Would You Rather Get Your Name Out There, Or Get Your Customers In Here?
Posted September 1, 2011 by adminI just returned from another dealer group meeting where I witnessed the dedication and determination of several dealers who have reinvented their dealership business models to be profitable with a significant reduction in overall sales. I also saw dealers who were lackluster, indifferent, and laboring over the difficult decisions that obviously needed to be made to insure their survival. For some, the extreme urgency to change now was a non-negotiable, however, others were content with a down the road complacent mindset.
One of the common themes among the high performers in this meeting was a commitment to a “back to the basics” management style. While many dealers are trying to cut expenses by reducing office supplies and toilet paper, most of them have tens of thousands of dollars in lost cash flow due to unpaid warranties, obsolete P&A, used bikes buried in service, internal department account abuse, funding delays and so on. All of these cash flow deficiencies affect a dealer’s ability to spend money on direct revenue generating expenditures such as marketing and training.
Perhaps the most powerful fundamental required in today’s market is the ability and willingness to create and embrace a sales culture. And when I say culture, I’m referring to a bona fide passion that starts at the top with the dealer principal and his commitment to drive traffic into the store with effective advertising as well as his dedication to the showroom, P&A and service sales process. That’s right, everyone works in sales.
What good is your advertising if you can’t sell? And what good is having a master sales team if you aren’t driving traffic to your store? We’re now in a new era and a new economy. The industrial age is gone and the information age is here, and the economy sure isn’t making things any easier on us. We’re also in a place where the customer has more options, more choices, more tools and resources than ever — which in turn gives them more power. This vast increase in resources has brought about more competition, distractions, and clutter than ever before. This further illustrates the need to stand out from the crowd and present yourself and your dealership in a unique way to your specific target audience with the right message via the right media at just the right time. Additionally it exploits the need to train your entire team to become sales people and not just order takers. Ask yourself this very powerful question. “Why should I (your customer) choose to do business with you versus any and every other available option to me?” The answer to this question is called your unique selling proposition and is a non-negotiable in the new economy.
Nowadays trying to penetrate your specific market with traditional mass media advertising via a bland message is far too expensive, wasteful and frustrating. When I was a kid we had five main television stations and two of those were fuzzy. Now my satellite TV has over 400 channels which is the perfect illustration of how fragmented and specialized media has become. This of course doesn’t factor in the DVRs, Internet and satellite radio. This further exploits the need for you to hunt your prospects with a rifle and not a shot gun. You must spend your limited advertising dollars going after a viable, proven, target audience that you can reach specifically with an efficient media method. To cut through the clutter, trim the fat and waste of mass media and increase the number of new prospects generated, as well as improve the frequency of visits from past and present customers, you must first understand direct response advertising versus traditional image advertising. Image advertising is all about building your brand, or as mass media sales reps love to say “creating top of mind awareness”. This may work for huge companies like Microsoft or Budweiser with millions of dollars to spend and plenty of time to wait on the results. However, for most small to midsized businesses such as mine and yours we’re looking to leverage our advertising dollars to generate red hot sales leads, and that’s exactly what direct response advertising is all about. It’s not designed “to get your name out there” it’s designed to “get your customers in here” through cost effective media targeted to your precise audience via a compelling message which includes a call to action and a deadline. And best of all its 100% quantifiable.
The incremental increases to be gained by focusing on the fundamentals of cash flow management simultaneously while creating a dealership wide sales and marketing culture go a long way in tough times.
