Posted by jonathonhewitt in Automotive Sunday, 1 August 2010 14:04 No Comments
At the age of 21 I was heavy into cars and had many years of sales experience under my belt. Soon enough I had developed a desire to become a car salesman as I was told there was a lot of money to be made. I called a local Toyota dealer (Gettel Toyota) and they told me to come in for a training class, if I passed I would have an interview set up with the GM of the dealership. Two weeks later with a score of 105% (there was extra credit) they told me they would call me the following week. It never happened, I called and called and still no interview. I was determined to sell cars for someone, but who? Well, I had known that Gettel had a few dealerships that were even closer to me so I put on a tie and off I went! Showing up at the dealership not knowing which of the 4 buildings to walk into, so I just happened to walk into the used car building. Not but two minutes later I’m sitting down talking to Lee Johnston the GM of their strictly used car dealership. Lee said “Well although most new people with no previous car sales experience get placed in a new car store, there is something that I like about you so I’m gonna go ahead and hire you. When can you start?” So there you had it! I was in!
My very 1st month in the car business and I sold 8 used cars. When I saw that most everyone else sold 13 or 14 each I was determined to figure out how they sold that many! Before you knew it I was outselling most of them with an 8 month avg of 16 used cars per month and although I was kept in the dark on how much I was grossing, I knew I was making better money than I ever had before.
It was about halfway through my 8th month in the car biz and I already had 11 cars out for the month when I walked outside and my sales manager (Bob T.) told me that I was fired! As he walked away from me, I approached him and stood in front of him and asked why I was fired, he quickly stated that I back talked him two weeks ago and that he didn’t like it. So I was fired. Although maybe I should have gone above the sales managers head and asked to keep my job as it still wasn’t clear to me what exactly I said wrong but the fact was that I didn’t want to work for a dickhead like that anyways.
As it turns out Bob T the sales manager that fired me also had fired 5 other salesman that same week, all of us were in our early to mid 20′s. Two weeks later, Bob T got fired himself. This made me wonder why he went on a firing streak in the 1st place? Was he just having a power trip? Was he trying to get rid of salesman before they reached their bonus levels? Have you ever had anything similar to this happen during your car days? Explain in the comments your story or thoughts about what you think about sales managers that get a “power trip”. Stay tuned for more car stories!
Posted by chrisburns in Dealer Websites Wednesday, 14 July 2010 06:36 No Comments
Car dealers are one of the many industries that are experiencing huge sales increases thanks to proper usage of the internet. Dealers are slow to change. In the past direct marketing has been the primary source of advertising and investment for car dealerships all over the country. In today’s world, the owners and general managers of car dealerships and dealer groups are finally becoming educated about the power of the internet.
The internet is a general term that encompasses many different potential marketing strategies such as social media marketing, pay per click marketing, blogging, search engine placement and content republishing (cars.com, craigslist, and many more). The focus of this post is how indexing your dealership’s inventory is giving your dealership greater exposure to thousands of new potential clients on the web.
What is dealership indexed inventory?
To understand why indexed inventory works we must first look at how inventory is currently handled on most current dealer websites. Currently most dealerships host their online inventory with 3rd party vendors such as ADP or Homenet. These 3rd party providers collect all of the dealer’s inventory data and provide the dealership with the ability to present their inventory, in an appealing way, to their clients via inventory listings pages. As we said earlier these providers are hosting this data that is being framed into the dealerships website.
The actual page that the inventory is on is something like this… http://inventory.3rdpartyvendor.com/dealerinventory. As you can see the data is not on the dealers domain and as such is not being indexed by the search engines in any way that can possibly benefit the dealership. Most dealership website providers will simply try to gloss over this fact or hope the the dealer is not in the know about the opportunity they are passing up.
Why We’re Different
SEO SPORT however has taken a different approach. We like to push the envelope of technology for our client’s and of course maximize the internet for our dealership client’s benefits. One of the many benefits we offer our clients is the ability to host their inventory on their own domains and get it indexed on their domains by all major search engines. This means that Google will see something more like this… http://inventory.dealerwebsite.com/dealerinventory. Now every single car on the dealer’s lot is potentially going to be indexed and ranked by search engines. This means when someone searches for a particular model car there is a chance that a car in your inventory is going to show up as a result in the organic search results for them. This will lead them to your inventory page and ultimately your website where they can collect your address, call your dealership, or submit a finance request online through your website. They can even share the car they found on your site with a friend or their entire following on twitter or Facebook, for example!
There are literally hundreds of tricks that dealers can use to game the search engine’s for their companies benefits. SEO SPORT is here to educate as many dealers as possible about these very tricks and implement them for your dealership so that you can realize the increased unit sales and profits that inevitably comes from optimizing your web presence. Sadly many dealerships are unaware of these types of techniques because their web providers are not staying cutting edge or are just too lazy to offer them. The internet is a gold rush for car dealerships. Those that dive in and begin panning early will see huge benefits since SEO and online marketing grow exponentially with time. The more time put into it, the greater the results become.
Don’t let your competition pass you. It’s time to embrace the technology and it’s time to do business with a cutting edge firm that’s sole goal is to increase your dealership profits, not our own. Get a free quote from SEO SPORT today and learn how we can index your dealers inventory and provide many additional tactics that will take your dealership to the top of the search engines and grow your business into the future.
