Extracted comments from the post Dealers in California… by Arnold Tijerina.

Levi Arevalo commented, “Commissions are an archaic form of compensation that need to be eliminated.  Salaried workers with reasonable quotas would be more adequate.”

Jim Kristoff commented, “I believe the “NEW” model of automotive sales professionals need to be compensated in this way.

1. Salary – (majority of their pay)
2. Small volume…

This question is huge, because simply dialing the phone can dramatically change the outcome of your dealership’s Internet Sales. Your Dealership’s Internet Department and BDC are, after all, a numbers game. Let me break it down for you:

• The more people you dial, the more people you get on the phone.
• The more people you get on the…

Price cutting is a self-inflicted wound. Nobody holds a gun to your head and makes you cut your price. I know that many of you are thinking right now: "There is so much competition today that you can't maintain profits," "Everybody is giving everything away," "The salespeople can't negotiate," and "Everybody knows our pricing from the Internet..." Blah, Blah, Blah. Stop whining about price!

Only about ten percent of buyers buy on price alone. For that ten percent, you can…

Selling twenty or 30 cars a month.  Holding gross.  Prospecting through the…

Hey DealerElite members,

The 11th Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition is having a sweepstakes for a FREE registration to the conference. Anyone is eligible to win so I encourage all dE members to enter! CLICK HERE TO ENTER!

 …

Who can you trust?  That’s a hard question.  In business, we all want the answer to be ME.  As we were forming AutoNetTV, one of the issues that kept coming up in our market research was trust.  Trust, or some variant, was among the top 3 concerns of every service center owner, service department manager or service advisor we interviewed. …

Everyone has wishes albeit winning the mega million dollar lottery, tossing a penny in the wishing well, even rubbing on Aladdin’s Lamp and making 3 wishes. We have seen wishes come true when people from all walks of life become instant millionaires. In today’s social world we watched the modern day rags-to-riches story of YouTube sensation Ted Williams go…

How to leave Messages that generate business for your dealership?

We have found that most dealerships get one phone number when speaking to customers. In addition to this fact they usually have only the home number. Due to this fact our BDC’s need to make a large volume of calls in order to speak to a small volume of customers.

What this means is we need to leave a large volume of messages for customers. Due to this fact we have also developed a number of tactics to improve…

The sport that so many predicted I would excel at due to my size was actually the sport where I floundered.  When it came to the hardwood, the only skill I had was shooting free throws.  My coaches could have just given up on me and focused their attention on the superstars on the team, but instead they invested time and energy into the one thing I could do well.  In place of teaching me to drive down…

When salespeople get to work in the morning, what's their goal for the day?  As managers plan the week or the month, what outcome are they focusing on?  When dealers set their sites on year end, what do they see? Usually, in each case, whatever it is, it's not enough.  Sales people want a sale, or a commission.  Managers focus on total volume or gross.  And dealers see that they ended up above water. 

Unfortunately, with visions like that, even if you accomplish what you set…

Sometimes your biggest weakness can become your biggest strength.

 Take, for example, the story of one 10-year-old boy who decided to study judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. …

Great leaders understand more than anything that it is ALL about the people…..

The people… are the driving force of any organization…..

Don’t believe it???

Go ahead and hire some bad ones and let me know how that works…

Thanks for your intuitive and sincere response. Its interesting the things you said.

As the Internet Director of a department that has three dealerships to deal with, I have my hands full.

I have a staff of three, including myself. All over the internet there are consultant types who would have us believe that they know the answer to: "How do we run an automotive internet department?" They would have us believe that for a fee, they can take all the things we have learned about…

If you're a dealer not satisfied with current performance, these ideas may be useful.

Honesty and Ethics Rankings

A November 2010 Gallup poll asked consumers to rate the level of honesty and ethics of various professions. Nurses, military officers and pharmacists were at the top. Lobbyists and car sales people were on the bottom. (See graph below) There are many highly honest, ethical and good dealers in the business, yet these polling results have…

Chances are, since you’re reading this post, your dealership or company is involved in social media. That’s good - it’s hard to imagine how difficult it will be moving forward for organizations that have not embraced social networking. Although Social Media is relatively new (and certainly exciting), its meteoric growth has unfortunately caught the early attention of the legal powers-that-be.

Despite the widespread use and misuse of social networking at work, 45 percent of all…

Before you begin recruiting, interviewing, or hiring for the position of Internet Manager/BDC/Internet Director, there are three crucial things you must do first.

1)  Determine the hierarchy of the store.  Who will this person, in a new department, be reporting to?  Often anyone from sales managers to salespeople believe they can delegate work to someone in the Internet department while the top stores usually have a director or GM as the only entity that presides over the…

I’ve often wondered what makes salespeople go from optimism to pessimism in such a short amount of time. (i.e. 30 day wonders) When they first hit the pavement, they are full of optimism; I mean they believe every customer is a buyer.  Eventually, they become pessimistic; their speech begins to change; all buyers are liars and all of them are buried or idiots. As…

Mike overy of the BDC experts will show your sales, service and BDC team how to reach more customers. After over 20 years teaching dealers we have found that contact ratios are as follow.

100 Calls 20-30 contacts and 4-8 appointments with one contact number.

These numbers are of course based on a trained BDC staff member calling sales, service or internet customers.

We are asked by customers, clients, owners and sales and…