If you think about it, the intersection of technology and people should be making our dealerships more efficient places to do business. The rise of demand for transparency, coupled with a myriad of reporting tools tracking every metric and variable of our business, should be resulting in something like an algorithm change: picture the squiggly line in movies when subjects are  hooked up to a lie detector test — an urgent procession of sharp spikes and descents. Instead, many dealers are seeing results on their overall statements which are, oddly, flat. In my work with dealers these past few months, I’ve noticed a trend which may explain the disconnect between inputs and outcomes, and why most dealer principals and GMs won’t see positive changes without mending this breakdown.

Being a car dealer in Canada, especially in stressed and fragmented markets like Ontario, has become progressively harder to do successfully over the course of the last ten years.

Without boring you, I will sum this up in three events having a catastrophic impact on the industry. First, this thing we know as the Internet, with its many evolutions and innovations of network and device. Second, the fallout from the financial recession and the resulting instability in the job market leading to a shrewder consumer who, in some cases, can’t afford to care about anything other than price. Third, “ZMOT” (zero moment of truth), or, the commoditization of the service business: whatever you can sell a person, houses, cars, legal wills, is now researched in a sterile and logical environment, often online, in a consumers home or on their device, far away from where we can sway their quest with our best sales approach and emotion. This brings us to today.

I think if given the option, the majority of dealers would really like the Internet to just go away. The perception I hear is that it’s expensive to maintain an online presence, impossible to measure, and that the jury is still out on whether or not it actually helps us sell more cars. With the exception of a few innovators, the large majority of us dealers haven’t quite figured out who we are supposed to be online, never mind how we are supposed to do it profitably. When sales are down, how many dealers even look at their Internet numbers? In a climate where the latest stats show consumers consulting up to 24 online sources before visiting dealership, it is safe to say that if your store is not competitive in some aspect or other, that fact should show up in a metric somewhere.

Fact: if you Google “car shopping paramount concern”, the resulting SERP (search engine results page) is a list of pages with that stock copy from Dealer.com websites, “Dealer X treats the needs of each individual customer with paramount concern …”

People. Come on. Are you kidding me? This is like opening a store in a facility used by another dealer in the past and leaving their name up on the door. Nothing else screams, we don’t even look at our website, like leaving your home page covered with the stock content stuffed onto 90 percent of the dealer sites across the country. Remember that figure of 24 sites consulted online? Now imagine reading about “individual needs with paramount concern” 24 times!  I guess the “long walks on the beach” line worked for a time too, but trust me when I say: that time has passed. The fact is that if your online efforts aren’t working to move people through the new, elongated Web-to-showroom sales funnel; it’s not them; it’s not Auto Trader; it’s not even Google; it’s probably you (or your digital twin).

I firmly believe that despite the three issues mentioned above, every single dealer in Canada can afford to run a successful online dealership. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t risk offending dealers by highlighting so brightly why so few of us are doing it. You see, we spend upwards of 50 hours every week in our stores, we know them, and our lot, like the back of our hand. But how well do you know your digital dealership? Answer these five questions:

  1. What reason would people have to do business with you after reading your home page?
  2. Do you own your URL?
  3. What page on your site gets the most traffic? The longest visits?
  4. What happens when you Google your dealership name and the word “reviews”?
  5. How many cars do you have online right now, with pictures and descriptions?

I ask because each of these questions has a corollary to our physical businesses, and they speak to issues of basic dealer identity, stability, having an accessible business that lends itself to the car buying experience, having a good reputation in your community and just plain being open for business.

You would never allow your physical dealership to fall into the condition I suspect your digital dealership has. Until more dealers take control of what consumers find when they go online, we will continue to hear about upwards trends and recovery, and wonder why it is not translating to more profits and more sales in our store. For the select group of dealers who are actively managing their online identity, please accept my congratulations, and my apologies: I do hope that soon (after the release of this article) there will be more competition from your peers.