Fort Lauderdale, FL – May 20^th, 2013 — AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions (www.autousadealers.com) today introduced Shop-By-Payment for Payment Pro^SM, powered by DriveItNow, a patent-pending next generation payment marketing tool that offers consumers a new way to shop on auto dealer websites. When a customer visits a dealer website with Shop-By-Payment, they are given the option to search inventory based on their desired monthly payment. The customer is prompted to enter in their name and a few details—no SSN or DOB required. Shop-By-Payment searches the available inventory based on their actual credit, the dealers’ current finance programs and returns a list of new and used vehicles that match the desired payment.

 

“Shop-By-Payment for Payment Pro revolutionizes the online auto shopping experience,” said Phil DuPree, President of AutoUSA. “Instead of searching for vehicles based on make, model or price, customers can now view and choose from all the vehicles they know they can afford based on the monthly payment.”

 

After displaying a list of vehicles that match the customer’s payment range, Shop-By-Payment allows the customer to change criteria such as monthly payment, down payment or the bottom line price they are willing to pay. The inventory displayed instantly adjusts to the new criteria selected by the customer. When the customer narrows the selection of vehicles, they click on a button with the desired monthly payment. That information then becomes a credit analyzed website lead and is sent to that dealership.

 

Shop-By-Payment for Payment Pro offers dealers the following benefits:

 

·      For the majority of car buyers, it is all about the payment. According to CNW Research, 70.5 percent of car buyers finance their vehicles. Shop-By-Payment instantly engages these customers by offering an easy, interactive and immediate way to view the vehicles they can afford, instead of viewing the vehicles they want and not knowing if they can afford them.

 

·      Because no Social Security Number or date of birth is required, Shop-By-Payment protects consumers’ privacy and credit reports. Payment Pro delivers payment quotes based on the customer’s credit without negatively impacting the credit score.

 

·      Payment Pro delivers accurate monthly payment quotes based on the customer’s credit, the dealership’s finance programs and the specific inventory available, producing high-quality, credit analyzed leads. With customers this far down the sales funnel, the next step is for the customer to visit the dealership and take delivery of the vehicle.

 

Shop-By-Payment is initially available to car dealers who are currently using AutoUSA’s Payment Pro. To see a demonstration of Shop-By-Payment for Payment Pro, visit www.AnywhereMotors.com.

 

Dealers interested in learning more about Shop-By-Payment for Payment Pro can call AutoUSA at 800-509-8714.

 

About AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions (www.AutoUSADealers.com)

AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions brings the best-in-class tools to increase Internet sales and lower costs for automotive dealerships. Leading products include Payment Pro^SM, a payment-based pre-qualification tool for dealer websites; ShowPro^SM incentive program, proven to turn more leads into shows; Leads&Listings^SM, providing the highest quality, new and used car email and phone leads from 100+ sites; PowerListings^SM 2.0, helping dealers increase traffic to—and leads from—their social media sites; and AVA Virtual Sales Assistant, helping dealerships manage more leads at a reduced cost. AutoUSA products are currently benefiting thousands of active dealers all across the U.S.

 

For more information, visit AutoUSA’s web site, subscribe to our blog at http://blog.autousadealers.com, follow us on Twitter @AutoUSALeads and “Like” us on Facebook at /AutoUSADealers

 

About DriveItNow® (http://www.DriveItNow.com)

DriveItNow® is a patent-pending monthly payment marketing technology service of Automobile Consumer Services, Inc. (ACS). ACS is a leader in developing innovative online shopping technology with the initial launch of LeaseCompare.com in 2000. LeaseCompare.com continues to be one of the top destinations for auto financing and leasing in the industry.

The Internet customers who say "I'm not in the market right now" most likely ARE in the market, but just overwhelmed. Josh Vajda, Director of Inside Sales with AutoUSA, shares tips on how to deal with this common objection. www.autousadealers.com

The broad term “Internet Marketing” encompasses a fast-changing industry. In the past two years, “new” developments such as mobile, social and reputation management have quickly become mainstream, while the effectiveness of “old” methods such as banner ads and e-mail marketing have been debated.

 

While dealers should be aware of the latest technologies, ensuring that perceptions about the Internet and its capabilities is extremely important too. Here are three things every dealer should know about Internet marketing:

 

1) The Internet Creates Buyers, Not Shoppers

 

Given a choice between greeting a showroom customer and working an Internet lead, most salespeople would choose the former; simply because they believe they have a better chance of closing the showroom customer in the short term. Many dealers (and salespeople) still view Internet leads as “Internet shoppers” who are potentially difficult to work with or even reach.

 

The reality is that, whether they’re in your virtual showroom or your physical showroom, they’re a buyer. Maybe not today, but statistically the Internet customer is highly likely to buy within 90 days.

 

94% of car buyers begin the process online, according to recent estimates, yet most dealerships attribute less than 30% of actual sales to Internet leads. Why the discrepancy? Most consumers do research online but instead of submitting a lead, they decide to call or walk into a dealership when they’re ready to buy. Because of all the research they can do on their own, though, customers today visit only 1.4 dealerships before purchasing a car, down from 4.5 in 2005, according to J.D. Power.

 

And, according to a recent study by CAR-Research XRM, only 25% of people leave showrooms because they are “still shopping.” The rest leave because of inventory, financing or some other issue. These customers are ready to buy, the only question is, are they buying from you?

 

2) Internet Marketing is More Than a One-Person Job

 

If I asked you, “Who is in charge of your Internet marketing,” would you answer, “The Internet Sales Director?”

 

To be effective, Internet marketers need to have knowledge of and take advantage of all facets of the Internet. This means managing the dealership’s website and SEO, e-mail marketing campaigns, and being the resident CRM expert.

 

In addition, Internet marketers should know how to properly leverage and manage the dealership’s presence on independent auto shopping, research and review sites, the manufacturer website, social media sites and reputation management sites. Finally, they need to keep up with the latest trends and create strategies for search marketing, payment marketing, mobile marketing, banner advertising, e-mail marketing and video marketing.

 

That’s a lot for one person to keep up with, let alone the time needed to work the leads that come in as a result of all that work. To stay competitive, dealers need to allocate the appropriate budget, training and resources for their Internet departments. According to a recent article in Ward’s Auto profiling the top 100 e-dealers, successful Internet dealers typically spend 40% or more of their overall advertising and marketing budget on digital.

 

3) Evolve Your Communication

 

Most dealers are probably not Internet gurus; nor do they want to be. Several years ago, the perception was that this was okay. Hiring an “Internet nerd” who could run the Internet operations was the norm. But staying competitive today—and maybe even survival tomorrow—depends on how successful your dealership’s Internet marketing program is.

 

Every manager needs to understand that customers can engage with the store and its sales staff anywhere online. They need to stay abreast of trends, direct strategies, manage processes, hold teams accountable and respond to customers’ online concerns and opportunities—wherever they arise. One click, one call, one person doesn’t work any more.

 

What do you think dealers need to know about Internet marketing?

www.autousadealers.com Josh Vajda, Director of Inside Sales, shares three proven methods for getting Internet leads into the dealership showroom.

I’d like to think that by now most dealerships have a written Internet sales process to handle Internet leads effectively. As the documented, researched and confirmed driver of “lead quality,” an established process is the key to obtaining a maximum ROI from Internet leads. Though many dealers are allocating a substantial portion of their marketing budget to attract Internet leads, many are still not achieving the recommended minimum of five times their ROI on those dollars spent, even with a “good process”. Why not?

 

Very often, accountability is the missing link between a written process and lack of desired ROI. How easy is it for an Internet salesperson to check off tasks as completed when they are not, or to say “I’ve tried calling that person three times and they haven’t called me back. What’s the point?” A good process that isn’t followed is the same as having no process at all—both salespeople and managers must be held accountable to following that process.

 

Here are a few tips to help weave accountability into your processes:

 

Does Your Team Own It? Accountability is about ownership – do your salespeople own the process? Ownership means more than just knowledge of the process, it’s belief in the process and its consistent execution. As a manager, if you want to hold people accountable you have to reinforce WHY they should be following the process and instill the belief that their personal results will improve. Call out individual successes that reinforce that following the process yields personal returns.

 

Review the Internet Sales Process.  Does it mirror the showroom sales process? In the showroom process, there’s always room for interaction with management. Salespeople have check points throughout process; the test drive, desk log and the write-up. In many stores, managers walk the lot and showroom and inject themselves in the process to ensure everything stays on track. Is management involved throughout your Internet sales process, only at the end, or not at all? Create availability of management to the Internet team and reinforce the need for manager involvement.

 

Openness and Competition. Nothing breeds accountability like visibility. Show the whole team where all of them rank in your key performance areas and include the steps of the sale (i.e. contact rate, appointment rate, show rate), not just sales volume. Regularly review team results in a group, calling out the best at execution, and schedule individual meetings for coaching and personal accountability.

 

What are your tips for improving accountability? What tips do you have for managers and for salespeople? 

Since more than 80% of your customers are likely to finance or lease a vehicle, when is the right time to bring up this potentially touchy subject? Is it better to pre-qualify or not to pre-qualify your Internet leads? Josh Vajda, Director of Inside Sales for AutoUSA, shares some tips. www.autousadealers.com

It’s becoming more common for customers to shop, communicate and conduct daily business using their mobile devices. If you are selling cars in a dealership, I’m guessing you’ve received many responses from customers with the signature “sent from my iPhone/4G-LTE smartphone/mobile device.” When you see this type of response, do you attempt to communicate as you normally would?

 

Almost all of the e-mail templates and responses I have seen were created for customers who are sitting at their computers. Many salespeople have been trained to reply to an Internet lead with a fairly long, personalized response that includes links to several pieces of inventory, reasons for buying from this dealership and one or two questions designed to engage. This type of e-mail is great if your customer is sitting at the computer. But if you send that same response to a mobile customer, they’re probably not going to engage.

 

So what’s the best way to communicate with a mobile customer? Here are a few tips:

 

1)    --Get to the point. Mobile customers don’t think or respond the same way, and don’t have the same level of patience as when they’re sitting at home on their computers. A mobile customer is probably going to be distracted; multi-tasking, bouncing from checking e-mail to Facebook, to Twitter, to attending to their daily life. For this reason, keep your e-mails to no more than a couple sentences and you’ll be more likely to engage that customer in a conversation.

 

2)   -- Choose attachments and links carefully. If you’re used to sending a brochure about your dealership, an embedded video, or showcasing a particular vehicle with hundreds of photos, think twice before sending memory-heavy attachments to the mobile customer. Mobile users aren’t likely to open an attachment that’s difficult to view on a small screen or takes a long time to download. Instead, send a link to a video or send one good photo of the car that they inquired about.

 

3)    --Be Patient. On mobile devices, many people respond one line at a time, as if in a chat. Going back and forth one line at a time may become frustrating to you. But remember, this is not about you, it’s about the customer and their needs. You may reach a point where you think that one phone call could replace all this, and ask the customer to just call you, or you may try calling them. Or you may be tempted to write, “if you set an appointment to come in and take a test drive, all your questions will be answered.” Yet, just as we’ve been taught to earn the right to ask for the sale in the traditional sales process, you must earn the right to ask your mobile customers. When you’re communicating via mobile, it may take a lot longer, moving one small step at a time. Trying to skip ahead in the process could disconnect them from the conversation.

 

What tips do you have for communicating with mobile customers?

It’s the classic prisoner’s dilemma, to tell or not to tell. Two suspected criminals are separated into two different rooms, and given their options:

 

1)    If neither of them betrays each other, they both go free

2)    If one betrays the other, the betrayer goes free while the other prisoner gets maximum penalty

3)    If they both betray each other, they both get a penalty slightly less than the maximum penalty.

 

Clearly, it benefits both prisoners to not betray each other as they can both go free. Yet, inevitably the prisoners betray each other out of fear that the other will betray them, and that they will get the maximum penalty.

 

So how does this relate to the classic “Just Give Me the Price” objection? When a salesperson hears that objection, they are faced with a dilemma: to give the price or not to give the price? First, you have to assume that if a customer sends in an Internet lead or calls into a dealership demanding to know the price right off the bat, they are probably making the same inquiry to at least a couple of other dealerships. Based on that reasonable assumption, here are your choices:

 

1) Don’t give the price.

 

Ideally it would be in every dealership’s best self-interest to never give the price. If nobody quotes a price, the customer has no choice but to make an appointment with a dealership in order to discover and negotiate a price. But in the information age, this just isn’t how business is done: customers expect the price.

 

If you don’t give a price and your competitor down the road does give that customer a price, your chances of working with that customer have just dropped to zero while your competitor’s have skyrocketed. So, what do you do?

 

2) Give the price.

 

If you and your competitor both give the price, you both still have the opportunity to work with the customer. You’re competing on a level playing field, and the next step is to convince the customer to buy from you. Contrary to what some salespeople believe, the customer will not automatically choose the dealership with the absolute lowest price. Ideally the difference in quoted prices should be minimal, and if you can build trust and give that customer several other reasons to buy from you, then you will win the sale.

 

For this reason I always recommend giving a price when a customer demands it. However, giving a price does not mean you have to give the gross away. Here are a few tips on how to effectively engage these customers, give them smart quotes and to ultimately secure an appointment:

 

1) Know Your Market. It pays to shop the competition, use internal sales history and third party resources to tell you what the average selling prices are for the vehicles you’re quoting. If you end up sending a quote that’s close to your competitor’s, you increase your chances of selling to that customer.

 

2) Give Options. When you send out a price quote for the customer’s desired vehicle, send out a lower and higher-priced option that are similar to the vehicle they inquired about. Use the opportunity to educate the customer that comparing prices of two models isn’t like comparing apples to apples. Prices can vary based on a number of factors such as age, mileage, options and more.

 

3) Include Payments in the Conversation. Most consumers consider the payment of the vehicle, not just the price, when evaluating a purchase. Offering a link to your website’s credit application, when done the right way, can progress the deal. If you really want to stand out, provide payment estimates in your quotes, or use a real-payment-quoting lead generator such as Payment Pro^SM to bring you one step closer to the sale.

 

How do you deal with the “just give me the price” objection? Have you ever sold to a customer who made this demand right up front, and if so, what was your process?

Fort Lauderdale, FL – February 4^th, 2013 — AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions (www.autousadealers.com) announced today that its recently launched website conversion tool, Payment Pro ℠, is transforming the customer buying experience on auto dealership websites. A vital part of the buying process for most consumers is credit eligibility and monthly payment affordability, but current website tools such as estimated payment calculators and long-form credit applications fall short of consumer needs. Payment Pro is the only website conversion tool that offers accurate payment quotes to consumers without requiring personal information, resulting in pre-qualified leads directly from a dealer’s own website.

 

“The feedback we are getting from dealers using Payment Pro is that customers really like the fact they can get a real payment quote without having their credit checked which can negatively impact scores,” said Phil DuPree, President of AutoUSA.

 

Payment Pro, powered by DriveItNow, is also the only solution offering customers a method for getting pre-qualified via their mobile device. Approximately 20% of new-vehicle buyers use smartphones or tablets close to the time of their purchase, according to the 2012 New Autoshopper Study by J.D. Power and Associates. Google forecasts that number may rise to 47% in 2013.

 

M’Lady Nissan in Crystal Lake, IL has been using Payment Pro on its website since October 2012. Soon after installation, Operations Manager Patti Scipione noticed a significant number of new leads from Payment Pro. “These leads are very qualified and we are closing them at an average rate of 40%,” said Scipione. “This month (January 2013) we received 28 leads and so far I’ve sold 14 of them. It’s the best new product I’ve tried in a couple years and I’m very happy with it.”

 

Tony Rehn, General Manager of Evergreen Ford in Issaquah, Washington, appreciates the level of transparency that Payment Pro offers.  “Car shoppers have plenty of choices when it comes to inventory and low prices, but they don’t know what will happen when they go into a dealership for the financing aspect of it,” he says. “Some dealers may surprise them with high interest rates. That’s not what we do and I want customers to know that.” He adds that Payment Pro enables customers to get further down the funnel on Evergreen Ford’s website, so that once they know their monthly payment and their interest rate, there’s nothing left for them to do but come in and take delivery.

 

In the three months prior to purchasing a vehicle, 31% of car buyers perform at least one “low-funnel” Key Performance Indicator (KPI) online; such as request a quote, locate a dealer, use a calculator, search inventory and review financing options (source: Online Shopping Behavior by Yahoo! Autos and Compete). Payment Pro converts these low-funnel car buyers into leads at a rate higher than conventional estimated payment calculators and long-form credit applications.

 

Payment Pro is powered by DriveItNow and sold by AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions. To see a demonstration of Payment Pro visit www.paymentprodemo.com or visit Booth #274 at the NADA Convention & Expo this week in Orlando, Florida.

 

 

About AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions

 

AutoUSA Internet Sales Solutions brings the best-in-class tools to increase Internet sales and lower costs for automotive dealerships. Leading products include Payment Pro^SM, a payment-based pre-qualification tool for dealer websites; ShowPro^SM incentive program, proven to turn more leads into shows; Leads&Listings^SM, providing the highest quality, new and used car email and phone leads from 100+ sites; PowerListings^SM 2.0, helping dealers increase traffic to—and leads from—their social media sites; and AVA Virtual Sales Assistant, helping dealerships manage more leads at a reduced cost. AutoUSA products are currently benefiting thousands of active dealers all across the U.S.

 

For more information, visit AutoUSA’s web site, subscribe to our blog at http://blog.autousadealers.com, follow us on Twitter @AutoUSALeads and “Like” us on Facebook at /AutoUSADealers

When a customer walks into the showroom and says, "I'm just looking," we train our salespeople how to deal with that objection. Yet when an Internet lead says "I'm Not Looking," we often close out the lead. Josh Vajda with AutoUSA gives tips on how to deal with this objection.