The dealer’s front door is not where it used to be. It’s on the Internet. How many salesmen do you have right now? How many walk ups are they perched and ready to serve each day? The answer I have been getting from several dealers is that they have 12 guys or gals waiting for 6 to 7 walk ups a day. Bad use of your staff, it’s worse than that, it’s borderline insanity. You have more visitors on your website and other places where your inventory resides every 15 minutes than you have walk ups each day.

A lot of marketing is about hunting.  In the olden days, you would hunt with TV, Radio, Newspapers and conventional means of direct mail.  You would hope to catch someone at the right time so you could get a shot at them.  With TV, you don’t know how many of them have TiVo, With Radio, you pay for the spots, but a quick switch of the dial turns you off, with Newspapers, you’re fishing in waters that are teeming with other fishermen, not necessarily fish.  And, with conventional mail, you are hoping that your ‘list’ has some kind of predictive quality behind it.    Well, it doesn’t.  Potential car buyers leave a trail. 

That trail is usually where they have been shopping around on the internet.  If you could direct your marketing only to those who are looking at vehicles similar to the ones you are selling and to people who live or work only where they could and would shop you, why would you bother doing it any other way.  Why would you try to ‘predict’ who might be in the market, when we can approach those who we know are in the market? More