Day 2

The day started by meeting with the General Manager to talk about what our next steps would be. The main reason I was hired was because the dealership felt they were losing sales, and in a down market needed to take steps to recapture them. So the areas we wanted to concentrate on were:

• Internet leads for new and used vehicles
• Phone-ups
• Lease renewals
• Website

During the initial stages, we want to develop the internet department, and continue in the planning stages for the BDC. How big the BDC becomes will be determined by what we want it to accomplish. And I feel the BDC is a much bigger job. So we'll take one step at a time so we can do things right.

All the dealership salespeople have computers on their desks logged into Autobase. But they are not allowed to use the internet. The dealership is worried that they'll abuse the system, so they've eliminated it completely. The only ones who have direct and unlimited access to the internet are myself and the General Manager.

Well, today my firewall kicked in so I couldn't access the internet. I need to wait till tomorrow for the networking guy to come in and fix it.

So I spent time visiting with the current New and Used Vehicle Internet Sales Managers, updating them on my plans and gathering information on what they were currently doing with the leads. I'll get more indept in gathering realistic facts and figures probably the beginning of next week. There's no sense making any plans without current data.

I also met with the Autotrader rep to put together a package for the dealership. He'll probably have that ready by the beginning of next week.

I need to put an ad in Careerbuilder.com to hire an Appointment Coordinator. I have had great success setting up Internet Departments by starting like this. I realize that the only way to make sure every lead is handled properly is by putting someone totally in charge of them. Salespeople hate using the phone and usually cherry-pick the leads. Plus they don't do a really good job of following-up. So by setting the appointments for the salespeople, they can concentrate on what they do best - close deals. My department can handle all the rest of the work.

Tomorrow I'll need to start learning the Autobase system. They have a really good University online, so I'll spend most, if not all of the day studying.

Until tomorrow.