If you were asked what is your single biggest challenge selling cars today most of you would say “traffic” or “finding good sales people”.

I’m curious: if you were to bring in more traffic, what type of effect would that have on your sales recruitment efforts? Would you retain a higher percentage of your sales reps because they are selling more cars and making more money? Word usually travels fast doesn’t it? Imagine a world in which traffic is not a problem and your dealership is the place to sell cars and make the most money, how much easier would it be to recruit the top talent in your market?

The bottom line is your business world and the problems in it will never change if you continue to do the same things over and over again hoping for different results. Most people change their advertising messages quite often, hoping to find something that works better than the prior ad. The reason the results rarely change is because the ads change but not the strategy.

What percentage of your advertising budget goes towards institutional advertising? What percent is invested in direct response ads? Most institutional advertising tells you how great the dealership paying for the ad is, or how old and stable it is, or some other non-persuasive message.

Institutional advertising, as practiced by most advertisers, is wasteful. It doesn’t convey any compelling reason for the customer or prospect to favor your dealership over another. It doesn’t make a case for the product or service you are trying to sell.

Institutional advertising doesn’t direct the reader, listener or viewer to any intelligent action or buying decision.

Direct-response advertising is self explanatory. It is designed to evoke an immediate response, action, visit, call or purchasing decision from the viewer, listener or reader.

Direct-response advertising presents factual reasons your dealership; product, service or offer is superior to all others. Direct-response advertising directs people to action. It compels readers, viewers or listeners to visit your dealership, call you, pay you or drive their car down to trade it in on a new model. At its best it literally compels people to call, visit and buy. And you can analyze the value, profitability and performance of your advertising.

What does your future look like? What are your goals and how do you plan to get there? Start by creating a marketing strategy that focuses on growth. Marketing is not just advertising, it also includes your corporate identity and sales processes. Maximize the potential of your marketing plan by working backward – starting from sales. I strongly believe for any marketing plan to work the advertising element must align with the way a dealership sells cars. This class war between marketing and sales is a primary reason for program failure.

To improve your productivity and profitability many times over, make sure your growth strategy invests a higher percentage of your ad budget to direct-response advertising compared with institutional advertising.

Direct-response advertising is much more effective than institutional advertising because your prospect doesn’t care one iota about you or your motivations. All the prospect cares about is what benefit your product or service renders to him or her. How will your product improve the prospect’s situation and save him or her effort, time and money? How will your product or service improve the prospect’s life and why?

Effective growth strategies have specific goals and objectives designed to grow your dealership the only three ways it can, by:

1. Increasing your numbers of active customers
2. Increase your gross average
3. Increasing your frequency of repurchase – get more residual value out of each Customer

In order for any strategy or plan to be effective you have to be 100 percent committed to it. One hundred percent committed means making sure your sales team is completely prepared by having the right skills. Your sales processes must align with the advertising, and management must make sure that the sales staff does what it has been taught.

The business of sales is about opportunities. The more opportunities we have the more cars we sell – if each opportunity is worked the right way.

Article by: Scott Joseph