Author: efgmarketing

Categories
Industry Trends

Diving Into Digital

Eric Fifield Chief Sales Officer EFG Companies
Contributing Author: Eric Fifield Chief Revenue Officer, EFG Companies

Did you take advantage of Amazon Prime Day? Spend a little time investigating the online deals promoted by Amazon or a dozen other major online retailers? Did you have an enjoyable digital experience, or form an opinion about a retailer thanks to your online shopping trip?

If you are like the majority of consumers, you relied on brand perception to point you to certain retailers. You researched your purchase against a couple of other online options. You vetted the product by checking reviews and ratings, and you hit the “Buy Now” button. You didn’t visit a store or consult an expert.

The importance of a digital presence is only continuing to grow in retail automotive. EFG Companies recently released a finding from its national consumer research study revealing the critical role of a dealership’s online presence in making a sale. According to the 1,500 respondents, today’s digital consumer begins their buying research process online. An Ernst & Young study showed that more than two-thirds of customers now spend less than 10 hours to research their vehicle purchase – down from 15 hours in 2016. This same study showed that consumers spend more time online researching a car than any other online purchase!

Continue reading “Diving Into Digital”
Categories
Featured

EFG Training Graduates Contribute $205K in Additional F&I Revenue Per Year

LOVE (Learning Opps Through Virtual Engagement) Supports F&I Producers After Training and Helps Maintain Performance Improvements

EFG Companies, the innovator behind the award-winning Hyundai Assurance program, today announced that the average EFG trainee generates an additional $204,605 per year in F&I income through a 22 percent performance increase. To help sustain this performance increase, EFG Companies also announced the launch of EFG Learning Opps Through Virtual Engagement (LOVE), a dynamic digital portal designed to boost F&I Producer knowledge, reinforce training learnings, and reduce the cost of a poor hiring decision for a dealership. To see one of the many training videos featured on EFG LOVE, visit http://bit.ly/2LgOnVY.

Many dealer principals and general managers complain that their past experience in sending F&I producers to training only impacts per-month results in the short term. In addition, when training is not reinforced in the dealership, improvements are quickly negated by diminishing returns. EFG Companies conducted a six-month analysis of the true impact of its industry-leading, behavior-based F&I training combined with its award-winning, in-store engagement model. The company compiled a series of metrics, both pre- and post-training, with both the trainees and their dealership management. EFG trainee performance showed:

  • EFG’s guided-discovery training represented $204,605.00 in additional F&I income per producer per year, based on 80 turns per producer per month
  • Average trainee F&I performance increased 22 percent
  • PRU increased from $967 to $1,180 on average
Continue reading “EFG Training Graduates Contribute 5K in Additional F&I Revenue Per Year”
Categories
Compliance

We’ve Been Down this Path

Contributing Author: Steve Roennau Vice President Compliance EFG Companies
Contributing Author:
Steve Roennau
Vice President
Compliance
EFG Companies

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been in the news a lot lately.

From Acting Director Mick Mulvany’s decommissioning of the Advisory Committee, to a federal district judge ruling its structure is unconstitutional, some might think that the CFPB’s days are numbered.

But history has a lesson to offer, compliments of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC was created on September 26, 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission Act into law. The regulatory agency opened its doors in 1915, with a mission to protect consumers and promote competition. The FTC building was finished in 1938, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt stating, “May this permanent home of the Federal Trade Commission stand for all time as a symbol of the purpose of the government to insist on a greater application of the golden rule to conduct the corporation and business enterprises in their relationship to the body politic.”

Currently, the FTC houses three bureaus:

  1. the Bureau of Consumer Protection
  2. the Bureau of Competition
  3. the Bureau of Economics

Each bureau has a set of mandates to guide its work. In the early 1970s, the agency became more aggressive in its prosecutions and sanctions. The business community and Congress criticized the FTC’s activism, claiming it had become too powerful, was insensitive to the needs of the public and business, and operated with little oversight from Congress or the president. During President Ronald Reagan’s first term, control of the FTC was moved under the president. Its direction was modified to become more cooperative with business interests, while continuing its consumer protective functions.

A Matter of Checks and Balances

Continue reading “We’ve Been Down this Path”