As some of you may know, I served in the United States Marine Corps back in the 1980s. I was lucky, and was allowed to spend most of my time in the service sitting on the tropical island of Guam. While I enjoyed serving with nearly everyone I met in

The arrival of a lead is the moment of truth. Best practice is to execute a multi-vehicle price quote right away every time, followed by a phone call in 10 minutes. The dealer who consistently delivers his customer a 10-minute call in response to an

Cross training and team building are critical Are your business development and Internet sales teams integrated with your experienced sales team, as documented in your store’s playbook? If you do not have a defined process with a back-up plan for e

I hear this all the time, “If the dealer doesn’t buy in nothing happens.” Is it any surprise? The vendor or the manager inundates the dealer with all kinds of details he or she can’t process with everything else – and it takes a three-hour

Whether you are training new sales consultants or just want to upgrade your sales team’s skills, deciding between online and instructor-led training can be a challenge. In the end, the decision boils down to four factors: content, quality, effectiv

‘Tiny’ wrote me a great letter recently on the ABCs of common sense advertising. ‘Tiny’ is a lawyer-turned-car dealer who married into an ‘automotive’ family in 1985. His real name is Pete but most of the world knows him as ‘Tiny’ fro

Business development seems to have many perceptions of its functionality. From my experience, Business development is more than a department. It is a mindset translated into a team’s actions or process. The foundation of business development is bas

Today’s progressive auto dealer faces three difficult challenges: limited scale, broad span and significant marketplace shift. How he responds to these three challenges will determine how successful his dealership will be. First there’s the issue

So, you’ve been assigned the responsibility to write the vehicle comments on behalf of your store. While this may be Internet Sales 101, it is more than apparent that dealers can use a refresher course now and again. As I research dealership after