Yesterday's episode of Auto Dealer Live had over 1,300 views from people who tuned in to watch a very spirited debate on direct mail! I was very glad to participate in this debate and share my $0.02 on the subject.
Didn't get a chance to follow along? Watch the video here!
Thanks to David Villa, and the other participants on a great chat! Thoughts? Leave them in the comments!
I'm super excited to be invited on Episode 308 of Auto Dealer Live! We'll be talking direct mail this Thursday 1/25. Pop over to the Auto Dealer Live Facebook page at 2:30 CST to tune in.
https://www.facebook.com/autodealerlive/?fref=mentions …
See you then!
Has your dealership website started looking like your messiest salesperson's desk? We've welcomed too many cooks into the kitchen online and our websites have become optimized for everyone BUT our customers.
Coming to Digital Dealer 24 this April in Orlando? Stop by and see my session, Just Who IS Your Website Designed for? Optimize Your Website for Your Customers While Keeping the Focus on Your Bottom Line on Tuesday 4/10 at 1:25pm.
See you at #DD24 !
![DD24 speaker email signature[2][1][1].png](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f0917ce4b0844ebbc5ced3/1516308545838-QRSVK7ESDHVQ9FRQKIL4/DD24+speaker+email+signature%5B2%5D%5B1%5D%5B1%5D.png)
For the last 4 years I've had the amazing privilege of riding in the Sunflowers to Roses charity bike tour. Benefitting Cancer Action, proceeds from the ride go towards supporting Kansas City area cancer patients. Each year my employer, Soave Automotive Group, has fielded both the largest team in terms of riders and the overall highest donation amount for a team.
This year I'm taking my commitment to S2R one step further. As of February, I was proud to join the board of directors for Sunflowers to Roses, with the specific purpose of using my digital marketing skills to grow the ride in both riders and dollars raised.
It's going to be a busy summer leading up to the ride, but we're on track for this S2R to be the best ever.
For personal and professional contacts willing to donate, you can checkout my donation page here.
It may seem odd for a professional who works almost entirely in digital media to need a break, but over the past months it's become more obvious that I need to disconnect. Rather than going to a beach somewhere I've decided to just take a 10-day vacation from social/digital mediums themselves. Hopefully by doing so, I can:
Prove Myself Wrong - Admittedly, I'm skeptical that I can even do this. With such an ingrained habit of checking social media and digital news during down time, I will be fighting my subconscious.
Reduce Negative Influences - Those hanging around Twitter lately can definitely relate that the platform has become a negative echo chamber following the election. While I definitely support the points of view, the constant flow of negative news outside my control has to be impacting me at some level. Hopefully taking a break can give me a more positive outlook.
Added Focus at Work - I've scheduled my media vacation during launch week for a new CRM system at our dealerships. The result of a year long evaluation and signup process, it's a critical week for work and focusing on the main thing should be the main thing.
Gauge Dependence - Since I've been immersed in the technology for so long, I'm not really sure how i'll handle it. Will I be craving it after 24 hours? Will I simply just miss it? We'll see soon!
Whether it gives me a temporary calm or long term piece of mind, who knows, but wish me luck!
It’s just after 5 in the evening as I right this ode to Wednesdays, one of my all-time favorite days of the week. Why do I love Wednesdays you ask? Well...
I intentionally keep Wednesdays completely meeting free. I have no regularly scheduled meetings, nor do I usually accept requests for meetings. Thus, it’s a day for non-stop grinding. With no meetings, Wednesday is a nuclear weapon to my to-do list.
While I don’t think the hustle should be limited to M-F and that weekends aren’t just for disconnecting, Wednesday does serve as a mid-week waypoint to evaluate how I’m doing on my weekly goals, and to recommit to accomplishing them by week’s end.
By keeping the day free to work and using it as a pause for reflection, Wednesday has become one of the best days of the week.
I'm not sure exactly how it happened but at some point in the last 10 years everyone became super busy. Maybe it's a combination of smartphones bringing work home with us or social media's intrusion into our personal time, but at some point everyone caught the disease of busy.
Look at your day, do you consider it to be "busy"? Now ask yourself to define that word.
What does "busy" mean to you? Does it mean that you have lots of meaningless meetings planned with no set agenda or assigned action items? Do you spend your day putting out fires and avoiding your goals? If this describes your definition of "busy", it's time to get cured.
Busy is an excuse. It's a veiled attempt to sell others that you are working really hard, but in reality is your defense mechanism to avoid being open to new projects and opportunities. It's a way for you to avoid confronting your real problems of poor time management and fear of new opportunities.
Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Pharrell, these are all highly productive people who could legitimately considered busy. Do you think you're busier than they are? Or are you just filling your time.
Like any disease, you cannot be cured unless you admit that you have it. While the tips below represent ways to begin your fight for productivity, none of them will help if you don't take step one:
Admit that you aren't busy.
Once you've admitted it, the road to busy-ness recovery starts here. Here are some steps to begin life as your new not-busy self:
These are just a couple examples, but will set you down the path to be less busy. That said, none of them will help unless you admit you've caught the disease of busy.
In a fast paced work environment it can often times be easier to take care of an issue or unrelated task rather than rely on others. I've found that I take on such tasks myself for one of two reasons: I'm either worried that it won't be done as well as I think I would do it, or training someone else to fix it would take much longer than if I did it myself.
Get Over Yourself!
The belief that you're the only one who can do something the right way is the first step in developing contempt for your coworkers and team. The first step towards showing a co-worker that you trust them is to give them an added responsibility or duty. The next item you delegate may be the next time you discover that one of your team is much better at that type of task than you.
Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing
By inundating ourselves in minutiae we lose sight of the primary projects and goals we are constantly working towards. By shifting focus to do an unrelated item, we may "save" the time it would take to train someone, but we mortgage our future deadlines in exchange.
Give Yourself Confidence
There are lots of managers that are scared to take a day off (let alone a vacation) because they are afraid of what will happen in their absence. Most of these concerns center around their fears that the team will be unproductive or that a problem will arise that only they can handle. By delegating issues regularly on days when you are in the office, you'll give yourself more confidence and piece of mind on the days you aren't.
Start Small
If the concept of delegation scares you, start with a smaller and frequently occurring item, like running a report. As you develop more comfort with delegation, gradually increase the size and complexity of the task.
Check In
Follow up with the team member you delegated to. Ask for feedback and de-construct how they did it, offering feedback when needed. Avoid being critical or commenting on how you would do it, and let them find their own ways to get the item done.
While those are just a few tips on delegation for beginners, it's important for managers to recognize that the avoidance of delegation can cause major projects to fall by the wayside and can have a disastrous impact on employee engagement. By becoming more comfortable with delegation, managers can give more attention to goals and give greater empowerment to their teams to grow and succeed.
At one point email was heralded as a modern miracle. The ability to instantly communicate without a phone call had the promise of improving personal effectiveness. Fast forward 20+ years later and for many email represents their largest daily headache. Managers can feel as though email represents a constant obligation and a never-ending to-do list. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be so, using these handy tips:
By using these three tips, you can cut down on your attachment to your inbox and free up more time to be productive. Have other great tips? Post them in the comments below!
With a massive consumer shift in mobile usage the battleground for email marketing has shifted from the desk to the palm. With more consumer checking email on mobile devices, it's critical that marketers shift their strategy to optimize for smaller devices and quicker decisions.
These few tips can dramatically improve the success of your email campaigns in the hands of the mobile shopper:
While there are many more ways to optimize your emails for mobile, the steps above can help you increase results with your mobile customer!
In recent years the topic of talent acquisition has been a major one in the retail automotive business. Dealers are scrambling to attract new employees and convince younger applicants that the car business isn't as slimy as some stereotypes would have them believe. Here are some tips to attracting and hiring workers that will provide long term success for your organization.
By following these key points you can hire new employees for success!
In a busy work environment it can be easy to get into work with the best possible intentions and leave having accomplished none of the things you set out to do including work on longer term projects. I've found that these few tricks below have kept me on track and allowed me to better focus my time.
Start Right
The way you start your day will determine your momentum for the rest of it. When I get into the office, the first things I do are:
Do you notice what's missing? Email. I take a much different approach to email management.
Email Management
As I noticed I don't check email first in the AM. Here's my rules for email to keep it from killing my productivity:
Avoid Meaningless Meetings
There is a tendency in the workplace to try and attend every single meeting so you don't miss out or are in the loop on everything. The second I adopted a policy of only value added meetings, I added 4 hours to my weekly special. Plus, people call me all the time to pop into those old meetings if they have something relevant to me.
While there are lots of other little things that get me through the day in a productive way, those three main concepts have greatly improved my effectiveness and reduced anxiety.
What do you do to stay in your lane?
With the 2017 North American International Auto Show came a focused discussion on both the success of shared car services like Uber and autonomous vehicles, two areas that seem destined to combine at some point in the not-so-distant future.
Caddilac revealed the creation of Book, a subscription service allowing a customer to pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited use of the automaker's lineup. Ford's Chairman Bill Ford remarked that shared services could provide a revenue stream "Unlike they have seen". Add that to GM's sizable investment in Lyft and it's clear that automakers are hedging their bets on a shared vehicle future.
All of this is leading to claims that OEMs are planning products and services that are in direct competition with the current retail sales model, a prospect that concerns many of their franchised dealers.
Rather than face massive revolt later, manufacturers can start by including their dealers now. Here are some ideas...
Dealerships as Sign-Up Centers:
While the telecom industry is a mobile focused area, in person stores are still utilized to give subscribers a place to experience the products and sign up for service. Creating a plan for utilizing the existing footprint will give dealers a share in the future (when paired with incentives for subscriptions).
Dealerships as Service Centers
This idea may be a little obvious as Dealerships already represent the service network for existing OEMs, but there are steps that can be taken now to prepare them for the change in customer expectations. Planning for vehicles that drive themselves into the dealership for work and how to manage that business is one step and developing methods to replace down subscription vehicles is another. Service departments will also have to plan on how to expedite service on these vehicles as they will be in more frequently and excessive downtime will impact profitability of the subscription model.
The Pre-Owned Problem
Witt shared efficiency and autonomy, vehicles will be constantly transporting customers to and from their destinations with minimal downtime. This means that vehicles will accumulate mileage extremely quickly and exceeding the markets current definition of average miles. This will create a huge supply of hike mileage late model cars that Dealerships can help with via used car operations.
There is no doubt that self-driving cars and subscription services are going to change how consumers use vehicles in the future and how smoothly automakers integrate their current dealer network will likely determine the winners and losers of this new frontier.
We've all been there, staring at a car that several months ago seemed like the perfect acquisition, with a great profit potential and the promise of a short lot life.
Now look at it, 100+ days old, with not a crack of the door by a prospective buyer. The time has taken its toll with a film of dirt and failure that's causing your sales team to ignore it completely.
Here are just a few things you can do to re-merchandise the car and put a renewed focus on getting it sold:
If none of these have an impact, auction may be the way to go. That said, these added steps may help save a few good cars for a great new home.
Probably the single most important skill I've picked up over the last few years is how to be good at taking bad news. This single skill has reduced my workplace stress, made me a more effective manager, and kept me more focused on major projects thhen temporary distractions. While I'm still perfecting this skill, here are some thing I do to improve my ability to take bad news:
Take a Minute to Process
Chances are that if you're hearing a bit of bad news that it's unexpected. The 5 minutes after hearing the news will completely set the tone for how you handle the situation. So, take a moment to breathe, process the info, and ask questions for more detail.
If you can do something about it, don't worry about it.
If it's something that is within your power to fix, find comfort in that simple fact. While you may not have a solution right away, knowing you'll eventually find one can provide immediate calm.
If you can't do something about it, don't worry about it!
If it's something you can't control, you've got a choice here: You can let it completely ruin your day or work process, or you can suck it up and keep going. Don't waste your time worrying about something you can't control.
Be the Calm
Your team is going to look at you for leadership during crisis, so it's important to broadcast a calm demeanor and avoid causing alarm or stirring the pot. The second your team sees you complain, the second that it becomes part of the culture.
Work it Backwards
If it's a problem that can be solved, take a methodical approach and avoid jumping to gut conclusions. Work it slowly and from a perspective of future prevention.
By becoming a better handler of difficult news you'll be able to keep your team running smoothly and reduce your own stress levels
What do you do to take bad news well?
For marketers that manage dealer groups with multiple franchises, or even those who only have a single brand represented, it can be hard to balance our own campaigns and initiatives with those proposed by our OEMs. Whether it's new prospect process adjustments, website guidelines, or marketing adjustments, it can feel like we're hampered or downright weakened by directives from the manufacturer.
By following a few guidelines we can manage that stress and do our best to make the best of our relationships.
Staying open, measuring outcomes, and communication can all help reduce your stress levels when implementing new OEM programs and allow you to have a more meaningful communication process with your brands.
Anyone out there managing their business's reputation knows that monitoring reviews can be exhausting and that finding the perfect way to answer each one can be mind numbing. Here's a short and helpful guide to responses.
That's it! By following the above guidelines you should be able to handle most negative reviews in a professional way that allows you to solve customer problems. I've listed a template below for a final example:
NAME, we're very sorry to hear about your experience with us. A member of our team will be reaching out [or/ from your review we can't determine your contact info. Please contact me directly at #] for more information to resolve the situation and to learn where we could improve. We really appreciate your time to let us know.
Best of Luck!
This year the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas once again broke attendance records for a convention / trade show. Additionally, while many automakers and suppliers were gearing up for the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), they also hosted simultaneous booths at the consumer trade show. This represents a continued belief that automakers need to match consumer demand for more tech-forward vehicles.
While this doubling-down on consumer tech doesn't guarantee that all of these concepts will make a difference on the retail auto industry, it's important that dealers be aware of these trends and plan accordingly. Some of the major trends this year at CES included:
Autonomous: While we're some years away from fully autonomous vehicles roaming the roads, CES 2017 had an eye towards what technology is ready now, including semi autonomous features. Does your sales and delivery staff know what features are equipped now? Do they know how to demonstrate these features, like autonomous braking and self-parking, to consumers? Does service know how to differentiate between something being broken and a poorly trained consumer? Getting your staff ready to review what capabilities do exist can create a more progressive look for your store and protect against untrained consumers.
Connected: Infotainments systems are nothing new, but each year brings more advanced systems to the new vehicle lineup. Are we reviewing year to year changes with sales associates, including model specific technologies? Are we fully explaining to consumers the proper way to setup these devices, including the myriad of subscription services often required to make them function fully? Part of the reason that Tesla has become a consumer darling is that it's owners are very well trained on how to use and explain what makes their vehicle advanced and different.
Virtual Reality: With Samsung announcing that it has 5 million of its GearVR headsets already in the market, it appears that VR is becoming a more mainstream trend. While it's not necessarily clear that this will have an immediate impact on the dealership, we already know that 1/3 consumers would buy a car without a test drive, so we should consider how the model changes when consumers can "test drive" a car in the comfort of their own home.
There were many additional trends (drones, wearables, etc.) and many more to come, which is why it's important that the retail auto industry keep our eyes open on them and plan for how these developments will impact our business going forward.
If you knew exactly what a customer was going to ask prior to coming in to your business, you'd plan for that occasion. right? If doing just that is so easy, why do customer facing employees fumble common questions asked by new customers?
By creating a list of frequently asked questions, you can make sure you have the perfect answer to each questions assembled ahead of time to provide the highest levels of service to you customers. Here's how to get started:
Most companies miss objectives or create customer issues through a lack of planning and communication. By planning how we communicate through a simple FAQ guide we can reduce the frequency of these occasions.
Fresh powder is usually the last thing an auto dealer wants to see. Traffic drops, the lot becomes a mess, and a large portion of the staff can't make it in. What if we thought about snow days differently? What if we used them to our advantage?
Have a snow day campaign saved in your CRM ready to go. That way you can just click send while you watch the traffic and weather segments on TV.
Ensure you're using a CRM system with a mobile app or the ability to access from home. That way even your team members who can't make it in will be able to get follow up done.
Make sure whoever you have doing lead response is ready to surprise customers with a quick answer. The couch-stranded customer will be impressed and likely to continue dialogue.
For the sales / BDC staff that does make it to work consider having them inside and making calls while other support employees (or you) focus on getting unburied.
Make a focus to load up your appointments for once the snow clears. Consider adding a BDC or sales contest for whomever sets the most appointments that day. Execute this right and it will be like the weather never happened.
Snow sucks for dealerships and we all know it, but how you prepare and execute a snow event can be the difference between missed forecasts and your best January ever.
