA’s) has become a popular title in the chat industry lately. ActivEngage coined this term in 2007 and now other chat…

SureSale Marketplace offers dealers free express listings of eligible to-be-certified inventory; turnkey process exposes dealership inventory to certified shoppers in minutes

Venice, CA – December 11, 2012 – SureSale, the certified pre-owned marketing program that is changing the way used vehicles are bought and sold, today launched the nation’s first dedicated certified…

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…

I have been writing a number of articles on Google Analytics and how dealers can customize their Analytics reports to give the dealership a better view into which marketing investments are working to sell more cars. The auto industry has to start a better discussion on the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that drive more car sales in regards to marketing investments.…

I have been writing a number of articles on Google Analytics and how dealers can customize their Analytics reports to give the dealership a better view into which marketing investments are working to sell more cars. The auto industry has to start a better discussion on the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that drive more car sales in regards to marketing investments.…

        It's no secret that those of us who train for The Dealer Resource Group, spend a ton of time on the road.  A lot of windshield time can make you listen to anything on the radio to just hear some noise and stay awake.  That happened as I was driving 11 hours to get to our last assignment.

           I'm hitting the seek button on my rental's radio for what seemed like hours when it finally found a station.  I heard that familiar twang of the guitar and knew this was a country…

There is an old expression, "You can't judge a book by its cover."  But, as the author of 10 books (#11 will be "Auto Sales for Dummies with Anthony Bartoli), I can tell you that statement is false.  My publishers spend almost as much on having a great cover design as they do on the entire layout process of the book.  Why?

 

They want to impress you into buying the book.  Now, some of my books have sold because they were recommended.  Others were sold because large organizations…

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…

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…

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…