The team at PCG Consulting, Inc. has always been one to share relevant information regarding issues that affect dealerships. We have been writing and teaching about the importance of your online reputation and ways to not only grow your presence but to market it as well over the past few years.

Due to the many changes with…

Pinterest and Instagram, the two new kids on the block. They are niche social networks each catering to a specific gap in the market and each are growing at exponential rates. We can expect Facebook and Twitter to remain the supreme social media leaders but these alternatives are growing in popularity very quickly, Instagram doesn’t have a huge value for marketing but…

Starving for Attention

I’m sitting in the manager’s office. He’s got the blinds up and is pointing to the showroom floor.

“That’s him – third desk. Ed. When he started, I thought the guy would be a natural. Young, good-looking, knows the cars, knows finance, friendly, great recommendation… I think I must have spent $10K on getting him trained. But I don’t understand him. He’s making me look bad, like I can’t pick ‘em anymore. The other guys are starting to crack jokes.…

AutoTrader.com and vAuto announce the integration of AutoTrader.com’s Trade-In Marketplace (TIM) into vAuto’s suite of inventory management tools.

Integrating TIM with vAuto enables dealers to efficiently acquire more trade-ins and deliver a more market-transparent and customer-satisfying appraisal and purchasing process.

“This integration advances our goal to build greater synergies between AutoTrader Group companies and provide more value for dealers,” says Jim Menard, vice…

A new report released by Maritz Research recently claims that four in 10 customers are not even test driving their cars before purchasing. This is an astounding number of consumers, even if half of them didn’t tell the truth.

This phenomenon of customers bypassing the test drive can actually cause a backlash of issues…

If there is a bright spot in the economy these days, it’s the auto industry. Pent-up demand, lower interest rates, great product, and easing gas prices are driving consumers online and into showrooms, ramping up sales for dealers across the country. But it is not all sunshine – at least for new car dealers, who are feeling increasing pressure on margins (attributable to some of the same factors that are also driving sales…

Good morning Dealer Elite members and friends,

In my travels I visit hundreds of dealerships as a consultant and sometime as an observer or even as a consumer. Some of the things I see amaze me, some in a good way and some in a bad way. For example I was touring a series of dealership locations over the weekend and I must say that each dealership had a different customer experience.

It was saturday and it was quite warm so I was dressed casually and I visited…

AutoCon Coupon Book Worth Over $10,000

All dealership attendees will receive their Exhibitor Cash coupon book with over $10,000 in discounts when they check-in on September 5th.  There will be over 50 companies in the Exhibit Hall and the Exhibitor Cash book will allow attendees to identify the right solutions for their dealership and lock in instant savings.

The coupons range from $200 - $2,500 off world class products and services.  The…

Facebook is undeniably one of the most influential companies on the internet; they dominate the social media landscape and cause web-wide rage with even the most minor of updates. Could they do more, though? They certainly seem to think so.

The social media…

Great article recently published in The Car Connection: "Car Customers Hate Haggling More Than Anything." It might seem obvious, but sometimes dealerships can get caught up in the sales game, and forget that customers are so disinclined to participate. Getting a great price for the customer while also turning a profit for the company is a high priority (and rightly so) but a new survey found that the one thing customers hate above all else is negotiating the price of their new…

 ActivEngage, the most trusted name in live chat brings the top ten blogs and auto news stories right to you! We monitor industry trends, current events and the auto dealer community every week to bring you the top ten blogs and automotive stories from around the globe. In this weekly edition – portraits made out of beef jerky, alternate…

The other day I was reading the latest headlines on automotive advertising strategies, and came across this post:

"Porsche Makes Direct Mail Personal…And A Little Bit Creepy"

Have you all heard about this? An ad agency named 'Low Roche' recently helped one of its clients, a Porsche dealership, get a 32% response rate on a 'mailer' -- using some very…

It seems as though Google continues to be more transparent than in the past, which is great for webmasters. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to take part in a Q&A with the famous Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.  One of the attendees asked Matt about the Penguin update and what it meant going forward.  I’m paraphrasing Matt here, but he said that webmasters should expect Penguin updates to continue and to be "jarring" for a…

Google announced this week that they would be making further adjustments to their algorithms, specifically with the Penguin and Panda parts of it. If you’ve been reading our blog and following our advice you should have nothing to worry about because you will already be creating good content. If not you might want to pay attention because the adjustments to the algorithm are…

Every successful business wins because it has at least these dimensions:  The Paper, The Plan—and The People.

One measurement of website success tends to get overlooked a lot in favor of other, bigger numbers like traffic and bounce rate. That measurement is conversion rate, what percentage of visitors to your website convert into a lead. One of the biggest factors when it comes to…

In an NCMi Leading Your Dealership to Success course that I taught in April, I made three “punch-in-the-nose” statements in my introductory comments that were related specifically to the retail automotive industry:

1. Most (a lot more than 50%) auto dealership employees give…

Studies indicate that a child will hear the word NO anywhere between 140,000 to 200,000 times while growing up compared to only fractional amounts of hearing the antonym Yes. Today as adults, it’s no wonder why we will go to great lengths to avoid hearing the word No -particularly in sales. What air is to breathing is what No’s are to selling-the key to survival.…

I recently read an article published by Forbes titled …

Entrepreneurs: They Embody the American Dream

The late Peter Drucker once said, “Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.” CCI practices entrepreneurship.

Small business owners by the millions are eagerly waiting for the next election to learn how the upcoming years will effect not only their ability to grow and profit, but to continue toward the goals that are infused by their enthusiasm. They want to…