“Top Ten” Signs a Dealership is Not Serious About the Internet
This is a post from Dealer Impact’s Blog written by their President, Brian Cox, that is worth reading. If your dealership falls into any of these categories, maybe it’s time for a change?
See the original post here
“Top Ten” Signs a Dealership is Not Serious About the Internet
10. They have AOL or Hotmail email address.
9. They still have the Field of Dreams mentality (Build it and they will come)
8. The Internet Manager spends more time integrating that new flying airplane on the site than making sure leads get followed up.
7. They switch website providers every year trying to find a site that will sell cars for them.
6. The Internet Department thinks they can take the same number of smoke breaks as everyone else in the dealership.
5. Policies, Procedures, and Accountability don’t pertain to the Internet Department.
4. The newspaper is their primary advertising medium, where the average reader is 55 and the new generation doesn’t even pick it up.
3. They use Cobalt or Reynolds as their primary web solution because they were told to (can you say brainwash).
2. The GM/Owner doesn’t use the Internet so why would anyone else.
1. The dealership has handed over a multi-million dollar profit center to Internet Guru they wouldn’t trust to baby sit their 8 year old daughter.
Oh my I really enjoy this posting especially number 3. We are currently using both and have been working hard to plead my case on thier elimination. Somewhat difficult however considering the cost involved in the implementation. Not to mention the corporate manufacturer pushes cobalt down each dealer’s throat. Hard to imagine that cobalt just recently re-did their web architecture so that it wasn’t frame based!!!! Yet they are, apparently, at the forefront of SEO and SEM.
Thanks for the post!
I really like your comment about Cobalt.
‘Yet they are, apparently, at the forefront of SEO and SEM.’
I have yet to encounter a website vendor that isn’t the best at SEO. It’s really comical how many dealers are using framed in inventory on their website because their vendor is SO STRONG AT SEO that they don’t have their own inventory options!
Having a website optimized is has easy as making sure your website is ‘Googlized’. Luckily, Google allows people the opportunity to cut through smoke-and-mirrors that SEO companies are pitching and see exactly what they are looking for help anyone shopping for a website.
Check out the post regarding Google’s Webmaster Guidelines that was postest early this week.
Hi Patrick, thanks for all your help and patience educating us older guys with the use of your website and phone conversations. Dont forget that you speak with with comutereeze,a language that some of use are struggling to learn. Mabe a refrence chart on you site with the meanings of the abbreviations would be helpfull . I believe dealers believe that they have to hire 20-25 year old to run their internet sales division.Although that may be true most of the time, some of us 40-55 year olds dont want to become obsolete either, you can teach a old dog a new trick, We want to stay relivant. I am from MEDFORD and you spent some time on the phone with me about a month ago teaching me about SEO thanks abunch
Hi Guys,
Just wanted to throw a developers 2 cents into the ring. First, I can’t tell you how over priced and overrated most auto CRM and ILM tools are. I have yet to find a solid ILM or CRM that doesn’t look like it was built in 1996. I guess the rational is that each vendor thinks they have some secret with their DMS polling solutions. Frankly I don’t think this rocket science. BZ results sucks. I guess the only web development they know is how to publish a flash file to a page. I looked at webControl until I found out that the login screen only works in IE. Cobalt just blows in every category. Their designs suck. Their integration sucks.
Why do most vendors think dealer site visitors want media rich HTML and Flash newsletters fouling up their inboxes. Spam is ne of the most irritating reasons email sucks. Besides the fact that the support for HTML in email clients is piss poor. It is so underlooked that they actually started a email standards movement.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the manufacturers actually cared about the web visitors and stopped pushing crappy vendors on the dealers.
Imagine if someone built an open source CRM/ILM solution that outperformed these over priced solutions. Visit Magento http://www.magentocommerce.com. It is an open source solution for e-commerce. These guys get it. They are building a feature rich solution that will be better than 90% of private label solutions. Wouldn’t it be nice to give the dealers an option of self-hosted solutions or hosted-solutions?