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LARRY BARDITCH Director of Business Development Kendall Chevrolet page 16 May 2010 Internet Sales: Send a Multi-vehicle Quote; Win on the Call page 10 The Myth of E-mail Leads and Rise of the Internet as an Influencing Medium page 12 Five Truths about Social Media page 14 Technology Trends: Profiling your Customers page 23
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Digital dealer magazine may 2010

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Page 1: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

LARRYBARDITCH

Director ofBusiness Development

Kendall Chevroletpage 16

May 2010

Internet Sales:Send a Multi-vehicle Quote; Win on the Callpage 10

The Myth of E-mail Leads and Rise of the Internet as an Influencing Mediumpage 12

Five Truths aboutSocial Media page 14

Technology Trends:Profiling your Customers page 23

Page 2: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 2   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

ABLE OF CONTENTSTMAY 2010

PRESIDENT AND CEOMICHAEL ROSCOE

VICE PRESIDENT AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

CLIFF [email protected]

248-351-2620

PUBLISHERGREG NOONAN

[email protected]

CONTENT COORDINATORMARIA BURKEL

[email protected]

ART DIRECTORJOE BIRCH

PRODUCTION MANAGERELIZABETH BIRCH

PRINT PRODUCTIONNICK THOMAS

COVER DESIGNJOE BIRCH

COVER PHOTOSTRAVIS HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY

CIRCULATION SUBSCRIPTION

RICH JARRETT314-432-7511

[email protected]

NATIONAL ADVERTISING [email protected]

607-264-3359

Dealer magazine makes every attempt to ensure the accuracy of all published works. However it cannot be held responsible for opinions expressed or facts supplied herein. Nothing may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. The publisher encourages you to submit sug-gestions. Submitted materials become the property of Horizon Communications, Inc. and will not be returned. Send material for publication to 330 Franklin Rd., Suite 135A, PMB 386, Brentwood, TN 37027. The editor re-serves the right to edit material; submission of material constitutes permission to edit and publish that mate-rial. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is presented with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Commit-tee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers.

A PUBLICATION OF

C O M M U N I C A T I O N S

FEATURES Digital Dealer Cover Story 16 Larry Barditch Director of Business Development Kendall Chevrolet

Digital Dealer Vendor Profile 20 Dealer.com – The Power of One Platform

COLUMNS AAISP Notes 8 Dealer Communications Launches New Web Site Cliff Banks

Internet Sales 10 Send a Multi-vehicle Quote; Win on the Call

Tom Mohr

12 The Myth of E-mail Leads and Rise of the Internet as an Influencing Medium Chip Perry

14 Five Truths about Social Media Stephen Stauning Technology Trends 23 Profiling your Customers Sandi Jerome

DEPARTMENTS 4 Digital Dealer E-mail 6 News

Page 3: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

To learn more:www.bzresults.com

888-260-4906

BZ Results, an ADP, Inc. Company, 2000 Nooseneck Hill Road, Coventry, Rhode Island 02816 ©2010 ADP, Inc. – Dealer Services Group / BZ Results and the BZ Results logo are registered trademarks of ADP, Inc.

How are you Handling your online repuTaTion?

simple • online • resulTs

BZ has the sTraTegiC plan to help you:• attract more customers • Transact quickly and easily• Convert shoppers into buyers • retain customers for life

Page 4: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 4   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

IGITAL DEALER E-MAILD

Paige Presley,I read your article in December’s Digital

Dealer magazine, “Ways to Create a Sticky Web Site”. I am fairly new to the automobile industry and would like some guidance from outside sources. As the business development manager my job is to develop, drive, and maintain business. I also assist one of the owners with all of our web sites. I would like your professional opinion on some of the things we could do better to attract custom-ers to our web sites. What are a few strate-gic things you are doing? Do you have any examples of your work?

Thank you,Devon ApplewhiteBusiness Development ManagerLindsay Honda and Lindsay AcuraColumbus, OH

Hi Devon:First, to drive more traffic to your web site,

you should include plenty of relevant content, especially search terms for your inventory make/models, as well as specific locations. This will help users find you through “long tail search”— searches specific to makes and models in particu-lar areas. You should also be aware that many of today’s shoppers are looking for cars on their smart phones, so having a version of your web site visible on those platforms is key. And, of course, always be sure to promote your web site in all of your offline advertising.

Relevant content is equally as important as it keeps users on your web site. What good are your efforts to boost traffic if your site’s visitors are leaving as fast as they’re arriving? The page that usually generates the highest traffic on a dealers’ site is the specials page, so always keep your promotions up to date. Also offer these items: tools to help car buyers build customized vehicles, the option to compare multiple vehicles side by side, a media center with multiple images and

videos for each vehicle and a variety of useful car-buying tips such as OEM-specific information.

There are companies that offer these types of products and services that help customize dealer web sites, as well as tools that allow dealers to upload video content for vehicles, send alerts to shoppers when the vehicles they’re looking for appear in your inventory and post vehicles to Craigslist.

Thanks,Paige Presley

Joe Orr,I was so impressed with your cover story

article in the March issue of Digital Dealer magazine. I want to learn how to do this but I am about out of capital. I have East Texas Ford in Winnsboro, TX. We have been there for 15 years this April 15, 2010. I owned one of the GM dealerships that General Motors let go and now I am in arbitration to get that store back. I would like to set up for success. I am having the hardest time right now. I didn’t go bankrupt but I do not have the cash I really need. What can I do to pull out of this?

Thank you,Suenan GoberOwner East Texas Ford/Gober & Merrel Chevrolet, Buick and GMC Inc.Winnsboro and Sulphur Springs, TX

Suenan,First of all I want to say that I would love to

have a telephone conversation and that you are not alone. I also want to say that the two things that I have done that have made the biggest traffic/ROI/culture movement in my 30-year history cost very little (under $1,000 a month).

With the new type of business that is evolving and taking shape and actual control of our auto-mobile business, it is my belief that we can no longer afford to hide from the facts. And facts are

what we as dealers should be sharing with each other to make us stronger and more profitable. I have noticed as I have become more involved in building relationships nationally that some of the dealers in our country are getting very impressive results in very different business categories.

It is my hope that we will be able to form a type of Internet 20 group. Not a traditional 20 group, but a group of digitally committed minds that will offer real analytics behind new thought. I envision a group of people whom are voted in and out, dependent on their involvement. There is software available that makes it possible for up to 100 dealers to video conference from their office/home and share spreadsheets and so on with no costs to travel.

I know that we can learn and benefit from each other’s successes and failures more than anything else that is offered to us.

I welcome a call from you Suenan, and I know that many dealers around the country are also willing to offer assistance.

It is my belief that an executive management team with unshakable intentions, unusual focus and a love of the game can turn their store around or feel massive improvements in this new “real time” business model in short term.

Let’s chat when you have time,Joe Orr

Dealer welcomes your letters and after verification will run them signed or unsigned. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.

Send letters to: 2000 Town Center • Suite 1900 • Southfield, MI 48075FAX: (248) 351-2699 • e-mail: [email protected]

JOEORRDick Hannah Honda page 14

March 2010

Internet Sales:A Darwinian Fight for Survivalpage 8

Put the Right Content on Your Site page 12

Technology Trends:Making Profit with your IT Department

page 23

The Cruel Mistress of Social Mediapage 24

Page 5: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

2010 Top Rated Web Provider, DrivingSales.com

Top Awards for Websites, SEO, and InternetLead Management

2009 Net Promoter®Score Survey

Top customer service ranking in the nation’s software industry

2010 Diamond Award“Best Website Provider”

Auto Dealer Monthly2010 Dealers’Choice Awards

2009 Automotive SearchMarketing Association

Most ComprehensiveSearch Marketing Platform Award

SEARCH MARKETING | DEALER WEBSITES | LEAD MANAGEMENT | PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS

888.785.5418 | www.dealer.com | [email protected]

Jana Kusin, Director of Advertising, Gillman Auto GroupRanked 40th in the 2009 Automotive News Top 125

“We’re most impressed with the customer service and technology that Dealer.com provides. They have really helped us stay at the forefront with new ideas and new technologies that keep our websites fresh and up to date.”

There’s a Reason Why More Top 125 Dealers Choose Dealer.com

Page 6: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 6   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

IGITAL DEALER TECH NEWSD

Manheim launches new online ‘Daily Sales’

programManheim announced the launch of its new

Daily Sales program, a powerful, expanded portfolio of online buying and selling oppor-tunities for dealers and consignors. Designed to capitalize on the popularity and success of its current Online Event Sales efforts, the Daily Sales program brings together existing Online Event Sales such as Manheim Monday, Dealer Wednesday, Thunder Thursday and M’OVE it Friday with newly-launched Online Event Sales, creating a comprehensive online line-up of fresh inventory for dealers.

Individual Online Event Sales are designed to address specific needs of Manheim’s customers. With Manheim Monday, the company took what was a traditionally slow sale day for auction locations and created a highly successful program that helps deal-ers to search, buy and sell the freshest used vehicle inventory online. Today, 60 percent of all transactions each Monday on OVE.com occur during a Manheim Monday Event Sale.

“Since introducing Online Event Sales last year, the feedback from both buyers and sell-ers has been extremely positive, so Manheim decided to offer these sales daily,” said Nick Peluso, senior vice president customer man-agement, Manheim. “The program provides the freshest inventory for buyers and selling opportunities for both dealer and commer-cial consignors. Promoting Daily Sales on Manheim.com allows us to inform customers of all the buying opportunities Manheim offers, from Manheim Monday to weekend events and everything in between.”

In conjunction with the launch of Daily

Sales, Manheim also introduced a pro-motional campaign to keep its customers informed about the variety of online events happening daily at Manheim. As part of the campaign, Daily Sales promotional e-mails will provide dealers with regular news and updates on upcoming sales. In addition, an interactive calendar on Manheim.com will ensure that all visitors can track and set

updates for sales in which they are specifi-cally interested. Promotion for the Daily Sales line-up also include a banner ad campaign and advertising at Manheim’s in-lane auction locations, ensuring that even more buyers and sellers connect online.

Customers who want to stay up-to-date on Daily Sales digitally can add events to their electronic calendars, set reminders for specific event sales and receive alerts through e-mail on the Daily Sales web page by clicking on the sale of interest.

www.manheim.com

Dealer Impact releases unique Facebook app

Promoting auto dealerships on social media has gotten easier thanks to the release of Dealer Impact’s innovative Facebook Inventory App. The dynamic program is specifically designed to integrate with the Facebook interface.

The Facebook Inventory App functions like a second web site for a dealership. The no-fuss program allows dealers to display cur-rent inventory on their Facebook fan pages as well as add inventory videos and specials to Facebook. The app also has the ability to automatically update a dealer’s web site and Facebook fan page simultaneously.

Dealer Impact offers the most comprehen-sive digital marketing products on the market, including video test drives, mobile web sites, and social network marketing. Dealer Impact began building web sites in 1998 and wrote the auto industry’s first online inventory pub-lishing tool in 2000.

For an example of the Dealer Impact Facebook Inventory App visit: http://www.facebook.com/karlchevrolet

The StoneEagle Group integrates DealerTrack

DMS toolThe StoneEagle Group announced it has

joined DealerTrack’s OpenTrack program. The OpenTrack program provides StoneEagle customers with real-time bi-directional access to a dealership’s data, increasing operational efficiency and profitability. OpenTrack’s six touch points into the Dealer Management System (DMS) will allow StoneEagle to deliver optimum performance and results to dealers utilizing the DealerTrack DMS. The OpenTrack program gives dealers the flexibil-ity to use solutions delivered by StoneEagle or any third party application they desire to meet the unique needs of their business.

“StoneEagle is pleased to participate in the OpenTrack program to deliver the highest levels of security, reliability and scalability to our customers,” said Jason Gillette, director of sales and marketing, StoneEagle Group. “The OpenTrack program will enable StoneEagle to increase efficiencies and performance for dealers using the DealerTrack DMS. In addi-tion, the OpenTrack program has been very easy to work with and completely reliable.”

“We are delighted to welcome StoneEagle to the growing list of technology vendors participating in the OpenTrack program,” said Rich Holland, vice president and general manager, DealerTrack DMS. “OpenTrack represents the realization of our vision of an open platform that enables dealers to choose any third party solution they want without sacrificing the efficiency benefits of real-time integration with their DMS.”

www.stoneeagle.comwww.dealertrack.com

Page 7: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

7

firstlooknew

Instant Experts. Courtesy of the Internet — They know it all. Do You?

With 88% of consumers starting their shopping process online, “Instant Experts” are everywhere. Today’s pre-owned buyers often know more than the “pros” selling the car. Now, you can level the playing fi eld. INSTANTLY.

Call 800-730-5665 or visit us at www.FirstLookSolutions.com and fi nd out how the revolutionary new sales solution exclusively from FirstLook can help you start closing more customers, more profi tably — with higher customer satisfaction — today!

www.FirstLookSolutions.com 800-730-5665

Know It All. Consumers Do.

Instant Experts.

I know exactly how muchyou can resell my car for.

Page 8: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 8   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

Dealer Communications LaunchesNew Web Site

This month, we launched our new web site – www.dealer-communications.com. This project has been a labor of

love since I began at Dealer Communications in October 2009.

I can say confidently this is the most robust, content-laden and informative web site that is focused solely on new car dealers and their needs.

We have content going back to 2005 that covers every department in the dealership. As you poke around, you’ll find columns from the leading automotive retail thinkers in the industry. For just about any question you have about managing your dealership or your department, you’ll find an answer on the new site.

You’ll also see our magazine cover stories featuring highly successful dealers, Internet directors and fixed operations directors. Not only are these Profiles of Success inspirational, they are filled with ideas and nuggets of infor-mation you can use in your own dealership.

We’re going to be posting stories and aggre-gating content daily, scouring the web to find the most pertinent news stories for you.

I invite you to register and play around on the site. We’ve incorporated several aspects of social media throughout, including blogs and forums.

Setting up a profile gives you access to our forums where you can post content, com-ment on posts, ask questions, set up polls and much more. You’ll also be able to participate

in the conversation by commenting on our many blogs.

You can also create friends lists, post pic-tures and send private messages to other reg-istered users. We trust you will find the site valuable in providing you information you need in your endeavors.

8th Digital Dealer Conference & Exposition

We just finished the 8th Digital Dealer Conference, and it was the biggest one to date. We had nearly 1,200 attendees, of which 550 or so were dealers, general managers and Internet directors.

It was rejuvenating to feel and hear the opti-mism in Orlando at the conference. Sales are up. Solutions are getting better and dealers are finding new ways to connect with customers.

The conference has become the place to be if you want to learn, share ideas and get the creative juices flowing. There may not be another conference in which this much brain power is assembled. I’ve written before, the technology space in automotive retail is the most vibrant, fertile and exciting sector in which to participate.

We like to beat ourselves up saying we’re behind other industries when it comes to technology. I disagree. Granted, we may not always respond to every lead correctly, nor handle customers the way we should all the time, but this is an industry where anyone with an idea, hard work and a little bit of luck can make it big.

At each conference we see companies that were once small start ups begin to scale and hit it big. And that is exciting. I also get a charge out of seeing Internet directors grow and improve their businesses.

This is one reason I believe the conference and Digital Dealer magazine are so success-ful. It’s the people on the front lines, in both the dealerships and with the vendors (many of whom are former dealers) who are pas-sionate because they understand they are at the front of a revolution and are helping to write history.

It may sound Pollyannaish, but the people that attend the Digital Dealer conferences are the ones who are determining the long term future of our industry.

It doesn’t get any more exciting than that.

If you weren’t able to join us in Orlando, the next conference is just a few months away and will be in Las Vegas at the Mirage October 12-14, 2010.

IGITAL Dealer AAISP NOTESDCliff Banks

Cliff Banks

Vice President and Editorial Director

AutotrAder.com® Asking

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$15,679mAnheim mArket rePort Auction

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107 Autocheck vehicle history*

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in today’s market, it’s hard to know exactly how much a used vehicle is worth. But your profitability depends on an accurate appraisal. get it right and get it fast — with nAdA AppraisalPro®. with just a click, book out a vehicle and print your appraisal offer. that’s all you need to close more deals in less time. All for the lowest price on the market. All from nAdA.

Order NADA AppraisalPRO today for just $150 per month.Visit www.nada.com/appraisal for more information or call 866.974.6232 to set up your own personal demo.

SM

* A separate subscription is required to the experian Autocheck service.

Page 9: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

9

nada used car

guidenew

AutotrAder.com® Asking

$16,416J.d. Power And AssociAtes® / Pin retAil

$15,679mAnheim mArket rePort Auction

$11,700nAdA AverAge trAde-in vAlue

$11,750vAuto dAys suPPly

107 Autocheck vehicle history*

CLEAN

6 SourceS. 60 SecondS.1 smArt dECisioN.

in today’s market, it’s hard to know exactly how much a used vehicle is worth. But your profitability depends on an accurate appraisal. get it right and get it fast — with nAdA AppraisalPro®. with just a click, book out a vehicle and print your appraisal offer. that’s all you need to close more deals in less time. All for the lowest price on the market. All from nAdA.

Order NADA AppraisalPRO today for just $150 per month.Visit www.nada.com/appraisal for more information or call 866.974.6232 to set up your own personal demo.

SM

* A separate subscription is required to the experian Autocheck service.

Page 10: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 10   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

Send a Multi-vehicle Quote; Win on the Call

When you respond to an Internet lead, do you just send back a quote on the requested vehicle?

If that’s what you do, you might want to reconsider.

Instead of responding with a single quote, provide quotes on multiple vehicles. Doing so fundamentally alters the phone call. What does the customer talk about when you just send a quote on the requested vehicle? Price.

It’s all about how your price is higher than the next guy for the same vehicle. If you change your response to a presenta-tion of three alternative new vehicles sur-rounding the trim-level request, and add three to four used vehicles of like trims, you will have set up an entirely different phone conversation.

With a multi-vehicle quote, the conversa-tion turns away from price to the features. Do they want new or used? Do they like the navi-gation system or not? This is the type of con-versation that changes how you are perceived. The customer is more inclined to reveal their price point requirements as they mull over the alternatives you have presented. You are

their helper as they sort through their options. All of a sudden, an adversarial conversation becomes a consultative conversation.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this.

At the “moment of truth,” when a customer sends you a lead, you are on trial. The same lead has been sent to two or three other com-petitors. How you respond at that moment is key. Your goal is to create a relationship, and turn that relationship into a sale. Speed of response and quality of personal engagement are the two ingredients of success.

The first critical step is to respond with a multi-vehicle price quote back to the cus-tomer in 10 minutes. Next is the phone call

— also in 10 minutes. That’s the best practice to catch the customer when they’re in the active shopping process. With a multi-vehi-cle quote, your conversation changes from a competitive price shopping conversation to comparative feature shopping conversation. Think about it – that’s where we all want to be, right?

Use the call to review the alternative vehi-cles you have presented. As the customer’s questions start to fly, as they reveal their pref-erences and price points, you gain a foothold, inch by inch. You have begun to build a rela-tionship. It’s a relationship based on your role as consultant. You’ve taken the conversation farther than the other guys, because you’ve discovered more about your prospect. These are the stepping stones towards a sale.

Many have said, “It’s all about the phone call.” That’s true, with this qualification: “It’s all about the speed and content of the phone call.” If you can get back to the customer very quickly — in 10 minutes — and if you can use the call to turn the conversa-tion from price to features by reviewing the five to seven vehicles you have presented in your price quote, you will have gained a huge advantage. If implemented effectively for every lead every time, you will transform your sales results.

Tom Mohr is CEO of ResponseLogix, and has worked closely with auto dealers for 25 years. Prior to ResponseLogix, Mohr was president of Knight Ridder Digital, where he was on the board of Cars.com.

If you wish to discuss this article with other dealers, or with the author, please go to the “Discussion Forums” at www.Dealer-communications.com and enter the “Internet Sales” forum or e-mail him at [email protected].

IGITAL Dealer INTERNET SALESDTom Mohr

With a multi-vehicle

quote, the conversation

turns away from price to

the features.

Page 11: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

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Page 12: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 12   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

The Myth of E-mail Leads and Rise of the Internet as an Influencing Medium

Many dealers using the Internet as a marketing resource are still heav-ily focused on e-mail leads as the

measurement of a successful online presence. But what is the current state of the e-mail lead, how satisfied are shoppers with e-mailing dealers and how else should dealers be using and evaluating online marketing?

According to recent studies, the number of people e-mailing during the shopping process has not grown over the past few years, despite an increase in the number of car shoppers using the Internet. Today, about 75 to 80% of car shoppers utilize the Internet in their shop-ping process, but the use of e-mail leads has stayed stable–and low–for years. In 2004, only 20% of those online shoppers sent an e-mail lead as a part of their shopping process. In 2008, that number had only grown to 22%.

This reality differs sharply from dealers’ perception of the situation. In a 2008 study, dealers said they believed that 17% of their showroom traffic first establishes contact via e-mail and that an additional 41% call before coming in to the store. But in surveying con-sumers, the reality is that typically only 2% of shoppers on dealers’ lots initially contact the showroom via e-mail first. Phone wasn’t much better, as it was found that only 17% of shoppers on the lot called before arriving at the dealer. The vast majority, 81%, simply walked in.

This fact doesn’t mean that e-mail leads aren’t important, but they are clearly not the “main event” when it comes to Internet mar-keting and sales.

That being said, dealers clearly recognize the value of walk-in traffic. According to deal-ers in an internal study, about 14 e-mail leads are needed to generate one sale, versus nine leads generated via phone calls and just seven for walk-ins.

Perhaps part of the reason why it requires twice as many leads via e-mail than leads via walk-ins is the low satisfaction rate shoppers have with asking for information from dealers

through the Internet.Response time is one of the most crucial

components in driving this satisfaction; the longer it takes a dealership to respond to an e-mail lead, the less likely shoppers are to be satisfied. In surveys by AutoTrader.com, it was determined that almost half of dealers did not respond to consumers on the same day that the lead was received.

But even among consumers who got a response within three hours of their initial request, satisfaction was only 68%. Many consumers were put off by the dealership not answering their specific questions regard-ing availability, price and details of inventory listed for sale.

Satisfaction among consumers drops sig-nificantly the longer it takes for a real person at the showroom to answer that shopper’s inquiry. Only 54% of shoppers were satis-fied with the response received under a day’s time, and only 35% were satisfied with the response from one to three days. And among consumers who did not get a response until three days after the initial e-mail inquiry, the level of satisfaction fell to a mere 9%.

Dealers and the automotive industry in general should realize that most shoppers prefer not to send e-mail leads to dealers. In fact according to a recent market study commissioned by AutoTrader.com, two in three shoppers prefer to visit the dealer in person. Therefore, it is critical for automotive advertisers not to measure campaign success solely by clicks and e-mails leads.

Instead, dealers should focus on tracking dealership foot traffic and identifying what elements of online marketing and other sources of information influence shoppers to pick one car over another and one dealer-ship over another.

Dealers who competitively price their vehicles and effectively merchandise their inventory find they have much more suc-cess attracting shoppers to their stores and than those that just post basic ads and wait

for e-mail leads to roll in. Online shoppers across the spectrum now expect fresh, detailed content that highlights what a showroom has for sale and gives the shopper reasons to buy from one outlet over another. The Internet increasingly offers opportunities for dealers to influence shoppers’ choices and dealers who have educated themselves on the techniques that can help maximize this influence are gaining market share at the expense of those who have not been closely watching and fol-lowing current best practices.

Fortunately, most third-party web sites are now well equipped to share information and market intelligence that can help dealers understand how their store’s performance compares to “best in class” dealers.

Dealers should also be sure to fully utilize the customer tracking tools and insights pro-vided by the third-party vendors they already use as well as popular web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which is available for free for any store. Using these tools will allow dealers to improve their use of the web as a marketing medium, both with their listings on third-party sites such as AutoTrader.com, as well as on their own web sites.

Of course, there are still e-mail leads coming in, even if they are not as big a slice of the pie as dealers think. With these leads, dealers should improve response times, as well as the quality of responses. By doing this, along with using better online marketing techniques, dealers will see improvements in the most important measurement of all: the bottom line.

Chip Perry was the first employee of AutoTrader.com in 1997.

If you wish to discuss this article with other dealers, or with the author, please go to the “Discussion Forums” at www.Dealer-communications.com and enter the “Internet Sales” forum or e-mail him at [email protected].

IGITAL Dealer INTERNET SALESDChip Perry

Page 13: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

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Page 14: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

DD 14   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

Five Truths about Social Media

If you’re like me, you’ve read so much about social media lately that your eyes are ready to gloss over whenever you even

see the words “face” and “book” in the same sentence. It’s beginning to border on the ridiculous – so much so, that I almost talked myself out of writing “another article about social media.”

For dealers, this is a confusing time as expert after expert line up to tell you the what and wherefore of social media. The truth is that social media is so new no one can be certain where it will fit with your long-term marketing plans or how much it will really matter to your business. As of this writing, there are no dealers facing “make or break” time with respect to social networking, micro-blogging or social bookmarking (reputation management, of course, but not the other three types of social media). This is not to say you should wait and see before ventur-ing into certain types of social media, rather it is merely a suggestion that you can tread carefully as you grow your dealership’s social footprint.

Regardless of how you proceed online

– though I do recommend you stop posting and tweeting specials, and you stick to report-ing about social activities and non-sales events – remember that everything you write or post on the Internet will likely be there for as long as there is an Internet. Write your content, let it sit, let someone else edit it, reread it, then post it online.

For those of you ready to tackle social media, it might be helpful if you understand these five basic truths:

Truth 1: The future for social media will be much different than the present social landscape. Have you heard the automotive experts touting that “social media is here to stay” or “social media is not a fad?” Very brave of these folks to proclaim that the most talked-about, most visited and most coveted web sites in the world are going to be here forever. While they are probably correct, the way busi-nesses successfully leverage these sites will likely evolve so much over the coming months that what we do today on our Facebook pages will seem dated in just a couple of years.

Truth 2: MySpace is more socially rel-evant than all other social media sites (except

Facebook). Those same pundits who pro-claim that social media will be with us forever are also very quick to point out that “MySpace is dead.” Which is it? Is it a medium that will be here until the next Ice Age or one where major players like MySpace are declared dead the moment they are overtaken in the traffic rankings? The top five web sites in the United

States (based on unique visitors) today are: 1) Google; 2) Facebook; 3) Yahoo!; 4) YouTube and 5) MySpace – begging the question: If the fifth most popular site in the U.S. is “dead,” what does that say about number six and beyond?

Truth 3: Your social presence/reputa-tion/existence online will be there with our without your involvement. The consuming public will be sure to let the world know about your business whether you like it or not. As dealers, this usually means negative reviews. Understanding the fourth truth could ulti-mately help you manage that which you do not control: the public.

Truth 4: What you do offline has much more to do with how you will be perceived within social media than what you do online. Hire all the consultants or in-house teams you want and pay them to repair your online repu-tation and manage your social networking account. If you run an old school dealership

IGITAL Dealer INTERNET SALESDSteve Stauning

continued to P-15

The trick here is that

there is no trick: manage

your business as if all of

your future customers

were watching –

because they are.

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  DigitalDealer-magazine.com   May 2010 DD 15 

that revels in “crushing” every customer, “stealing” every trade and packing payments, your consumers and former employees will skewer you online. Ultimately, it won’t matter how many Facebook fans you have or how many twits are following your tweets, the public will out-shout-you at every turn.

The trick here is that there is no trick: manage your business as if all of your future customers were watching – because they are.

Truth 5: Your employees can make or break your social media persona. Dealerships seem to be spinning their wheels creating Facebook and Twitter accounts, getting fans and followers (who are most-often dealership employees, vendors and their friends) and then posting their latest specials to no one. These dealers are missing the point of social media: it’s supposed to be social, not sales-driven. Social media “success” will be fueled by how others interact with your dealership, not how you force yourself upon them. Your employees – most of whom already have active social networking, blogging, microblogging,

photo-sharing, podcasting and video-sharing accounts – should be encouraged to include their relationship with your dealership in everything (legal and moral) they do online.

For example: if your mechanics and other service employees divulge on their Facebook pages that they work for your dealership (and hopefully include a link to your web site for SEO purposes), people in their network will seek them out for advice. The advice they provide and the subsequent goodwill begins to build greater social cache for them and for you. The combined power of your employ-ees’ social networks is much greater than the power of one dealership Facebook page and one Twitter account – and ultimately more trustworthy to the average consumer.

Social media has its place. In my opinion, that place is at the end of a very long line of Internet process and marketing basics that most dealers don’t do very well. While social networking can likely be a tool that helps dealers build a solid customer base, it is not a stand-alone marketing plan and it cannot

take the place of sound processes, trained people and smart spending that focuses on long-term growth.

Steve Stauning is the co-founder of Kain-Stauning, a leading automotive dealership training and consulting services firm focusing on digital marketing and Internet sales. Prior to his work with Kain-Stauning, he has served in various leadership roles, including as the Asbury Automotive Group’s director of ecommerce, the director of the Web Solutions division of the Reynolds & Reynolds Company, and as general manager for Dealer Web Services at Dealer Specialties.

If you wish to discuss this article with other dealers, or with the author, please go to the “Discussion Forums” at www.Dealer-communications.com and enter the “Internet Sales” forum or e-mail him at [email protected].

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DD 16   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

Larry Barditch Director of

Business Development Kendall Chevrolet

COVER STORY

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Larry Barditch owned a water bottling company for 19 years before Van Olp, the owner at Kendall Chevrolet, convinced him to run the dealership’s Internet department. Larry has been Kendall’s director of business develop-ment almost 10 months now. He shares his perspective as a former outsider

to the industry and walks us through the changes he’s made at the dealership.

You’ve been in automotive retail for less than a year.

Yes. I owned a bottle water company for 19 years in south Florida until I sold it in 2008. I’m the president of a local chamber group. Through that I’ve known Van Olp, who is the dealer principal here at Kendall Chevrolet, for about five years.

We were having lunch when he asked me what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I said, ‘I’m not sure, I kind of enjoy sales training and playing golf when I want to and picking up the kids at school in the afternoon and coaching baseball.”

He shared with me his vision of what he wanted to do with technology and Internet sales. He wanted to hire somebody who was non-car guy, had no experience, and wanted to know if I was interested. I wanted to do something with technology and the Internet. So I agreed to try it for six months. That was nine months ago.

Did he say why he was looking for a non-car guy?

He had four salespeople that he promoted as Internet sales managers in the course of one year, and none of them could seem to get this thing working on all eight cylinders. That is one of the reasons why I liked Van and why I jumped on this opportunity. He is the guy that takes risks. What he tried hadn’t worked. So he thought bringing someone in that is popular in the community, president of the business association, had been a business owner for 19 years, might change that.

Walk me through what you did when you first came on board almost a year ago?

You know, it’s funny, I said I wasn’t going to change anything but my underwear for the first 30 days. I sat back here and looked at what was going on here. The auto industry is like nothing else I have ever seen.

I just feel like I am a very fortunate guy and I actually love what I am doing. That’s one of the things when you get up every morning, and you have that great feeling and you love what you are doing, there is not much that can bring you down. Although, the auto industry has challenged me more than any other.

One of the books I really love is Good to Great by Jim Collins. He talks about getting the right people into the right positions. When I started here we had a hodge-podge of what was an Internet sales department and half BDC department.

But we didn’t have the right people. I hired two BDC girls for the dealership. Their hours are 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., so I hired one that works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and one that works 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., so I had it covered all day long. Then I hired two Internet sales guys, one that had been in the car business for 30 years, and one that’s been in the car business for 15 years. That was huge, because I had their experience of the car-sales process, which I didn’t know anything about.

My strength was the process and discipline. I had two guys that knew about how to sell the car and I knew how to put in the disci-pline and process to make the Internet BDC department work.

Define process and discipline in context of the BDC and Internet sales.

Every month I put together an action plan. My April action plan says, “You can’t hit the bull’s eye if you don’t have a target.”

In my bottling business, my retention rate on customers was three times higher than the industry average. I believed in extraordinary customer experience. Anybody can give aver-age service, most people give bad service, but I believed for 19 years that if I gave extraor-dinary service -- white-glove kind of service

-- customers would remember me. I brought that philosophy here.

You also have to set clear defined goals. I don’t just tell my BDC girls to follow-up on all of the unsold floor traffic from the day before. I tell them they have to follow-up on all of the unsold floor traffic and get one appoint-ment for the next day. I give them precise goals that they need to hit. It is kind of like being dropped in the middle of Italy and not having a road map and told to go and visit the Vatican.

A lot of people confuse activity with pro-ductivity. You don’t get paid for the time you are here, you get paid for the results that you get. So don’t waste your time on activities that don’t produce results. I see a lot of that in the car business.

You brought some discipline into it, what were the results? How long did it take before you starting seeing results?

Well, 30 days was kind of an absorbing and learning period. I have had some great men-tors, guys like Matthew Belk, who came here with a program called ‘Best practices for reply-ing to Internet leads.’ I’ve had guys like Glen Hardy, with General Motors, who showed me our e-mails weren’t any good.

Before I took this job, I mystery-shopped several stores. I found a lot of people do a mediocre or bad job. The response I got back from Kendall Chevrolet was a response where my name was not capitalized. There were mis-spellings in the response. And it didn’t answer my question.

How hard is it to hit spell check before you send an e-mail? That is just a discipline you just have to get into every e-mail that you send. You do not send an e-mail without hitting spell check. How hard is that? Glen Hardy slapped me around a couple of times and really got me to shape things up. I talked to him on the

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DD 18   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

phone probably every two months and and he spent some time with me, so he has been a great mentor.

I have great vendors, and have great rela-tionships with them. Not just the person who comes and sees me every day, but the national sales director. I am on the phone with them, getting advice and helping get it done. I’ve been very, very fortunate. And then I have a dealer principal that provides me with the tools and resources that I need to be successful. He is a visionary when it comes to the digital dealership.

Did you change any of the technology or any of the vendors?

We’ve improved our technology. We had some great tools in place, but we didn’t know how powerful they were. By meeting with the vendors and getting tutorials on how they work, enabled us to automate better.

Who do you use as a CRM?AutoBase is our tool. And our Internet lead

management tool is called Aeros. I struggled with them at the beginning. They had that tool for over a year and nobody knew how to use it right or set up a rotation. It just wasn’t the way it needed to be. Just working with the vendor and learning about it and getting it automated helped us set-up the way we wanted it to be.

Who built your web site?Cobalt does our web site. That was another

vendor that the relationship wasn’t there. I’ve got the best customer advocate there, Joshua Eubanks. He is great. I speak with him weekly. Apparently, no one from here would call him. I’m constantly updating our web site. We recently changed the style to make it more user-friendly.

We’re embedding videos into the site itself. We’ve added an appraisal tool on the front page along with a 30-second credit application.

Cobalt manages the majority of our search engine optimization and does a great job. I ask Joshua all the time why they do something a certain way. In my mind, I think it sounds stupid. And he says, “Yea, but you are the first rank in Google search aren’t you?”

I see you are doing some social media stuff too: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

I am definitely in the infancy stage of social media. I went to the NADA Conference and I am signed up for the Digital Dealer conference

next week, so I am learning how to do that. That is more of a feel-good, this is what I do in the community kind of thing. I am not posting: ‘Check out this new car’ or ‘Come to my dealership for service.’ I am not selling on social media at all.

We have a great YouTube page and our videos are getting hits like crazy and I just started putting them on. We are the south Florida dealership for Mary Kay. And they are using Chevrolets now, so no more pink Cadillacs. When they come here and pick up their courtesy delivery, I’m there with my Flip Video camera taking video of the delivery. There’s got to be 20 or 30 people here and they have flowers and balloons.

It is a big show when someone reaches that car bonus. All her friends are there, it’s a party. I’ve got it online and on YouTube and I have e-mailed it to her even before she leaves the dealership. We post it, we make her a friend on Facebook and we post it to her Facebook and say, “Look, here’s the new car she just got delivered.”

Her friends are calling her before she leaves the dealership to congratulate her on her new car. So that’s the way we are kind of using the social media now. It is just shows customer testimonials. We’re sponsors of the Corvette Club down here in south Florida, we promoted our Corvette show and we do things like that. I took video and pictures of all of the guys with their 1963 Sting Rays. They walked me through the restoration of it and we posted it on YouTube and within

three hours I had 26 hits.

We’ve steered away from the GM-looking site Cobalt creates. Most of the Chevy web sites look like Chevy.com. We did that differently. Our web site doesn’t have that cookie-cutter prototype.

Has GM given you any feedback back on that?

Not on the web site, but we do a lot of good things for GM. They just implemented a digi-tal rewards package and raised the standards. We crushed it last year when 98.7% of our leads were responded to in under five hours. Our average response time was 38 minutes.

I knew we had to respond quickly within 30 minutes with a response that blows you away and it had to be back quick while you were still at the computer.

What is your process for handling the lead?I send the initial response back. Then, the

follow-up call is done almost immediately after the e-mail. I, the general sales manager or the senior BDC representative, which is Erika Diaz makes the call. Erika has been a God send to me. She makes a majority of the calls for the Internet leads. She will print an invoice of the car the customer is requesting. She gets the trade information and will run the paperwork over to one of my Internet salesmen. So now all they have to do is sell the car.

So your BDC sets up all of the appoint-ments and hands them to the Internet department?

“A lot of people confuse activity with productivity. You don’t get paid for the time you are here, you get paid for the results that you get. So don’t waste your time

on activities that don’t produce results,” says Barditch.

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  DigitalDealer-magazine.com   May 2010 DD 19 

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Yes, they set up a majority of the appoint-ments and hand them to the Internet sales-people. Now, if they are following up on the unsold traffic or missed appointments, those go back to the salespeople. We don’t just set-up an appointment, we set-up VIP appointments. A VIP appointment merely means, it is show-room readiness, it is what you should be doing anyway, having the car you are looking for at the front of the dealership, waiting for you with the key in hand. It’s not showing up and having the sales guy having to go to the key box and get the car, or having to walk out to the parking lot and hope it’s there. It is get-ting that car ready for you and making that extraordinary customer experience from the beginning. So that’s our VIP appointment. We’re ready for you when you get here. People don’t like spending six hours at a car dealership anymore. And quite frankly, Internet custom-ers have done a lot of the work already. They come in with a manila folder knowing what the rebates are, and what the invoice is. They know terms I haven’t heard of yet.

They don’t want the gloves on, they don’t want a boxing match anymore, they don’t want to be here to six hours, they want a clean deal, they want transparency, and they want you to be on your game.

In what mediums do you advertise? We don’t do newspaper at all. We do TV and

we’ve just put a lot of additional money into Spanish television. South Florida is a predomi-nately Hispanic community now. And we’ve spent a lot of money on digital.

In terms of digital advertising, what are you doing besides search?

We’ve got the highest package that AutoTrader offers, I think it is the Platinum Package, so we’ve got all the banners. We’re at the top of every search and we’ve just become the first AutoTrader buying center in south Florida. That means if you just want to just come here and sell your car, we will appraise it and we will buy your car.

We’ve also got the best package with Cars.com. All of our vendors we’ve pretty much have the best package from all of them.

What gets the most traffic on your web site?Our inventory is definitely seeing the most

traffic.

Do you get a lot of traffic on service yet?We have a great relationship with our service

department. One of the things we were missing was the turnover from service to sales, and sales to service. We now take the customer over to the service department and introduce them to the advisor. Every customer gets their first oil change free and we let them know that. We added a customer rewards program in the service department where for every dollar cus-tomers spend, they earn future dollars on either service or parts or accessories at our dealership. So we are making more of that connection between sales and service.

What is your biggest challenge? I think it is every dealers’ challenge. There

is always turnover and technology that is con-stantly changing. So getting people to do the right thing every single time is the challenge. Keeping everything on track, that is always a challenge, it just keeps you motivated. The car business is a people game. You have to keep the salesman happy and you have to keep the customer happy. It’s all about the people.

When Van asked you to come on board, at that time I think GM was going through bankruptcy issues, and dealerships were being eliminated. You were an outsider to the auto industry, what was your thought about the industry as a whole?

Because I was the president of a business organization that had 200 members, I talked to a lot of people every day. And nobody in any industry was able to tell me their business was better than it was the year before.

No matter what I chose, it was going to be challenging. It was evident when Cash for Clunkers came out that people were holding their money, they were scared, but everybody has to drive a car. We don’t have a great public transportation in south Florida, so our high-ways and our streets are filled to the rim. So everybody’s got a car. It was a matter of getting into something that people need. Van sold me on the whole technology aspect. It was going to be my baby and I could run with it. It was just one of the many challenges I’ve had.

Van received his ‘go forward’ letter from GM dated July 1st, and I met with him on July 3rd. So he was able to show me the letter saying we’re not one of the dealerships going away.

GM owns the property that we are on, and at that time Fritz Henderson, who was the CEO, lived here in south Florida and played golf with

continued to P-24

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DD 20   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

We all know that the Internet has dramatically affected how we do business, and constant

change is now the only thing that really stays the same. Keeping up with these changes is a crucial component of business success today; there is simply no “set it and forget it” in the world of online marketing, which begs the question, “How can busy dealers stay ahead of the rate of change?”

With web sites, SEO, SEM, social media, third-party sites, lead management and more, it can be a challenge to ensure a dealership’s marketing message is reaching valuable consumers online. Dealer.com solves these challenges by providing the industry’s most comprehensive online marketing platform. All online marketing activities can be managed, monitored and evaluated in a single location, with a single

login, from a single vendor. This ends the inefficiency of multiple logins in multiple locations to measure web site, advertising, inventory marketing and lead management results. Consolidation is smarter, saves time and money, and generates a higher return on investment. When Dealer.com was founded back in 1997, few people in the automotive industry realized the potential of the Internet to reach consumers, and even fewer were actively leveraging online marketing. Automotive dealer and visionary Mark Bonfigli realized early on that consumers would increasingly begin to seek retail information via the Internet. He founded Dealer.com to offer the automotive industry the most innovative and useful online marketing solution. Today, Dealer.com is the global leader in online marketing solutions for

the industry, providing award winning e-marketing solutions to OEMs, auto dealers and media companies.

Focus on R&D, customer service and company culture

As a key component of the company’s extensive research and development (R&D) investments, the unified platform provides enterprise-level online marketing, with the latest tools and the most intuitive user interface. The single-login platform benefits all automotive sectors by allowing more effective online marketing management, while decreasing overall costs. Recent enhancements include expanded customer service, with a doubling of the number of customer-facing staff, extensive employee development and training, and a 100% increase in R&D investment for the second consecutive year.

THE POWER PLATFORMof

oneDealer.com delivers online automotive retail success to more dealers with the

industry’s most comprehensive and efficient online marketing platform

IGITAL Dealer VENDOR PROFILED

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  DigitalDealer-magazine.com   May 2010 DD 21 

Dealer.com’s account management and technical support teams provide the immediate assistance and guidance to help dealers maximize the online marketing platform. The customer service teams keep in continuous contact with their busy dealers to ensure that all online marketing opportunities are utilized. In fact, there are an average of two outgoing customer service phone calls for every one incoming phone call.

As a testament to Dealer.com’s service and technology focus, the company’s Net Promoter® Score (NPS) continues to lead the technology sector with the top customer service ranking in the nation’s software industry. In addition, Dealer.com is the top ranked website provider on DrivingSales.com dealer vendor ratings. Further, 80% of the leading dealer groups choose the Dealer.com online marketing platform, as ranked by the 2009 Automotive News ranking of the Top 125 Dealer Groups.

Dealer.com also firmly believes that happy, healthy employees provide the best service to customers. This philosophy comes from the top down, creating an environment that is fast-paced, innovative and fun. Dealer.com is a pioneer, offering diverse wellness opportunities to its employees, unmatched in today’s workplace. Additionally, with the strong focus on R&D, employees are encouraged and rewarded for creating innovative solutions for the complex business challenges of online retail marketing. Dealer.com has been named one of the Best Places to Work in Vermont and has also been named as finalist in the national Inc. Magazine Top Small Company Workplaces. Key components of the online marketing platform

Web sitesDealer.com SmartSites™ are highly adaptable, precisely engineered, search-savvy, lead-capturing machines. Built according to Google’s standards and results-driven best practices, SmartSites™ are search-optimized, easy to navigate and edit, and contain more lead-generating forms for higher conversion. With enhanced video, mobile and social networking capabilities, they reach, retain and convert more in-market buyers for all dealership profit centers.

In addition, Dealer.com’s MobileSites™ turn smart phones into lead generating machines, allowing mobile consumers access to inventory, parts and service hours, integrated inventory videos, contact information and more, from anywhere at anytime.

Online advertising The Internet allows unprecedented online advertising potential. However, success largely depends on the right blend of key technology components: strong search engine marketing (SEM), website design consistent with industry best practices, and well-managed search engine optimization (SEO). Dealer.com SmartSites™ combined with ManagedSEO™ service provide optimum organic visibility on the major search engines. In addition, TotalControl DOMINATOR™ premium paid search advertising, PowerMail™ broadcast email campaign management, and full integration with popular social media networks allow dealers to effectively reach consumers wherever they spend time online. Lead management Fully integrated with SmartSites™, LeadMachine™ lets dealers accept, organize, distribute and track leads seamlessly throughout the lead lifecycle, across the entire sales force.

LeadMachine™ can track leads from the dealership’s web site, AutoTrader, Cars.com, Autobytel, regional web sites and more. Leads can then be tracked throughout their lifecycle, with response-time monitoring to optimize sales departments’ lead processes. LeadMachine™ allows the creation of customized lead lifecycles for all types of incoming leads. In addition, dealer groups can manage and track leads by store or individual sales person. Inventory marketingDealer.com’s inventory marketing tools organize, integrate and automate online inventory marketing. The inventory management tools push dealers’ inventory to eBay®, Craigslist, online classifieds, popular social media networks, and hundreds of other locations. CarFinder™ Automated Inventory Alerts send emails to prospects regarding vehicles they are interested in. Further, Dealer.com’s inventory marketing also includes integrated video. CarFlix™ HumanVoice and CarFlix™ Virtual Test Drive videos deliver captivating, full-motion videos with audience appropriate human voices. Video Blogs and transcripts can also be generated for every inventory video, boosting SEO and providing a more engaging customer experience. Performance analytics Dealer.com’s reporting structure is designed to produce actionable analytics, with business intelligence that carefully measures success, enabling increased sales and efficiency across all dealership profit centers. Transparent analytics monitor the effectiveness of lead strategies, merchandising strategies, online advertising and the entire marketing plan. The end result When combined, the components of Dealer.com’s comprehensive online marketing platform allow OEMs, dealers and media groups maximum efficiency by unifying all key areas of online marketing in a single location, with a single login. The consolidation ends the need to work with multiple suppliers to manage and monitor marketing results. Further, Dealer.com’s award-winning customer service and technology keep their customers years ahead of the competition, with the maximum return on investment.

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DD 22   May 2010   DigitalDealer-magazine.com

The Dealer.com Executive Team

Mark BonfigliChairman, CEO and presidentMark is the founder, president and CEO of Dealer.com. He has more than 20 years of marketing, retailing, wholesaling, and service experience in the auto industry,

including 10 years as the co-founder of a successful New England-based automotive retailer. Mark was named as a finalist in the 2007, 2008, and most recently the 2009 winner of the Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award in the New England Region, as well as the 2009 Vermont Small Business Person of The Year award. Under Mark’s leadership Dealer.com has received numerous recognitions including Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies, and numerous automotive industry awards for leadership in Internet marketing solutions.

Rick GibbsChief technology officerRick has driven technological innovation and positioned Dealer.com as a leader in the online automotive marketing industry. Rick brought expertise to Dealer.com with his previous experience implementing a web development division for an international consulting firm.

Combining creativity with strategic foresight, Rick has consistently led Dealer.com’s research and development teams, delivering cutting-edge products that outperform the competition. He has been instrumental in streamlining the development process, bringing products to market, and backing them by robust architecture and logic. Rick maintains a vision of continuous product improvement that translates into better value and performance for Dealer.com clients.

Mike LaneChief operating officerMike has experience in operational development in both consulting and industry for the past decade. Experience in finance, IT, and automotive have enabled Mike to drive success in the development of e-business solutions.

Financial discipline and solid business planning are foundations of the success he pursues, along with unconventional and creative methods of developing key teams for organizations’ operational success. The end result is highly effective teams that are in line with objectives to support clients with the best possible service and solutions, while achieving or exceeding company objectives.

Dean EvansChief marketing officerDean brings 18 years of experience in automotive retail marketing strategies. He has acted as an executive or consultant for many high-profile companies and automotive clients, including Ford Motor Company, Land Rover of NA, Jaguar of NA, Chrysler Corporation, The Cobalt Group, Dealix Corporation, Nextag.com, AutoNation/

AutoUSA, and Jumpstart Automotive. Dean was acting operations manager and general manager of a full line Chrysler dealer in the San Francisco area in 1995-97. He was the first in the market to start an Internet department and BDC.

He played an active role on several company advisory boards, including DrivingSales Inc., Target Diversity Marketing, Auto Dealer Traffic, and iAutos, the largest automotive portal

serving the rapidly growing Chinese market.

David Stetson Chief financial officerDavid Stetson brings more than 20 years of senior management experience in finance and investment banking, with a focus on growth companies in the technology sector, to Dealer.com’s leadership team.

Most recently, David served as senior managing director and head of the investment banking department for Caris & Company, an investment bank focused on fast-growing public companies in the technology, healthcare, consumer and energy segments of the economy. Prior to Caris, David was CFO and senior strategic executive at Xpoint Technologies, a venture backed provider of disaster recovery and security software. His accomplishments at Xpoint included helping the company manage an aggressive growth plan that saw the company’s Rapid Restore® software deployed to more than 30 million desktops, laptops and servers around the world.

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Profiling your Customers

One of my favorite TV shows does a “profile” of the criminal suspect for each crime. Can you use this

same technique to “profile” good sales or service customers and then data mine your DMS database to find more of the same?

Your best sales customer is your cur-rent service customer. If you can get 20% more people into the shop today, that means 20% more opportunities for repeat sales business.

Many of you might be frustrated by the service department because they are already “maximized out,” but you need to do this simple test to see if you could get more business into the shop that could equate into sales opportunities.

Step 1:Take how many working hours in a

month (April had 22 days, times 8 hours – or 174 hours) times the number of technicians, times your efficiency goal. If you have 10 technicians and you hope for 120% efficiency (how quickly a technician can do a flag hour) – then you should have 2,112 labor hours.

Step 2:Multiple those “expected” labor hours

by your labor rate ($100 an hour) and you should have $211,200 in labor sales. Generating gross profit of 75% (which is a good number) then you should have $158,400 in gross profit.

If you look at your financial statement and you don’t see this magical number or more, then you’re leaving open holes in your shop loading. You might have a tech-nician efficiency report that shows them doing far more than 120%, but they might not be productive.

What is productivity? It is making sure they are flagging 120% of the available hours. If your shop is slow and they are leaving early, taking vacation, or getting “shop” time instead of flag time, then your shop is not as busy as you might think.

The next issue might be your effec-tive labor rate. If you are discounting too many jobs, then the $100 an hour is not obtainable.

The last issue is your gross profit. If your labor rate or effective labor rate – less your average technician pay (effective gross profit) divided by your labor rate isn’t the same as what your financial statement gross profit shows, then you’re either not dispatching the right jobs to the right tech-nicians, or you’re writing off labor.

How can you find out which of these items is the problem? You need to do a full labor analysis. For last month, pull your labor lines from your DMS system and analyze it. You’re looking for labor op codes that have a high gross profit (normally done by the lower cost technicians) and a high efficiency (they can do a job is less time than flag time.) If you need detailed instructions, e-mail me – I wrote an article in my Profit Retention Newsletter.

Now that you have your analysis, you should know what are the best labor op codes for you to do? Look at the coupons that you sent out last month? Were they for the labor op codes that you just discovered? If not, then make a list of the good labor op codes and this is the type of additional service work that you want to get into the shop to provide more sales opportunities.

Once you have those codes, then you need to do a marketing campaign to get that work into the shop. Study the year, make, model, and miles of the good labor

op codes (you might need to do another data mining pull and use a vLookup). You should be able to devise a profile of this premium type of customer in your database and now search for them. Let’s say that your labor analysis came up with brake jobs as your best labor op code. You then analyzed all the brake jobs for last month and found that they were trucks four years old, driven by customers between 25 and 40.

Next you’d find all the customers in your database that didn’t have a brake job done in the past few years and give the list to the sales department along with the price of brake jobs, a description of what is done and how many appointments they can make a day. Your sales department could call their customers and schedule the appointment. It is a wonderful opportunity for your sales department to “connect” with their customers and possibly sell them a new truck instead of fixing up their old truck – or at least get them into the shop for the brake job.

Sandi Jerome is a former controller, CFO, system administrator, F&I, assistant GM, and fixed operations manager with over 20 years experience in the automotive industry. She is the owner of Sandi Jerome Computer Consulting.

If you wish to discuss this article with other dealers, or with the author, please go to the “Discussion Forums” at www.Dealer-communications.com and enter the “Technology” forum or e-mail her at [email protected].

IGITAL Dealer TECHNOLOGY TRENDSDSandi Jerome

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Dan. The moon and stars were aligning. It just seemed like the right fit for me.

But I also told Van, “I’ve heard the auto industry is very demanding on your time, but I am a corporate guy, as long as I can have a work/life balance, that was really important to me.” I told him that he had to promise to me that he would never try to turn me into a car guy, and so far and we have been good. I will see him in the hallway, and I will yell “Dan” and startle him. I tell him, “Did I tell you how much I love my job?” And he will just smile at me and keep walking.

You said the auto industry is different than any other industry. In your mind, what are a couple of those differences?

Back in the day, the auto industry -- I don’t know if it was a noble profession, but it was a professional profession. There were professional salespeople. When you went in and bought a car, 20-30 years ago, these guys were all dressed in ties, they were professionals.

Now, people would rather go to the dentist than buy a car. That is not a great image. When I see something happen such as the scandal with Toyota, I think it is just another black eye on the industry.

Right now I am starting with an industry and I am going to make this dealership more professional. Everything I tell is going to go back to an extraordinary experience at my dealership. We are building a new building – we break ground in December of 2010. It is going to be state-of-the-art leaning towards a digital dealership. We’ll have interactive kind of stuff for our customers.

The car dealership is a totally different animal than other businesses. We’re open seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the virtual showroom that I manage is open 24/7/365. The Internet never sleeps. You need to be ready to respond to the customers whenever they are shopping. Unfortunate or fortunate, most customers are shopping when they get back from their

lunch break, maybe when they are doing it when they start their day.

Most are doing it when I am, married with three kids, after I say prayers and put the kids to bed, and after I’m sitting on the sofa with my wife having a cup of coffee, that’s when we are on the Internet and that’s at night.

So you have to be prepared. I feel like a doctor on call -- the beeper goes off and you have to run into the hospital.

Sounds like you are off to a great start. I really am. When I tell you I like my job

and I feel like a blessed guy, I really do mean that. I think the team has done a great deal here. That’s a great feeling to know you are doing things right. Not just doing things right, but you are doing it the right way.

I really enjoy the owner and think Chevy is a great product. When I see what is coming down the pipeline for the Camaro, the Equinox, the Volt and the Cruze I think they are going to turn it around and will be the brand of 2011.

[email protected]

Advertiser ............................. pg #

ActivEngage ..............................25

AutoSoft ....................................19

AutoRevo ..................................14

AutoUSA....................................26

BZ Results ....................................3

Car Research .............................15

Dealer.com ..................................5

DealerPeak (Widestorm) .........10

ExteresAUTO .............................24

FirstLook ......................................7

Homenet ...................................11

IMN Loyalty Driver ...................13

NADA Used Car Guide ...............9

Digital Dealer cover story, Barditch, continued from P-19

866.994.2618 • www.exteresauto.com

Page 25: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

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Page 26: Digital dealer magazine may 2010

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