Bio

My Name is Eric Stroderd and I am currently 33 years old. I am the founder of MyDealerSupply.com which is an online Ecommerce Auto Dealership supply company and Executive Director of Sales for national GPS company. This didn't happen overnight and its been an interesting journey to get here.

To start, I am a third generation in the Auto Industry. My grandfather managed dealerships in the 70's - 80's and got my father into the business in which he currently is the GM/President of a large Auto Dealership Company. I have been around dealerships all my life and in 2001 I decided that "it was in my blood" and I have been hooked ever since. I have detailed cars, sold cars, managed dealerships, and have had my opportunity to own dealerships. I decided in 2004 I would do my own thing and left the "retail" business to start my first company. 

I became an agent of National warranty company in the Louisiana territory in which I banged plenty doors down hustling business. Even with my persistence and passion for the business I unsuccessfully was able to really grow the business like I wanted to. It was the hardest thing I have ever done and learned a lot about what it takes to succeed and never quit. During the stint of this 3 year run my mentor in the business saw something in me which I didn't see in myself. He presented an opportunity to become the exclusive agent for a new national GPS tracking company. One chapter ends and new one begins. 

Stroderd GPS Firm is launched in 2007 and I am now the LA Territory Sales Agent. Here we go banging on more doors but this time its the independent auto dealers. I started out selling less than 100 units for a short period of time and fast forward 3 years our company now sells 10,000 units annually and have over 100 dealers we currently do business with. Throughout this stint of growing the GPS business I quickly realized that my passion is in the consulting aspect of the business. I love being part of companies that really want to grow their business. I have had a interesting opportunity to really be part of multiple successful business and have learned so much from all of them. Something is missing though, ALL dealers buy their supplies from various resources yet not one of them actually own a significant market share and dominate the market. Here goes a new company. 

MyDealerSupply.com launches in 2010 as a Auto Dealer Supply company online. Getting online though is not as easy as it sounds. Launching a website that sells over 2000 products takes time and money. We quickly developed distribution and manufacturing relationships all over the US as well as internationally. We began selling various supplies to trusted and very understanding dealers who really just gave us a shot in the beginning because we begged them to. 9 months into starting the business we went live online. Starting a website from scratch isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Many sleepless night went into development and design. We finally launched online and to our surprise the response is overwhelming. November 2011 was our first full month online and as cliche as it may sound we sold enough business to pay all the companies expenses. I anticipate that this business will be the platform for future business opportunities. The Auto industry is a fast evolving business and being able to bring dealers the latest and greatest products that will elevate and help grow their business is exciting. 

Executive Sales Director of national GPS supplier. Our GPS supplier for Stroderd GPS Firm is now the fastest and largest Supplier of product in the US. Their market share continues to grow and they are only scratching the surface on the possibilities to come. Due to the demand of the product and the growth of my business I had no other choices than to join forces and make a bigger impact on the business. So, I now become an employee of a corporate company managing multiple states. I am so excited at this opportunity and really think I can do a great job for this company in assisting to grow their business. 

Well here we are the end of 4th quarter of 2011 and boy has it been a ride so far. I have enjoyed every minute and anticipate every morning waking up and conquering a new day. I read this tweet today that said "its not about the destination, its about the journey" well the journey is what I am here for and needless to say I love it! 

Changes "How it will effect my customers"

I am now working for Procon, the parent company to Goldstar/Enfotrace GPS and many other brands in the location based services industry. I am the Executive Sales Director over the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. As the transition takes place the customer experience will not change other than better service and more direct and immediate attention. Jaci will continue to service and manage all accounts.

I am really excited about this oppurtunity for not only myself, but my customers. As a customer you will save hundreds or thousands on product and supplies in the future. 

If you have any questions or concerns please email me. 

All the best, 

Eric Stroderd

Its Draft Day -- Who’s Your Pick?

Draft day -- Who’s Your Pick?

By Glenn Pasch

As a manager of a sales team or a team of supervisors, there will be a time when you need to bring a new member to the team.  You have cut the pile of candidates and resumes down to the final few. On Draft day, choose the player who fits into your overall team’s needs. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole or convince yourself that you can make it work.

A lot is going to depend on the makeup of your team. But, more importantly, it will also depend on how you RUN your team. Are you a hands-on and structured supervisor, do you deliver consistent employee training to groom your team members? Or do you just let people do it their way and only focus on the end result?

What criteria should you follow when you pick up the phone and call someone to offer the job? Here are three things managers should focus on when deciding on a new team member:

1. Recruit for the position. Don’t try to fit a Top Salesperson who is used to working on their own into a position where they have to work by committee.

2. Recruit for the skills that are important to the position. If work ethic is more important than experience, so be it. I personally would always take someone with 100% work ethic and 75% experience than the other way around.

3. Recruit for personality. This is a bit tougher, but if you already have the high energy, big ego salesperson, don’t hire another one. It can tip the balance of your team. Hire someone who is confident, but a more even keel personality.

Glenn Pasch is the President of Improved Performance Solutions. Click here to read this article in its entirety.

3 tips to SAVE MONEY when Buying Auto Dealer Supplies

The Auto Dealer Supply Business is a thriving business and loaded with fly by night resellers. 100% of Auto Dealerships purchase products from various sources to operate their business every month whether it is Office, Sales, and Service or Marketing supplies. We put together 3 Tips that may help save money the next time you place an order.

	Buy in Bulk Buy in bulk! When you purchase products in bulk you can save lots of money. All suppliers get bulk pricing on large quantity purchases. Make sure those savings come back to you, the customer. Purchasing single products at a time result in multiple shipping costs and retail pricing.
	Watch out for HIGH Shipping Cost Watch out for HIGH shipping cost, some supplier’s makes money on shipping. Be aware of high shipping cost. This is the toughest part of the business for suppliers; make sure that you are paying accurate shipping cost on all orders.
	Watch out for ALL the Middle Men Save money by purchasing products from a reputable source. When you purchase products from individuals or multiple middle men you're paying the mark up! With that being said, if that supplier takes care and gives you great service sometimes it may be worth the additional cost. Finding one company that can offer both is your best option.

Sales Meeting that Motivate

he purpose of a sales meeting is to motivate your people and get them prepared to focus on selling. All too often sales meetings become boring lectures, repetitive messages that really have nothing to do with selling your products, and then becomes a source of de-motivation rather than motivation and increased sales. Sales meetings that are unplanned are punishment for those that have to attend.
Sales meetings should be delivered every day and provide the team with information that gives them new hope and new solutions that will help them in increasing business. Most companies agree with daily sales meetings but then don't have them because they lack fresh and compelling content and soon find the meetings to be a waste of time. For sales meetings to be effective you must invest time and energy in making them interesting over and over again. The purposes of the meeting is not for the sake of a sales meeting but to: (1) Bring the team together and get cohesiveness as a selling team. (2) To motivate and provide the sales and management with hope of what is possible. (3) Prepare individual sales people with new techniques and solutions that will actually increase sales.
These meetings must be kept fresh, motivating, engage the audience and be upbeat. It's important that you don't waste your salespeoples' time, but also avoid overloading them with information that is just information. The meeting should be short, inspiring, provoking, positive and focused on SOLUTIONS! The key to almost any successful meeting is to make it interesting, useful, positive and short. Short means under twenty minutes.
Before you rally the troops for another sales meeting, consider some of the following ways to get the most out of your sales meetings:
a) Get the meeting off to a jump start and surprise your team with visual content that sets the stage and grabs their full attention. Use high impact video to make points, something that can really wake them up and get your team thinking. Here is an example of a wake up video called, You Can't Handle the Truth Sales Meeting. Don't just talk to people get their senses engaged, get them focused, and wakes them up! The major goal of the sales meeting is to offset the massive amounts of negative information your team has received in the last 24 hours from mass media.
b) Once you have their full attention then next focus on 'saving' business that was worked over the last days or weeks. The goal here is to get them thinking how we as a team can piece a transaction together and get the day started on a fast track.
c) Focus on the 'wins not the losses! Take a few minutes at every meeting to congratulate salespeople for any and all completed goals, closed deals, and successes. Praise reinforces positive behavior and encourages everyone to do well. Keep the discussion relevant and don't allow people to present problems unless they also have potential solutions.
Sales meetings should be daily, short, engaging, entertaining and interesting and focused on solutions and the positive not the negative. Your people are being trained whether you train them or not. The question is will you provide them with sales training daily or will you let the media train them. An effective sales meeting will motivate, entertain, engage and get your people focused on how to conquer sales. An effective sales meeting done on a daily basis will prove a great investment of time and energy when done correctly.
Grant Cardone, Author, Sales Expert and Creator of Virtual Sales Training

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem. 

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/

5 Tips for Keeping Loyal Customers Loyal

By Jessi Hales, Editor  

In a lagging economy, keeping your loyal customers loyal can become increasingly more challenging, but there is probably no other time when good customer loyalty is more vital to your business. Your loyal customers are your high-value clients, bringing in as much as 80% of your overall sales, according to Pareto’s principle (the 80-20 Rule). These customers will not leave you for your competitors based merely on prices; customers stay loyal to businesses that provide them additional value and consistently outstanding customer service.

Do you know who your most loyal customers are?

What are you doing to keep these high-value clients happy and loyal customers?

We’ve provided 5 tips for maintaining customer loyalty in any economic climate – even today’s lagging economy. These steps will help you gain a better understanding of who your best customers are and what you can do to keep them loyal.

 1.  Ask Them What They Think.  Survey all of your customers, former customers and potential customers with just two simple questions: a. On a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend us to others? (1 = definitely no, 10 = definitely yes) and b. Why or why not? The answers to these two questions tell you how what general percentage of your customers is loyal as well as their reasons behind why they are or not.

2.  Stay In Touch.  Whether it’s included in a loyalty program or you purchase on separately, find an email marketing tool and use it wisely. Be sure to target messages to the right customers at the right time. Provide your customers specific information they would find helpful and special offers that are customized just for them. Let them know about contests, upcoming events, new products, etc. But don’t send out too much too often. Find a balance between encouraging their patronage without taking advantage of their trust.

3. Go the Extra Mile.  In addition to your advertisements, announcements and non-solicit emails, sign up for a greeting card system or set up recurring email campaigns. Send birthday greetings with a gift or special offer just for them. Thank them on their “customer” anniversary for their continued patronage to your business. Send them a greeting if you’ve not seen them x-number of months and extend a special offer for their return visit. This personal touch helps your customers understand that you value them as individuals and invites more loyalty and trust.

4. Encourage Participants, Not Spectators.  Keep your loyal customers involved and ask for their opinions as any pending changes or new directions in your business arise. You never want to make a business decision that will alienate your loyal customers. (Remember the Pareto principle!) As loyal customers, they will love having a say in things and will provide an invaluable incite to your focus groups and planning meetings. Plus, once a decision is reached, their word-of-mouth marketing will achieve more success than almost any other marketing efforts you employ.

5.  Say It To Their Face.  Never shy away from an opportunity to thank your customers for their business. Train your employees to extend sincere thanks for even the smallest business transaction. Greet your customers by name (when you can) and encourage all your employees to do the same. Host customer appreciation events. Support local charities. Be involved in their (your) community and you will be surprised how much you get ahead by simply giving back!