Traffic & Lead Generation

I’ve always told dealers that letting me loose on a Service Department is like letting a kid into a candy store… there’s so much going wrong on the Service side of the roof from an e-commerce perspective that Consultants such as myself could live on that alone, without ever having to step foot in the Sales side of the mess.

Funny thing is, I was prompted to write this post after my experience as a consumer, rather than a Consultant. Now that I’m nearly a year gone from the days of driving demos, servicing my vehicle is a regular occurence. My local Acura dealer couldn’t hack it, so I started searching around for other options… I located another nearby dealer to try out, and sent a Service Appointment lead in off their crappy Reynolds site. I forgot the format Reynolds demands its users instinctively know in order to complete the Appointment form, so it took me three tries to submit that. And did I get an autoresponder to confirm that the dealer knows I exist? Nah. Did I get a response via email or phone at any point in the day? Nope. Okay, so it looks like in order to give this dealership my money, I’m going to have to set the appointment myself by making a phone call.

Ah, but there’s no Service phone number on the Service Appointment form. And the number on the Service Department page apparently just rings to the Sales receptionist… I know that because when I called, I got the overflow voicemail for the Sales department. Hi folks, it’s me, Mr. Customer - I have $39.95 I want to hand to you… is anyone there? Anyone?

Did I neglect to mention that this is a Penske-owned store? I guess there’s no corporate efficiency trickling down to the franchises these days. What else can you do but shake your head and wonder how much money Service Departments leave on the table every month simply because they make it as difficult as possible for customers to request work.

When I see a dealer showcasing blatantly outdated photos of its pre-owned cars online, I know I’m looking at a store with no serious grasp of Internet Sales. This used to happen all the time years back, but by now I figured that both dealers and the vendors who take photos have realized the importance of taking non-incriminating shots.

Alas, it appears I’m wrong. I came upon this Wrangler just a few days ago while checking out Ramsey Chrysler-Jeep in North Jersey. Note the pile of snow it’s sitting on. Note the fact that the last snowfall in New Jersey was about 4 months ago. So it’s just about time to take this baby to auction I suppose, eh?

Listen, Internet buyers are smarter than ever, and they’ll only get more resourceful as time goes on. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out from this photo that Ramsey Chrysler-Jeep will accept pretty much any offer on this truck… but then, is it even worth the money? If it’s been sitting for that long, perhaps there’s something wrong with it, no? A lot of thoughts go through the consumer’s head when seeing a photo like this, and not a single one of those thoughts is “wow, I want that car and I’ll pay anything for it”.

Here are a few dont’s to take note of when your photos first go up for a pre-owned car; and honestly, I can’t believe I’m writing this in 2008.

- No snow. Shovel out a spot or put the car inside for the photoshoot… no white stuff on camera.
- No people in the background. When the guy in the background is wearing a t-shirt and the consumer is looking at the car online in January, you can kiss your gross goodbye.
- No dashboard pics showing the temperature. You get the idea… 35 degrees on the information display doesn’t hold water in springtime.
- No seasonal crap in the background. Avoid having anything on or around the car that indicates the season, i.e. christmas trees, memorial day/4th of july banners and balloons, etc.
- No visible tailpipe smoke. If you’re shooting the car in the cold, don’t leave it running… the smoke from the tailpipe will be visible and expose the fact that it’s a wintertime shot.

Of course, you could avoid all this and just do a better job of turning over your inventory…

I found out recently that one of my clients was strong-armed into signing a brand new Autotrader contract for the group just 7 months into their current agreement. Now, it does state in the Autotrader contracts that either party may terminate the agreement at any time after the initial 90-day period, but just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right. Or good for business, for that matter.

I’d certainly love to hear Autotrader’s rationale behind forcing clients into new, more expensive contracts before their current ones have expired. And not their rationale to the clients, but rather the rationale to themselves.

It takes some real salesmanship to make this execution come across as anything other than a big fat slap in the face to dealers, and I haven’t met an Autotrader rep in a long time who has that kind of salesmanship. Where is the logic here? Every year, Autotrader pisses off more and more dealers by raising prices and providing less return: their site becomes more saturated with competition every year, they stuff as many third party ad banners as possible into the pages, and other U/C classified listings (many of them free) are making more and more progress all the time. So with all that taken into account, who was the genius at Autotrader who decided, “you know what… let’s not just raise our prices again, but this time, let’s invalidate everyone’s current paperwork and start gouging them right away”?

I heard a lot of the b.s. that corporate shoveled to their reps as canned excuses (fyi, the word “excuses” may have been substituted with the phrase “product enhancements” by your local Autotrader rep), and as usual, none of the excuses justify increasing the price, let alone doing it so abruptly. It’s really come to the point where part of my consulting with dealers involves thinking up solutions to get around using Autotrader. Every few months, those solutions get more and more appealing, and Autotrader edges ever closer to having to take their business model back to the drawing board. I’ve got the champagne on ice for that day.

When Dealer Principals first dip their feet into the world of online lead generation, they all tend to emerge with the same question: how can I bypass these third party lead providers and get an exclusive lead?

While it’s naive thinking, it’s naive for the right reasons. What kind of advantage could you possibly gain from buying a third party lead that gets simultaneously delivered to your competitors? And furthermore, if such a large portion of these leads are created via the third party’s search engine marketing, why pay a middleman for something you can do yourself?

The reason dealers don’t know the answer to these questions has to do with their lack of experience as an Internet consumer. They don’t understand that Internet buyers seek multiple levels of research, and use the anonymity and speed of the Internet to comparison shop. Those two elements - tiered research and comparison shopping - make “exclusive” Internet leads virtually non-existent.

You can buy leads from a provider who only sells a lead once over. You can take it upon yourself to run PPC campaigns to snatch up leads before they hit a third party site. But you’ll never stop a consumer from submitting one lead and moving on to their next bit of research, wherever that may be. In fact, this is often why exclusive leads from smaller vendors are worse than those coming from the big third parties… you may be the only one getting the lead from that website, but that could be hours or days or weeks after the consumer submitted their information to a top-tier site like Edmunds, which is what the big third parties are selling to you.

Point is, the nature of the Internet consumer makes lead exclusivity nearly impossible. They don’t want to be stuck talking to just one dealer, and they don’t want to limit their research to what a dealer’s web site can provide. You’d have an easier time generating exclusive Internet leads by trying to direct non-Internet shoppers to your corner of the web. Take your radio, print and other advertising mediums and use them as a means to promote your website. Of course, there’s nothing to say you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot by pointing inexperienced shoppers to the mecca of consumer buying power, but hey, if you’ve got a thing for exclusive leads, that’s your best bet.