By Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller

You’ve heard about the bailout right? Dumb question. We’ve all been reading about the bailout bill that’s being worked over by the bureaucrats in Washington. You’re probably feeling the pain from the credit crunch and mortgage debacle that started this mess.

It seems like none of these people involved with this mess have a clue about smart business, good deal making or fiscal responsibility.  Imagine if you ran your dealership this way. You’d be out of business faster than an Olympic sprinter with a digestive problem (that’s fast).

Consider this… If you put a good car guy in charge of Wall Street we wouldn’t have this problem. You know how to desk a good deal and get things done. You can put the fix on steroids if you put direct marketers like us next to the car guy.

Why a direct marketer? Because we’re masters at tracking where every dollar gets spent and where every penny originates. Knowing your numbers is paramount to keeping your profits high and your liabilities low.

Plus, direct marketers like us are fanatics about testing. We try new things all the time but we make sure they are profitable before we continue doing them. We don’t just through a whole bunch of new things in the mix and hope it all works out. That’s foolishness. This is the kind of stuff that’s ruining our country and many dealerships too.

Listen up guys… this is really important especially as things get tighter with credit and consumer confidence drops. The days of being loose about the way you track your marketing results and where your ups and sold deals come from is over.

You need to start implementing smart, response-oriented marketing systems and strategies that get results and can be measured. Gravitational Marketing is built on these foundations. It is an accountable customer attraction system of marketing for a car dealership.

If you want to stay alive you have to keep marketing. You can’t just opt out until the market comes back. The reality is it may never come back to the lending free-for-all it’s been in the last 10 years. Dealers have to evolve. You have to be more diligent and become a smarter marketer. If you don’t market you’ll go out of business fast. The dealers who market through the slow time will succeed and have ultimate power when the market levels out.

It really is, you snooze… you loose time. But because things are tight, there are fewer deals to go around and financing is harder than ever. You have to spend your money wisely and you have to have systems that will track, test and measure your expenditure.

The time to get smart about marketing is now. Or suffer the consequences later.