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Some of us who have been at this thing called the Internet & effective dealership sales process for a decade or more are tired of tech vendor hype.
Since when does the neatest "Gee-whiz! Made them look." tech product sell cars? Not in any dealership I've ever seen.
And not to pick on anyone (the following vendors included), but in the past week, I've had dealers tell me these exact quotes:
- "I'm spending $4,000 / mo on my BZ Results contract and I'm barely selling any cars from it, yet others are."
- "I spent $3,990 last month on leads and only sold 4 cars from them. The other 4 I sold came from AutoTrader and now my dealer wants to cut that."
As someone who has been the General Manager and CFO of dealerships, I remain completely underwhelmed by and share your frustration from such results. That is a lot of hard work and expense for paltry results.
If I were a dealer and my showroom had metrics like that, I'd have shut my doors a long time ago.
Questions I keep asking myself are:
- Why is efficient, profitable Internet execution so hard?
- How profitable are these e-Dealers I keep reading about? Are they giving away all gross just to steal my volume?
- And more concerning, since clearly almost all of my consumers are on the Internet and are at least being influenced by it, where is this going and what can I do about it?
Hence most dealer's torment about the Internet. There are exceptions, but many are stuck between a rock (unprofitable results, inefficient efforts) and a hard place (consumers are there + others are taking their volume).
I'm a tech vendor and in the spirit of honesty, there are no easy answers. As a dealer, you can't save or spend your way to profitable success on the Internet.
Any technology without decent process, management and financial support, systems and properly qualified and trained people is not going to produce a positive ROI.
As Michael Dell once said "The Internet is NOT going away, but flawed business models are."
Now in the second column of this email, I'll actually try to be helpful. |
To get a different result here means you can't refuse to do R&D by experimenting, managing and studying what works.
Hopefully you are not making traditional mistakes like holding your Internet operation to higher standards than you hold your showroom operation (i.e. how accountable are they for their advertising effectiveness?)
And you certainly can't do it by giving a salesperson or marketing manager an activity or gross/volume based pay plan, then saddle them with all administration work required to execute on the Internet. They starve or leave or when the results don't mgically appear, you fire them putting you right back at square one - frustrated.
Consumers buy cars from people and organizations they like and trust. No technology is ever going to change that. How does your Internet operation look through that lens?
Personally I believe dealers will figure out the Internet. To me it currently represents their single greatest threat and opportunity.
At Ai-Dealer we have specifically crafted our product to give dealers a new strategy they did not have before:
- a hybrid model for dealers to obtain true eCommerce.
- We call it a hybrid model since by marketing "the only complete online shopping experience" then requiring the consumer to verify their email in order to enter, the dealership gets the selling opportunity whether the consumer buys direct from the dealer using the system (eCommerce) or stops part way through (idle shopping carts).
- A car is not a book and the unsolds deserve the extra attention, especially since dealers already have operations set up to do that.
But I didn't write this as an infomercial. Either your dealership has pain here or it doesn't. Either it is commited to figuring out what is effective and profitable on the Internet or it is not.
Maybe your dealer has enough money that he isn't worried about the erosion of his store's profitability from the Internet.
Maybe everyone involved in your Internet operation is so busy in their daily routine of "doing" that you don't feel you can look at one more thing.
If it were me and I was a dealer, I'd at least take 5 minutes out of my day to think about it. Okay, maybe 6 minutes, but I'd at least hold myself accountable to asking the difficult questions even if I don't like my current answers. |
