Mastering the Art of the Car Business

by DAVID JOHNSON

Mastering the Art of the Car Business

If you are having success in this business, you are no stranger to the fact that you have to better than average at many things. This is a multi-sided Rubik��s Cube of a business if there ever was one. One weak area is all it takes to get your cash flow pipes seriously plugged.

Case Study: This might sound like a plug at first, but this is as good of an example as it gets. In our business for example we tackle everything from lead-to-lender to keep the client��s heart rate up. We started building Web sites back in 1999 because we found a way to create a certain visually-induced reaction in a prospect��s brain that makes them want to submit a sales lead. That was great and today our average Web site conversion rate is around 30 percent of visitors that submit leads. The rest of the industry still hovers around 2.3 percent by comparison. So yippee for us right? Not so fast. A lot of vendors have great products. Just because we can dump 15 times the leads over our dealer��s heads than our competition doesn��t mean they��re going to sell any cars. If you��re a dealer, you know exactly what I mean.

So for our next step we decided to go with only one dealer in each market area and put a particular focus on special finance. So in a world where BDC training and systems consist of ��Debbie The Time Life Operator Syndrome�� and outsourced BDC programs are a sure-fire ticket to self-destruction, we decided to create the Mastery Council BDC and Internet sales system. The result was a system so effective that I can walk into any of our dealerships and document a 90 percent lead contact rate, a 96 percent appointment set rate and an 80 percent show rate. Yes you heard that correctly, and no, that��s not fiction. That��s 69 percent of all leads in the door.

So now we have more leads than would otherwise be possible and the best BDC and sales program that ever grazed planet earth, so now our dealers should be in the money right? Well yes for some, but then up pops another issue.

Advertising: It doesn��t matter how well your Web site converts if you don��t know how to advertise it. By the time I would get done going through advertising invoices and of course solving the traffic problem, the dealer in question would have already lost thousands in gross. So the next step based on Joe McCloskey��s good advice from Colorado was to start an in-house advertising agency. This way we could solve media problems before they happen and have our ear to the ground 24/7. We, of course, were already writing all the creative anyway so why not? I was reluctant at first, mainly because I think agencies are a horrible idea for some very solid reasons, but in the end we launched HyperDrive Media LLC. It was a smart move that resulted in some serious Ninja Jedi advertising methods, which has made our dealers a grip of cash.

So now there should be nothing standing in the way of massive volumes right? Yes for many, but then something else popped up in some of our stores.

In the end it doesn��t matter how many leads you have, how well you dominate the market in special finance or how many bodies you drag in the door if your special finance penetration is suffering and you can��t get enough people in cars. Okay, so now we already have three companies all of which have been fortunate and smart enough to be the best of their kind anywhere. So now what were we supposed to do with this challenge?

Well, we found the best working special finance guy in the country, stole him, moved him to one of our stores, paid him too much and watched how he did. Then we moved him in-house and made him the head of a new division dedicated to special finance training and more importantly deal monitoring. This has led to special lender arrangements exclusively for our dealer group and is resulting in a landslide of success as we build our open markets but that��s not the point.

The point is, we started out as a Web development company almost 10 years ago. Since then we��ve had to design and launch three record-setting companies and four key programs surrounding Web site conversion, BDC/Internet sales, management and leadership training, strategic advertising placement, and now special finance coaching just to insure that the dealers could take full advantage of the program, sell cars and own the special finance markets in their DMA��s. You gotta be kidding me right?

For any dealer out there, just like us, mastering the car business is not about being a jack-of-all-trades; it��s about being good enough as an organization in each of the specific areas that make up your business to be better than the guy down the street. For us, we can��t afford to be second best at anything we do, and trust me we��re not. There isn��t a company or a trainer in the industry that does any of the things we do that we couldn��t mow over in the street without breaking a sweat. As a dealer, that should be your goal regarding your competition. I am absolutely resolved and convicted to the best-of-the-best for our dealer group and you should be resolved to be best for yourself? Being competitive means just being about as good as everyone else, and for you that shouldn��t be good enough.