Transforming The Dealership Part 3 - A Live Week By Week Case Study (Dealer eTraining) - Automotive Digital Marketing Professional Community.
Transforming The Dealership Part 3 - A Live Week By Week Case Study (Dealer eTraining)
Welcome to Part 3 of a live
dealership case study in which Stan Sher from Dealer eTraining is
working on location with a dealer, management team and the entire
customer facing staff.
It has been two weeks since Part 2
was published. Stan has been working in Chicago while consulting with
another client, along with his role in presenting at and facilitating
the Internet Sales 20 Group 3 day series of workshops...
Here is Mr. Sher's Part 3 Report for this series:
I came home to a major hurricane which slowed things down considerably. But here is what we were able to accomplish:
CRM Implementation:
We have been working on pre-installation
processes with eLead by installing email headers, templates, and other
important parts of the CRM. It has been a simple process as the CRM
company is accommodating. eLead will be spending the week at the
dealership training and installing the CRM at the dealership which means
we will be live in a few days.
Dealership Website:
Once again, the major challenge is that it
is OEM mandated and certain things are not able to be done while others
are being developed as we speak. As much as I respect what OEMs are
doing to make all dealers in the same brand unified I feel that they
make it difficult for a dealership to create a unique image to stand out
from the competition.
We are in the process of updating
employee pictures. This is a tough task because the owner wants all
pictures to be the same exact size. The challenge is getting
the pictures to show up on the website in the same size. I am still
trying to figure out with the vendor what is going on and this is the
one time where I feel they are not helping me as they should.
We drastically improved the way the specials pages look with come great content and even more specials.
We started to add video testimonials to the website which was a
challenge also because the videos did not want to upload from my end.
In addition, we made proper changes for the new month and any news
pertaining to changes.
Social Media:
I have begun to focus on Facebook this past
week. I have been posting engaging content and getting people
responding it. In terms of twitter, I know we have followers but for
some reason I am looking for the login which no one can seem to find. I
might have to setup a new account but I will give it a week before I do
it.
I have continued to blog and
syndicate content. The content has been getting some views which tell
me that people are reading it. We had an announcement from the
OEM that there is a hurricane relief discount available to people in
certain areas that lost their vehicles to flood and hurricane damage. I
was quick to post it and promote it on facebook before any competing
dealer can think of doing the same, if they normally do it.
Videos/Pictures:
It was disappointing to me that
when I left for a whole week and asked sales people to start getting
their own videos and pictures that not a single person took an action.
They got all excited about the fact that they can brand themselves but
they took no action at all. I addressed that with management because
the process takes all of one minute and I am even here to get the
content up. All they need is to have a form filled out, snap a picture
or capture a 30 second video and have me handle the rest. I hope that
they fix the situation and get to it. However, one person did get a
picture for me that is now posted.
I added more content to the Flickr account.
Traditional Advertising:
I have not had to be involved with this.
Online Reputation Management:
I discovered a challenge that I have never
had before. In all of my years doing this I was always able to grow a
dealership’s online reputation without problem. I sat in and
listened to reasons why the service department has a hard time getting
reviews and I am noticing from the sales department why they are not
doing.
The sales department is not pushing for it
at all. The service department explains that whenever they ask for a
review to get posted that customers do not want to post it. The
understanding that I am getting is that a lot of the customers here are
generally in aged in the mid 40s and range as high as 70+. They do not
want to leave an email address and they prefer to leave a survey in pen
and paper.
This raises a challenge to me, a social and digital warrior that believes that everyone and everything should be online.
I am thinking that we need an iPad in service and sales with a 4G
connection and we should work closely with the customer to get what we
need by guiding them or assisting them. It is obvious that post cards
with links to review sites do not work well for the customers as they do
not pay attention to them.
I have never been a fan of spiffing
customers for reviews. However, cars.com has a really neat format of
how to generate reviews. Cars.com offers to place customers into a
contest where the customer has a potential of getting $100 for leaving a
review. There is an email template for it. I am thinking of also
creating a process strictly for cars.com to let customers know about the
offer not just as delivery but also after delivery where they can be
guided through. I mean, “Who wouldn’t want a chance to get $100?” It
is also my goal to learn from cars.com if the review can somehow be
syndicated just like the way DealerRater does it with google.
If anyone has suggestions of how to get
reviews from customers that are more mature and not as computer savvy, I
am open to some responses on here.
Dealership Process and Operations:
While walking around the dealership
looking for things that needed improvement I noticed a binder with
parts specials that looked sloppy. I
took it upon myself to let management know about this and created a new
professional looking binder with better specials and more transparency.
I have been spending time watching
how the sales department functions from how sales managers are managing
their people to how they work deals. I have to say that when
it comes to working deals and selling cars they do a great job and they
have decent grosses. The managers get involved in deals and are
aggressive to sell cars. This dealership is generally number one in its
district. The other things that I have been observing are how the one
internet coordinator functions throughout the day. The GSM complains
about the coordinator because he finds him playing on his cell phone a
lot. The fix to the problem was that I monitored CRM activities in the
old CRM and read comments along with emails that were being sent to the
customers.
I noticed something interesting and
disturbing. When an internet appointment comes in the internet
coordinator sits with them and talks with them sometimes as long as
20-30 minutes. When I approached management they agreed and said that
it needs to be fixed. I had the perfect fix for that. At the
Internet Sales 20 Group, Ralph Paglia introduced the “Showroom
Appointment Reception Agenda”. This form is a professional way for the
coordinator to meet the customer that they communicated with. What is
amazing about this form is that it explains in a quick and transparent
fashion what the customer will accomplish on this visit which is a 4-5
step process. The coordinator turns over the customer to a
sales consultant and moves on with their job. This takes 1-2 minutes.
We are implementing this as of this week as the new CRM is installed.
There were major changes made to the document that Ralph provided which I
will describe in the next section.
Call monitoring is not very strong in the
dealership. The dealership relies on cars.com and their website
provider to have toll free numbers. It is amazing that the newspaper
always had a local number. No one really ever listened to phone calls.
In fact, all sales calls are being handled by sales consultants
and not the internet coordinator. This is a whole other issue that I
will be tackling soon if I get the chance to. The way I
monitor the calls is I stand in the showroom and listen to the sales
consultants talk to phone ups. I then log into to my limited tools and
listen to the conversation. My plans are to do the same with service
and parts soon. While taking many notes, I have discovered flaws in
phone skills and will be planning on phone training sessions at this
dealership after the CRM is installed.
Ownership Challenges:
The only real challenges in the improvement and transformation of the dealership are dealing with ownership in this case. The
dealer principle is not hands on yet has very interesting opinions to
how things should run. As far as sales and service is concerned, she
lets the managers do their thing and make money for the store.
But when a highly paid expert that has built numerous success stories
is brought in a challenge is created. Now, I am not saying that
challenges are not fun. This is a unique challenge where I am working
with a personality that involves me trying to figure out how they
think.
Every best practice email installed needs
to be edited because the writing does not work for them. This stalled
the processes of installing emails into the CRM by two weeks. Take
website content, wording of some serious best practices just never work
and they need to be changed. My challenge is that I need to change
content and write it as if I was this other person. Again, it is an
interesting challenge.
The best practice implemented by
Ralph Paglia was another example where 60% of the content was rewritten
and another 20% was omitted just to satisfy their feelings.
Now I am not saying the document became a bad document but it had
changed the TO process from internet coordinator to sales person in a
way that I personally would have done differently.
I respect the challenge and although at
some point it is frustrating it is what makes me better at my job and
what ultimately brings more success to the dealership.
That is all for Part 3.
If anyone has questions, always feel free to contact me.
http://dealeretraining.com/
https://www.facebook.com/dealeretraining
http://www.drivingsales.com/ratings/companies/dealer-etraining
