Tag Archives: Car Dealers

Sales People Make Economies not Marketing by Grant Cardone

Posted on 08. Mar, 2009 by admin.

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automotive internet marketing
The following is a great article by Grant Cardone that holds a lot of truth for automotive marketers and car dealers.

Economies do not exist until somebody BUYS something! And economies cease to exist when a sale is not made.  Management then decides “customers aren’t buying anything so let’s just cut heads, slash budgets, hunker down and shrink our way to  greatness!”

Prospecting, Interviewing customers to properly identify problems and opportunities and then collaborating with  them to find appropriate solutions seems to be a skill set lost to an entire generation.   How did this happen?

Two major shifts drove this change. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, virtually every company had a sales force that were required and depended on things like; prospecting- the creation of customers, product knowledge, application knowledge and selling skills.  Great companies were built on great sales teams who were responsible for creating opportunities not for just selling them. The sales team was the engine, leading the  charge, driving the revenues of the company!  In the 90’s sales teams were deemed to expensive to maintain, inefficient, difficult to manage and the responsibility for driving revenues shifted to the marketing department.  The theory was that the company could create demand for products and services through advertising, promotion and gimmicks then the company could merely harvest the flood of incoming  orders with call centers or order desks. The second major shift currently taking place is from traditional marketing to internet marketing.

But, what happens when customers stop looking and searching the net and the phone stops ringing?  Because selling is a lost art the solutions are limited to- increase the advertising, make even bigger claims of the importance of customer satisfaction, lower prices (again) and increase gimmicks like no money down, rebates, zero percent interest and free trips.  Companies started spending more money on ad campaigns and google search then the entire sales force makes in salaries and commissions.  While these marketing shifts created breakthroughs in the ability to reach greater numbers of potential customers, the fact is it failed!  You don’t have to look far to see the corpses of companies who relied on marketing and disregarded the sales team;  Circuit City, Heard Automotive, Dilliards, Sears, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and Merrill Lynch.   These companies failed because of their dependence upon their marketing campaigns and their inability to sell their products!  Marketing without a trained sales team is a “one  way” vehicle, causing the company to only activate at the point of marketing and then become passive at the point of creating an opportunity or even closing on those created.

These marketing methods virtually eliminated management’s expectation of the sales team and their abilities. This is a critical problem in a recession, maybe event the cause of it, whereby the customers stop looking for new products and services, and therefore are immune to the wiles of marketing and promotion. The consumers’ focus in now also on cutting expenses and unless your product or service can help them save money without any investment, they simply won’t pay attention. Search engine optimization is useless when potential customers stop searching.

Companies must return to the creation of true sales skills and sales teams because without them nothing happens!  Management, marketing and customer satisfaction does not sell product.  Sales people sell products and you must have effectively trained salespeople that can (1) generate a prospect and (2) know how to determine what is needed, (3) how your product or service can satisfy that need and (4) how to justify a purchase decision. The lost art of real salesmanship must be restored in order to create the revenue a company desires.

A well trained sales team, not management, not the internet, not customer satisfaction and not marketing is the only thing that can cost effectively create customers in this economy.  Economies exist only when someone finds a prospect and then sells that prospect a product or service at which point they exchange money with your company.  Sales people drive entire economies and without them we have no economy.

Grant Cardone, Author of Sell to Survive

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Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by admin.

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I recently followed an article written on a blog site by a popular blogger and SEO consultant regarding the merits of dealer.com and search marketing versus pay per click and search optimization. Many automotive marketing experts do not realize how quickly a blog post or search content can be picked up on the Internet.

The lesson that this blogger was teaching was to try to prove that dealer.com search engine marketing did not spend enough focus on search optimization and spent more efforts on pay per click or SEM. Pure Dealer.com agrees that good SEO can beat PPC any day of the week, and sometimes it takes a long time and some dedicated marketing efforts to win the search engine battle.

Then again, did dealer.com speak too soon when they opened up a public challenge to test the power of search marketing? Dealer.com is a very well respected company that has experience huge growth and obviously is well versed on how to market themselves so I guess that Google will decide who wins this battle.

If you google “dealer.com search marketing” or “dealer.com search engine marketing” we will all know the answers to that question.

Here is the full repost of the article, with recognition to the author and full post here:

Search engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic.  What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign.  A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.

Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site.  However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC.  One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.

Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.

eyetracking Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

google heatmap seo vs sem Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

From the post at Hubspot:

Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:

1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.

2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far - more than double the second result.

3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.

4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it - this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!

SEO wins day in and day out.  Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic.  Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms.  I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign.  Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO.  I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com

I’ll report back with results.

  • Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
  • Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge - SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
  • Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
  • Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08

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CraigsList Automotive Inventory for Car Dealers

Posted on 01. Dec, 2008 by admin.

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Craigslist is a huge online property that car dealers can benefit from in some major ways. In the past it has been very time comsuming, labor intensive, and quite frankly a lot of work to get your postings in and keep them regularly updated.

PureDealer however has solved many of these problems with our new CraigsList Automotive Inventory Service. We will post your entire used car inventory into your local Cragslist Automotive area on a monthly basis for one low price. We work with all of the major data providers (and some small ones too) to get your current pictures and inventory onto Craigslist.

How it works:

  • We post all your ads and inventory for you.
  • We provide all of the staffing to get your entire preowned inventory online.
  • We repost deleted, flagged, Craiglist ad postings as needed
  • We add new vehicles once they are added to your inventory.
  • We also post all pre-owned to backpage.com

In some cases the automotive marketing budget and inventory site investments have dropped dramatically for some dealers. Since this service is much less expensive than the major sites on the market, the return on automotive advertising investment is very high. Sell more cars and smarten up your automotive marketing efforts today. Contact us for more details, and sample links to some real dealers who are moving cars every month for fractions of what they are paying for other service providers.

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