I hope this got your attention.

Why would I tell you to stop all your marketing, especially as we are ending 2018? Well, for many companies, your marketing dollars are being wasted.

I have been a loud voice advocating for holding vendors accountable, educating yourself so you can understand what your agency is doing for the fees you pay, and asking yourself the question “Who is driving the digital marketing strategy for your dealership?”

However, I am telling you to stop your marketing. More specifically, don’t increase your marketing budget, because for many, your internal processes to handle your current customer volume is inefficient. For many, you want more “leads” or opportunities, yet you are not handling the ones you have properly.

When I audit business procedures, there is no one tried and true method for customer interaction, no written process for follow up, and employee training is sporadic and unstructured. Mostly, I see a lack of accountability for people doing their jobs. Despite this, some dealers can hit the sales numbers they need by spending in excess to increase leads. They sell in spite of a bad process, but at what cost?

I spoke to an attendee of the AAAS conference who had just taken over a store, and I received a refreshing perspective that isn’t common among most dealer owners and GMs. He said he was not going to increase spending until he felt they handled the current flow of customers efficiently, and that this led to increased sales without increased opportunities. Well done!

He apologized for going into the granular details of his process, however this is where success lies–in the minutia. The consistent inspection of results and efforts and continuous refinement of process and execution to deliver maximum efficiency is where dealers make their money.

Once you’ve discovered a way to economically run your business that exhausts all of your current opportunities, you can increase market spends with a focus on what should be expected from the increase using the process.

Before you increase spending, I recommend auditing your process and looking at your efficiency metrics (appt %, show%, sold%) so you can work to maximize these figures instead of focusing only on end sales numbers. 2019 should be about efficient marketing efforts by your agency and productive execution from your team. The combination will help you win as the market gets tougher to navigate.

Please take the time to reach out to me with any questions, or if you just want to bounce some ideas around with me.

About the Author

Glenn Pasch is a Partner and CEO of PCG Companies. Glenn continues to author articles for multiple industry publications, blogs and forums as well as continuing his writing online at www.glennpasch.com.