An excerpt from Dennis Galbraith's upcoming book, Sales Integration:

Marketers of packaged goods may not feel selling applies to them, but I submit that packaging and in-store promotions constitute selling without the involvement of store personnel. Supermarkets are certainly designed to sell. You want cereal, and sure enough, there is an isle that says cereal right on it. If you did not know the first thing about cereal, you could categorize them at a glance just by scanning the isle.

The hot cereals are together and segregated from the cold cereals. You want to know which cereals are healthy and which are for kids. That information is made clear by the product names and the artwork on the boxes. You want to know which cereals are most popular, and the amount of shelf space allocated to each product gives you an immediate indication. Which are on sale? Shelf talkers provide the answer.

To some degree, the shopper is having a discussion with the physical store and product packaging. Together, they provide a matching service by answering the shopper's questions regarding where it is, who it is for, how much it is, and which is the best value. Further demonstration of the product is provided on the side of the box. You do not need that information unless the product is in your consideration set. Just like a good sales person, the box does not try to give you the information until you request the information by lifting it off the self and turning the box.

CPG marketers and the stores retailing their products began replacing sales people decades before the internet came along. The world is a better place for it. Occasionally we need to ask a clerk where to find the Velveeta, but most shoppers are self sufficient all the way to the close. Increasingly, shoppers are taking the close into their own hands as well with self-service checkout.

How did internet shopping catch on so fast? Shoppers already understood how to navigate a sales process sans the sales person.

Several weeks ago, Jennifer Renno took over the leadership of RevenueGuru.com. She hit the ground running, publishing even more free training content for dealers.

This week, Jennifer's letter to the editor was published in Automotive News:

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dealers must have a marketing strategy
JENNIFER RENNO, Hope Mills, N.C. The writer runs a company that provides marketing and advertising training. May 17, 2010 - 12:01 am ET

The story of a dealer and his Web guy seeing things differently is all too common ("Twitter? Facebook? Where's the deal?" April 26).

Sadly, neither is right. No dealer has any business buying any advertising without a defined strategy that is clear to everyone on the team. We estimate franchised dealers are robbed of more than $1 billion each year from poor advertising purchases and improper execution.

The problem is understandable. Automotive retail is dominated by sales experts thrust into an increasingly complicated marketing environment.

Media options will continue to change over the months and years ahead, fueling even more arguments.

What will not change is the need to view those options through the lens of a holistic strategy.

When dealers start asking, "How will this investment contribute to my traffic now and branding objectives?" the path to good decision-making will be illuminated. Until then, precious profits will continue to be wasted, and dear friends will continue to be forced out of business.

Budgeting Part 2 is the second half of the Budgeting series.

On August 25, I challenged vendors to stop throwing products at dealers and start providing profit-generating systems. The auto industry's leading chat company, Contact At Once! LLC, took me seriously and positioned itself to reap the rewards. Their six-part training program is now available to their over 7,500 dealers.

Dealers will be able to realize more profit from their chat program and realize it sooner. Delivering value within the first few weeks is essential. This is the time when the GM is going to be asking how the program is going and how many chats are being received. The program gives dealers the information they need on how to use the product, how to manage it, and how to maximize the benefits from it.

Retention problems are minimized when dealers know how to profit from a product. Additionally, the availability of the training program is now a key selling feature to dealers and those companies considering chat as a service to their dealers.

Contact At Once! will continue their weekly professional training webinar. The new training program is interactive and designed to supplement the webinars. All audio tracks are from the same professional voice learners engage with during the live webinars. Interactivity is an important learning tool that is difficult to include in live training programs and impossible to include in video or audio formats. The new programs use interactivity and are loaded with animation, to keep learners engaged.

With over 100 national companies selling to dealers, it is important for vendors to stand out from the pack. Having a great product is not good enough. Having a great profit generating system says you care about dealers. It also assures dealers they are buying a turnkey way of generating new sales.

We at RevenueGuru were proud to work with Contact At Once! on the creation of their training program and look forward to hearing feedback from dealers. Plans are already in place to gather feedback and further improve the program this year. Giving dealers all the tools they need to maximize their profit is the surest way for vendors to maximize their own.

In less than 6-minutes, this training program introduces you to the proven marketing concept Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It demonstrates how auto dealers utilize this concept. This training is vital for dealers planning or executing a branding campaign.