Recently, Chrysler announced that they reached their goal of having 80% of their stores opened on Saturday. In the pre-Fiat days, the number was closer to 60%! How exciting! What are the other 20% of their stores doing being closed? How can you NOT open your service department at all on Saturday? Even if they are there to support the sales department, they need to be open. Unless of course you have a CBA saying you must be closed which, in that case, the person who negotiated the contract,…

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Following is the latest used-car weekly report from Ricky Beggs of Black Book USA. This data is for the week ending July 21, 2012.

Even though the overall market continues to move down at increasing dollar and percentage levels, the number of adjustments at 1,941 per day throughout the week was the 3^rd lowest amount over the past 11 weeks. The average price…

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Back in the 1970's, I cut my teeth in the car business pumping gas and being a mechanics (yes we were called mechanics then) helper. I learned quite a bit and it set the foundation for a wonderful career in the automotive industry. 

One of my early lessons in customer service was provided by my old boss. Our oil change cost $9.95. A quart of oil cost about $1.10 back then. The store I worked at was an Exxon franchise. Now our customer could go into the chain supermarket right next…

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Following is the latest Black Book pricing data on the used-car market. Additional analysis and chart information can be found here.



It was an interesting week regarding the market values. Sure the softening trend continued. The car segments were overall at very close to the level of the previous 4 weeks, at -$31 this past week. The lone increasing segment in the cars was the Premium Sporty Cars (PSC) at…

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Just saw this article on TechCrunch about CarWoo. One of the main things in this whole TrueCar scenario (other than data) was TrueCar's goal of removing salespeople from the process.

I thought this part of the article was interesting.

"That’s the promise of CarWoo, a startup that looks to take the stressful negotiation tactics and pushy salespeople out of the equation, allowing consumers to buy their car online with a relatively small amount…

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I was inspired by a discussion on DrivingSales, an automotive social networking site, where an Internet Marketing Manager at a VW dealership was soliciting help on improving his closing percentage above its current consistent 10%.



This manager has a basic set of steps he follows, which are widely accepted as the best practice to… Continue

This blog post can also be found at http://wp.me/p1zj9v-1l or at http://infiniteprospects.wordpress.com

Is your dealership's Internet sales process focused largely on converting…

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This article can also be found by visiting http://wp.me/p1zj9v-1i or http://infiniteprospects.wordpress.com.…

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