In the 2000 movie “Dude, Where’s My Car?” it was pretty amusing to watch Ashton Kutcher stumble around looking for his lost car. But if you’re a dealer and that’s your salesperson stumbling around on a lot while a customer is impatiently waiting, the inability to find a car is not so funny. In this [...]

The future of the retail automotive industry has arrived. Going forward, only the most efficient dealerships will survive. What do I mean by efficient? Well, first cutting fat (unnecessary spending), and second becoming lean, and by that I mean making your dealership extremely efficient. I know what you’re thinking. All analysts point to improving auto [...]

How do dealership sales managers forecast expected monthly sales figures? In my experience, most of the time it’s a “top-down” forecast; that is, the sales manager may look at last year’s number of units sold in that month, then come up with an estimate that also figures in other factors such as state of the [...]

Tell a dealer you have a new process for him and watch his eyes glaze over. Every day, dealers are barraged with best practice recommendations to improve productivity and increase profits. On one hand, dealers know process is important. On the other hand, implementing a new process is a lot of hard work. All too [...]

Parts customers are typically classified into three categories; retail, wholesale and the customer who brings the car in to be serviced. The first two groups can be easily identified and have marketing plans developed to target them. But, who is actually the customer in that last group? The service technician is responsible for requesting and [...]

If you ask a marketing person what the most important tools are to get the job done, they’d probably start talking about e-mail programs, templates, and certain whiz-bang features within a CRM. They might not mention the dealership management system (DMS), even though the CRM’s data comes directly from the DMS. Here’s where an old [...]

The mere mention of the word “audit” makes many people shudder. For most dealers, it conjures images of poring through financial statements, lost productivity and stressed accounting personnel. But I’m not talking about IRS audits. Many businesses perform self audits once in a while; not only to ensure their books are accurate and accounting standards [...]

It’s a generally accepted practice in the auto retail business: the service department offers the used car department discounted rates. Doing so keeps the recon cost of the vehicle low, which makes the resulting margin and gross higher. But does it really? I would argue that dealerships as a whole would reap more profit if [...]