My Market Resources

A common trait we have seen among many dealers lately is burnout.

Dealers are burnt out with the auto business, they are burnt out with chasing leads and they’re sick to death of forcing outcomes just to stay alive. There’s just no light at the end of the tunnel. Success feels light years away.

So what’s the cause of all this burnout?

The chief reason for this is that the traditional technique of doing business in the car industry is broken. The conventional methods of marketing and attracting leads no longer work.

So in reality, success IS light years for the dealer still utilizing traditional lead generation and customer attraction means. How can you run a business whilst chasing down leads, making numerous calls, pushing for meetings, clinging to the hard sell and forcing outcomes all at the same time?

You can’t… and that is the reason most dealers are going under right now.

So what works? What could you do to refresh your efforts and start getting customers to your store?

It all begins by understanding things from your prospects’ perspective.

You see, when conventional customer attraction means are used in the car business, the experience is as equally uncomfortable and unnatural for your prospects and clients as it is for you.

The customer is on the receiving end of your manual brute force efforts and normally feels like an animal being chased by an amateur hunter who will not give up the fight. They feel pressured, hounded and beaten… and eventually a weak few might give in and move ahead. But the greater part will run, and stay away for life.

This not just applies to your personal sales effort but also to external marketing. Your external marketing is doing an equally brutal hack job on your personal brand and on your prospects’ or clients’ perception of you. Interrupting them, bombarding them and confusing them, not to mention wasting their valuable time is no way to build an authentic relationship.

You do not require a degree in marketing psychology to see how you are sabotaging your efforts by doing the types of marketing and hard selling practices as I touched on above. You are just working against yourself-alienating more people than you draw in… which obviously makes for a horrible bottom line every month.

Well here comes the frightening part.

The expense of this forced, unfocused and barbaric approach is enormous. Prepare yourself. It’s ugly, it is scary and it is familiar. More work, more waste (both time and money), more frustration and lower gross. All of which means you put less money in your pocket, kids’ college fund and retirement account.

When you use the traditional approach and it is not working the symptoms you experience are more time spent working each week, more marketing which does not create results, a lot less cash to operate and grow and more disappointment and frustration.

Ultimately you lose, either by getting so burnt out that you cannot go on any longer or your dealership is forced to close because it can’t sustain its operating budget.

Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller are the authors of Gravitational Marketing: The Science of Attracting Customers and founders of the Rich Dealers Institute. They help dealers double their profits in as little as 118 days. Receive a free copy of their special report & video presentation, The New Rules of Automotive Marketing by visiting http://www.RichDealers.com/special