My role as an Internet Sales Manager started off as a salesperson who handles online automotive leads and has developed into much more. While the core of my job is to take a customer from contact to close the volume that I have created through various lead sources and self created content has caused me to push out of that description.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depends on how you look at it, I have reached a critical mass on lead volume to the point where I can not manage it all by myself and have started “pitching” leads to other guys on the floor, (Sorry gals we don’t have any on staff in sales) then moving completely out of the process other than sourcing the customers. Meaning that I am not actively hands on in the sales process after the lead is passed. I do manage follow up if the opportunity is “lost”.

I have refused to take on other responsibilities on the front end, maybe to my detriment maybe not. I believe that concentration of effort in your niche is a hell of a lot better than trying to wear too many hats. I can usually skirt picking up additional duties mumbling about “gigabytes and pop servers” and can you help me with this? It usually grabs the desired response in my situation.

In a perfect world for me I would just handle marketing as a whole with a emphasis on Internet Marketing and be completely extricated from the sales process having others deal with the consumer directly, however I do like the personal branding that the internet has afforded me and feel like it would be impossible for me to relegate myself to an office with 5 monitors and 3 cpus pouring over spreadsheets and conversion ratios.

My goal is to bring in incremental business via Internet Marketing of our dealership and bottom line I am paid for sourced results. Nothing more and nothing less as that is the only bench mark current management understands.

Sell a car, sell a car sell a car!!!

While that is the main goal of any car dealer, selling cars, it just seems to me that many miss the forest for the trees. Relying on vendors to push leads and traffic to poorly converting websites, mine included, and to ignore the long term branding that the Internet provides. Anything along those lines is just not understood or embraced because the immediate ROI is not visible by creating multiple levels of contact online. I have been able to build up a nice secondary income just by doing these things pushing affiliate products and Adsense revenue and have capitulated those efforts to promote our store online with a built in personal branding message every step of the way.

While it does seem that my role is not clearly defined other than meeting the goal of selling a car today I have given additional layers to my responsibilities, on my own, to build that online brand that will be a force to be reckoned both on the showroom floor and the wild West of online automotive marketing.

Let’s hear how are your duties defined and what are you are doing to get outside of the box?

Subscribe to My Feed

Technorati Tags: automotive internet sales mananger, Brand Building, defining roles