Thanks for your note, you guys do a great job. Are you planning on attending the CADA event next week in Denver? I’ll be conducting a general session and workshop, hopefully you can make it.

Thanks again,
Dale

Joe Reiner, Murray BMW of Denver

Congratulations on your success and thanks for the question. The vAuto system has been designed to give you information about your live market. To the extent that you’ve had experience with particular vehicles, they will show up on both your heat sheet and buy list. This allows the user to balance what the market is demanding against their dealership’s past performance history. Since each dealership values their history with varying degrees of relevance (i.e. very subjectively), I’m not sure how to create such an algorithm. If you have any ideas, I’m open to listening. By the way, this is exactly what I perceive to be the shortcoming of other tools that purport to make buy recommendations solely based on the dealerships past performance history. I just don’t get it.

Dale

Customers always love to feel like they got the extra care that only they got. I agree this is easier to convey when they do meet a manager who at least makes it seem like this is beyond the ordinary. I don’t know if I would want to create the potential to prove ourselves by handling problems all day though.

I believe that getting early management involvement in every deal as well as at the delivery to offer a sincere thank you and contact information in case of issues can bring great loyalty as well as avoid issues. Though when you think about the customer situations that are taken care of promptly and positively the end result is typically a happy, loyal customer.

Looks like we need some A/B testing with 2 sets of customers the first being the customers we take care of from the start and the second being the customers we drop the ball at first, but then swoop in to save the day with a great make up experience………..oh wait, depending on your sales staff you may already be doing that since we all have the 1 or 2 salespeople who just don’t get that the customer is the boss.

“Woa! Looking at and managing Policy is not loss management, it’s an opportunity! hahaha… simple, makes sense and I love it!” I think any real salesperson or manager that understands it not the situation; it’s what you do with the situation will agree that this statement is what it’s all about.
Craig

Following your over/under reconditioning comments reminds me of a CSI presentation by GM when they were just launching the CSI campaign several years ago. One snippet in the multi-day presentation I’ll never forget, I’ll paraphrase:

“According to surveys of all automobile customers, which customer is the most loyal and most likely to become a repeat customer?”

“The customer most likely to buy again is the one that has had a mechanical failure and had to go all the way to the manager to get it resolved.”

Woa! Looking at and managing Policy is not loss management, it’s an opportunity! hahaha… simple, makes sense and I love it!

So… this particular dealership I was working at was over recon’ing. I lobbied management to recon less, move the savings into a red carpet solution for any policy claim.

They avoided the logic and went on bitching about recon costs, no profits and policy eating them alive.

I can see this working from a customers perspective, I’ve never tracked it to prove it, am I nuts?

Proper reconditioning depends on what you sell for vehicles. It could be your customers expect a recognizable name tire or maybe not, depending on your market. If you are going to over recondition a vehicle the next 2 factors become more important. If you are going to under recondition a vehicle reputation needs to be of less importance to you….know your goals is all I’m saying.

Reputation is huge both in person and online with sites such as DealerRater.com more importantly what you do to create, manage and leverage that reputation can make or break you in the tech savvy, social media recommendation world we live in.

Display both physically on your lot and virtually in the “showrooms” of the World Wide Web where your customers find their next new or used vehicle have never been as important as they are today. How your pictures show as well as accuracy of descriptions plays a huge role in both new vehicle and especially used vehicle sales.
Buying vehicles and sourcing them both in the right days supply as well as the right price isn’t getting easier that’s true, but if your customers can’t find you or don’t like what they see or read it won’t even matter.
Craig