Have We Embraced The Internet... Really?
Most dealers figured out that today’s shoppers use the internet extensively. Advertising budgets shifted to The Internet. Our hope was that consumers would use The Internet as they previously used print, radio and television. We hoped The Internet would be a cheap, efficient way for us to get our message to consumers. It has worked that way to an extent, but with the unintended consequence of empowering consumers with more knowledge and power than they ever held before. The end result is that we’ve embraced The Internet as a conduit for our advertising, but in our sales process we want to pretend that it’s changed nothing. Embracing The Internet requires not just a shift of the Advertising Budget but a rethinking of the sales process.
This rethinking won’t happen within the Internet Department. It needs to occur at the top levels of management.