Q: Paul, what is your background?
Paul: I am actually new to the car business. I worked for United Parcel Service for 27 years. I obviously had a lot of experience with customers. Customers are customers. You have to know how to treat the customer. I treat them the way I want to be treated as a customer. You have to make them feel like they are the only one and they are special. You can develop a great rapport that way.
Q: Why did you choose to put the dealership on-line?
Paul: Actually, that decision was made by our dealer Gail Duncan. She has always been very proactive as far as getting on-line. She has a lot of foresight in this area and embraced it earlier than most dealers. It is really because of her backing that we are where we are today. It is Gail's baby.
Q: How is your Internet Department set up?
Paul: Right now we have four people. We have two full-time salespeople. We have a full-time technical person who links the computers together and who programmed the database that we use to store our leads and to run our reports. Then there is myself. I am the one who prints out the leads as they come in and makes the calls. I make the first initial contact with the customer and get all the information that the salespeople will need to run a quote for them. I check our inventory and match the customer. At that point I turn it over to the dedicated Internet salespeople. They then write their quotes and start the sales process and get back to the customer. We do it that way rather than have the salespeople do it all. We have found that Internet sales have grown so much that one person cannot do it all and do a good job. We pride ourselves on doing everything right. But it is a learning process for us. With everybody assigned to their specific areas, it meshes really well. The salespeople do what they do best. I do what I do best, which is organize and track. And our technical man does what he does best. We each have our own role and we work very well together as a team.
Q: How do you get most of your leads? Are they from your own site or do you have some lead generating sources?
Paul: We have several different lead generating sources that we receive the leads from.
Q: Take me through your process. After a lead comes in, where does it go from there. Exactly how does it work?
Paul: Once I get a lead via email I print it out. Everyone gets a response letter and I call them right away. I respect the time of day they wish to be called. If I don't make contact with them immediately, I will try again. If I still cannot reach them by phone I will email them and we will do this four or five times, letting them know I have failed trying to reach them by phone. Eventually, when I do reach the customer I try to find out exactly what type of vehicle they are looking for. I find out if they are flexible on color and options and how they want to purchase or finance the vehicle. I get all this information and then enter it into the database and print a standardized form that eventually will go to the sales consultant. We use the form so there is no scribbling of notes here and there. Then I check our inventory to see if we have a car matching what the customer requested. If we don't, I look in the incoming folders to see if we have one on order. In any case, I give all that information to the sales consultant. They then call the customer and if they cannot make contact on the first call, I send an email and the process is repeated again. We continuously try to make contact with the customer by phone or email until we reach them. When we contact them we give them our lowest price right up front. There is no bargaining and we feel comfortable with that. We are the number one selling Ford dealership in Michigan for four months in a row. Hopefully we can get them into the showroom and get them to test drive the vehicle. They can take it home right then. If they like, we can expedite the process even further. We are trying to keep their time at the dealership to a minimum. We realize that is why they are using the Internet in the first place, because they don't have time to shop around.
Q: What has been the reaction to the way you are selling cars?
Paul: I think that we have more satisfied customers because our system frees up some of our salespeople to spend more time with each customer; they don't have to wait three days for our people to call them back. The salespeople have all the information they need when they do call the customer back.
Q: What would you say are some of the biggest hurdles that you have come across so far with Internet sales?
Paul: There are actually two of them. The first is making contact with the customer. There are a lot of messages being left unanswered. The second is the sincerity of the request. A lot of people are not really serious. They sometimes view us as an information source rather than a sales source. We are also having a few problems with our lead providers in that the request form the customer provided has not made the customer aware that a dealership is going to call them. Through nobody's fault, the customer is unaware of this. They think of it as a place to get information. They take the information and go to the dealer closest to them and say, "Here, beat this."
Q: What is the most important piece of your Internet "puzzle"?
Paul: I think the support of the ownership and management that allows us to have the staff that we have. We are extremely fortunate to have Gail Duncan and our General Manager, John Hager, backing us. It is definitely the level of support we have here and the system that we have set up that are the most important pieces.
Q: How many cars are you selling a month through your program now?
Paul: That is a closely guarded secret. I will tell you that it has been a steady increase since I started about nine months ago. The graph goes up at a steady trend. When management and ownership got behind the Internet you could really see it go up. It has grown significantly to the point where we are actually on the advisory board of CarPoint and Auto Web. They realize that we have a great situation here in that management and ownership support us and we are doing really well numbers-wise. We stand out above the crowd.
Q: Do you find most of your business in your market area or are you pulling outside of your area?
Paul: We are doing about half and half.
Q: What is your closing ratio for the leads you get? Average showroom leads track about 15%.
Paul: We are way above that. We have some very talented people working here and our closing ratio is quite a bit higher than the traditional showroom ratio. It is exceptional. This is a competitive business and it is going to get more so. Customers now can do in fifteen minutes what used to take them three weekends. They can now shop a dozen dealerships where they used to be able to only shop three to five. That is going to make it better for the customer because ultimately they are going to get the lowest price. It is going to make it even more competitive. It is a changing marketplace and if you don't adapt to it you are going to be left by the wayside.
Q: What are some of your future plans for the Internet at Jerome Duncan Ford?
Paul: It is all about identifying trends, such as priceline.com for one, where customers can actually bid on the vehicle and name their own price. There is such a wealth of information for the customers now. They are becoming more sophisticated and educated as to the pricing of vehicles. Dealers are going to have to accept that and realize that profit margins are not going to be as big on Internet sales compared to customers who come in and buy off the showroom floor. I think that the trend is going to be where the customer can do most of the paperwork on-line at home. They are going to let you know exactly what they want to pay for the vehicle and it is just going to be a matter of, "Do you want to accept the price I want to pay or not?" It is going to be a computerized process that takes place in the comfort of the customer's home. We can print the paperwork here, have the customer come in to sign it and drive away.
Todd L. Smith is the President and C.E.O. of Target Marketing Group, the leading automotive Internet solutions provider. He is the publisher of the manual "Automotive Retailing on the Internet." TMG works with OEMs, dealership groups, and individual dealerships on creating Internet strategies. If you have specific questions or require more information about this subject, please check the appropriate box on the reader response form on page 3. tsmith@dealeronline.com.