Read an interesting article today over at Ward’s Dealer Business called
“Send In the Data Crunchers“.

The discussion was on tracking your results from your internet marketing efforts. You can with the right scripts or services track everything you are doing on line. Should you? Absolutely.

The thing that I read that really resonated with me was something that I have seen numerous times. You need to actually take action on the results.

Let’s take leads as an example. Tracking is easy on the web side but..

Do you have any tracking you are doing once the lead comes in whether it was free or purchased? Who got the lead? Did they actually follow up? Did the lead convert?

It is extremely hard to know whether your lead source is working and if you sales force are actually working what you give them if you aren’t tracking them. This part of tracking is probably the least done and the most important.

Following the 80/20 rule I would bet that 20% of your sales people get 80% of the sales from these leads. If you aren’t tracking you won’t know will you?

Tracking these will allow you to find out which lead sources are working and which salesperson/s actually work their leads promptly.

No matter what your lead source (self generated are always best) if they are not contacted promptly it can be of the best quality and quickly become worthless. How fast are you receiving your leads and how soon do they hear from someone?

What are your thoughts and do you actually track these items? Let me know.

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Why is this? What do they do that the others don’t?

Now some of this may just be a better work ethic. Making the follow up calls, working leads the minute they get them rather than standing out in the smoking area complaining about how slow it is and how the dealership needs to do more advertising and lead generation.

Much more likely it is that the top sales people run their own business. After all commission sales people have their own business. Make sales – Get Paid.

Now you don’t have the overhead and have to worry about the taxes etc. but if you think of your job as a business that you control instead of a job where you put in time you may start doing the little things that will make a big difference.

What are you doing to advertise and brand you for you?

Do you have any kind of web presence?

What organizations do you network at?

Here are just a few ways you can increase others awareness of you.

If you have children are you active in any of their organizations? Having been involved in various things like Little League, Girl’s Softball and Band Boosters when my children were younger I generated and did business with those that I interacted with there and supported my children at the same time.

Anyone can get a free blog and post helpful tips about the car buying process and get exposure. A great way to start getting your name known.

There are a variety of free interactive web services like Squidoo, Hub Pages and Face Book to name a few that can increase your exposure.

And…

The best part about the exposure you generate for you is that it is portable. Yep, you change dealerships and it all points to you not the dealership.

Think about this – if you spend time discovering how to do and use things like this and they sell an extra car or two a month for 2 hours effort a month what is your return on the time work out to hourly.

Discover how to do this the right way and you can increase your sales by more than just one or two sales per month and the more you do it it grows exponentially.

So are you an employee or do you have a business?

Leave your comments and let us know.

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