I have learned a lot during the 25 years that I owned my own business. Shortly before I retired from the salon/day spa, Facebook was becoming mainstream and the discovery process of how it could benefit the business was evident.

 The opportunity to market on every level through client engagement…

Automotive Web Marketing "Really Connected"

 Everyday you wake up and you have your list of reports to update and spreadsheets to fill out with the same old numbers, but what do these numbers really mean? Most car dealerships nowadays have an internal BDC (business development center) and…

We all have listened to the untrained sales professional or Internet Coordinator spend half an hour selling the car to a customer over the phone; and the worst part about it is once he/she gives away all the info the majority of the time you never see the customer show up that he/she was talking to.  The sales professional or Internet Coordinator of today must have a…

Facts tell and stories sell. If you want to become really good at sales, then you must know how to tell your story. People think in pictures and they can and will follow a story. People learn better from stories and become emotionally connected to stories. What is your story and can you tell your story and tell it well?

What makes you who you are? You are different from anyone else. Your life experiences, background and everything about you makes you unique. Unfortunately, if…

Many dealers are trying and failing at social media. Some are succeeding. One of the keys to finding success is in taking on an “always open” mentality.

Just like a website should always be on, social media requires constant attention, particularly Facebook. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take weekends off. In fact, some have seen that the weekends are when the real activity happens. For some pages, they’re receiving…

There are seven ways you are wasting your marketing dollars. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday to learn what you're doing to throw away your advertising money.

Creating a loyal customer is sort of like getting married. The introduction is followed by a period of courtship and, if all goes well, commitments are made. Loyalty in the automotive world is something that everyone battles from the OEM level to the dealership. Did you know, however, that the longer you’ve had a customer the harder it is to keep them?

Logic…

This isn’t going to be a long post (I know a lot of mine have been too long, lately) but that doesn’t make it any less important. It’s short because the concept is simple. Unfortunately, many are missing out on this easy technique.

There are plenty of types of content that you can post on Facebook, but they invariably fall into one of two categories –…

The automotive industry is always evolving and with that evolution we must constantly adapt to the changes.

Question: When is the last time you thoroughly reviewed your CRM processes in your dealership?

Think about it.  A CRM in the dealership is generally setup for sales people to enter an UP and follow up with sold/unsold…

COMMUNICATION!

I just got through reading “Is the dealership sales call center obsolete?”on autonews.com. I got the article from Andy Warner on twitter. This article highlights dealers that…

"Second place is a set of steak knives."

When Alec Baldwin's character lectured the sales team in Glengarry Glen Ross, he made it clear that the winner was the one on top, that everyone else was lucky to have a job, and that if they continued to perform the way they did they wouldn't have a job for much longer. The same holds true in social media. If you're not…

Recently, I have been playing around with various tools in order to increase how BDC departments connect with their internet leads.  It has been painful to watch BDC coordinators solely rely on the telephone that the dealership provides.  At one dealership I asked for an investment of a mobile phone and the dealer did not want to do that.  I had to come up with…

There has been plenty of controversy about cars.com and other vendors taking dealers inventory and feeding them to some really nasty anti-dealer sites such as cargurus.com. I believe that Jim Ziegler has done a great job standing up for the automotive retail community by fighting for what is right. I am seeing dealers cancel cars.com left and right while others just…

http://www.internetsales20group.com

Why Should Car Dealerships Train? - Automotive Sales - Car…

Advertisers Must Pay Attention to Hispanic Consumers as Rising Trendsetters in 2013…

I can relate to this as I had a colonoscopy in Bogota, Colombia and did not realize that I was not going to get anesthesia of any kind. I almost got up and left but I had been ill for 4 months so went through with it----------OOOOOUCH!

Two patients…

Facebook has a promise that it has made to businesses. It’s not an official promise in writing anywhere on the site. It’s an implied promise. “We have the attention of the masses. If you want to get in front of them, we’re the biggest game in town.”

The unfortunate reality is that the majority of businesses, particular small and…

This is an actual email I received from a customer:

“I have been looking for a truck for a while now and happened by your lot at about 5 PM today to see if you had what I wanted. I drove through slowly, looking at both new and used. One of your salespeople - a lady - smelled blood in the water and started following my car on foot as I drove around.…

Hi Guys...I ran across this today, and it so much speaks to us in the business we're in, I just had to share it with you all.  It's just…

In many ways, Facebook has lost some of its luster as a business tool. It isn't that it's not possible to properly market a business on the platform. It's that the complexity of the EdgeRank algorithm mixed with the touchiness of the advertising formats has many turning autopilot onto their pages instead of investing time or money into them.

They just weren't seeing a return on investment…