It’s always fascinating for us at AutoUSA to learn about the trends in the market, the changes in customer behaviors and the challenges faced by our dealers. This year’s annual survey results highlighted an evolving marketplace, where customer behavior is changing and forcing dealers to examine their processes, and their positioning in the market.

According to the results from AutoUSA’s annual Internet Marketing survey, the following were chosen as the three biggest challenges that Internet departments are facing:

1) Not Enough Leads (26% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

Dealers don’t seem to be getting the hoped-for volume of leads they want or expect from their websites. This is interesting because two years ago, “keeping up with lead volume” was the number one challenge. In spite of increased spending on websites and SEO/SEM, and increased traffic, it seems dealers are failing to convert visitors into leads.

To me there’s a simple explanation for this. Consumer expectations and behavior have changed in the last two years. Today’s customers want to be in control of the car-buying process, while many dealers also want control of the process. As a result, dealers and dealer website vendors are saying “It’s all about the lead, give me the lead,” while their customers are saying “It’s all about the information, give me the information.” So when a customer visits a website and is bombarded with chat pop-ups, lead forms and can’t find the information they are looking for (such as price or payment information), they are going to leave the website and find the information somewhere else.

This trend isn’t going to change. Dealers must adapt and give customers the information they want, otherwise they risk losing them to a competitor. Remember, a customer visits only 1.8 dealerships on average before making a vehicle purchase. That tells me today’s consumer has already done the majority of their research online before heading out to their top two dealership choices.

Dealers that focus on the customer’s website experience – making it user-friendly, full of helpful content, and making it convenient for the customer to walk themselves through the process – are more likely to draw customers in than websites that are designed solely as a virtual brochure or to get the customer’s information. Conversion tools that are useful to customers, including trade-in calculators, showroom-visit incentives, and payment quoting tools give customers a compelling reason, or even a reward, to submit their information.

Instead of battling for control, dealers should be helping customers with their search for information. Chances are, those who help the most will be one of the 1.8 dealerships visited.

2) Not Enough Staff (20% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

Staffing issues tend to be a perpetual challenge year after year, according to our surveys. Whether it’s not enough staff, the quality of staff, staff turnover or staff not following processes – it’s clear that many dealers believe that finding, training and keeping the right staff is a never-ending challenge.

But is it really the staff that’s the problem, or is it that many dealerships haven’t changed their sales model to reflect the state of the market? It’s well accepted that nearly 90% of car buyers start their search online. They, like the majority of us, are used to transacting business regularly online, whether it’s buying books, music, electronics, shopping for homes or travel. The Internet is a common tool, but many stores still treat it as a stand-alone department. We continue to see progressive, successful dealerships with high volumes in Internet sales adopt a model where every salesperson is also equipped to handle Internet inquiries so they can scale to serve more “leads”.

3) Quality of Staff (19% of respondents chose this as a major challenge)

As a young sales manager, I was taught by my GM that a salesperson’s failure (and their subsequent departure from our dealership) was my fault. You hire a skill set, train the desired behaviors, and manage execution of the processes so that you have the best-quality staff possible.

There are many new hires who do not receive enough training and are not held accountable when they don’t follow processes. If quality of staff is your greatest challenge, take ownership of that and improve the quality of your staff, and consequently the customer experience, by providing training and expecting excellence.

Salespeople can be trained to follow Internet processes; it’s no different than training them how to take phone calls or how to deal with customers in person, just a different method of communication.

Other major challenges cited in the survey were as follows:

4) Staff does not consistently adhere to written processes (18%)
5) Marketing budget not large enough to accomplish objectives (18%)
6) Keeping up with lead volume (17%)
7) Lack of staff accountability (16%)
8) Lack of management buy-in (16%)
9) Lack of staff training (15%)
10) High staff turnover (9%)

What is your Internet department’s greatest challenge? How have you dealt with some of these challenges?

POSTED BY Josh Vajda

Why should you refresh your website for the purpose of inbound marketing?

• Because it's cheaper - a lot cheaper - than other marketing 
    (up to 61% cheaper 
  according to research)


• Because it can be measured - "What, I can measure real ROI on my 
  marketing? You're kidding!" No we're  not.


• Because it's where you can influence most of your buyers. 
    We are in the "era of the buyer" where 
  the buyer is searching for information  online, all day every day, if you're not 
  there they won't find you. It's that  simple. Over 85% of B2B buyers start their 
  purchasing journey online through  outlets like social media according to research from 
  Forrester.

The truism “You get what you pay for” is as true as true can be when it comes to building a company website. When small firms fail to budget properly, one of these nightmare scenarios is likely to ensue:

• The site ends up costing two or three times more than expected, causing all-important post-launch marketing activities to be cut back or eliminated.
• The site ends up having half or a quarter of the desired functionality, rendering it nearly useless.
• The site ends up as a series of compromises in design, content and functionality, making a mediocre impression on customers and prospects.

• Design. How much customization do you want? Will a standard WordPress theme suit your needs? Do you need a custom design from the ground up? Something in between? Do you have imagery for your new site, or will photos need to be taken? If so, how many photos (or other imagery such as charts and diagrams) will be needed?
• Content. How much unique content will your site need? 10 pages? 100 pages? Will it be easy or hard to write? Do you have the ability and bandwidth to write it, or will you need to outsource copywriting? If outsourced, will the writer need to do extensive research to write the copy properly?
• Functionality. Do you need more than a basic contact form? Do you want to offer downloadable PDFs or other information? Do you want leads from various forms to be tracked? Will you need e-commerce, and if so, what type of payment options? Are there any other functional requirements, such as integration with internal systems or third-party e-commerce sites? Do you want to optimize your site for search engines (SEO)? Will you need W3C or other compliance? Do you want Flash design or a customer portal?

• Design disconnects. Creating images is expensive and time-consuming. Often, firms don’t care about images in the early stages of a project, but later on, when they see boring, text-heavy pages on the test site, they desperately want a lot of customized imagery. Settling for tired stock imagery, the usual Plan B, results in a generic-looking, unimpressive site.
• Content disconnects. Content is far more expensive and time-consuming to create that most people realize. Firms often assume they can have an employee whip up content at the last minute, and learn too late that’s an impossible task.
• Functionality disconnects. Firms typically have no idea what pieces of site functionality — some of which were detailed above — actually cost. They become frustrated in mid-project when they ask the developer to “throw in” a little e-commerce and discover it costs $5,000 to do so.