Employee Activity Management or EAM is every Dealer’s worst nightmare and it’s most ignored challenge. We will discuss why in the paragraphs to come and what we can do to manage it, but before we can talk about managing our employees, we have to look at why workers come to work.

                For the last 50 years the Wall Street Journal has done a Gallup poll of American workers and ironically the only thing that has changed throughout the years has been…

Many, many moons ago I was a brand new agent at the Western Southern Life Insurance Agency.  I was given a debit book (book of customers whose premiums were collected by the agent), piles of marketing material, business cards, and a cool little desk that opened like the ones I had in elementary school.  I was also given a stack of 3x5 index cards with pre-printed fields on them complete with a metal box whose dividers allowed you to file the cards according to who was to be called throughout…

What’s the most time-consuming part of making a sale? More often than not, it’s the paperwork: dragging the customer inside to input information…involving sales managers who are stuck in their offices desking deals...getting trade-in information down on paper to input into the appraisal tool, which is back in the office, and so on.

Sound familiar?  There…

I want to start here. This may be my Jerry McGuire moment. Maybe I should end here…but this has been eating at me for a while. …

What’s the Difference for Your Dealership? 

Ever wonder about the difference between your CEM and CRM?  What are the specifics of each, and how do they benefit your dealership—both individually and when strategically positioned to work together?  At first glance, it’s easy to think they’re synonymous, and while they have overlapping features, there are definitive…

ALBANY, N.Y. – December 15th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that it has recently integrated its dealership management system (DMS) software with CRMSuite. Dealers using both Auto/Mate and CRMSuite will benefit from the increased business intelligence that the DMS and CRM deliver via real-time data exchanges between the systems.

“Our Open/Mate integration program is very inexpensive…

It happens every day. You sit in your morning meetings and you review the daily log from the day before and you ask each salesperson, “What is going on with Mr. & Mrs. Smith?” And then it happens, the salesperson goes blank and gets that “deer in the headlights” look. You wait….. and nothing. Across the table there is always “the guy.” You know, the salesperson who…

If you're a GM or dealer principal I have to ask: Do you have any idea what your BDC is doing right now? 

A few weeks ago a general manager I’ve known for some time was bragging about the performance of his group’s Centralized BDC. He was almost gushing about how well they were doing and how there was no conflict between the BDC and the various floor teams. He told me…

Today’s car buying marketplace demands nothing less than a connected, personalized customer experience. Consumers want dealerships to know who they are and what their interests are, and to anticipate the types of cars and services they need. They want to reach their salesperson whenever it’s convenient for them, whether by…

I almost titled this post “Perfect Data Matters,” but because it is one of the MOST IMPORTANT blog posts I’ve made this year, and because that title is so stinking boring to you and your managers, it would guarantee the least amount of interaction.

And that is sad. Perfect Data matters.

As boring as that sounds, not only does Perfect Data matter, it matters more than the Up getting out of their car right now. In fact, compared to Perfect Data in your CRM, that Up is…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ALBANY, N.Y. – May 11th, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that Lead Information Services, LLC (LIS) a developer of internet-based Customer Relations Management (CRM) and Internet Lead Management (ILM) software, has fully and successfully integrated its solutions with Auto/Mate's dealership management system…

ALBANY, N.Y. – March 23rd, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) announced today that DealerPeak, a leading provider of enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM), lead management and website solutions to auto retailers, has completed integration with Auto/Mate's Dealership Management System (DMS). Auto dealership groups using both Auto/Mate and DealerPeak…

Real-time data delivery improves customer service & retention opportunities for auto dealers 

ALBANY, N.Y. – February 23rd, 2015 – Auto/Mate Dealership Systems (http://www.automate.com) today announced it has integrated its dealership management solution (DMS) with VinSolutions' (www.vinsolutions.com) all-in-one management, sales and service…

One of the most valuable assets you have at your dealership is your customer database. However, frequently dealers fail to effectively use this information to help achieve more specific marketing goals. While some may use their database to send marketing messages to existing and previous customers in an effort to sell another vehicle, or perhaps remind of a future service…

Finding a lost earring in the jewelry box, discovering the old autographed Tom Seaver baseball card when you clean out the attic, and learning that the shirt you are about to pay retail for is discounted, are all pleasant surprises.  How about walking into your bank and having the ATM talk with you and then give you a gift for being a customer?  Could that surprise highlight…

CRM Companies are engaged in an immense battle over market share, but then aren't we all in one form or another? He who has the most customers wins! Or so that's how it would be if simply HAVING them was enough. As each CRM company dives deeply into the data, hoping to extract their next golden goose, the blogs, articles, and paid press releases fly around the nation. They started out by talking about "capturing the data" moved on to "garbage in garbage out" then "big data" and are now…

For years, marketing agencies have used many methods to track consumers in order to increase the likelihood of reaching them. From the very basic – yet still in existence – use of postal change-of-address records, to appending marketing lists for increased deliverability, to today’s use of big data to track consumers, technology is better enabling marketers to deliver more…

[This is part five in the "What's the Big Deal With Data Anyways?" series. Click here to read part four.]

Segmentation of DMS data can be defined as the process of dividing up your customer data into specific groups for…

As I mentioned in part two of this series, many DMS providers make it difficult for dealers to download their customer database. In some cases, it’s because there are control issues arising between dealers and their DMS (or CRM) as to who…