mspecperformance

Another thing to remember is how can you accurately tell if you are getting quality leads? I struggled with this constantly as I can get tons of calls however my conversion rate could be low and then the blame game starts. Must be that all those people who are calling are just low quality leads right? Not necessarily.

What I am getting at is the other very important component is having the right staff and right systems to take advantage of those leads and convert them into appointments/customers. Before making the big investment in marketing, make sure you are investing and setting up your systems and have quality and talented people to use them. Training is big here.

 

 

Thats a great way to look at it but how do you track that?

Your management software should have some way to track this. Also there will probably be some manual input when you close out a client on "who referred you". These are system that have to be in place for your service advising team so they can collect and enter this info so you can measure it.

Careful the way you turn a customer down!!!!

Had to deal with some BS this morning. Stupid kid obviously his parents are savages brings in a Mercedes he just bought. We give him an initial assessment of a Check engine light problem, explain to him we need to book him for an appointment to properly test and diagnose his problem. He returns 3 times in the next few days every day asking for prices on various possible fixes. We explain to him we need to book an appointment to have enough time to properly test and diagnose. Tells us story about how we went to another shop after he left ours and he had some coils replaced and it didnt solve his problem. He said he knew they were good coils because the shop let him go buy his own parts (FML). Leaves again says he'll give us a call. Calls us up after the weekend is over and wants to book an appointment. Explain to him we are down a tech and our next available appointment is next week. We could have filled him in but we really didn't want him as a customer however we were always 100% professional and courteous. Gets pissed off and 15 minutes later we get a nasty 1-star yelp review filled with lies stating we cancelled his appointments, made him empty promises etc. Mind you he never ever spent a dime with us whilst we did give in a 30 minute consultation for free.

Point to the story is you have to be very careful when you turn away business. People can be 110% irrational POS.

We always inform the customer that our initial diagnosis is FREE. We spend 10-15 minutes diagnosing the car. After the 15 minutes we inform the customer of the findings and state that we have to perform a "Specialty Test" which is usually $45 to $75.

 

The main idea is to offer a free initial diagnosis over the phone to get the car to OUR shop.

Key is to get the people and cars through the door so IMO you are on the right track.

My 2c are that I wouldn't necessarily call it a "diagnosis" considering that you might lock yourself into a commitment in the customer's point of view. What we call it is a consultation and/or inspection of their concern. We make it clear to them that we want to give them some professional eyes on their problem before determining what the problem is or if further action needs to be taken to discover the problem/solution.

So in short we replace FREE with COMPLIMENTARY and INITIAL DIAGNOSIS with CONSULTATION and/or INSPECTION. It helps to differentiate your actual testing and diag fees.

Depending on the job and the customer. If its a one off customer and you know its going to be a problem, I would definitely pass it along.

If it is one of your good customers, the ones that spend money with you on maintenance and repairs and tell their friends all about your shop then yes you have to bite the bullet and take care of them.

I always tell my guys what is important about our jobs is not repairing cars. That is a given. Its how we take care of our customers and leaving them with a great experience. One that will create a circle of business in which they always come back and tell all their friends. The real challenge is to find all these great customers! They are out there, we just have to find them.

You also have assess what your ACTUAL diagnostic capabilities are per technician. I battled with a tech for the better part of 2 years about diag time. I believe we charged appropriately however the tech was just generally slow and overly thorough... It is good to be thorough but not good if you are very slow! At the end of it all that technician wanted to blame the front end for not charging appropriately whereas this tech needed to take responsibility of being slow.

Google has made a $50 billion dollar business out of providing businesses leads.

 

When you google auto service related topics in your area . . . Who shows up? Generally the big boys!! They are not spending money on this cause they like to waste their investors' money. They understand the importance of an online presence in an online world. And they are paying up to $10 per click.

The difference here being Google is a proven commodity. Everyone that has a brain and a heartbeat understands Google Organic and Google AdWords. Google retarget ads as well as popular search/review sites such as Yelp are also big winner in many markets. What this gentlemen is proposing sounds promising however highly unproven. Promises are great but results are necessary.

dang John! that sounds awful!

If you live in a highly populated area (in or close to a city) where you have a lot of people engaging on yelp, it might not be a bad idea. The other key to this formula is to have a great online reputation. I would say spend time to build up that reputation or repair it if you have several bad reviews. It would be completely useless to you to promote a business listing that has a bad reputation. The magic happens when you have a great reputation, you'll see a lot of leads and a lot of business come through the door

I don't think the problem really is that these shop owners are not interested in your service but rather what proof do they have in making an educated business decision to give you money. Anyone can claim they can give a quality lead however the proof will be if you have any way of test piloting the program.

Besides this I would really like to see how you are generating quality people to visit your lead generating site. There are many sites out there that promise to give shops more exposure such as repairpal and openbay. I do also understand it is slightly different than what you are proposing however I truly cannot remember one shop owner that has generated a good (not even great) amount of new customers and sales through some of these lead sites.

I have seen level 1, level 2, level 3 implemented. I am not entirely sure if that is necessarily more profitable than a case by case basis approach. i have not implemented a level system however I was interested in trying it out. I can see how it can certainly clear up a lot of wasted time on debating on what should be charged. One thing is that you'll have to have a meeting to have everyone understand the system and your techs have to trust your SA's to charge appropriately. Weekly monitoring the progress of the system would also be important.

you guys are missing an opportunity to visit a beautiful city like SD!

A big mistake many businesses tend to make is that when business is good then tend to pull back on marketing because they have all that they can handle and... when business is bad they tend to pull back on marketing because they don't think they can't afford it... moral of the story is ALWAYS MARKET. The other piece of the puzzle is marketing is a relatively slow process at least in relation to our ever changing fast pace of life. Marketing campaigns you enact now you will probably not see a result from for several months at the very least. To establish a strong web presence and online reputation takes a lot of time (months sometimes a year or more), direct mail requires several mailings for you to see a return (generally a fraction of a percentage of responses), etc.

In regards to losing customers to mobile techs etc you are having either 1 of 2 problems. First being your customers are just not the right kind of customers. There are some people that truly only care about getting bottom dollar pricing. I am not sure what the percentage is but this segment of the population is fairly low meaning that most likely this is not the majority of the problem you are seeing. The second problem is exactly what usedtireshop pointed out which is maybe you aren't doing all you can to keep a customer happy. Whenever I lose a customer I always put it on myself and my staff to find out what we did wrong. 99% of the time we could have done more, a better job, something that would be make the client impressed and happy with us. When I look internally at myself and my company I can normally find a lot of possible causes to a retention problem. Since being conscious of this, we have had less and less problems retaining our clients.

Just my 2c

Last week, as part of an ATI 20-Group exercise, my son and daughter-in-law went with the entire group to do an assessment of one of the group member shops in Nashville. They broke up into sub groups and evaluated facilities, equipment, interviewed service writers, reviewed processes and management practices. The goal over the next couple of years is to visit all shops in the group and do the same thing. It's tough to hang yourself out there in front of your peers like that, but the rewards are amazing. Anyway, the point for this thread is that Autovitals sent a rep to the meeting. Not long after the visit started, Uwe Klienschmidt, the head guy at Autovitals showed up and met one on one with the members of the group who use AV (most are users). He took home a lot of first-hand feedback. That's pretty good support and reinforced our belief we made a good decision going with AV.

Awesome! Maybe Bolt On will take a page out of AV's book. Meeting with 20 groups is a great idea.

losing another one.....

 

A customer drops off his vehicle for a shifting problem. Its an 88 Mustang 5spd. So with any ado I hop in and go for a spin around the block to feel what he is talking about, once I hit 50MPH the hood opens and smacks the windshield.

 

Its a aftermarket fiberglass hood and was just put on and painted at the body shop 100 miles ago. We told the guy its not our fault on this one, if we had open and closed the hood id eat it but we didn't even have it in the shop yet. so the body shop that did it came by and looked at it and said it wasn't his fault but he is a good customer of his and offered a 3 way split to make the customer happy.

 

So in the end I talked to the customer we told him not our fault we didn't do it but its 1500 bucks to have it fixed and we are willing to split it 3 ways and so is the body shop. He just said I guess we will see what small claims court has to say and walked off. This is a guy that works for himself as a handyman I was expecting more reason out of him and thought he would value his time more than trying to sue me.

Isn't that amazing. Sorry to hear. There are many people that inherently selfish. What can you do

How I'd Elite different from Management Success or ATI? There website looks the same. "Make more money, have less stress and take more time off". Those are the promises all the automotive management companies are making. What's the difference?

I guess I will chime in as I am working with Elite as a client.

With any management coaching, your success really depends on you. You have to implement the changes that are necessary for improvement. With that being said I think that any management coaching probably has value. The different I see mostly is the people involved with Elite over the other companies. I look at it like this... Elite is like the special forces of the management coaching (lol). What I mean by that is their organization is not as large as Management Success or ATi it seems however they have a concentrated group of really experienced and successful coaches. I have several friends involved with Elite and I have never heard one complaint about the confidence they have in their assigned coach. ATi on the other hand I have heard of dissatisfied clients on numerous occasions. The solution to this as far as I have seen is "call ATi, they will reassign you to another coach." IMHO that is a scary thought to not have confidence in a coach that is assigned to you after you have forked over a bunch of money.

In regards to my experience with Elite I am very happy with them and they have been an invaluable resource to me in turning around my business.

Everything from $175 aux battery for his mercedes to $280 for rear brakes. Everything. It was unbelievable lol

I don't necessarily mind asking for the sale however there are just certain people that cannot be pleased when it comes to dollars. They can be the nicest sweetest people but they cannot be parted with their money and its the most frustrating thing to deal with at times. I literally have no problem taking home a bit less if it means that I don't have to deal with that annoyance.

So I have my Service Advisor off to training for a few days in San Diego and that means I am manning the front end. I am pretty dang good at talking to people I would like to think but had to present some pricing to a customer and all he kept saying when a price for a job was given was, "Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww." I just realized how much I dislike talking to people in a Service Advisor capacity. Like I really can't stand it LOL. That is not to say I don't like speaking to my customers because I do. I just hate the daily grind of dealing with the one off customer that has unrealistic expectations that no one can meet. God bless all your service advisors out there. I am about ready to hire my second one just so I never have to do this again haha.

Moral of the story is if you ever have that type of feeling then its high time to get a service advisor! Make sure they are a people person too, that helps!!!

You'll be seeing Eddie at this one Joe!

proper marketing efforts and campaigns need to be continued through the slow times. The biggest mistake most businesses make is to pull back on marketing efforts when business is slow.

bought it, it was mehhhh. I get a decent amount of good information from their trade publication so I don't mind sending a little $ there way but strictly speaking I don't think it was worth it.

We use Kukui which has a comprehensive dashboard showing us several metrics including number of visitors, number of opt ins via the call tracking number on our website, what landing page they were on when they opted in, etc. It is nearly impossible to get pin point accuracy as to where people are actually opting to use your services considering someone can go to your google+ reviews, then your website, and finally opt in to call you from yelp. In those cases what really got them to call. I guess you can chalk it up to the last point of contact which was yelp in this case BUT you can't know what the importance of your google reviews or website was as well.

Either way I believe we chart our ROI pretty well with Kukui.

wow.... revisiting your hiring practices are in order

I did as well take part in the survey.