Articles: Marketing & Sales

Put it in Neon Lights and Watch Your Sales Heat Up!

Jack Lintol is the Chief Operating Officer for Auto Credit Express (ACE), Sub Prime experts who help dealers satisfy the need of Sub Prime consumers through their Training, Traffic and Technology products. ACE's senior management team has delivered tens of thousand of Sub Prime deals since the early 1990's. ACE has helped dealers across the country get into the Sub Prime business or improve their existing Sub Prime business ultimately increasing car sales and profits. Jack can be reached at (248) 370-6658.

Do you want a successful sub prime department in your dealership? Kind of a silly question, of course you do. Are you willing to do what it takes to get there? This is easy to answer, but not as easy to carry out each and every day. Why? Because it takes consistent execution, which is tough when you are running a complex and ever changing business. There are many important points to executing a successful sub prime department, let's hit on one key item today - ensuring your marketing and advertising investment is giving you the return you want. That's right I said investment. To make your marketing and advertising dollars work you need to treat it as an investment, not an expense. There are many key steps to investing, lets take a close look at the most critical ones when it comes to marketing and advertising:

What are you trying to accomplish?

Are you trying to brand the dealership and make your name well known or are you trying to sell more cars? Most folks will say both, but then focus on selling more cars. If you are really striving for brand and name recognition, then you have to consider the entire dealership's plan for branding. This is very complex and includes more than just spending money on the internet, newspaper, television and radio. It includes how your dealership looks, how it operates, how your salespeople handle customers, whether you can help every customer that walks through your door, whether you answer your phone in three rings or less, etc. You will want to coordinate the message and action plan in all the things you do at the dealership. Also, branding and name recognition is much harder to track and is never ending. For this article we will focus on selling more cars.

Selling more cars is easier to track and you know very quickly whether your advertising investment is working or not. Each time you approach a new a marketing or advertising campaign you need to clearly determine what you are trying to accomplish, write it down and track it. To state a goal and then just see if it happens by the end of the month without tracking it daily will result in missed goals and disappointing results. Tracking is as important as the process you have in place to sell cars.

The people involved in helping you achieve your goals for this advertising investment need to be involved in setting the goals. This will ensure they are bought in and eliminate any excuses that "you set the process and goals, not me." If possible break it up by person and track it individually. Everyone should know what the goal is and where you stand against the goal at all times.

Include relevant team members in the goal setting process.

Are you more motivated to do things when the boss is busting your chops to hit a number or when you have been part of setting the goals and process, know what the expectations are and believe you have some control over your own destiny? Of course it's the latter.

Since everyone is hot on leads we will focus on sub prime internet leads as our advertising investment. I know most folks track closing percentages to judge whether or not the leads are working and that is good, but is it telling us the whole story? No. We need to ensure we track all the critical steps in the process for all who are performing them. You have to ask yourself who is involved in your process and what are they responsible for. If you are handling the whole process yourself you should still do this. You may be handing out leads to your salespeople and expecting them to call, set appointments, ensure those appointments show and close the deals. If that is your process you need to commit to them how many leads you will get them. Then the salespeople need to commit how many appointments they will set, how many will show and how many cars they will sell from those leads. If you are responsible for calling all the leads then you need to commit to how many appointments you will set and how many will show. Then the salesperson needs to commit to how many cars they will sell from the appointments that show. I think you get the drift. Whoever is responsible for the respective sales "gate" should commit to the goal for that gate.

How will you track that accomplishment?

Once you have determined who is doing what in your process you have to set a method to track whether everyone is doing what they need to do to hit their and the team's goal. The tracking should be where everyone can see it, on a whiteboard that gets updated everyday. In our business we have a daily meeting that lasts 10 -15 minutes where all the salespeople come to update the "Board". It is affectionately called the "2:10", because we have it at 2:10 everyday, come hell or high water. Our salespeople set their goals at the beginning of the month and we report daily on where they are with their "critical" numbers. This is done on a giant whiteboard that everyone in the company can and does see. Since we have been doing this our sales have gone up, no surprise in that is there? We measure it and we manage it. This is exactly what you need to do to ensure your marketing and advertising investment pays off.

Let's take a look at how you could do this at your dealership:


Put this where everyone can see it and have a meeting daily to update the board. You will be amazed how it gets you to focus on where the problems are as opposed to just thinking that the leads aren't working. You will be able to clearly diagnose what needs to be adjusted. The last very important piece to ensuring you get the most out of your investment is to know who you are dealing with.

Check Out Your Advertising Source

Do your homework. With Special Finance Internet Leads you really need to check out whether the company you do business with is a lead "Generator" or a lead "Supplier". What is the difference? A "Generator" actually generates the leads they sell you. They will be able to show you where they are positioned on the search engines, directories and other places on the internet. You should be able to go out and type in keywords and find their sites. Also, check out their main site. Is it a five liner or does the customer have to invest a lot of their time to get through the "Generator's" process? The longer the process and credit ap, the better quality customer they will send you. If someone spends a lot of time filling out an ap they are more committed to the process. Take a look at sites like www.ranking.com and www.alexa.com to get the "Generator's" site rating. The site rating shows how much traffic they get to their site (remember the lower the number of the ranking the better). Compare this to other "Generator's" you are looking at doing business with.

"Suppliers" on the other hand will just buy leads from other lead "Generators" and sell them to you. They don't control their own traffic and therefore have less control over their quality. These folks will not be able to show you how they generate their traffic or if they do their rankings will not be very good on the two above sites.

Obviously, the quality of the leads from the "Generator" will be higher and will probably cost more, but when you consider the amount of time that you would waste on lower quality leads the extra price is worth it.

Ultimately after you have done your homework you need to make the investment and take the risk. Track it daily and you will know where to invest more of your advertising dollars and where to stop wasting your money.

Consistency and commitment to the process is the key to the whole thing. Tracking how your investment is paying off will evolve as you learn what works and what doesn't. You don't need to do exactly what I have laid out in this article as it is just an example of what has worked for us. The key points are to know what you want out of your advertising investment, set goals related to how many cars you want to sell, set goals for each step and person in your process and put it in Neon Lights so everyone can see it. Lastly, you need to make adjustments during the month when things aren't tracking the way they should be to ensure you sell more cars. Good luck and give me a call if I can help.

Published in the Special Finance Insider
February Issue 2008