We had the opportunity to speak with Mike Cavanaugh, Executive Vice President, at MAX Digital about what leadership means in the automotive industry. 

“You don’t have to be the owner, the GM, the CEO, the president, the VP. You can be a leader right now doing whatever you do.”

Leadership happens at every level, you don’t need to have a fancy title to drive innovation and progress your dealership for the better. It’s a common misconception that if you aren’t a ‘big wig’ at the top of the company, you don’t have any room to lead. But that line of thinking is faulty. If you want to be in a leadership role, the best thing you can do is to display leadership wherever you are at right now.

“It’s not so much about who has the most cars available today, but who provides the best experience.”

Customers are drawn to streamlined and flexible experiences. That’s why there was a big push on digital retailing last year. But the more we see dealers advance towards a fully Amazon-like environment we realize that it’s not strictly digital retailing that customers like, it’s the ability to conduct business with dealerships at their own pace. They like the transparency of Amazon, and the convenience of being able to shop on their time. 

Due to shelter-in-place and social distancing measures that prevent the spread of COVID-19, dealerships across the country are hurting and scrambling to adapt to their customers' new mind-set and restrictions. 

Join industry experts Andreas Ronneseth of RevolutionParts and Ted Fellowes of Fellowes Research for a discussion about digital parts commerce and how it can help dealerships through a down economy.

Learn about the surprising traffic trends and parts sales happening online right now, and how eCommerce and other digital logistics tools can help dealers serve their local wholesale and retail customers.

Key Takeaways:
1. COVID-19 and the resulting economic downturn have changed how dealership parts and service do business, likely permanently.
2. Digital parts commerce is a viable source of revenue for dealers because consumers are still buying online.
3. Dealers can use digital parts commerce to provide omnichannel services to their local wholesale and retail customers.

We spent some time with Jamie Oldershaw from Dealer Rater, to talk about the unsung hero of your dealerships marketing (dealership reviews).

“Gamify the experience within your dealership of earning reviews”

Getting more reviews for your dealership can be as simple as making it a priority to your salespeople. Jamie suggests tracking who brought the most reviews in your dealership by having a leaderboard with your salespeople on it. Since your salespeople are naturally competitive with each other, that can help get your dealership reviews.

“The health benefits to responding to all reviews are numerous”

Beyond just responding to negative reviews, there are a lot of benefits to responding to every review. It helps build the relationship between you and the customer. Responding to negative reviews can repair that relationship and responding to positive reviews can “turn happy customers into loyal customers” - Jamie Oldershaw.

Sharpen your pencil. How you appraise a car hasn’t changed, but you need to lean heavier on actual transactional data vs a cost-plus strategy that is going to be distorted in our current market. At the curb or at the block, your acquisition strategies are changing as well, with full access to markets online. Merchandising is more important than ever for digital visibility. Join Tim Scoutelas and Patrick McMullen, as they share what smart dealers are doing to survive the current downturn and thrive on the other side.

Webinar Takeaways:
1. Suggested updates to your appraisal strategy given distortion now of cost-plus strategy.
2. How to look at pricing your inventory now vs a month ago. How merchandising has changed and what are the current best practices.
3. Core store-level analytics. What are the most important metrics on a daily and weekly basis?

We sat down with Steve Smythe, CEO at Market Scan, at NADA 2020 to talk about the current state of automotive and where it’s going.

“Dealers are better off when they’re transparent”

The era of your sales manager being the only one that knows truly what a car costs is gone. With everyone being able to look up and compare prices on the internet you have no choice but to be transparent with your customers. The best thing you can do to your customers is to be upfront and be completely transparent on price.

“We’re all spoiled by amazon”

When customers can’t spend time in a dealership, it’s up to the automotive industry to adapt to online retailing. We need to perfect our digital retailing processes in order to sell and deliver vehicles with as little face-to-face contact as possible.

We spent some time Keith Tomatore, Chief Executive Officer at iFrog Digital Marketing, to see where AI is headed in the automotive industry and where you should optimize your marketing strategy.

“AI takes away the data entry of today”

The farther we get with artificial intelligence in the industry, the more we realize how important humans are to the sales process. Where AI will come in handy is automating the simple steps that take humans too much time so we can spend our time selling instead of doing simple and time-consuming tasks.

“We don’t worry about clicks impressions and cost per. What we worry about are business outcomes.”

In marketing, it’s easy to get tunnel vision on all of your individual metrics and data. A lot of the time it’s more important to pay attention to the outcomes of those metrics and tweak processes from there. Don’t let yourself get distracted by dozens of different tiny metrics when they aren’t going to make a huge difference in the end.

We spoke to Brandon Nixon, National Sales Director at Update Promise, to talk about implementing new tools in Fixed Ops and how your personnel can build trust with customers.

“I don’t care what vendor you go with, what tools you go out there with. They’re exactly that, they’re tools.”

New tools and processes won’t automatically solve all of the problems in your dealership, as a manager you have to drive implementation and keep everyone accountable to the new product. If you can keep everyone accountable, including yourself, you can use almost any tool and succeed.

“You’re about five times more likely to get an approval when you have a photo or video attached.”

Most customers don’t understand what you’re talking about when you contact them about potential service, having visual examples can build trust with your customers. If your advisors and technicians turn the camera on themselves that can help develop a personal connection with your customers and build trust even more.

We met with Steve Roessler, Vice President of Sales at DriveCentric, at NADA 2020 to discuss how dealerships can nail their customer experience. 

“At the end of the day, the data is out there that says customers will spend more money for a better buying experience.”

It’s a common belief that you have to be the lowest price to beat your competition but that isn’t true. You can beat out all of your competition by simply offering up the experience that your customers want. Sell your customers on a superior experience, then follow through with that when they walk on to your lot.

“We can’t just assume that every customer is going to go through 17 steps of buying a car.”

A large part of improving your customer experience is to tailor your process to each customer. We have to practice responsive selling in order to get them to come back for their next car. If your processes are built around being able to change in order to meet customer demand, getting repeat customers is going to easier than ever.

We sat down with David Steinberg, CEO and founder of Foureyes, to discuss where automotive is headed and what we can do to improve in 2020. “The name of 2020 is going to be efficiency”, he said.

There is a set amount of people interested in purchasing a vehicle, which means there is a set amount of leads that can exist. The way you are going to make more money in 2020 is through optimizing how your salespeople respond to leads and increase your close rate, not just getting more leads to your salespeople.

“Every great movie is three great moments, and no bad moments.” The premiere way for you to improve the closing rate and make your dealership more efficient is by improving your processes to improve your customer experience.

Just like great films “every great process is three great moments and no bad moments”.

As COVID-19 continues to spread, our thoughts are with dealership employees and their families.  Retail has been hit particularly hard with officials encouraging social distancing. This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us.  In the near future, this situation will impact the way we sell and service vehicles.

At DrivingSales, our goal is to help dealers optimize their greatest asset, their people.  We feel that it is important to continue to provide dealership leaders with the tools they need to develop their employees and improve the customer experience.  Because of this, we are implementing the following:

The DrivingSales Presidents Club is moving online.  We will host this event at the end of April, and any dealership employee can attend.  Additional information will be provided in the coming weeks, and you can find more details and register on the Presidents Club website.

The DrivingSales Community will continue to be a source for employees to ask questions and discover how other dealerships are addressing the different facets of their operations.

Also, we have been having some great discussions with industry experts addressing how dealers are responding to the challenges we are facing today. Check out the latest Roundtable discussion here. Stay tuned for more discussions coming soon!

A moment like this is a reminder about how we all need to band together to navigate these challenges and complexities.  DrivingSales is working at full capacity, and as always, is here to help you in any way we can.

Stay safe.

The DrivingSales Team.