Make Technolgy Your Friend!
One of the most common mistakes dealers make is to confuse technology tools with solutions. I’vemet with far too many dealers who have invested large amounts of money in technology that their managers and salespeople don’t understand the need for, or even if they do they don’t know how to use it. What most dealerships need much more than technology is knowledge and process. And where technology is needed, like tracking email leads, the tool has to be something that a typical salesperson can use, and it needs to be supported by a vendor that provides on-going user training, so that the dealership will get their money’s worth over the long-term.
Sending an email to customers is easy - making sure they get it, read it, and respond to it is challenging. We teach our clients to use a variety of electronic communications, including video emails and newsletters, as well as more traditional campaign emails. Dealers need to make sure that their email campaign tool is using the latest technology to get the messages into the customer’s inbox. It seems so simple, and yet it is one of the more common problems I hear about.
And if retail automotive professionals think they’vealready seen their world rocked, just wait they haven’t seen anything yet! There are so many exciting, new things on the horizon - MySpace, YouTube, Facebook. The research we’vedone has convinced me that the social networking sites are going to be the web sites of the future, and dealers are going to have to incorporate them into their Internet strategies.
Future generations of buyers will demand the real time interactivity that these mediums offer. And as convenience replaces loyalty as one of their primary purchase considerations, the ability to connect with them and their peers in the online world will become more and more important. This shift is going to be every bit as dramatic as the initial emergence of the World Wide Web as a shopping channel, and will occur in light speed in comparison to the Internet shift.
And once again dealers will be forced to embrace mediums that they have no familiarity with, and many of them will be misled by suddenly appearing vendors that promise the latest and greatest, for a healthy price. The dealers who emerge victorious will be the ones who partner with established and credible service providers who genuinely represent the dealership’s interests, and not the factory’s.
July 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
What an excellent article! I completely agree with your point about social networking sites being the way of the future. I mean, look! Here we are on DrivingSales, a networking site for the automotive industry. More so, the sites like Facebook and MySpace are the primary media through which a large majority of the younger generation communicates, finds information, and connects to others. This includes recent college graduates as well as incoming 7th graders. As this generation continues to familiarize themselves with these sites and master them, it may become the primary, if not the only, way they will know how to access, and communicate with, others. For the automotive industry to stay afloat as we transition in this direction, we will need to become experts in this medium in order to reach future car shoppers and, ultimately, buyers.