How often do your sales consultants or sales managers have to respond like this to customers to whom they’ve just presented or demonstrated a used vehicle?

“Don’t worry about that clunking noise we heard. I’ll have a technician get it fixed in a jiffy.”

“That smell will go away as soon as the carpets are thoroughly dried out.”

“After we do a front end alignment, it won’t pull to the right…

The following article is authored by, and reprinted with permission of, Kenneth Shilson, founder and president of the National Alliance of Buy Here, Pay Here Dealers. 

Franchise dealers enter 2012 with many of the same challenges they have faced for the last 24 months: a) excess facilities; b) needing more vehicle sales; c) declining credit scores of their customers; and d) tougher credit approvals from financing subprime sources. In response, many are looking at…

“I don’t need another book on farmin’, when I ain’t farmin’ as good as I know how right now!”

I remember that statement like it was yesterday.  That’s what a dealer told me over the phone back in 1987, in the the early days of my consulting career.  It was right after I explained the services I could offer him. He made it very clear to me that he wasn’t interested in anything new and different. He knew that “magic bullets and shiny objects” wouldn’t provide the solutions he…

By now, many of you have verified your dealership’s profitability for 2011.  As most dealers, general managers and controllers understand, until we perform a final year-end reconciliation of each asset and liability account, the YTD profitability displayed on our income statement remains an unproven number.  For some of you, this verification process will result in an upward adjustment to your 2011 profitability. However, experience tells me that most dealers…

Many professional sales and sales management trainers believe that you have not "maxed out" on a vehicle buyer until that buyer initiates one additional sale (additional household vehicle or personal referral) during his/her normal purchase cycle. Mathematically, here's how the "one additional sale" concept works:  

Assume that the normal customer purchase cycle…

Sometime in your automotive management career, I’m sure that you’ve all been asked, “How do you know whether you’re winning or losing without a scorecard?” Scorekeeping and scoreboarding is a discipline that falls within each of the following major Elements of Effective Accountability Managementas discussed in previous blog posts:

• Plan your Work and Work Your Plan!

• Clearly Define and Communicate Your Expectations!

• Measure What You…

In late December, we posted an article titled, “How Do You Increase Service Department Sales?” In that article, I noted that there are only three ways to do this, the most difficult being to increase the number of customer-paid service transactions (customer R.O. count).  Up To Speedreader feedback indicates this is a high-priority subject, so today I’ll discuss one way to increase your customer R.O. count.

What follows is a…