If a dealer is looking for a hard number on the ROI of Social Media they may never find it.

The challenge facing dealers is finding a software product that can manage the growing number of sites with the ability to manage discussions and campaigns for multiple brands over many roof-tops.

Let me introduce Social CRM – the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with a goal of building trust and brand loyalty. A new breed of software which enables a company, franchise or dealer group the ability to manage, monitor and measure Social Media and Reputation web sites. As well as organize personnel, task management, communication and reporting.

Dealer principals or their management team putting off establishing social media strategies will be detrimental for a number of reasons.

Data indicates each day more time is spent online and less time is being spent on traditional media. A strong presence online certainly means more coverage. Many dealers are moving their advertisement budget money to online methods of advertisement and social media.

Using email as a method of advertising is losing strength. Effective email usage is to move along a conversation not to strike up conversation. Junk email is almost as bad today as junk mail.

Trending today are reputation sites which empowers each person that touches your dealership with a voice. A voice, that could either influence many future sales for your dealership or a voice that could lambaste your sales agent that was rude or abstinent in his sale pitch.

Many social media sites are free and can give dealerships a sound platform to advertise, engage and correspond with its prospects and customer base. Dealers need to know that software can help them manage the enormous task of handling the growing number of sites.

Ignoring Social Media today will have the same impact on dealers that resisted launching their own web sites almost a decade ago if not more.

A new breed of software has evolved the Social CRM software. Look to these providers to guide your dealership with a solid Social Media initiative. When looking to hire a consultant or firm they should guide by providing a first step – define measurable Social CRM goals, then workout an action plan for achieving these goals, execute the plan and quantify the business benefits arising out it.

This forms the basis for calculating Social CRM ROI and remember, not Social Media ROI.

Eugene Gonzales
Social CRM Software Boarding Technician
DealerClickZ Software and Services

DealerClickZ software enables dealerships and DealerClickZ to work together to not only create social media properties but to schedule and disburse social media content from a single interface. We can have a four months Social Media content created and scheduled for the dealership. It may include new product roll-out’s, tent sales or service offerings all departments. Our software enables a dealership to see their entire social graph from a single interface. That is just the start, DealerClickZ can nurture all of the sites for the dealership and then use the software as a communication tool to manage communication between the customer, DealerClickZ support staff and dealership for a seamless solution. We not only listen to social media site but also dealer rating sites to manage the dealers online reputation. Mr. Gonzales went on to say.

DealerClickZ software is a SaaS software as a service model that can be accessed from most browsers. They offer web site monitoring and a CRM package to their offerings. The latest numbers indicate that over 80% of all vehicle sales cycles begin on the internet with over 90% of vehicle purchase buyer’s research the internet during the car buying process.

Much is being written about so called Social Media experts, in my opinion Social Media is fluid much like computer science, it’s evolving like Moore’s law that states that integrated circuits double every two years, social media’s landscape will change over the years to come, users may change properties but the numbers of social media users will grow for some time. We experienced the growth and maturity of dealerships using web sites to sell car’s and the troubles dealers have with managing email leads. SocialCRM is perfect for outsourcing dealers need help fielding or listening to social sites for potential buyers.

More dealers are shifting their advertising budget to online methods. The social media graph has become the key component to SEO or Search Engine optimization and this service certainly will help dealers address that need also. DealerClickZ is a platform which dealers can stay in touch with their customer base and nurture potential customers during their online car buying experience. Smart dealers will leverage Social Media not hide from it, it’s going to grow in strength as people share with on another online.

Social media sites are growing in number and in membership. Their impact on your dealerships bottom line should be taken seriously and addressed immediately. Failure to do so will cost you real money now and more into the future.

Social media sites are the new water cooler the new gas station for the dealers to gain a reputation in the community. Online reputation is key to a dealers success, they should be aware of and know how to handle negative feedback quickly and efficiently on all of the dealer rating sites. If your dealerships sales numbers have been sliding lately take a look at your online reputation this may be a enlightened event.

Become active on the top 10 social media sites, know what your reputation is on the 15 or so dealer reputation sites. Create a buzz for your dealerships and become proactive by reaching out to those in your market area, grow a fan base.

If you don’t have the time, outsource to a company that knows the automotive industry. One such company launching in 2012 is DealerClickZ a California start-up positioned to make wave in 2012.

They provide a service from their web site http://www.dealerclickz.com which their own personnel will map out your social media plan mapped out for the dealership months in advance with your approval. Also with the service they will listen and interact with the social media community on your behalf, dealerships will only need to respond to elevated events to insure a personable experience. Software is fully contained in a web browser for easy access and is complete with an easy to understand dashboard and reports section that quantifies the return on investment of the system.

This company is worth a look for those dealerships that want to jump into social media to sell more cars.

Becoming a Tactical Seller, the secret to giving yourself a Pay raise anytime you want!

It is no secret that we are all experiencing some difficult times in our respective economies and that these times are causing many in the automobile industry to question their career paths. However, even in these challenging times, there are those that continue to flourish because they seem to know something that many or their counterparts do not. These individuals continue to give themselves pay raises every month and every year. They have figured out some time ago that they have to make up in volume what they lack in skill or make up in skill what they lack in volume.

For decades we have known that the majority of those selling on the frontlines of automobile dealerships have lacked the necessary skills that they need to be effective, but due to the abundance of prospects that used to walk through the doors, this issue was continually ignored. Today it is common place to see these salespeople jumping from dealership to dealership chasing the hot product or compensation plan to compensate for the roller coaster effect in their income. This unfortunate reality is one of the symptoms of an individual that lacks the knowledge of how to effectively build a book of business or create a customer following. The irony is that many of these salespeople will boast about having a significant amount of years in the business simply because they lacked the formal education and skills. It’s seems that it’s Reckoning time!

The key to not just surviving in these challenging times, but to flourish is to become a tactical seller, to go on the offense by being proactive instead of standing around waiting for prospects, which is being reactive. These individuals who have gone on the offense have learned not only to sell professionally, but to sell differently and become proficient in packaging their offering in different combinations so as to appeal to each buyer uniquely. They have modified their selling style and their processes because they have accepted the fact that consumers have access to more information than ever before to include invoices, incentives and so on. They have come to terms with the fact that their customers prefer to negotiate from the bottom up, not the other way around, so they have redefined their strategy to increase their gross margins and therefore increase their personal income. In addition, as tactical sellers, these professionals realize that it’s futile not to give the client exactly what they want, so consequently they spend a good amount time building value and cultivating the relationships in order to position themselves as the expert when making buying recommendations.

It is important to note that the fundamental value to selling accessories is that they have no published invoice price, and like art or fine jewelry, the perceived value to the consumer rests in the seller’s ability to articulate and transfer the benefits of ownership though a proper presentation. The tactical seller knows this and through a proper needs analysis, they are able to identify potential opportunities before they begin to make a presentation. These add-ons are introduced by the tactical seller earlier in the selling process and they are able to demonstrate and present the accessories as a must-have instead of a should-have. The difference here is that most salespeople discuss accessories as an afterthought where their “oh by the way” approach diminishes the value and importance causing it to be perceived as unnecessary.
With that being said, here are a few things that you can do as a salesperson to up your game so that you can join these selling professionals who are currently flourishing in these difficult times.

This is tactical selling at its best, and is a strategy that anyone can use to give themselves a pay raise today!

Author, Kurtis Smith is founder and president of the Kmethod Group, an online training solution that meets the ever growing need of continual sales training. For more information on Kurts and his services and products please follow the links below.

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The challenge is that the Internet not only modified how we sell cars, it totally destroyed it! It disrupted our approach to creating gross profit and exposed our internal processes to scrutiny that no other industry has experienced before. But more important than that, because we use to operate as a microcosm where we made up our own rules to include tailoring the job description of those that sold our product, it was easy to hide their flaws under layers of floor managers and closers. Inexpensive newspaper advertising, inappropriate commercials and other gimmicky campaigns were used to get the prospects to the lot for our people to do their jobs, however when the Internet came on line, it changed everything. Dealerships were no longer the destination for all things in the buying process and without notice what use to work was no more. So what do you do with a sales team that was always taught to keep your eyes on the lot and wait for the next up? Or more importantly, what do you do if you are a struggling dealer with lots of inventory and a staff of individuals that only knows how to stand around and wait for their ‘up’ to show up? In this case, you re-invent the wheel, that’s what you do.

If you step away from the table and look at the sales process, what you will see is that it is linear, where there is a starting point and a finishing point and both ends are properly defined. This explains why salespeople are struggling and why the Internet has disrupted the dealership’s sales process to the extent that it has. Stay with me…because most sales managers focus on the part of the sales process they can see, like the prospect coming onto the sales lot as an opportunity to close a sale today, they scrutinize and emphasize all the steps involve in that onsite client interaction (the road to the sale). However, when it comes to all of the other activities that cause the client to return or send referrals, in most cases they are silent because these activities are so ambiguous that they could not be measured in order to be duplicated. The reason that this is so critical for you to comprehend is that by introducing two new processes to the mix, (Business Development & Customer Relationship Management) it will close the loop by transforming the sales process from the linear, start at the meet and end at the close, to a circular motion where once a prospect enters the system, they never fall out.

Teach a man how to fish and he will always eat….
By redefining the role of the selling professional, we will be able to take into account all the variables that we now have to deal with.
By defining the job functions as Build, Maintain and Manage a book of business, we will then be able to outline the things that they will need to know in order to be effective at this new role.

A book of business refers to the customer database, and although the business owns the data, the salesperson has a symbiotic relationship with the clients that they sell to thus making them a joint owner of that data. I know that this statement may not be popular, but if you think about it, people do not do business with an entity, they connect with and do business with people that work within that entity. This is why you cannot remove the salesperson from the solution and then generate sustainable results. So by teaching them how Build a book of business, they will know how to generate their own lead sources, they will be able to actively engage in relationship building activities, expand their sphere of influence and connect with past clients to ensure that they remain in the fold. By teaching them how to Maintain a book of business they will be able to actively engage with clients to sustain the relationships during long and short selling cycles as well as throughout the entire relationship life cycle. And by teaching them how to Manage a book of business means that they will know how to leverage the use of technology to include CRM software to sustain all the activities that are needed to grow a vibrant and profitable book of business. But even more important than all these is the fact that managers will finally have a process to manage instead of trying to manage the person.

So right around now you might be saying that all this sounds great in theory but how do you teach salespeople to do all this? That’s a great question, but you will have to wait until next time as the thing that you need to wrap your head around now is that all roads do lead to Rome and all the programs that the business engages in to generate traffic from SEO, to BDC centers to text messaging, to whatever, still directs the prospects to a salesperson to convert. So if their ratios cannot be quantified and if systems are not in place to address the findings, then spending more money on lead generation is just like burning money!

Kurtis Smith, President and Founder of the KMethod Group and Author of Lessons from the Concrete Garden

The irony of his passing was it came hours after Apple disappointed many by not releasing; in name only really, the iPhone5. The iPhone4s release actually caused Apple stock to fall. I for one watched what I thought would be the launching of the iPhone5 and had a hard time with the name. Why didn’t they just name it the iPhone5? The phone is completely new with some very slick and ground breaking features. Perhaps the S will stand for Steve. Hopefully this is not the first sign that Apple implode without his direction? I hope not, Apple’s products bring art to computing and raise the bar on usability. It would have taken a 20 k investment in Apple stock just about ten years ago to make someone financially independent today. He will be missed that is for sure. God Speed, Mr. Jobs

In his own words:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

Last night I saw the movie “Moneyball” and it made such an impression that I believed I shed a tear once or twice during the movie. My wife says that the older I get, the mushier I become and so I’m sticking to that as my reason for being emotionalJ. The movie was about the Oakland A’s baseball team and its General Managers who was given the impossible task of rebuilding the team with a budget that was less than half that of the competition. Although on the surface it seemed like an impossible mission, especially with the experts and their years of experience telling him that it could not be done. However, as fate would have it, the GM found an assistant that had an unconventional approach to picking players that destroyed the paradigms of the experts and those that were institutionalized by the system and with this new approach changed the game forever.

What struck a chord in me were the similarities between that story and its players and the retail automotive industry and its dealers at this junction in time. We as an industry are in the process of re-inventing ourselves form the ground up to include how our products are made to how they are sold. In the movie, the “experts” continually reasoned that their years of experience and instinct was much more important and valuable than data the GM’s used to measure a players true worth to the team. With that being said, because we as leaders, managers and solution providers look to “experts” for answers and we use time as a measure of someone’s experience, I am curious to know how you define experience for our business model. Is it years of doing the same thing over and over again? Or is it the demonstration of their evolution and ability to adapt, improvise when necessary and rebuild from scratch when they had to? The reason this question is relevant and so important is that the information and mindset that got us to this point is not capable of getting us to the next stage of our evolution and unfortunately most experts are still relying on what use to be and using deflection and misdirection to support the recommendation.

The harsh reality is that the industry is not changing, it has already changed and our approach to leading, managing and even selling has to change as well, so just like the Oakland A’s GM who had to find new ways of evaluating and attracting talent, we need to look at the real reason that dealerships are not selling cars and fix that first before more resources are spent on client generating programs. Its time to acknowledge that salespeople are the only ones that are face to face with the prospects, getting them to say yes or causing them to say no and consequently are at the center of the business development process.  Do managers know the numbers? I mean the current ratios of those that sell the product; do they know what the suspect-to-prospect to pipeline then to sold customer to returning customer ratios are? Do they know the activities or the specific areas of the salespersons skill needs to be improved? Do they have access to the educational tools that are needed to cause the improvement to take place? Or do they still believe if they put up a big tent and advertise more, the prospects will come?

Are we still behaving as a “wandering generality?” –  Constantly being distracted by flashy lights, bright colors of the sales materials and ideas that promise results without work and without paying the price? Or, are we ready to become a “meaningful specific?” – Focused on demanding measurable results from the activities and solutions that drive business? Are we willing to ask the tough questions and demand process based solutions in the areas of selling and business development training or do we still believe that because the trainer is famous or works for a brand name company they must know what they are doing. Are you a wondering generality or a meaningful specific?

About the Author:

Kurtis Smith is the founder and President of the K-method group an online sales training solution geared to teach salespeople on how to build, maintain and manage a book of business with step by step instructions to do their jobs effectively and become more successful.  Please visit the   K Method group for more information.

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