Customer retention in today’s market environment may be the best way to insure cash flow and increase profitability while this market corrects itself. Vendors and trainers if you are delivering on your promises to your clients then the vendor rating platform will be one of your best closing tools and assist in customer retention.

In an effort to build our Internet Department, I reached out to an Internet Lead Management Vendor (ILM), iMagicLab, and was shocked at the amazing apathy displayed in that organization. I basically asked if they would be willing to work out some type of trade out for their ILM product’s set up fee and the response was that they were not interested.

I really can’t say that I live up to that goal but I am working on it and with the huge shifts taking place online today car dealers need to start listening to their customers instead of telling them what to do. Your customers are talking about you at work, church, the local bar and now they are talking about you online and how you handle this can make or break your online reputation.

I read two very interesting articles today that deal with the rise and eventual fall of social networking and social media style sites. Auto Dealers have been penny wise and pound foolish when taking a practical approach to using these resources as marketing tools and now that doors will soon start closing on social networks it may be time for dealers to actually get in front of a trend instead of trailing it by several years.