Brian Hannan Blog
Total Posts: 2
BH
Dealer Writer
Nov 11, 2010
Industry Profile: Cory Mosley
When you meet Cory Mosley, you'll no doubt like his quick wit and easy charm. If you hire him, it'll be for his industry knowledge, dealership experience and commitment to your bottom-line results.
"I want to see guys really get out there and crush it, really take advantage of the market," Mosley says. "I’m all about the competition. I’m all about outsmarting and outfoxing the other guy, and that’s what I like to see."
As president of Mosley Training, an automotive retail consultancy, Mosley focuses on what he calls "turnaround work." He helps underperforming dealers learn how to get their house in order, implement effective processes and hold themselves accountable.
"I don't usually get the call from the store that is No. 1 or doing everything right, so I have to make sure people understand on a dealership and individual level that if we can work together, everyone wins. Two of my favorite lines are, 'I didn't make up this stuff I'm sharing with you last night,' and 'I can't want your success more than you do,'" Mosley says. "It's important that the owner or decision maker who hired me make the agenda clear. People must know the consequences, or else they will wait for whatever is the new product, process or person to go away."
Prior to launching his company in 2004, Mosley says he owned several businesses – getting his entrepreneurial start at 16. Ventures ranged from Apple computer consulting to hair salons, landromats and TMG, an automotive industry reseller of business development center, direct mail and telephony services. In the dealership, Mosley said he "lived the classic retail life" – moving from his first job as a floor salesperson to positions in BDC and Internet sales and sales management.
DealerADvantage recently spoke with Mosley to learn more about the issues he and his clients are addressing in their stores. Mosley says he resists the temptation to look for simple solutions (i.e., magic bullets and "shiny objects") to address complex problems.
"I am very straightforward about these types of things. Just ask my clients," Mosley says. "I say, 'You can always buy more stuff.' All of the clichés apply: 'This is a marathon, not a sprint. Rome wasn't built in a day.' We have to balance quality products and services with the fundamentals of the sales process and common sense."
DealerADvantage: Why did you adopt that progressive, new-school approach? How do you see it playing out in your clients' stores?
Mosley: I think it's important to separate the things that look cool from those that actually increase sales, profitability, customer satisfaction and customer retention. I like what I'm seeing from dealerships that are taking their reputation seriously, keeping merchandising at the forefront and focusing on the customer experience. I love being in the Chevy store that treats its customers like Lexus buyers. I like the stores that take risks and focus on communicating and marketing where their customers are, not where someone may think they are. Finally, I like the dealers who are saying the old way just isn't good enough anymore and are open to and are taking action to implement and invest in a more progressive approach.
DealerADvantage: What is the dealer mood you’re seeing as you go around the country?
Mosley: To be honest with you, the mood is really dependent on the person. I think there’s a general mood of optimism because it’s better to be optimistic than pessimistic as a general manager, as an owner. I think that people want things to return to some semblance of normalcy, but they may not understand that what they thought was normal before will no longer be normal. I think what people have to do is start establishing a new normal. For people who aren’t looking to change or aren’t changing, the market, the industry, the consumers are going to punish them. I'm reminded of the quote: “People who hate change will hate irrelevance a lot more.”
DealerADvantage: What is the new normal?
Mosley: I think the new normal is focusing on maximizing every opportunity – not relying on some big ad campaign, the mailer at the end of the month that hopefully will save us, the giveaway, the newspaper ad or the manufacturer. We have to maximize every opportunity from the moment customers hit the lot. That’s the theme of things. I work with a BMW store that doesn't do a great job online, but it shops other stores. One of the guy's responses to me was, “Well, these guys aren’t impressive either.” I said, “Thank God. Thank God you’re all mediocre. God forbid somebody comes in and really starts to clean up." That’s the beauty of this business: You only have to be a little bit better. If people really buckle down and get competitive – not competitive at who's going to give away the car the cheapest – and creative, they could close some of these gaps.
DealerADvantage: You frequently talk about "old school" and "fundamentals." What's the difference?
Mosley: "Old school" is a matter of philosophy and technique. When someone says "old school," we’re talking about things we’ve been saying forever: "What would it take to earn your business?” or, “Well, sir, you know this increase in payment we’re talking about is the price of a cup of coffee every day. Could you live without a cup of coffee every day?” Those are old-school techniques. The problem is something called the law of diminishing returns – and that’s what we’re experiencing when a salesperson says, “We’ve been stagnant; we’ve been doing the same numbers for the past four years, and we can’t do more.” I ask, "Why can’t you do more?" Well, you can’t do more because what you’ve been doing is the exact same. When I hear the reply, “But we’ve been successful," I counter with, “Well, you’ve been successful to a point.” It’s an attitude I hear expressed with, "If customers were interested, they'd call back," – not that salespeople have to follow up with a person for 45, 60 or 90 days, because that’s not part of the old-school regimen (e.g., "A real buyer comes in. A real buyer buys in 72 hours; all these definitions of a 'real buyer' or what you have to do to sell a car.") It’s really a philosophy, a language versus fundamentals: road to a sale, the meet and greet and trial closes.
How do you solidify those areas? How do you make those areas stronger in a way that fits with what the customer today is looking for? No matter how customer service-driven you want to try to be or how "transparent" you want to try to be, at the end of the day, there’s still a psychology that has to be put into place for us to complete the sale. Practicality causes delay; emotion causes action. If we allow a customer to remain practical, we’re in this information exchange that causes a person not to completely act. So you have to combine that part of it with what actually causes the transaction to take place – and that’s an emotional tie to a vehicle, to a dealership, to a salesperson.
DealerADvantage: How do you create that emotional connection?
Mosley: You create that connection by starting to establish or re-establish a new set of techniques, a new set of actions, a new set of principles for how you engage the customer. We’re not going to simply tell people to, "Come on down," anymore. We’re going to create a what's-in-it-for-me conversation with shoppers that meets their needs. What are the principles under which you want people – yourself, your sales staff and your customers – to take action? Where’s the authenticity? It starts at the high level. I’m a believer in life and business as 80 percent psychology, 20 percent mechanics. If I’m not mentally tied into what I’m saying or if I’m not connected to the act of what I'm doing, all the word tracks and all the processes in the world won’t matter. So, at the high level, what is the principle action we’re going after – not what is the process? If you think about life for a second, people die every day for their principles. I’ve never heard anybody die over policies or procedures.
DealerADvantage: Is it tough to convince your clients to make that shift?
Mosley: I’m an advisor. I don’t come into somebody’s store and tell them this is the absolute way he or she must do it – or else. Everything's not going to fit everybody. That’s the danger with, unfortunately, a lot of consultants who are kind of popping up and have spent a year or two at a store and they were successful at one store and in one town and now go around the country telling people how to sell cars based on the way they were successful. Those stores are going to run into challenges with their business doing that because you have to look at the landscape of how the store runs, how it operates to meet that goal.
I need to change the psychology. I need to break down the psychology of what they’re thinking and what they’re doing. If I can change their psychology, if I can get them to see the why, then they’ll be better focused on and more interested in the how. Too many consultants go in with the how. They come in with their packs of phone scripts and do drills all day. Everybody is trained, and everybody is a bunch of robots. I work with the why: Here’s why we want to change. You can always buy more stuff. Some of it works; some of it doesn’t work. There are great products out there, but that’s not necessarily the problem. I always get those phone calls from clients. “So-and-so was here pitching us about (the latest shiny object). What do you think?" I say, "It’s all great stuff, but you can’t answer the phone yet."
People have to be careful when they talk about best practices -- are they trying to institute best practices? They have to keep in mind what is relevant to their store, what they’re willing to do and not do. I’ve watched dealers go out of business in the past four years because they wouldn’t fire the people that were hurting their business. They wouldn’t make the personnel decisions or invest in the technology. People need to understand the difference between the idea of old school and what would be considered fundamentals – the fundamental road to the sale. The fundamentals of what you’re trying to accomplish on the phone call. The fundamentals of what you’re trying to accomplish in an email exchange or when converting an Internet customer to a showroom visit. That’s why I’ve never painted myself as this guy that wants to just pack a lot of technology and chase whatever the great technology is - because we’ve still got these fundamental things that we can’t get quite right.
DealerADvantage: How does your approach play out in practice?
Mosley: The conversations that I have are more focused because I work with a store over an extended period of time. Very rarely will I go in and do something just for a series of days. I normally have stores six months or a year in what I call a dealer development phase. I’ve learned over the years of doing this that, with anything less, you don’t have sustained results.
One of the realities I've learned to accept in this business is that my clients will want to change course. When a dealer tells me he wants to veer away from what I’d like to see happen, or from my advice, I explain that it’s my job to mitigate the loss he'll experience from some of these decisions. I’ve had dealers spend a year building a BDC and then decide they don’t want it anymore. They say, “I changed my mind. I don’t want the expense. It’s not what we thought it was. It’s not what we wanted.” Yet they’ve done everything we discussed: They’ve sold more cars, they made more money. For whatever reason, they’ve decided in their mind that this isn’t the way they want to go; this isn’t the direction. I say:
Mosley: OK. What do we need to do for you now? My first job is to try to deliver on what you’re asking me to from the beginning. You asked me for more sales for your BDC. You got those. You decided you didn’t want to continue with the BDC. What do you want to do then?
Dealer Client: I want to get the salespeople more involved.
Mosley: Fine. We’re going to switch direction, and I’m going to help you. In the meantime, we need to do X, Y and Z to help deal with the growing pains that we’re going to have.
Maybe we need to bring in a call center, maybe we need to bring in some technology or outside vendor. That’s why you have to be versatile. You can’t just go in and say, “This is how I sold cars in San Diego at the Honda store, and now I’m your consultant. Even though we’re in Muscatine, Iowa, this is how we’re going to sell cars here.” You can’t do it that way. You have to adapt. Every month, I believe in measuring and looking at things, but I don’t believe in getting stuck or thinking we have to do something just because it’s what we said we were going to do. You have to try to find the right mix that works for your store, works for your organization. That is really the crux of it. I’ve got clients that have different needs. One guy has got five stores with different setups in each store. One is a single-point store that lost its Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge franchise and has one franchise left that it never paid a lot of attention to. All of sudden, it's the only franchise, and we had to revamp the whole Internet and marketing strategy. Now the dealer is the top dealer in his region for new-car sales and doing very well with used cars. The store's in a rural area and tripled its Web traffic.
How did that happen? It happened because the dealer and the management team listened. You think there's a correlation here? Zig Zieglar – the famous motivational speaker – said it: People talk about motivation and training, but they often decide it doesn’t work, it doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why you need to do it daily. That’s why dealers constantly need to be exposing themselves to new information.t here
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BH
Dealer Writer
Sep 9, 2010
MileOne Drives Results with Online Video
When David Metter decided a few years back to take his online advertising to the next level, he borrowed a page from the real estate playbook. The chief marketing officer for MileOne Automotive, a large East Coast dealer group, realized the video realtors were adding to their listings could similarly boost his dealers’ engagement with in-market shoppers and their competitive edge.
“Consumers can look at photos, but if there’s a differentiator with video and a walk-around that tells them more about the vehicle, I think there’s a higher likelihood of them coming in to look at that car -- especially over one that does not have it,” Metter said. “Video gives you a better perspective on the car than just a flat photo; it’s more like a three-dimensional experience. Car buyers feel like they’re getting a true demonstration of the car instead of just a couple of photos of the vehicle sitting on the lot.”
MileOne began using video in late 2006 with the launch of its YouTube channel. The videos were primarily designed to support SEO initiatives but today range from why-buy-here testimonials to new make/model introductions and event marketing, as well as new-/used-car inventory and service specials. Managers immediately embraced the new initiative, Metter said, even though it meant additional work.
“They know video’s going to reflect on them in a positive way,” Metter said. “They’ve got the latest and greatest information about their vehicles, and it’s just going to make their new- and used-car offerings that much better. It was such a no-brainer decision.”
Video Performance Accelerates for MileOne
Today, MileOne records approximately 100,000 unique video views each month across its online channels -- including its websites, third-party listings and social media networks. For MileOne, Metter said, video:
Drives conversion. Since adding video to the MileOne toolkit, Metter said, inquiries from Internet shoppers have grown by a full percentage point. “For a dealer group the size of MileOne, moving from 8 percent to 9 percent conversion means an additional 10,000 to 12,000 leads per month. There are dealers and dealer groups that would do just about anything for an incremental jump like that.”
Boosts visibility. With Cars.com, Metter said, views of MileOne used-car videos climbed dramatically from a year ago. Visitors to the site watch more than 7,000 videos each month, up from approximately 900 in September 2009.
Fuels time on site. The average visitor to a MileOne website now spends an additional 75 seconds researching a vehicle purchase.
Video Demand Increases
With an estimated 90 percent of Americans now researching their next purchase online, MileOne’s performance is not unique. The 2009 Google/Compete Auto Video Study found that online viewership of automotive video multiplied six times since 2007 -- with ready-to-buy shoppers 14 times more likely to watch these clips than general Internet surfers. Top-rated content ranged from information about the car being considered (75 percent) to specifications (68 percent) and how it drives (52 percent). The most popular destinations included third-party shopping sites (60 percent), manufacturer sites (59 percent), dealer sites (52 percent) and YouTube (52 percent).
Perhaps most compelling, after watching these videos, shoppers take action:
61 percent visit a dealership
55 percent visit a manufacturer website
55 percent search dealer inventory
52 percent visit a dealer website
52 percent build and price a car with an online configurator
50 percent visit an automotive research site
“It’s not because people don’t have anything better to do,” Metter said. “Video keeps them on the site longer, it keeps them more interested. And it puts us in a position where we’re going to win over a competitor.”
Video Process Drives Results
MileOne uses both full-motion video and inventory-level video that simulates full motion by combining several still pictures and animating them with pan-and-zoom techniques. These automated videos can be inexpensively and quickly produced but deliver customized, professional results with integrated human voiceover narrations, informational graphics and text overlays. MileOne currently uses stitched video with its used-car listings and plans to add the capability for its new cars later this year.
Metter offered these tips for success:
Great stitched video begins with high-quality pictures. MileOne works with an in-house team to take 28 to 50 pictures of each used vehicle -- the first several of which are used to create the stitched videos. These initial pictures focus on the car’s key exterior and interior angles and highlight the most marketable features. The idea is to allow shoppers to take a virtual test drive and give them a sense of being in the driver’s seat.
Keep the shopper’s attention. Metter recommends that video demonstrations be limited to roughly 30 seconds in length. “Anything longer, and you’re not going to get people to watch all the way through. When you’re describing a vehicle, it’s got to be short and sweet.”
Build your brand. While the car is the star of the clip, Metter emphasizes the importance of including a marketing message for the dealership. All MileOne videos open with an introductory segment on why to buy from the dealer group and close with a map and directions to the store where the car is located.
While some Internet managers develop full-motion video for all of their listings, Metter does not believe the tactic is viable long term. “As much as I would like to think that’s going to happen, you’d have to be very diligent to go out and continuously shoot your new inventory.” Instead, he said, Internet managers are better advised to let automated tools do the heavy lifting and focus their time on merchandising, sales follow-up and preparing for the next phase of video marketing.
“I think it’s going to be mobile video,” Metter said. “We’re working now, very diligently, on how to be able to have our video show up on all of our mobile sites and how that’s going to be fully integrated.”
MileOne Automotive was formed in 1997, Maryland-based MileOne Automotive (mileonecorporate.com) operates more than 60 stores, representing 27 brands, and nine collision centers in Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The dealer group offers a new- and used-car inventory of upward of 15,000 vehicles.
Michael Page is vice president of advertising products for Cars.com, where he provides strategic direction for the company's dealer and manufacturer initiatives. Page began his career with Cars.com in 2000 as an affiliate sales manager, gaining firsthand experience with the internet marketing challenges dealers face. He became vice president of affiliate sales in 2005. Under Page's leadership, Cars.com strengthened its affiliate network and assisted dealers nationwide in implementing effective online advertising and sales processes. Prior to joining Cars.com, he worked in media sales and marketing.
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