I don’t think I need to tell you the importance of listing your RV inventory on the internet, making sure that information is accurate and that each unit has pictures, pricing and a good description at the very least.  For many RV dealers, their online presence is the backbone of their sales department.  That’s why it’s so important for you to go through a process, that may or may not include a number of the items below, when the person in charge of your online listings leaves the company or is dismissed for any reason.

I’ll get to the “to-do” items in just a minute.  First I wanted to mention that you, as the owner of the RV dealership or General Manager, should have from your Internet Manager a list of all the websites he/she is advertising your inventory on, usernames and passwords for each of those websites, a flow chart of how your inventory gets from your website to the others, what email address the sales leads from each of those websites are going to, what number the phone leads are calling from each of those websites and your reps name and number for each website.  This doesn’t have to be anything fancy – below is an example I created in Word.

Click Image to View Larger Format.

Having this information and keeping it up-to-date is going to save you a lot of time that otherwise would have been wasted trying to track it all down.

Now here’s your To-Do List when the person in charge of your online RV listings leaves the company:

1. Get in touch with your main Inventory Listings source, in the example above RVUSA.com would be the main source, and have them change the username and password on your account.  This is VERY Important because this one source feeds all the other websites.
2. If needed, change where the email and phone leads are going for each website your inventory is sent to.  Keep in mind, some of these websites may send out periodic stat reports, which may be sent to a different address than the email leads, so you’ll want to inquire about that as well.  If you do have them make changes, ask them to send you a test email through their system to confirm your leads are coming through to you correctly.

Sometimes when a new Internet Manager comes into the picture, they make changes to their online advertising campaign; cancelling websites, adding new websites, switching website providers, changing email address, etc.  If they don’t know how the current inventory data distribution flow is setup, this can cause real problems for your dealership that could take weeks or longer to straighten out.  During that time period you could be losing sales leads and sales.

MY EXPERIENCE:
A couple years ago an RV Dealership I work with dismissed their Internet Manager and did not change the login information for their Dealer Management Console before hand.  For whatever reason, this person deleted all their inventory listings without the dealers knowledge.  A couple days later when the dealer realized all their inventory was gone, they called me to find out what happened and that’s when we told them they had been deleted.  Unlike most providers, we run backups of our databases so we were able to retrieve the majority of his inventory and pictures.  If they were not using us, they would have had to re-enter all those units with pictures, which would have been at the very least 600 images to retake and upload.

Protect your RV Dealership by putting together this simple document.  An hour or two of work compiling this information is well worth the effort.

Cindy Spencer 🙂

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