As 2010 gets rolling, Auto Dealerships are finding themselves bombarded with calls to join the newest and hottest trends in the Internet Marketing revolution. The hottest trend currently is Dealership participation in online social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. This is on top of the recent innovations of SEO, SEM, Microsites, Live Chat, Google Adwords, Online Video, etc.
While everything mentioned above is very important and much of it is essential to selling more cars in our modern world, it is extremely important not to lose focus on the basics of selling cars.
Here is a recent example we ran across while working with a new client. While spending time with the client’s Internet Director, he bragged that he was posting a new Daily Used Car Special on their Dealership’s Facebook page every day. Great Idea! The problem was his internet department wasn’t selling any cars. Upon investigation the stores average response time for a new lead was over 8 hours and there was no internal process on how many times a new lead should be called. This is a great example of a Dealer using the latest and greatest technology but failing to combine that technology with strong and proven internal sales processes.
So before you invest time and money on the newest and hottest technologies, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:
Who is responding to your leads?
How quickly are your leads being responded to?
Do you know many times each lead is being called?
Do you know how many emails each lead receives?
Are your salespeople using phone scripts?
Are you tracking 3rd Party lead closing ratios?
Are you collecting email addresses for each customer?
I doubt anyone would argue that Facebook updates are more important than having strong internal sales processes or that Twitter Feeds are more important than having lightning fast response times to new leads. So before you sign up for latest and greatest technology, take a step back and make sure you have not lost focus on your processes that are vital to selling cars.
