Sales is More Than JustSelling Cars

On average, 80% of a dealership’s business comes from theservice department. That's why it is interesting to me that somany people have waited until now to warm up to the idea ofmaking service a bigger part of your online strategy. As longas I've been around this business, everyone is always

clamoring about "the sales part" of the website. The focus makes sense--when we thinkabout how to make money, we immediately think about sales. Right? "Show me the cars."

But I'm going to tell a little story that has stuck with me for a long time--a story that startswith the cars but ends with the humble service appointment form.

Many years ago, back when I was still new to Dealer.com and manning a phone in thesupport queue, a call came in. The call was from a client who had noticed that theinventory on his website was displaying incorrectly. It was showing cars that had been soldweeks ago. We did some digging together and found the source of the problem: we hadreceived a bad feed from their system.

The good news was that the issue would fix itself the next time we received a correct datafeed. The bad news was that we had no idea when that might be. Even in the best-casescenario we were looking at waiting a full day for that next feed. That wouldn't do! But whatwere our alternatives?

I asked our client what he thought about working together to fix each car manually. Heprotested: "But that could take hours!" And he was right; it was not a very good suggestion.But his alternative suggestion was even worse: "Just shut the whole thing down!" Hewanted to take his whole website offline until the issue with the inventory could beresolved. Something about that didn't sit right with me, but I didn't know what else to say.So I asked him if he could hold on for a moment, and I turned to my manager for advice.

"Are you crazy?" (my manager asked me) "Why would you let him do that? Think of all theother missed opportunities!" I saw at once what he was talking about -- The "Contact Us"form, the Directions page, and of course, the humble Service Request Form.

I got back on the phone and explained the epiphany I just had. "Why don't we just pull theinventory pages off for a day or two while we work through this together?" That solutionsounded reasonable to everyone. So we kept the site up, took down the inventory so asnot to lose any service leads. When I followed up with the client, they told me no leadswere lost and were happy that we decided to keep the site up.

Now every time I hear someone discussing how service needs to be a larger part of adealership's online presence, I think back to that phone call and smile. Even though wekept the website up without inventory, we were still able to generate service leads, provingthat sales is more than just selling cars.

Rob Friesel is User Interface Developer for Dealer.com.