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Take Me Out To The Ball Game (Customers Are Not Your Competition!)

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Most dealerships view their business as a competition.

I’m not talking about a competition against the car dealer down the street vying for the same customers. I’m talking about a competition with customers themselves.

Why do dealers feel that their customers are the competition?

We may not do it consciously but we do it.

How many times have you heard in the sales office or between salespeople that they “hit a homerun”?

In this analogy, you are in competition with your customers. I believe that every customer would agree that if you “hit a homerun” off of them, that would be a bad thing. So what this phrase is saying is that you are on one team and the customer is on the other team and that you just did something bad to their team.

If you sell a car with zero gross or lose some money just to move a unit, does that mean the customer “hit a homerun”?

Why is there a need to make a customer feel like he “won”? What does it take for you to feel like you “won”?

There are many analogies similar to this one that we use in regards to customers and deals and almost all of them pit dealers and customers in adversarial positions.

The mere use of the analogies reinforce their message.

Why not change your thought process and put the customers on your team instead?

If you and your customers are on the same team, there is a mutual benefit and interest in scoring. This way when a car is sold (and bought), everyone feels like they won.

In Major League Baseball, competition is intense. Players are hyper-competitive not just with their opponents but amongst themselves. (ie. “My stats need to be as good as possible.”, “I need more playing time than that guy.”, etc)

BUT, one day a year, the best players in the game get together and play on the same team. They throw aside their competitive nature against their normal opponents and work towards a common goal. Even the fans who would normally “boo” a player cheer him on.

Your dealership’s success and survival are dependent not only on your employees, but also on your customers.

Change your perception. Play the game with your customers as your
teammates instead of as your opponents.

Make every day an All-Star Game and everybody will cheer for your dealership.

Don’t Get Kicked Out! (Building Relationships vs. Selling Cars on Facebook)

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The second dealership I worked at was a brand-new dealership. I mean it literally had no cars on the lot when I first started. There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic. There weren’t previous customers to follow-up with. We worked from an “up” list so there were many moments of down-time where you didn’t have much to do. We could go the whole day and only see 1 customer at that time. At this time, I wasn’t in the Internet Department. I was just a salesperson “on-the-line”.

I took that time to look at message boards that were geared towards enthusiasts of my manufacturer. I found one that was particularly active and started participating. They welcomed dealer/salesperson participation with one simple caveat – they did not want you to try and sell them anything. The salespeople that did anyways, got kicked off the boards. I participated vigorously answering any and all questions people asked with complete transparency. If I didn’t know the answer, I found it. If it involved a different department, I got them involved. After doing this for awhile, I truly became a “member” of that community. People appreciated the interaction and that I didn’t try to sell them anything. They knew I sold cars and that, ultimately, I wanted to sell them a car, but I didn’t try.

By behaving in this way, I was rewarded by many of the forum members buying vehicles from me. Customers were flying to me to buy cars. I was shipping cars all over the country. People were referring other people to me. If someone went onto this forum asking other members where they should buy a car, I didn’t have to say anything. The other members did it for me.

I wasn’t giving the cars away either, I was selling them at MSRP! People were flying in to buy FROM ME at STICKER PRICE (and no, I wasn’t paying for their transportation either). Here’s the forum and a sample thread:

Fresh Alloy forum: Arnold Tijerina at Riverside Infiniti is THE MAN !

(There are more posts like this. Feel free to search around the forum.)

The point of this story is that I took the time to build relationships with these consumers online without trying to sell them anything, was still being profitable for the dealership and making money for myself.

Dealers have many other avenues in which to continue their traditional advertising and capture business – print ads, 3rd party leads, websites, direct mail, email campaigns, and more.

Social media is presenting dealers with an opportunity that either didn’t exist or I didn’t know about back then. (This was in 2003). Dealers have the ability to interact with consumers in a forum THEY control. The message board I was dealing with wasn’t under my control, I was a passive participant until a question was asked.

I’ve seen many dealers start to create Fan Pages. Some I think are doing it right. These dealers seek engagement and to put a personality to the dealership. A great example, in my opinion, is the Walser Automotive Group. Here’s their Fan Page. They’re trying to build relationships on Facebook.

I’ve also seen dealers on the other end of the spectrum who are basically mimicking their traditional online and print ads on their Facebook Fan Pages as much as possible. They’re trying to sell cars on Facebook.

You can take this opportunity to create relationships with the knowledge that the business will come in the future from the evangelists you created…..

or you can try to sell some cars and get kicked off the message boards.

You decide.

You’ve Got Mail! (Two Easy Ways to Give Your E-Mail Auto-Responder An Edge)

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Almost all dealerships get e-mail leads in some fashion, whether it’s through a 3rd party lead aggregator, OEM or through their own website. Many of the same leads your dealership gets, your competitor gets also.

Every dealer I’ve ever known has an auto-responder attached to their CRM or ILM that goes out to the customers upon receipt of the leads. Many of them are generic and very similar.

Something to this effect:

“Hi Bill,

Thank you for your inquiry on a [insert year, make, model]. We appreciate the opportunity to earn your business and want you to know that we look forward to assisting you with the purchase of your new [insert year, make, model].

Someone from our internet staff will be in contact with you as soon as possible. In the meantime, feel free to give us a call at 888-555-1212 if you’d like to contact us faster.

Best New Cars has been in business for 25 years and you can have confidence that we’ll give you the personal attention you deserve.

Thanks, Internet Manager”

Usually this e-mail is in a nice-HTML rich template with the dealership’s banner, some pretty pictures, links, etc. Sometimes they include an initial quote, many times, they don’t.

The problem with this is:

  1. Every dealership is sending the customer the same thing so it is quite impersonal and the customers know its an auto-responder.
  2. These e-mails are hard to read on mobile devices like Blackberries, etc.

 Here are two easy tweaks that can give you an edge.

Tweak #1: Change your auto-responder to a short message, ideally 1-2 sentences in a non-HTML email with an important twist in your signature.

Example:

“Bill,

Thanks for the inquiry. I apologize that I can’t call you immediately but I promise to get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Thanks, Internet Manager
Sent from my Blackberry”

This accomplishes a few things. It makes your auto-responder different than your competitors, is easy to read no matter how they’re accessing their e-mail and they believe it was sent by you personally from your cell phone rather than recognizing that the e-mail they got was computer-generated. The customer will get the impression that you stopped what you were doing and acknowledged their inquiry while they are getting obvious e-mail templates from your competitors.

Tweak #2: Change the timing on your auto-responder. Most e-mail readers default from “newest” to “oldest” in the order in which the emails are displayed. Most dealership’s have their auto-responders set-up to email the customer immediately upon receipt of the lead. If you delay the sending of your auto-responder by 5 minutes, now where is your e-mail in their in-box? At the top and likely to be the first one that the customer reads. 

In automotive internet sales, we’re always looking for an edge over our competition. Anything you can do to set yourself apart from your competition and make you more memorable will increase your chances of success.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

(Note: I learned this technique from Joe Webb at one of his sessions at a Digital Dealer Conference awhile back. Joe is a good friend of mine and is a very knowledgeable, progressive thinker and strategist. At the time, he was on the retail side of the business but now he is the President of DealerKnows where he consults with dealerships on internet marketing tactics and best practices. If you need some help, I definitely recommend him and his services. Also, if you’ve never been to a Digital Dealer Conference, you’re missing out on a wealth of information.)

It Must Be Nice To Have Your Own Magic 8 Ball! (Top 25 Technology Predictions)

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Dave Evans is the Chief Futurist – Internet Business Solutions Group for Cisco.

He’s worked for Cisco for over 20 years. He was responsible for rolling out their first-ever web server. He’s held every job a technology professional could hold. He credits his prognostication skills to technology “street smarts”. Some of his past ideas are currently transforming the automotive industry.

Can he see the future?

Cisco thinks he can.

These are his predictions:

  1. By 2029, 11 petabytes of storage will be available for $100—equivalent to 600+ years of continuous, 24-hour-per-day, DVD-quality video.
  2. In the next 10 years, we will see a 20-time increase in home networking speeds. 
  3. By 2013, wireless network traffic will reach 400 petabytes a month. Today, the entire global network transfers 9 exabytes per month.
  4. By the end of 2010, there will be a billion transistors per human—each costing one ten-millionth of a cent. 
  5. The Internet will evolve to perform instantaneous communication, regardless of distance. 
  6. The first commercial quantum computer will be available by mid-2020. 
  7. By 2020, a $1,000 personal computer will have the raw processing power of a human brain. 
  8. By 2030, it will take a village of human brains to match a $1,000 computer. 
  9. By 2050 (assuming a global population of 9 billion), $1,000 worth of computing power will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth. 
  10. Today, we know 5 percent of what we will know in 50 years. In other words, in 50 years, 95 percent of what we will know will have been discovered in the past 50 years. 
  11. The world’s data will increase sixfold in each of the next two years, while corporate data will grow fiftyfold. 
  12. By 2015, Google will index approximately 775 billion pages of content. 
  13. By 2015, we will create the equivalent of 92.5 million Libraries of Congress in one year. 
  14. By 2020 worldwide, the average person will maintain 130 terabytes of personal data (today it is128 gigabytes). 
  15. By 2015, movie downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing will explode to 100 exabytes, equivalent to 5 million Libraries of Congress. 
  16. By 2015, video calling will be pervasive, generating 400 exabytes of data—the equivalent of 20 million Libraries of Congress. 
  17. By 2015, the phone, web, email, photos, and music will explode to generate 50 exabytes of data. 
  18. Within two years, information on the Internet will double every 11 hours. 
  19. By 2010, 35 billion devices will be connected to the Internet (nearly six devices per person on the planet). 
  20. By 2020, there will be more devices than people online. 
  21. With IPv6, there will be enough addresses for every star in the known universe to have 4.8 trillion addresses. 
  22. By 2020, universal language translation will be commonplace in every device. 
  23. In the next five years, any surface will become a display. 
  24. By 2025, teleportation at the particle level will begin to occur. 
  25. By 2030, artificial implants for the brain will take place.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Even. (Internet Security and Terminated Employees)

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In another incident of employee “road rage”, a Texas dealership’s former employee disabled 100 sold car ignitions and/or set off their car horns. He also went into their accounting system and changed the names of buyers (ie. Tupac Shakur), and he ordered $130,000 worth of parts from a vendor. Apparently, the dealership installs GPS systems with ignition kills on sold cars to ease repossession if the customer defaults on payment. (Link)

What is your dealership’s policies and procedures for managing a terminated employee’s access to your company’s online services?

With dealership vendors increasingly moving online, and dealerships increasingly adding web-based services, how do you insure that a terminated employee would not be able to access your valuable data and/or sabotage your dealership in any way?

It’s not just enough anymore to just cancel their accounts and remove their access. Many of your employees know the user names and passwords of co-workers and, in some cases, managers despite any policy you may have in place that restricts that.

So what do you do?

  1. Keep track of which employees have access to which systems.
  2. Only give employees access to systems they need to do their job.
  3. Have one person who manages all your DMS, CRM, ILM, IMS and any online service’s access (and “all managers” does not count as one person).
  4. If you can avoid it, do not allow remote access to your systems.
  5. Do a regular audit of your system and user access.
  6. Don’t allow people to keep their passwords taped to their computer monitors, written in a notebook, or in a file on their computer. This is a recipe for disaster and happens way too often.

In the event of a termination:

  1. Cancel all of the employee’s user names and passwords before informing them they’ve been terminated.
  2. Require that all employees change their passwords upon a termination of any employee to all the systems/services which they have access to.
  3. Monitor access frequently immediately after an employee termination. Typically, if there is revenge or sabotage brewing, it will occur fairly quickly after the termination.

While some of this may seem like overkill and is inconvenient, you could be held liable for any misuse of customer data or consequences of a disgruntled employee’s actions.

Do you think the 100 people who had their ignitions killed on their cars are going to blame the disgruntled employee?

As dealerships become more virtual in their operations, security of your data and services becomes more and more important. Implement policies and procedures to minimize any backlash that could occur from a disgruntled employee.

It is not only your duty to protect your information, but also your customers.

                                  

I Do Not Like Them, Spam I Am

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I just finished reading “Linchpin” by Seth Godin and I must admit that some of the things he says in the book were very thought-provoking.

One concept stood out immediately.

From Page 192:

“Just because his boss demands that he act like human spam doesn’t mean he has an obligation to listen. In fact, he has an obligation to do just the opposite. To stand out, not fit in. To make connections, not to be an invisible cog. To do otherwise is a loss.”

The concept that stood out to me within that paragraph was “human spam”.

We all deal with spam. In fact, some of us in the automotive industry create a lot of it.

We have pop-up ads on our websites, GoogleAds, email marketing campaigns, direct mail marketing campaigns, print ads, billboards, fliers and social media marketing campaigns. We send out our message in every way possible in the hopes that some of those broadcasts will bring us some business.

The definition of spam is “the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.” (Link)

So what would the definition of “human spam” be?

I put forth that human spam could be defined as follows: the abuse of social interactions (including via phone, or in person) to send messages indiscriminately.”

Examples:

The salesperson who has so irritated a customer with the quantity of his follow-up calls that they have called in to complain.

The BDC employee reading a script to your customers whether on an incoming call or an outgoing call to anybody.

The salesperson burning ups on your lot because he’s pre-qualifying customers, judging them, or determining that they aren’t “now” buyers then lot-dropping them.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t seek out our customers. I’m not arguing that a BDC is a bad idea. I’m not necessarily arguing that scripts aren’t a bad teaching tool. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t follow-up with customers.

What I’m saying is that all of your employees should have proper training and be empowered to handle customers as it seems appropriate and per the customers wishes. We are in a service business, you need employees that have good people skills.

If that means that they need to deviate from the script with this particular customer, let them. If that means that the salesperson can make a judgment call as to how often (if at all) this particular customer should be called or followed up with, let them.

If you don’t have the confidence in the people you hired to make these basic decisions… why did you hire them in the first place?

If you answered, “because they were cheap” or “because they were a warm body”, then you’re wrong. That person acting as “human spam” on your behalf and at your direction is costing you more money in lost business than they are in captured business.

“Good people skills” is a hard trait to quantify but I guarantee you that you know it when you see it. That coffeehouse clerk who always has a smile for you. The customer service rep that you’re talking to on the phone ready to scream at about some issue they didn’t even create who magically calms you down. They have good people skills.

When you first meet someone, how do they make you feel? Chances are that’s also how they’ll make your customers feel.

If the human interactions your employees are having with your customers are only transactional and not genuine, emotional and tailored specifically to that particular customer, then they are human spam.

It’s not about the quantity of the message, but the quality. The better quality your message, the more successful it will be.

Interact with people how they want to be interacted with. Be respectful of their feelings and wishes. Treat them all with respect (not just the ones with good credit).

I had a unique experience when I first started with my current company. I’m a remote employee so there isn’t much interaction with the the other remote employees or the employees at our corporate offices. After about a month (or so) of working, I got an e-mail from a fellow employee that said this:

“Arnold,

 I think I know you.  I think I bought my Infiniti G35 from you. “

I sold 378 cars the year this person bought a car from me. Who knows how many actual interactions it took me to accomplish that. That year was a windstorm of 18 hour days and 28 day months. That was also seven years ago. To have this person remember me after that much time, only by name, was a great compliment in my eyes. It means that the interaction I had with him was genuine and emotional, not merely transactional.

Make every interaction count.

Be human. Not spam.


A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

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I have a wish.

I contact the people, companies and resources that I believe will help make my wish come true. They, in turn, tell me all the tools they have that can assist me in my quest of wish-fulfillment. They tell me that this will work and that will work. They offer  training and support and say you can call me anytime.

Then, they give me the blueprint. They give me the manuals and instructions. They give me the hammer. They give me the nails. They give me the lumber and all the necessary tools needed to fulfill my wish.

I take their blueprint and instructions and I start building. I follow the instructions. I end up with a house.

I wished for a car.

This is what I see happening all the time in the automotive industry. Vendors call upon dealers to “pitch” a piece (or all of the pieces) of the puzzle. They say this is what you should do. This is how you should do it. These are the tools that you need. This is why you should buy them from us.

What they fail to find out is what your wish is.

Make your wish first.

Then find the right tools, companies and resources to make your wish come true.

If you’re doing it the first way, you’re doing it backwards and you will fail.

Failure in this fashion is the easiest option. If you fail, you can blame someone else (ie. Their instructions were bad. Their tools don’t work. etc.)

The solution I inevitably see involves some sort of phrase similar to this.

“Hey boss, let’s just get some different tools!’

Then you fail again.

“Insanity: doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein.

Make your wish, then make it come true.

If the tools don’t exist, create them.

If nobody else knows the instructions, write them.

If you don’t have the tools, get them.

If your boss(es) or company won’t let you fulfill your wish, find a company that will.

Define your wish, then make it happen.

Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you.

Don’t let other people tell you what your wish is.

If you don’t know what you are wishing for, nobody, not even yourself, can make your wish come true.

Not even the Blue Fairy.

You Rock and It Sucks! (or Computer Generated Interpretation of your Tweets)

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We all know (and have been warned) that what you put out on the internet can come back to bite you. We hear stories of people all the time having their personal and/or work life interrupted by things they’ve said or posted on Facebook.

My personal favorite (and a great example) is the following “status update” on Facebook followed by the boss’s comment:

           

So, now we have privacy controls and the ability to specify on a piece-by-piece basis what, and who, can see things.If you use them, they’re better than nothing. At least your boss (or potential employer) can’t see that drunken photo of you dancing on the bar top as easily, if you do, in fact, friend him/her.

Let’s talk about Twitter, now. Twitter is completely public and indexed by search engines. I have Google Alerts (and other services) setup to monitor certain things and I am always fascinated by what pops out in the results.

An item popped up in my Google Alert last Thursday and, while I found it amusing at first, as I started thinking about it more, it made me concerned.

What exactly I’m talking about is a website called “Amplicate”

According to  the website, it’s purpose is to do this:

“Amplicate
collects similar opinions in one place; making them more likely to be
found by people and companies.”

This would be fine because you actually DO have the ability to input your opinion on things if you, in fact, choose to participate in and interact with this website. Your opinion is, however, limited to whether something “Sucks” or “Rocks”.

My concern is that apparently it indexes Twitter in some way and automatically generates your “opinions” for you. I don’t know how it chooses which tweets to use to form your opinions, nor do I even know how it selects the specific people which it chooses to form (and announce) opinions for. I do know that, at least in my case, I didn’t choose to participate in or interact with this website.

It seems to take keywords from your tweets and then determines whether you think the subject of your tweet “sucks” or “rocks”. It then posts that to the world under the guise that these are YOUR opinions. It’s obviously a computer generating these because some of the “opinions” actually make no sense and it’s apparent that the “opinion” is out of context.

The peril in this is that, to someone who doesn’t actually analyze the opinions that were generated by a computer based on your tweets, they may just assume that these are, in fact, your opinions. If there’s a potential (or current) employer doing a little research on you for whatever reason, this could potentially harm you.

As an example, the Google Alert that returned this discovery to me shows the following (it even hijacked my photo):

So, apparently, I think the word “enough” rocks and that the Oscars and Toyota sucks.

Now we not only have to be careful about what we say, but also about how a computer would interpret it.

Here’s Looking At You, Kid! (Live Video Broadcast on Your Facebook Fan Page)

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Last night, I was introduced to a new app that is a “cloud-based, interactive, live video broadcast application” or, basically, an app that will allow you to stream live video right within your Facebook Fan Page.

A sales trainer could hold a live training session from within his (or her) Facebook Fan Page. Conferences could stream live video of sessions on their Fan Page. Dealerships could hold live video conversations with Facebook fans. An Internet Manager could actually work with a prospect this way. A vendor could have a presentation. I haven’t fully-digested creative applications for this new application but possibilities abound.

The company’s name is Vpype (I’m imagining it’s supposed to read V-Pipe) and this app is supposed to be as easy to start using as clicking a button within Facebook.

Here are some highlights of the application (from their Press Release dated January 21,2010):

  • create scheduled or unscheduled live shows
  • send video notes
  • store completed broadcasts with audience participation
  • share videos in Facebook
  • requires no software download
  • easy-to-view chat history
  • embeddable web video player
  • broadcast Tweet notifications
  • built-in viral marketing tools where you can promote your broadcasts through instant notifications to Facebook walls as well as broadcast alerts to Twitter
  • content automatically archived

Here’s a picture of the interface:

I know there are plenty of live video chat/broadcast companies out there, but I don’t think any of the other companies have a potential installed customer base starting at 400 million people (and growing by 1/2 million per day).

Most of the other live video broadcast applications require a software installation on the users end. While frequent users of a particular service may not mind this, the consumer that wants to talk about a car, see a sales training session or view a vendor presentation might not attend just because of this hurdle. (Hey, we all can’t be computer geeks, you know!)

Most people have Facebook accounts, however, and if you can connect with them and all they have to do is click a button within their Facebook account, the odds of them participating and listening to whatever you have to say increase exponentially.

People like easy.

Will Facebook Make Web Sites Obsolete?

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Facebook offers a simple to use, standardized user interface. It’s non-threatening, easy to use and easy to navigate. You can almost do anything on Facebook that you need.

“There’s an app for that!” may be Apple’s slogan but it certainly applies to Facebook.

Businesses are scrambling to set up Facebook Pages and integrate effective Social Media Marketing campaigns. Some of them are doing it because they realize the value and some are doing it because.. well, everyone else is.

Some statistics:

As of September 2009, there are 227 million internet users in the US (74% of the US population and the U.S. accounts for 13% of the world population of internet users). (link)

As of January 2010, there are 102 million Facebook users in the U.S. (or about ½ the population). (link)

Facebook is adding 50 million users every 90 days (537,634 per day). (link)

Keeping the increase in Facebook users at the same proportional level as the percentage of internet users (13%), that would mean that Facebook adds almost 70,000 users per day from within the U.S.

There are approximately 11,000 babies born in the U.S. everyday. (link)

You see where I’m going, don’t you?

Now, Facebook has decided that its user interface is so attractive to consumers that businesses will want to mimic the “Facebook experience” on their actual web site.

Facebook is launching a new API they call Open Graph.

This API will allow “any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page.”

Is this the start of a Web 2.0?

We already have many of the tools a dealership would need to effectively make this transition.

  1. You can have a “Page”.
  2. You can interact with your customers through Ads, News, Specials, etc. 
  3. You can have
    your inventory on your Facebook page now through Gumiyo and other providers. 
  4. You can have effective, professional looking ads and landing pages. 
  5. You have analytics and can drive customers to specific pages. 
  6. You can have live chat on your Facebook Page through ActivEngage. 
  7. There’s a Marketplace to buy and sell things (including cars). 
  8. There is now even a full-featured customer support center (ie. App) for use on your Facebook fan page now through Get Satisfaction.
  9. Everything (just about) interacts in some way with Facebook whether its pushing or pulling data (or both) through Facebook Connect or in some way (ie. Fan us on Facebook)

Why would businesses do this? Well, simply put, because that’s where the customers are.

People like simple. That’s why Apple’s products have been so popular. Sleek, minimalist, easy to use interfaces are attractive. Standardized web pages would certainly be attractive to consumers rather than hard to navigate websites that are “too busy” with all the widgets, gadgets, flash, and video.

The shift is taking place right under our noses. All spear-headed by Facebook.

Consumers are on Facebook. Business are getting on Facebook.The tools that you have available for your website are becoming available on Facebook. Facebook is creating an API allowing businesses to mimic the Facebook experience.  Businesses adopt the new API and make their websites look like Facebook.

Isn’t the next step for businesses just to get rid of their web sites all together and just have a Facebook page? I mean, why MIMIC a Facebook page when you can just HAVE one?

It’s a devious plan, and it’s already been set in motion.

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