Automobile Dealer Magazine

Publisher's Notes On a hunch, I recently had an in-house phone survey done to determine how phones are being answered in dealerships across America. We called over 1,000 dealerships and came up with what I consider to be an alarming result: only 25% of our calls were answered promptly, courteously, professionally and unhurriedly by the receptionists. That means three out of four times, the call was answered, discourteously, unprofessionally and/or hurriedly. You know that in many cases, incoming calls are your first chance to make a good impression on a customer. When someone calls your dealership, you have an opportunity to make one of two impressions---good or bad. Call your store yourself from time to time and make sure that your store is making good impressions. Thanks to all of the dealers who responded to our May/June issue featuring Bert Boeckmann as the Cover Story Dealer. Your response to our advertisers and to our industry-expert writers made that issue our most successful ever. Plus, we sold more advertising than any previous non-NADA convention issue! And I know your readership and response was responsible for this issue breaking our record for ad sales, besting our January/February NADA issue earlier this year. We have the Cadillac Man, Don Massey, as our Cover Story Dealer and I know you'll enjoy this cover story as we explore Don's selling philosophy, his dealer philosophy, and his mega-dealer philosophy. Check out our inside back cover (pg. 39) and page 19 to get information on the Conference of Automotive Remarketing September 9th, 10th and 11th in Atlanta. Call my buddy and conference director, Chuck Parker, for a complete, detailed list of topics and speakers, some of whom you've read articles by in this magazine. If your used car department means anything to you, you should get somebody to this conference. In case you're wondering about the BPA logo on the cover, that just means that we can now prove to advertising agencies that we actually do go to over 21,000 Automobile Dealers. It's official, you are now reading this magazine. But what this really means to you is that we'll be featuring more advertisers and, consequently, even more concise, issue-specific articles on the topics that you are most interested in and on topics that you should be interested in.