Let’s face it, being an internet sales manager at a car dealership is a thankless job.
Most General Managers are trained by the franchise, and their minds get polluted with the most ridiculous strategies on a weekly basis.
General Managers just don’t understand the fact that anything you do to juice up your dealer websites will take weeks or months to kick in, and you can only promise more traffic.
The turnaround for internet sales managers is huge, and usually when a GM fires their internet manager the tactics they employed are about to kick in.
Then the new Jack comes in and starts over. Let’s face it, that’s how it is.
I’m going to give you one solid piece of advise. Get your own social networking accounts, specifically Facebook and Twitter.
Use your photograph for your profile, not the dealer logo. Brand yourself as a great salesperson for your car dealership.
Build a following and eventually you’ll have some power in your area. Now you’ll have some ammo.
Ever dream of going to the big dealership down the street? Well, you now have something unique to add to your resume.
If you get fired, you have some ammo to land a job fast. If you had 2,000 followers on Twitter and most were from a 30 mile radius you could bring all of those potential customers with you.
Showroom Logic is considering offering websites to salespeople themselves, which will allow them to display your inventory and use all of our social networking tools.
Imagine having your own website as well? All we need is your inventory feed, and if you go to another dealership we delete the old feed and add the new. Eventually this site will so so mature it will outrank the dealer you work for with all of the long tail keywords.
If anyone wants to try this out, send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com.
So true. I am now holding the internet sales manager position at a dealership, and it’s the kiss of death for me. They had a girl doing it and she was fired last month. None of us wanted the position, but I guess you could say it was forced on me.
My GM is proud of the leads we get, the problem is 80% of them are hand raisers that GM gives us for sporting events.
I find the best leads come from our websites (We have more than one), and I’m getting some good ones from Twitter. One thing I learned quickly, my Twitter leads have high beacon score, and most email leads from our websites have bad credit scores. They basically email me their social security number and say “What can you do for me”?
I wish I could say what dealership I’m at, but I don’t need my GM reading this!
How could I have my own website?
Reply:
It’s simple, you need permission to publish your dealer’s inventory feed to our website. Then you will have your own url. Go to GoDaddy and spend 10 bucks on a domain name (something cool and memorable like mikesellscars.com). As soon as you register the domain, create a 301 redirect to the url we give you. Be sure to put your domain name on your business cards, and tell your customers that this is your own site. This way they’ll be able to find you in a couple of years if you land a job at another dealership. It’s that easy.
Yes How true it is…….seems your only as good as your last deal. I am the Internet Director for a large Independant & “New Car Alternative” that only carries the current model year and 1, 2 & 3 year old vehicles….still under warranty in the Tampa Bay Area. Proud to say I work for Park Auto Mall & My name is David Ingold ….and yes…to say the least you must have thick skin to do this job….good or bad, effective and or efficient. Be prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that some owners and managers will ask you to ride on. How true and dead on is Mike and his posts……For me I just decided I was not going to rely on….. the dealers web site or “the listing services” (which by the way…I think most are a joke) that we list our feeds on…between twitter and facebook….if you work consistently hard…… it will pay off…..be patient…..and don’t give up…..before you know it …business will be calling on you…and I mean every day….. just about……. your phone will ring…..before you know it you will have thousands of follwowers and fans. “The equation is quite simple. Social networking/medias on the internet are used to drive traffic to websites or listed inventory…and then websites are designed to bring customers to the lot, and traffic on the lot equals delivered units” so go on….. blog, tweet, post yourself and do what you do everywhere that you can…keep the same email, and phone number forever and it will happily haunt you for many years to come! If you need advice or tips or tricks that I’ve used over the 20 plus years that I have been in the car business feel free to email me dingold@parkautomall.com or just call me me direct for faster help 727-623-5551 or to see how I do it…… visit our new site http://www.parkautomall.com