Sales Mavens

(Stop a bank foreclosure) A Review Of The 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid

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By Christine Harrell

 Auto dealers are looking forward to the release of the 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid. Many of the things that received harsh reviews in 2008 have been redesigned and tweaked by the automaker to put this vehicle back towards the top. Auto sales lots have seen this version sporting new additions to its standard package and they have maintained their truck like appearance. However, it certainly isn’t perfect.

The Good

To go along with the external overhaul of the 2008 model, Ford has beefed up the power, given it better handling, and a smoother more entertaining ride. This makes it far more popular for auto sales than it has been in recent years. In fact, Virginia Beach auto dealers say they are difficult to hold onto particularly with the spikes in gas prices.

The most noticeable change is the bigger 2.5 liter engine that has increased its power by 22 horses. The Escape hybrid now takes fewer than 10 seconds to hit 60mph. The noise that is associated with its continuously variable transmission has also been eliminated.

Its new suspension system, electronic stability control, and sway bar allow for a considerable improvement in riding and handling. When it comes to auto sales, Virginia Beach auto dealers say the interior is the real benefit to the 09 Hybrid. It has a voice activated Sync system for the audio, phone, and other electronic goodies. This model has excellent storage space and is rather comfortable. Its interior is also pleasantly proficient at keeping outside noises on the outside of the cab.

The Bad

One of the worst things about the 09 Escape Hybrid is that it still has drum brakes and the same regenerative breaking feature in it, which hampers the ease of breaking. It does take some getting used to. They have a good fuel consumption rating. It has a bigger savings between this and the gas model in the city.

On the highway, it is good on gas, but the actual savings is lower. Like other hybrids, it takes every opportunity to run off the batteries. Good in concept, but if you are heavy footed you might not notice as much fuel savings. The folding second seat in the back is also difficult to fold down and lift.

Perhaps the biggest downfall of all is its high sticker price that puts it at the high end of the spectrum for Ford’s auto sales. Virginia Beach auto dealers have a basic model starting at a price equivalent to where the Escape Limited gas model leaves off. This mean you should expect to spend considerably more than $40k for a fully loaded model. This vehicle is out of reach for some budgets at approximately $5,000 more than the gas version. It will take approximately seven years for it to pay back the extra $5k.

Overall, the 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid is not a bad vehicle. In terms of comfort, other models such as the Toyota Highlander and the Lexus RX400h are far more expensive with a lower comfort rating. While its drivability is better than it was, its breaking requires a bit of a change in driving habits. In all, if you learn to drive smart and want a vehicle you can hold on to for a while, this might be worth a second look.

Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on how to Virginia

Beach Auto Dealers, visit http://www.beachford.com.

To Start a Successful Consulting Firm, Learn from Your Clients
By Donald Mitchell

 I want to be part of the best team in the world.

–Will Carling

Let me tell you how I started a successful consulting firm so that you can learn from my experience . . . and get better results than I did.

After three years at head of corporate planning and development at Heublein, I was tired of the 100 mile commute each way. Contacting my old clients, I was pleased to find that they were all interested in having me work for them at night and on the weekends.

With Heublein’s permission, I started offering consulting again. Soon, I had a big enough base of business to start consulting full time, as the head of Mitchell and Company.

A month after I did that, Carol Bruckner Coles who had also been a colleague at The Boston Consulting Group, resigned from Heublein to join me. Carol did more of the missionary marketing than I did because there were more prospects near her home in Connecticut than near mine in Boston.

Early on, she realized that selling to a lot of people at one time was a better idea than selling to people one-by-one. We launched a series of free seminars in New York, and companies were soon fascinated by our ideas about how corporate performance translated into stock-price improvement, something we had done a lot of work on at Heublein.

That interest surprised us because much of our strategic work was of more economic value. This stock-price improvement practice became the backbone of our firm over time. From this enthusiasm for stock-price improvement, I learned that there was untapped potential in areas that I didn’t even consider to be very important because others did.

Wanting to push the boundaries of knowledge, Mitchell and Company did pioneering research in many areas of stock-price improvement. Typically, however, we found that client interest in important new ideas and practices was tepid, at best.

Focusing on that lesson, we turned our research model around and began to only research questions that were of interest to clients. In the process we formed a learning organization for executives at major companies, Share Price Growth 100.

Over the course of a decade, we learned that every major existing approach to stock-price improvement other than the one we had been developing was fatally flawed. Why? It turned out that those who wrote the road maps for stock-price improvement hadn’t bothered to do much, if any, research to test the validity of the directions.

Following Peter Drucker’s advice, we began inventing lots of new measurements, employing those measurements in as many ways as we could, cross-checking our conclusions with independent sources of measurements, and adjusting our conclusions to reflect how well the past estimations had worked. One of our first new measurements was to express a company’s stock price in terms of the factors that the company’s shareholders paid the most attention to.

We did this by looking at statistical correlations to a company’s historic stock price. Next we interviewed shareholders to find out which of those most highly correlated factors (or similar ones) the investors actually used to make buy and sell decisions.

The result was a verified multivariate correlation (an equation describing past stock prices in terms of what investors considered) that reflected those shareholder perceptions and practices. Those verified correlations, in turn, were helpful for anticipating stock-price changes through locating what had happened to companies taking new actions whose shareholders had similar perceptions and practices.

In addition, we used anonymously sponsored interviews to test market planned or potential actions to see which steps would elicit the most stock purchasing with the least selling.

We had a big surprise at first: We greatly underestimated how well our advice worked. We weren’t optimistic enough!

Here’s an example. One of our clients had asked us about taking a subsidiary partially public. After they succeeded with that stock offering, the parent company’s stock went to almost double the level we had predicted.

From that observation, we eventually learned that the client had created a bandwagon effect that caused investors to rush forward to create stock-price growth faster than would otherwise have occurred for less well designed and communicated programs. To adjust for that bandwagon factor, we added a fourth set of measurements related to the improved ways of understanding the current and potential liquidity of the stock.

Eventually, we developed a service to facilitate creating and sustaining the bandwagon effect and incorporated that learning into our estimations. With that service, we could help companies attract investors who would raise the value of the company while avoiding those who would harm the company’s stock price.

Then, the great epiphany occurred for me: With the right direction, people could greatly exceed the highest levels of historical stock-price performance that anyone had achieved. Now that was interesting to think about! Many company leaders were intrigued, too, and identifying and executing strategies to exceed historical stock-price performance became a rewarding part of our company’s strategy consulting practice.

Oh, how I wish I had been a faster learner from my clients in those days. I hope you will learn from my experience.

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at

http://www.fastforward400.com .

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Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.