Driving Sales Presidents Club Recap Day 1

 

Day 1 of the inaugural DrivingSales Presidents Club event kicked off strong yesterday!

Jared Hamilton, Founder of DrivingSales, shared his passionate view of what truly makes up our brands. At the core, our brand strategy is the allocation of assets with a purpose. (This may have been the shortest introduction from Jared ever – but it certainly didn’t lack intensity and focus.)

Jonathan Ord helped continue that mindset by telling the crowd of automotive executives to think effectively by sticking with two simple principles:

1. Implement new technology easily

2. Respond to new technology changes quickly

By focusing on the processes and the technology improvements dealers are improving sales, service activity, reduce marketing campaign costs and raise their CSI scores.

Another major theme Jonathan drove home was mobile – for both showroom mobility workflow solutions and the customer. This is changing behaviors quickly for salespeople and the shopper plus it’s desperately needed to help improve the shopping experiences dealer provide.

Mobile activities are able to help drive fresh ups, help confirm appointments and help speed up the sales process. Many dealers are still missing the opportunities with test drives, additional service advisor info and general content delivery.

Jonathan raised another strong recommendation for dealers to help improve customer experiences:  “Is each department helping the other departments as best as possible by sharing customer and product information?” Your staff needs to know how to connect with the customer on an emotional level to be strategic and not reactionary.

Jonathan stated, “Processes put a bubble around your salespeople; create buyers – don’t just sell to them.” He urged everyone to use the data-mining capabilities of your CRM and up the level of your game with regards to inventory management to help create those buyers.

The need to measure the social activity happening with your customer was also a key element of Jonathan’s message. Your staff must know and understand that 55% of social users share their purchase activity online; leverage your own internal network to help push those messages to their own social graph. Your dealership’s social activities can also help drive your CSI score by building upon the direct relationships you’re worked hard to create. You should also be using content marketing opportunities to help your staff extend your presence online.

Lastly, Jonathan stressed having accountability meetings with your staff to cover the basics of what’s being done – on a daily basis – to help drive cars sales. Leadership and accountability are such a key factor for your success and your dealership needs these values baked in consistently to be successful.

Following Jonathan was Duncan McCall, CEO of Place IQ, a leading mobile technology solutions provider. He simply described PlaceIQ as being an audience company – they help define, find, reach and learn about your audiences to help drive effective mobile solutions.

He raised a key point with regards to a common phrase thrown around today: “This is the year of mobile.” He said this is akin to car dealers saying “This is the year of the car.” The key point being that mobile has been around for a while, it’s simply getting smarter and more efficient – much like cars improving over time.

How significant is mobile? The adoption of iOS and Android has surpassed that of any other consumer technology in history. And it’s this fact that is powering the significant change in consumer behavior – but we’re not reacting to this change as quickly and effectively as we should. Knowing this behavior shift will help us wrap our heads around the new behaviors of today’s mobile customer. The average consumer is always within three feet of their mobile device and they happen to check their devices on average 40 times per day. What type of opportunities does this present to the dealers? That’s how we need to look at this shift.

Duncan helped the audience understand how the next wave of content marketing is evolving into geolocation targeting, which ultimately helps creates higher engagement and more valuable CTR’s. By adding the geolocation element to the marketers message you’re able to dive deeper into their activity and location is the biggest indicator of consumer intent.

Duncan also raised the awareness of how this geolocation activity will create additional measurement opportunities. PlaceIQ’s solutions provides the ability see the mobile devices that have entered a specific geofence – knowing the “Place Visit Rate” metric can help determine activity, frequency and customer demographic based on the devices identified. Geofences can also provide more specific messaging and also help measure a new layer of mobile conversion based on the “Dwell Time” – the time it takes for a mobile user to enter a geofence and take action upon a specific offer. This type of exact targeting can speed up messages rates while also reduce overall campaign costs.

This segment is changing rapidly and there isn’t a need to rely on static, broad messages being shown just within mobile search. New solutions exist to help messages identify specific locations where the message has the ability to be more relevant and valuable to the audiences. This trend won’t stop there as it can continue with other solutions such as physical screens that know the current audience and also wearable technology.

A solid opening for the first day and it created even more anticipation for day two that will surely make an impact on the 120+ dealership executives in attendance. The overall theme of focusing on their brand, their capital and their people is making an impact on the conversations and questions being raised already.

Stay tuned for additional updates including a full recap of Seth Godin’s keynote.

Follow along on twitter by watching #DSPC and join in on the conversation.