Old Habits Die Hard

Recently an internet manager posted a discussion asking about looking for “silver bullet” solutions to bring in more business.  I shared some of my thoughts in that discussion, and share them here on my blog too.

Every sales professional knows the secrets to success. Work the process, keep in touch with customers, treat them right and work the referrals.   It’s the great abundance of amateurs in our industry who are looking for the “easy” solution, the short term fix, and we all know who they are too. Joe Webb has cleverly highlighted them in his videos. While we get a kick from the videos, we know that many dealerships still operate “old school style” and employ “put ‘em in a car today” people.

There are many “silver bullets” available to improve sales, profits, and retain solid sales performers.  Unfortunately many General Managers and Sales Managers don’t have the courage to put the bullet in the gun and pull the trigger. It’s just too big a leap of faith. They would rather keep on doing what they are comfortable doing.  Essentially they are scared to death of change, and while we have lots of change advocates at lower levels in the dealerships they have no authority to make the change decisions. So instead we choose to do what makes us comfortable.

This was made evident by a recent medical finding. The study followed 200 men who had life threatening heart attacks. Yep, they came within seconds or minutes of leaving this earth. They were counseled on making lifestyle and dietary changes and told if they failed to do this . . . they would die from a future heart attack. So how many changed their ways when faced with death?  90% made no changes whatsoever! They knew they needed to make a change, but it was so far from what they were doing for years, that they could not break their ingrained habits.  Change isn’t easy.

This in a nutshell is a major stumbling block for our industry and the reason we haven’t made real progress in 50 years. We have lost a few thousand dealerships over the last year, and many were good hard working people, who did not deserve their fate. More are on the death watch now; Saturn, Hummer, Pontiac and Saab dealers will no longer exist. You would think this would serve as a strong wakeup call to the remaining dealers that they need to change or die.

You and others are on the money when you say it is a people business. We somehow have forgotten that, and now with the Internet and social media exploding a dealer or sales professional’s sins are all over the web. Many of us saw that reputation management and review and ratings sites would be the game changer for our industry. Now we are seeing and hearing about it every day.

I just spoke with an Internet Manager in Birmingham, AL who told me one of his customers drove 3 hours to his store, because this customer saw a number of bad reviews about their local dealer and chose not to do business with them. Dealerships that think bad reviews online aren’t impacting their business are totally in denial.

Recognizing online reputation is important, it is time for dealers to be proactive and start building and protecting their online reputations, and start re-connecting with their customers. One way to do this is to start pulling the trigger on some of those silver bullets.  Here are some places to start:

• Use your CRM tool every day to keep in touch with customers and prospects
• Monitor reviews of your dealership and your competitors
• Sign up for reputation building sites like www.carfolks.com (individual sales professional pages are free)
• Give every customer a great buying experience
• Try to clean up all the junk on your website’s home page.
• Don’t waste time on facebook, myspace or twitter unless every salesperson in your store is selling 15+ vehicles a month
• Don’t waste time putting up dealership community sites, unless every salesperson in your store is already selling 20+ cars every month.

If you implement these few initiatives you will see results!

Mark R. Dubis