Dive into the heart of dealership dynamics with the latest episode of the DrivingSales Defining Leadership podcast. Join hosts Bart Wilson, J.D. Mixon, and Craig Wilson as they unravel the essential components of a successful Business Development Center (BDC) through the lens of leadership and strategic management. This episode zeroes in on the transformative power of scorecards for BDC agents and the pivotal role they play in dealership operations.

Our experts dissect the intricacies of BDC metrics, from appointment settings to CRM task completion, offering a treasure trove of insights for dealerships eager to refine their approach and skyrocket their success. As you listen, you'll discover the delicate balance between performance indicators and the art of effective scorecard implementation. Whether you're a seasoned dealership manager or just stepping into the world of automotive sales, this episode is your roadmap to enhancing your BDC team's efficiency and impact.

In a recent sit-down with Kanchana Sundaram, Sr Director of Product & Innovation with Experian, we discuss first and third-party fraud. We talk about how fraud is evolving and its impact on a dealership. Kanchana talks about what you can do to address it in your store.

How has dealership fraud evolved?

With the acceleration of the use of digital tools for the last couple of years since the pandemic, what we're seeing is that fraudsters are leveraging multiple types of identities to get through some of these digital retailing tools and to essentially outsmart existing processes that dealers already have in place. 

A good example of that is a couple of the types of fraud that you raised, first-party fraud and third-party fraud. These are instances where fraudsters essentially leverage a good credit profile, so they have either stolen someone's identity with a good credit profile. Think of somebody that maybe works in a nursing home and there's a person they're taking care of that has built up a really great credit history for many, many years. They steal their identity or an identity that was stolen as part of a data breach. Or you also have criminal rings who go after people, and they have people that are part of their criminal rings who essentially have good credit history that they leverage. So the traditional processes that a dealership has would not flag that person as a potential fraudster. 

But what we do at Experian is we leverage analytics that tell us whether that person has had any history of defaulting on their payments, which really leads us to believe that they don't have the intent to continue paying or to pay for the purchase that they're moving forward. That means that there needs to be a deeper look at that identity.

How often is fraud taking place?

If the dealerships have solutions that the criminals identify are weakened, they become a target for other criminals. That's what we've heard back from law enforcement. 

It's important that dealers protect themselves because as we see more and more people adopting essentially digital technology, it's exposing dealerships more and more. And as you know, they're if they don't protect themselves, then they potentially become targets.

How much of the liability can lie with the dealership?

That's a great question because it depends on the way the fraud is perpetuated.

So essentially, if the person defaults on the first payment, the dealer is left holding the bag. What happens is if they're not able to recover that vehicle, let's say that the vehicle has now it's part of a criminal ring and they've managed to move the vehicle out, they don't have the ability to recover any of that money, and they're left with potentially their insurance premiums increasing as a result.

We've also heard from lenders that there are situations where there are more sophisticated criminals, who basically pay down against a vehicle for a certain period of time. It could be anywhere, for example, up to six months, which gives them the opportunity to move the vehicle out of the country, making it incredibly difficult for law enforcement to recover the asset. In that case, you have the lender who has the liability, but ultimately it's the consumer who is going to be impacted because all of these affect the bottom line for both of the retailers, which ends up being passed on to consumers over time.

Are lenders flagging dealerships with fraud history?

Well, that can happen. You will have cases where they may ask dealers to do further due diligence. It is possible that dealers do face some of those consequences that you laid out. Ultimately, it's in the best interest of both parties to be able to have those robust practices in place so that they can avoid those situations.

It's interesting that you mentioned lenders flagging some of these fraudsters that sharing information regarding the history of that identity becomes important. That's where I think the credit bureau plays a great role because we are connected to so many lenders and we're getting information being reported back to us as well as tracking the trade line. History across these identities allows us to be able to provide that deeper level of analytics akin to what you mentioned.

How long has Experian been monitoring fraud?

Experian has been at the forefront of fraud in the industry for a very long time. This isn't a new topic for us. And we have premiere products that are at the forefront of the industry, and we leverage those products as part of this dealer-centric automotive solution.

You mentioned that the traditional way that the dealership would look through a credit report. You're right, it does take education and training to be able to understand the different scores and the different pieces of information that come back from that credit report. And, you know, there aren't many people in the dealership who necessarily have the depth of training to even look through all of that information.

That was some of the feedback that we got from dealers. We designed the solution partnering with dealers. They said that it was really important that this be something that was very easy to adopt for a salesperson. And so, in spite of us having complicated analytics underneath that flag these potentially fraudulent identities, we present that in a way that's visually very simple for a salesperson to understand this is a potential synthetic fraud because there was an issue with the document and there was an issue with the biometric. This is a potential first-party fraud because we saw defaults by this particular individual. This is a person that may be flagged even higher as a third-party fraud because we're seeing this identity being leveraged in multiple trade lines with defaults associated with them.

It has to be very simple for salespeople to use because in this industry you've already got a hard enough challenge selling cars. We don't want to make it more complicated. It was important that it be frictionless with the consumer as well, so it's a very simple four-step process for the consumer.

Fraud and AI

Well, artificial intelligence, I think, is an exciting part of our journey as a society. There are so many cool functionalities that we're all leveraging today that are built on artificial intelligence capabilities. One of the things that we have a real depth of expertise in at Experian is the area of big data machine learning analytics, all of which provide the underlying layer that allows us to create artificial intelligence. So I think you described as a salesperson, you know, what were all the activities that you had to very manually take to be able to get information back about the person you're interacting with. And you weren't even provided some of that information in an easy-to-access way. It just wasn't even available to you.

So we're seeing solutions like fraud, protect, as you know, the growth of the maturity ladder towards more and more evolved A.I. that essentially help salespeople to do their jobs a lot easier and remove a lot of that difficult manual effort that they need to do through automation and intelligence, from data and analytics.

How will AI help people commit fraud?

I think you're seeing a lot of the sophistication in synthetic IDs happening as a result of the access that criminals have to this kind of information for them to put together identities.

Data breaches are also of concern where they're able to steal identities from people. And so interacting with trusted data sources and platforms, I think is becoming more and more important to consumers in an ever-increasing digitally sophisticated era where we're sharing more and more of our data to conduct interactions and transactions with retailers and other experiences that we're doing.

So I think that that's a really important part of any solution is to make sure that you're interacting with somebody who's invested in protecting your data.

What is Experian launching at NADA?

Well, I'm in Vegas right now. I'm in this beautiful hotel room at the Venetian, which feels like a palace to me. NADA is always an exciting place to be. 

We are launching our Fraud Protect Solution at NADA this year. We've been working with a number of dealers who've been using the product and have received great feedback from them.

We had dealers who were facing losses because of vehicles being stolen through various types of fraud, including these fraudulent identities. Adopting these practices really helped them identify where they needed to take more steps to validate the person's identity, reducing the amount of back and forth and pushback on pushing through the deal.

It also acted as a deterrent to prevent those fraudulent transactions from going through. So, for example, the very first day that we turned this on at one of our dealers, they had a consumer come in and they uploaded their driver's license. They were about to take they reached the step where they had to take a picture of themselves and they balked and they walked away from the transaction, which was a vehicle worth over $100,000.

It's things like that that help dealers put solutions that are going to protect themselves and their bottom line.

How else is fraud impacting dealerships?

Well, I think time is money. And at the dealership, we already know that there's a big focus across our industry. You know, any day you're going to just run into a number of partners who are building solutions that are going to make things easier for dealers and help them essentially focus on selling more cars.

In the economy that we're in today, where everyone is margin-constrained, it's important that these solutions be light, be things that are easily integrated into existing processes that dealers already have today. That was one of the biggest things that we focused on, working with our dealer partners is this solution is it's not yet another portal that they have to log into, but it's integrated right into their CRM.

So when a salesperson is interacting with that shopper, the consumer's information goes into the CRM, and the results of the four-step process that they went through go right into their CRM with the link so that they can click in a very simple to read visual that tells them if they're ready to go ahead to the next step or if they need to take further validation steps.

How susceptible are dealers to being hacked?

I think it's a very important aspect of being a digital retailer that a dealership needs to take into consideration. I have so much admiration for dealers. They're such a complex business. Many of them are small to medium-sized businesses, the heart of their town, you know, And now we're seeing a lot more groups and group expansion.

But at the end of the day, a dealership is a very complex business, and this is yet another aspect that dealers need to grow their understanding in, which is around data security, how we talk about output. And you're talking about consumer data, one of the things that we do not do is we do not share back our things like a consumer's biometric information.

That's protected and it's not something that would end up at a dealership. I think dealers need to make sure that whatever solutions they're using has a component of protecting the consumer data that they are collecting. Obviously, at Experian, it's a huge part of our business and we are heavily invested in the protection of consumer data by following all of the government regulations that are out there. So any solution that is part of the Experian suite of solutions, make sure that it is compliant with all of those regulations.

Final thoughts?

I think that the biggest thing is in this ever-evolving digital era, it's important that dealers be on top of what they're exposed to with these increasingly sophisticated criminals who are leveraging various stolen identities or identities that are good identities that might not be flagged by their existing processes.

We hope that our Experian Automotive Fraud Protect Solution is going to help dealers evolve their processes to be able to protect themselves and protect their bottom line.

Join hosts J.D. Mixon and Bart Wilson on the Driving Sales Defining Leadership podcast, brought to you by DrivingSales.com, as they explore the transformative power of leadership and coaching in the automotive industry. In this insightful episode, they are joined by Sean Kelley, CEO of CarMotivators (CarMotivators.com) and best-selling author, known for his dynamic approach to leadership and coaching within the automotive sector.

Delve into Sean's unique journey from a U.S. Army Special Operations combat veteran to a pivotal figure in the automotive world, where his military experiences shape his leadership and coaching philosophies. Discover how Sean's transition into the automotive industry led to groundbreaking sales strategies and leadership techniques that have propelled dealerships to new heights.

This episode is a must-listen for automotive professionals seeking to enhance their leadership skills, foster a culture of coaching, and drive exceptional team performance. Whether you're a manager aiming to inspire your team, or an executive striving for business growth, Sean's insights and the experiences shared by J.D. and Bart offer valuable lessons on the impact of effective leadership and coaching.

The DrivingSales Defining Leadership podcast is back up and running, and we've decided to launch a second podcast: DrivingSales Insights. Each podcast contains content that has been tailored to a distinct focus. Here is a quick overview of each with links so you can check them out.

DrivingSales Insights

We've been a part of some great conversations over the years. This podcast contains best practices from those conversations to provide you with nuggets you can implement with your teams.

If you're looking for a strategy or some tactics to help you improve your store, your employees, and yourself, this may be a good podcast for you.

Topics include sales techniques, including digital retailing, advanced marketing, progressive fixed operations, and the next generation of Employee Management

DrivingSales Defining Leadership

Customer expectations, new technology, and the economy are three of the many external factors impacting dealerships today.

In the Defining Leadership podcast, we take a deep dive into different topics that will focus on how to define leadership in automotive dealerships today. Episodes focus on human capital management, improving processes to improve your store, and what today’s workforce is looking for in a career.

Check both of them out. We'll be adding episodes frequently. If you'd like to suggest topics or provide feedback, you can email us at podcast@drivingsales.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

In this episode of "DrivingSales Defining Leadership," hosts J.D. Mixon and Bart Wilson discuss the evolution of leadership and the essential traits required in today’s dynamic environment. Our special guest, Gail Rubinstein, Founder & CEO of Retail Resilient, brings her unique insights and experiences to the table, enriching the conversation with practical examples and personal anecdotes.

The episode delves into the concept of resilience, both personally and professionally, exploring its definition, importance, and how it can be nurtured and developed within a team. Gail shares her journey and the challenges she faced, providing a real-world perspective on resilience in business. J.D. and Bart contribute their thoughts on the necessity of resilience in the auto industry, particularly in the face of rapid technological changes and market shifts.

Listeners will also gain valuable insights into the effective use of social media and AI in sales, with practical advice on how sales teams can adapt and thrive in the digital age. The discussion touches upon the balance between technology and personal touch in customer interactions, emphasizing the importance of human connection in a tech-driven world.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the auto industry, as well as leaders and professionals from various sectors who aim to foster resilience in their teams and adapt to the ever-changing business landscape.

Learn more about DrivingSales at DrivingSales.com and explore Retail Resilient at retailresilient.com.

Tune in to "DrivingSales Defining Leadership" for more insights into the art of leadership.

In a recent conversation with Dealer eProcess CMO Eliana Raggio and Chief Revenue Officer Gino Cipperoni, we discussed the modern website experience. How important is if for marketing conversion?

How would you define a website today?

Here's how a dealer should look at it. Your website is your number one most prolific salesperson. It is the person who talks to everybody before they ever walk into your showroom. It has a conversation with each and every person that comes there.

Now, the question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of conversation do you want that salesperson to be having with your potential customers? Is it one like we've seen for the past ten years with a website where that person doesn't really say anything at all and it's really up to the customer to drive the conversation? Or is it one that has an understanding of who that customer is and evolves the conversation proactively with that shopper's journey? And we believe it's the latter.

We believe it's something that should be completely personalized to the user. Digital retailing, that's dependent on the dealer, and how they want to operate. But I think a lot of customers these days want a digital retailing application, not necessarily so that they can put a car in a shopping cart and checkout right then and there, but to take control of a large portion of the buying process, value their trade, find their equity, figure out their payments, pick their terms, pick their loans, things like that.

That's what customers really want because you still hear the biggest complaint coming from customers when it comes to buying a car, is the time it takes at the dealership. 

A quick example, my parents just bought a car two weeks ago. They had already spoken to the dealer a number of times beforehand. All they really wanted to do was come in and test drive the car. And then if they like it, they're going to take it. They were there for 6 hours on a Saturday. 

It still happens. I know. But if your website can speed that process up and do it in a way that's fully tailored to the user, they're going to really appreciate that. They're going to latch on to that. And you got a really good shot at getting them in the door.

Now you mentioned CDP. A CDP can enhance all of that and, in fact, DEP, with our brand new connected retail platform that does all the things I was just talking about, we've actually integrated with a number of CDPs already so companies like Orbee, Client Command and the like, we're able to pull data in from the CDP and use it to personalize the customer journey based on other actions that they've taken outside of the website or marketing platform. So if they have data in the CRM or the DMS or another digital retailing tool, that might not be ours that's on the site, we can combine all that data in their profile in the CDP and then use that data to update their their marketing profile, their website profile so that everything is running in lockstep and the customer's not getting different messaging from all over the place. It's all completely organized and integrated. So that's how we're viewing websites today as it's more of a living, breathing thing, rather than just go here and see our inventory and tell us what you want, which is the old web.

I have to say, this is a really, really exciting time for websites. I've been in the auto industry for 15 years and I've seen websites go from analog to the early, early days of website. And now we have responsive websites, and when we made that switch over to responsive websites, the entire industry, that was the last big renaissance for websites. I think we're upon the precipice of another big renaissance for websites.

Now, we are at the point where we're making Web sites smarter and more intuitive. I just bought a car over the Christmas holiday and spent six months shopping for just the right car. I can tell you personally that I was visiting websites and I was looking for a convertible. I knew exactly the car I wanted. I was just looking for the right mileage and the right color combination, stuff like that. I knew exactly what car I wanted, but every single time I would go to a website, looking for a convertible, I was being shown, for instance, specials on pickup trucks. I don't want a pickup truck. I want a convertible.

Then I would leave that site and somehow be drawn back to that site maybe two weeks later. And guess what? I was shown pickup trucks. I didn't want a pickup truck.

Now we've made a Web site through our new technology, which you can see at NADA. We've made technology where a shopper like me, having known shopper history of shopping for a convertible, now, I come to this website, the smart website that has this first party, third party data integration now being fed into it is going to serve me up exactly what I've been looking for. And they're not going to show me a pickup truck.

And that's the kind of intuitiveness that websites should have. They get that from other people outside of automotive. It's time for automotive to catch up and bring that personalization to the shopper, and meet them where they are, meet them at the place where they are. And because we give them such a much better shopping experience, it's next to impossible for them to say that they would want to shop anyplace else.

We're reading their minds. We're saying, that not only do you want a convertible, you want it to be all-wheel drive. You want this, you want that. These are the things you're looking for. and you're a payment shopper, too, And they give you those things. And that's what the DEP CRP, the DEP Connected Retail Platform can do now, which shoppers really appreciate. It's what they've been waiting for. Now they just have to find a dealer who can serve them exactly the kind of shopping experience they are coming to expect. They're expecting it from other retailers, they should expect it for the second-largest purchase in their lifetime.

What is the CTA sweet spot?

Actually, I was looking at this last week because I've been wondering that myself. It's like I was just stumbling across some of our own sites. We give our dealers a lot of leeway with how they want to set up their site. I mean, we give our best practices, but sometimes cooler heads don't always prevail.

But I ran across a site where they had ten CTAs on their search results. Two were "value my trade", so that was repeated. One was "get your payment" while one was "get your lease payment". I don't know why those are our separate buttons or anything like that. One was a giant flashing red button saying "get today's price", which I think consumers are a little bit tired of at this point.

But to answer your question, the number of CTAs you should have on your vehicle pages is anywhere from 3 to 5. Five is the absolute max. It's five if you are a dealer that wants to run a digital retailing tool because that's going to naturally add one or two more CTAs that you have to have. But that customers appreciate if you're going to offer that type of a service, if not three, maybe four is enough.

Another thing to think about with your CTAs, is when you do go in, when somebody does go in to buy a car, what are the steps they take? They say, "Hey, I'm interested in this car. Let me test drive it", step one. And then during the test drive, "Hey, I like this. What's the you know, what's the price of this car?" That's step two. "Okay, great. Let's get back in the dealership. What is what will my payment be?" That's step three. Okay, cool. You got all that said. "By the way, what are you gonna give me for my trade?"

If you line your CTAs up in that order, you're going to have much better results because it follows the natural customer journey. Don't go out there straight away and say, "Hey, calculate your payment" because they don't know what they want yet, unless we know that and we can dynamically change things like Eliana talking about. But if you've just got somebody who's come to the site, maybe you have one of the old static sites that we've had forever. If you line them up in a logical order, you're going to get a lot more value out of it because customers, they don't live in our world. They don't necessarily know the difference between get my price, get my payment, get things of that nature. But they do know what "schedule test drive" means. They do know what "get your E price means". Oddly enough, that still does get a lot of lead conversions. And so if you just line those up logically and then don't overwhelm people, that's the way you want to go. 

I talk about this a lot. There's a phenomenon in psychology called the Paralysis of Choice. So if you think about it this way, there's the more choices you offer a person, the longer and harder it is for them to make a decision. The analogy that I like to use is if you're out to eat and you order a salad and the waiter says to you, "Good choice. I love that salad. Which of these 12 dressings do you want on your salad?" You're going to be sitting there thinking about it for 5 minutes, maybe like, "I don't know. Which would one do I really like? But if that same waiter says, "Would you like ranch blue cheese or Italian?" You know the answer. So if you slim down the number of choices, you actually start to see leads and engagement improve because the customers aren't deer in headlights looking like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. That's how we look at it.

How healthy is GA4?

It's not as still robust as Universal Analytics was, but that's to be expected because UA was around for a long time.

What I like about GA4 is the way that it can track, in much more granularity, certain details on a site like a button color change or a hover over a button or something like that is a potential engagement or data for an A, B test or things like that. It does have some good robust capabilities, but it has to be set up properly.

We are a a founding member of the Automotive Standards Council, which is a collaboration of a lot of different vendors within the space to say we are standardizing how we're tracking events within GA4 and that allows us to not only track everything properly that we need to, but also measure ourselves against other providers in a real true apples to apples sense. Because if we're all tracking the same things and doing it the same way, we should be able to compare the results on how everything's performing, which is good because it holds everybody accountable.

What we did at DEP is we actually built that ASC spec into our baseline code. So every site that launches with us has that spec initiated and running. We were actually the first ones to launch it on January 1st of last year. So we've had a lot of data so far collecting and it has proven to be really useful, particularly when you look at things like optimizing paid search campaigns because you can create such really robust and specific audiences based on actions that are taken on the site that you pay for. We can then funnel into Google and Google ads and use it for marketing and remarketing and things of that nature. So it's got some good robust capabilities. It's not all the way there yet, but it's making strides, slowly but surely.

I remember when Google came out with Google business profiles, of course, it was Google my business back then, Over time they added to it. They added far more feature-rich snippets and stuff like that. And now Google business profiles are very robust and now it's Google business profiles that get over 60% zero-click searches, you know, or something like that. So I think over time we're going to find out that GA4 is going to be our trusty right hand when it comes to looking at your website and and looking at your campaigns and seeing exactly everything that you could ever possibly want for any.

I agree with you. You know, it does need to be set up properly. And if it's not set up properly, then your foundation is faulty and things go downhill quite quickly. So just make sure everyone out there that you have somebody you trust who is knowledgeable enough to set that up properly for you.

They don't have an easy task. A lot of the reason for this is law. It is driven by a lot of new privacy laws and mandates and things like that that came about that they wanted to be conscious of.

And the removal of the third-party cooking cookie, which has been coming for five years, which sounds like now it's starting to be right around the corner. And so they're accounting for all of that while building a brand new analytics platform. It's not a small task. So, you know, kudos to them for getting it out there in a fairly robust way as it is, and then they'll get it to where it needs to be.

What are some recent shopper trends?

We're seeing a lot of dealers are struggling right now. I spoke with two different dealers today who both said the start of the year was a little soft. And I think there are a lot of macroeconomic factors at play there. You mentioned interest rates. I think a lot of people are underwater on the cars they bought early on in the pandemic that were sky-high prices and things have come down. A lot of uncertainty. And I don't know if you heard, there's an election coming up this year that's kind of important. That might sway people one way or another.

But what's interesting is engagement is still strong. So when people do get to the site, they are actively shopping, and going back to the personalization we talked about, we saw something completely opposite of what we expected. When we launched our new personalization system on our connected retail platform, a little while ago as a beta test, (we're doing a full launch coming up at NADA). We expected to see users on maybe their second or third visit, really that being the point at which they convert, because at that point on your second or third visit of the site, that site is completely tailored to you. It has your saved searches, it has your saved vehicles, and it has the features that you want already pre-loaded for you. It has your filters on the SRP set up in the way that you want them set up. 

All of this is done without a login in which some sites force you to log in to see any personalization. I don't think that's a good idea because it doesn't happen much. But all of that coming together we thought was going to be, once they come back and they see this personalized site, that's when conversions going to be really high. But you know, it was interesting, once the data came in, we saw that sites of ours that had our personalization turned on on the first visit saw almost 54% more leads generated than sites who didn't have personalization on their first visit, meaning this personalization is so robust and so rapidly adjusting to the customer journey that in that first visit, it's getting 50 plus percent more people to convert than if it's sitting there doing nothing.

The reason that's so valuable is because everybody knows getting their first in a sale is critical. Especially at the dealership level. If you're the first one to have a conversation with the customer, you've got the best chance of closing them.

But when you also look at the trends in the industry right now, post-pandemic, people are buying a car. 59% of shoppers buy a car within a one-month window. So if you get that conversion in early, you know that sale is going to happen within the next 30 days, more likely than not. So you got to be the first one in there talking to the consumer. And that's a big shift from previously when most customers were like Eliana here spending six months to look for a car because pre-pandemic they knew that that inventory was going to be there. "I don't have to get the car today. You know, there's not a rush".

So that's really been a shift that's been very noticeable on our sites. But that personalized experience gets that consumer to convert way more, way more quickly. And as I'm thinking about it right now, it kind of makes a lot of sense that that would actually happen on the first visit, because if you consider Amazon, who invented e-commerce personalization, Amazon did all of that so that on your visit to Amazon you would take that action. They have things like pick up where you left off, which we have on our site. They have, you know, suggested items that you want to buy similar to our suggested features and whatnot. So all of that's done to make sure that you make that purchase right then and there. And it happens. Obviously, if it didn't happen, Amazon wouldn't be worth trillions of dollars.

It's interesting to see how much that's mirrored on our side when we turn on this type of personalization. When Gino talked about your website as your number one salesperson, if you think about it that way, what is this website saying to me at this very moment on this very page? If it's throwing ten different questions at the viewer, that is the same as if the person was standing right in front of you and saying, "Hey, so do you want to test drive? Do you want to value your trade? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?" And listing out ten different questions at you. It's dizzying if you have that.

The real magic of a website is how it draws people in. It gets them excited and it easily brings them down the path towards the sale. And so how do you do that? As Gino said, make it make sense. Don't overwhelm them. Show them only the things that they really, really are looking for. And when you have that knowledge of how they've shopped in the past, you can actually serve those things up right at the top to them. So a person who is looking for the performance of a car is going to shop maybe a bit differently than somebody who's shopping for the best deal because they're a payment shopper. They're looking for something like a really great finance special.

For instance, you know, somebody who's concerned with safety features isn't going to be the same kind of person who is shopping for all of the features like Apple CarPlay and stuff like that. So it's making the website a great showcase for that particular person, for that particular shopper, and giving that person exactly what they're looking for, even maybe before they even know it, before they even had a chance to type it in.

Then, if they leave the website because for whatever reason they have to leave and then they want to come back to that same website, don't make it hard on them. Ask them if they want to pick up where they left off, and refill all of that same stuff. Your website is smart enough to know, this is a return visit. This is a return person who's been here before. Why are you making them start from scratch? There are so many things that a website that technology can do right now to service every single visitor that comes to your website. And it's a shame if dealers don't take advantage of the technology that's out there,

How do you approach AI?

Cautiously. That's my best answer for you right now,

I think AI is going to be very important in the next few years for dealers. I see some CRMs using it to really good effect like answering emails for customer inquiries versus maybe a template or maybe just helping your BDC rep, your salesperson write a good email to respond to a lead on the website. We've had our eye chat for a little while and that does a pretty decent job. It's not like an AI type of chat, but it does do a good job of guiding the customer through the journey.

But where I see AI coming into play is once you start working with these large data models like a CDP or like our CRP, and once we start to develop really large sets of data that we can feed into a system that can then even more proactively start to pull out insights from that shopper journey and decide what to present to a consumer.

It's just it's not there yet. I think it's going to be really important in dealer sites in the next few years once it gets a little bit further along. But it's right now it's a little too nascent for us to say, let's throw it on all our websites.

I agree with you. I mean, I think Skynet is real. The robots are just waiting for the right data to get over. I think AI needs to be approached carefully and I am of the mindset that you shouldn't just let AI do everything. I think it also needs to have not just only artificial intelligence, it needs to have human intelligence with it. So you get the right response the way you have to set it up right. And I think you can't do that without human interaction.

AI and programmatic advertising.

We leverage all of the AI within Google to manage that. It's gotten extremely robust, particularly when you look at things like Performance Max, which now have vehicle ads in them, which used to be separate. But you do have to be a little bit careful, though, because it does boil down to how much data you have and are you collecting the right data.

This is actually going back to the GA4 conversation. It's an important connection between those two platforms because if you're not tracking conversions and actions that you find valuable correctly within GA4, you can't funnel good data into Google ads so that it can optimize for those actions. So for example, what you want to do is if you have GA4 set up correctly, you want to be able to take all of the conversions that go into GA4, funnel those into Google ads, and then tell Google ads to, find people who are going to do this, who are going to take this action. If you don't have a lot of that data set up correctly so it can do that, you're not going to find the right people to advertise to and you're going to be wasting a lot of money. So AI in that respect is really powerful. If it's set up correctly.

We've also seen a lot of really good value from running programmatic ads on the Amazon advertising network, which I think a lot of your dealers might not be familiar with. Amazon advertising is a system that allows us to buy streaming TV ads on apps like Hulu, and Amazon Prime which just now this month is launching ad-supported content, which Amazon's happy about, I'm sure their viewers are probably not crazy about, but they're going to do it anyways. You run on Hulu, you run on Amazon Sling, or any of the major streaming platforms you can advertise to customers on as well as online video and display.

But the programmatic part comes from when Amazon's data is used as the filter for all of that. So we're one of a handful of Amazon partners that are allowed to use this data. And if you think about Amazon, the data they have is extraordinary. It's all first-party data to Amazon and it's all user-generated data. So I can target a customer by their home address, which I know is accurate because nobody's going to lie about where they want their Amazon packages shipped, you can tell them by what's in their garage because if you buy parts for your car on Amazon, you have to tell them your model trim that you own. So now you have an address with one or two vehicles sitting at that address. You can then target people by if they're shopping for a car because Amazon has all these OEM showrooms on Amazon.com, including the robust Hyundai showroom where they're going to start selling cars with Hyundai on Amazon.com. We'll see how that works. And I think the jury's still out a little bit on that.

They also know if somebody is going through what's called a life event, which tends to proceed, a car purchase. For example, if you have a customer who lives seven miles away from a dealership, which we know because of their address, who also owns a 2018 Honda Civic, who has been browsing the OEM showrooms and just created a baby registry and started stocking up on diapers, that person is probably going to get rid of that 2018 Civic. It's not going to cut it anymore. So that's a signal that we use to then programmatically put an ad in front of that consumer. If they go watch, like I was watching all the football games this weekend on Sling so you can target me on Sling even though I was watching football. If you knew all of those things about me and know I'm in the market.

So while Google's AI is really strong, I think the biggest marketing play out there for dealers today that nobody really knows about because it's so new is the Amazon piece. And the great thing is the two of them work together. So we have a lot of data that shows that when you run Amazon, it actually boosts the performance of your Google ads campaign because Amazon is essentially filling the pond with fish that are ready to bite and Google is your fishing pole pulling them out.

It's a very synergistic type of ad format. I call it like all the best one-two punch in automotive marketing today is Amazon and Google.

Why does AI need clean data?

You can try it yourself. If you go to ChatGPT and write a very short prompt and ask it to do something and you don't give it clear details, you're going to get a pretty, pretty bad answer, most likely, or it's going to make something up. Which it does. I've had it make things up on me that I've corrected it on and it says, sorry, I don't know where that came from. Let me try again. I'm like, okay. Yet another reason why I don't fully trust A.I. at the moment.

I think too, that an argument can be made that a dealer's most valuable asset. It's not the cars on the lot. It's their first-party data. It's the data that they don't know how to get a hold of. They don't utilize it. They don't do anything with it. Sometimes it's stored in, I think Gino is so good at explaining this, their first-party data is stored in anywhere from 8 to 15 different places and they they can't reach it and utilize it and be able to say okay I have this data, what can I do with it to make more money, sell more cars, get more customers?

And I think it's a darn shame that there isn't an easier way until now to be able to not only access that data, but maybe work for you. It's very, very valuable. And guess what? It's yours. You earned it. You have it and it's just not being utilized. It's sitting in the Ethernet someplace., and if you could take that and you could harness it, the kind of powerful results that you can get from it is extraordinary.

Like Gino just said, we utilized it in this one instance, in this beta test to see, well, would it really make a difference if we person took the data on these shoppers, personalized the website in real-time and see if it did anything? And to our surprise, it did way more than we ever thought possible. 53%, 54% first view conversions. It's unheard of and the only difference, the only difference was that we turned that personalization feature on. That's extraordinary. And that's only one instance where we used first-party data just to see if it would really make a difference and get people down the funnel faster. And now we know for sure it does. Yeah,

What is the impact of your website on your marketing?

I like to make this point a lot maybe people are sick of it, but website and marketing are not two different things. You can't talk about websites in one breath and then your digital marketing in the next because both need each other and both have the same goals. And if your website is not synced up with what your marketing is doing or saying, it's just a massive mess.

I see it myself every day. You look at an ad on Google that says "Lease this car for $499 a month". And when you click on that ad, it takes it to the home page or it takes to a page with vehicles on it where it doesn't have anything about that lease offer, It's like, well, you told me you were going to lease it to me for $499 a month. I want to learn more about that. That's why I clicked on the ad. But I don't see that info anywhere.

It's like we go back to your salespeople in your dealership. If I walked into the store and I said, "Hey, Eliana, I see you guys are leasing a Jeep Cherokee for $499 a month", and Eliana looks at me like "We are? What are you talking about?" I'm going to leave. I'll go somewhere that people know what's going on.

You cannot look at websites in marketing separately. It just doesn't work that way. They have to be completely synched up working together because they are the same thing. It's just digitally finding and selling customers and making sure that message is complete and carries through no matter where they see anything from you. Wherever you're a digital footprint is, it should all match

What does a dealer have to do to capitalize on CRP?

To get that up and running, the dealer does not have to do anything. They have to sign up with Dealer eProcess, which they should do anyway. But you don't have to do anything. As a dealer, if you have the personalization engine running, it will do all this, all the great stuff we just talked about. Now, what a dealer can do though, is invest in a system like a CDP that can funnel additional data into this system.

If you think about our website platform like a high-performance car, you can either put regular gas in it or high-octane fuel. If you have that data from that outside source pumping into this, that's that high-octane fuel. So the car is still going to run great on normal gas but is going to run even better with the better, better fuel.

That's really it. But if you don't have that, you can still get tremendous results out of this. The dealers that we've been running this beta on that got that boost in first was a conversion, they didn't have any other data running it. They haven't decided which CDP partner they want it to go with yet, but we wanted to start testing this anyway. So they've just been running it on the data that we as DEP collect and utilize to personalize the site.

I also want to point out that the beta test, was four dealerships. All for the same brand. The only thing they changed is two dealerships turned on the personalization engine and the other two didn't, and that is how we tested it. And that is where the difference was very, very obvious. They didn't change advertising. Nothing else except for let's flip the switch on this personalization engine and see what happens.

Every customer should receive a tailored website experience

Your dealership doesn't have any extra work. Guess what? Your visitors to your website don't have any extra work either. As Gino said earlier, they don't have to make an account or log in and sign up. I don't know about you, but I mean, I just finished eight, you know, six months' worth of car shopping. If somebody asked me to make an account so that I could see the cars and see the prices Now, I would never have done I would never have gone back to that.

It's also important to note this works for every customer, too, not just people who are in your DMS or who are our previous customers, every customer to your site should receive a personalized experience.

And that's our motto. And it reminds me of my favorite quote from Jeff Bezos. He said back in 98, way ahead of the curve. He said, If we have four and a half million shoppers, we shouldn't have one store. We should have four and a half million stores. Now, dealers aren't going to have four and a half million site visits, but they might have 10,000. So you should have 10,000 unique experiences on the website because everybody's coming there with different wants and needs, just like you would train your salespeople to figure that out and, you know, cater to those needs. The website has to do the same thing.

Upcoming NADA webinar

It's this Thursday and Gino is going to be talking firsthand about how to make your website so that customers fall in love with it.

We're only a couple of weeks away from Valentine's Day so there are things that you can do on your website to make customers fall in love with it. If they love the experience with your website, I promise you they'll come back for more. I cannot even tell you how many websites my husband and I did online for my car. I can't even tell you how many websites sites like, "This website. It's terrible. I can't I'm never going to go back to that website". And that's it. His shopping journey on that website was over. And so what you want to do is you want to make them fall in love with your website, Gino has got all the tips, tricks, and strategies. It's going to be an NADA webinar, but you can find the link on the delivery process website. It's going to be January 25th at 1 p.m. Eastern time and just go to dealereprocess.com/webinars. 

In the ever-changing world of automotive sales, mastering automotive data utilization is crucial for driving effective marketing efforts and achieving strong customer engagement. Many dealerships face a hurdle: their marketing campaigns underperform due to disorganized and incomplete automotive data. Dealerships hold valuable customer information within their DMSs, CRMs, and marketing systems, but the quality of this automotive data deteriorates rapidly and is often scattered across multiple systems, rendering many marketing initiatives ineffective or unpredictable.

Investing in foundational elements that enhance automotive data utilization across communication channels and marketing tools is essential. This involves employing an automotive-specific Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Journey Builder.



In this episode, J.D. and Bart delve into the findings of our post-pandemic talent market research project, shedding light on key takeaways and their impact on Millennial and Gen Z employees in the automotive sector. They discuss the current job market's dynamics, the gap between available jobs and qualified candidates, and the nuances of employee satisfaction and engagement.

Overfuel Cofounder and President Alex Griffis spent some time discussing website performance, search, and digital retailing in a recent sitdown.

What are your thoughts on AI today?

This has been a sort of a big topic of debate. I recently just did an article with Alex Melan with Smart Sites about the five predictions for this year and I think there's no denying that AI has been all the rage and that all these companies want to get in the race to get a product to market. But I think that inherently proposes some issues, right? If you're moving fast, you're not really asking the question, like, what's the problem we're trying to solve? And as a result of that, I don't know if you saw the article about the Chevy dealer using the AI chat and somebody convinced that AI to sell them a Tahoe for a dollar.

I think that was like a clear example of sort of a rushed product. I think there's a lot more behind-the-scenes operational stuff that AI could do. That could be simple things like predictive maintenance, proactively reaching out to customers, and setting appointments. There's a lot that could be done on the sales enablement side.

I think that's less customer-facing until the customer-facing products get a little more mature and catch up. I really think there's a lot that could go on behind the scenes that would that would benefit dealers, especially around inventory management. If we started, you know, crunching numbers and sales data and more competitively pricing cars. There's a lot AI can do behind the scenes.

How can AI improve the customer experience?

There's a big portion of the customer experience that could be dramatically improved. I think the focus on chat is a bit of a mistake because with live chat, the intent, or at least the expectation on the consumer side, is that it's going to be instant and intelligent and actually returning dialog or answers that are relevant to what they're asking about. But if you think about text messaging the expectation is a lot more casual. 

I think you could have the conversational APIs perform much better in a text messaging environment if you're sitting on the data in the analytics like we are with our products. We know every single step a person took on a website. We know every car they looked at, every button they pushed, and I think if you approach that from a text messaging standpoint, you can contextually offer them things based on what they've done. It kind of takes some of the guessing out. You have more of the history, you have more of an understanding of who the customer is.

A lot of the live chat products right now are just kind of sitting on top of the website, They don't necessarily see all the other interactions that are happening.

How can dealers improve the online path to purchase?

Well, there are quite a few pieces of that. I think that speed is going to become increasingly important. Over 80% of traffic that we see is originating on a mobile device. I think the entire experience needs to be built mobile first and really tailored to that form factor. What we're seeing today, if you pull up the dealership website on your phone, you have all these third-party widgets that are all competing for your attention and they're popping up left and right. They're slowing the website down. All of that has downstream implications. It lowers the conversion rate and lowers the overall quality of the website, So it hurts them from a search engine standpoint. It leads to higher pay-per-click costs. We look at speed and form factors, kind of the two most important things, you know, parts of the customer experience.

We're not anti third-party widget. A lot of OEMs have various requirements and plugins and tools that they use. But I think we're looking at it from how do we get a customer onto the site? It feels instant, it feels like a mobile, you know, native mobile application on their phone. How do we make the calls to action super clear and concise?

When we look at our data, it shows that eight out of ten people don't even scroll 25% down a page. How do you minimize all the distractions and bells and whistles and really just get somebody focused into the funnel? Hit search and type in exactly what you want, or click SUV, or click a sunroof, or any number of the features that you want. You just have to put it right in front of them and make it super simple. By doing that, we have found that most people don't scroll. Most people don't like to go to the second page of the search results. Typically, you've got to present the car to them pretty quickly at the top of the page to keep them engaged.

What CTAs work on a VDP?

That's why we lead with typically something like "lock in the best price" or "unlock manager special". Those tend to perform really well because people like a good deal. They like a coupon. The most leads that we collect through our websites is actually through the payment calculator. 

When you think about the sites you go to today, it might ask you to know your location and you're like, Why would I do that? Why do you need my location? Then it's going to ask you to fill out an application to get preapproved. Well, why would I do that? I haven't even found a car I like. Our line of thinking is to get them into the bids and present the most obvious options. Show them enough to submit a payment, let them customize that payment, and hopefully get a lead out of it. 

Then, once they have an understanding of their buying power, we hit them with "get a free credit score check". Our partners at 700 Credit integrated with us via API, so we can pull on our credit score and give them a pretty realistic number of what their payment is going to look like. So we lead with the payments, we lead with an action that instills some sense of urgency, whether that's unlocking some kind of a coupon, or holding the car for some period of time. We move some ancillary stuff further down the page, whether that's get preapproved, do a test drive, ask a question, and we really try to lead with urgency and things that actually appeal to the customers.

We're constantly adjusting that. We're looking at the heatmap data and analytics and we're looking at session recordings to see how people interact with the sites.

It's a little different for every dealership. But I think the underlying principles are the same. Show them what they want to see on something relevant and get them into the funnel. And interestingly, for some of the higher-end dealerships, Fisher Imports here in town, they were one of the first clients whom we deployed our retailing tools with. When we put "explore buying options", they got quite a bit of clicks like you could go through the whole process of your trading and your finance forum, all of it. But once we actually just added put down a deposit, that's one of his top performing conversion mechanisms and that requires somebody to put down a deposit with a credit card. It's not a free hold or anything like that, but for people that are shopping and know what they want, they're willing to put down $250 or $500 to, you know, lock into the car they want.

Can you share some interesting website analytics?

I've got a few. A lot of the leads that we see tend to visit two or three cars. It just really depends on the source of the traffic. A lot of dealerships are investing in, you know, blogging or content generation. That's honestly, the poorest performing. We see paid ads are sort of in the middle somewhere. It just depends on what are they collecting, what they are doing.

But overwhelmingly, I would say the best-converting traffic we see is organic from search engines. We're starting to see that the best-performing sites are typically 60 to 70% organic traffic. It's really sort of changing dealerships' behavior because rather than spending a ton on pay-per-click or referral websites, we see them investing more on the SEO and search engine side because it performs a lot better.

I have a funny statistic for you since we're on the topic of chat earlier. When we look at heat map reports on a vehicle detail page, the number one click is the close button on live chat and it accounts for nearly 21% of all clicks. 

There are some other things we track. Like what people are searching by. We track features. Features are really interesting because they seasonally change. So in the summertime, people are primarily clicking Apple CarPlay sunroof, all these things that are conducive to the nice weather. And then as soon as winter hits, it's all like all wheel drive, towing package, or whatever. It's all things that are sort of gearing up for the winter. So that's always interesting to see.

What trends are you seeing?

My business partner pays attention to search trends quite a bit. We're seeing about a 20% decline in used car searches which is interesting. If you go to Google search trends and put in used cars like that, numbers are trending down. So I think that that's pretty interesting.

Another one would be pay-per-click. So when I was talking with Alex Melon about predictions for this year, we were looking at some of our numbers and wanted to compare them to some of his numbers. And we see a handful of dealerships that were paying a dollar per click back in January of last year, they were all of a sudden paying three plus dollars for that saving click at the end of December. So paper click costs are just multiplying every year and it's just getting so much more competitive.

Site speed and search 

I think automotive has struggled. You talked about speed a little bit, but the speed benchmark that we looked at said only 39% of automotive websites actually meet Google's sort of core performance metrics. Only 39% of automotive websites are tuned to perform well on organic search or paid search. It is the second worst-rated industry, only second to travel. I think historically, the industry has really struggled from a speed standpoint. And for clients that we see invest in proper SEO and a great mobile experience, mobile-first speed, we see increases of 2 to 300% in organic traffic. And to your point, organic traffic performs better so that often ends up being a 2 to 3 X increase in leads. I've yet to see a single pay-per-click agency or an SEO agency deliver that kind of performance because ultimately we have to solve what's under the hood, like what's causing the performance issues in the first place.

What is slowing down dealer websites?

It's a number of things. There's a metric called total blocking time, and that is just the time that it takes for an end user to connect to your website. That is directly in the hands of the website providers, whether they're using highly available infrastructure and cloud hosting and all these things they can do to deliver the website to customers based on their location to try to get a closer proximity to the data center. That's just right off the top. The most obvious one. If you're like a lot of website vendors in the space that white-label a content management system like WordPress, you're not going to be able to optimize that metric very well because WordPress is not built for automotive websites. It's got all these other plug-ins and all these other configurations that it has to load before a customer can even see your site. So that's number one. That's a design decision on the software side of things. 

There are two other major contributors that we see very often. So a lot of dealership websites today are not efficiently serving up images or videos or assets. We've seen the dealerships that have 25-megabyte homepages. So like to compare that to one of ours. We're like five or below. They have these huge promotional banners and really large videos, and you have to think about how that's going to load on some 3G cell phone, right? It's not going to go well. 

And then the third really big one is just the fact that people aren't closely paying attention to the widgets that are being put on their website. When we migrate a dealership over, a couple of the activities that we do is we try to consolidate all of their Google Analytics accounts and we try to consolidate older Google tag number tags. I think the record holder that we moved over had something like six analytics tags and 12 Google Tag Managers. And that alone starts adding seconds to your load time.

It's really just because you had a vendor that had you add this tag or you had an advertising agency that wanted to add a tag. And most support teams or customer success teams aren't considering the implications of that. So one of the things we monitor very closely is how many new scripts and new tags have been added to the website so that we can go back and empirically point to that and say, Well, this is when things started to go south and then we figure out how to consolidate them and and keep it performing well.

Google Tag Manager is slowing sites down.

Well, Google's being kind of quiet as to why that happened. I mean, that hasn't always been the case. I would say it's a fairly recent development, maybe the last 3 to 6 months that the tag managers especially are performing really poorly. If you go to the Google developer forums, there are a lot of people asking what is going on. And the conversations are just closed, unresolved and they're not allowing new people to comment. So it's kind of unknown at this point as to when they're going to fix it. So the best thing we could do as website providers is to try to optimize around that,

How are website providers contributing to slow sites?

It's I mean, it's a good question. I think if you went and looked at the list of industry leaders, the first thing that stands out is there are some very dated technology choices being made. I empathize with that because I'm the last person who wants to go back and rebuild my entire infrastructure. But I just think everything's evolved so rapidly. You have modern JavaScript frameworks now that are powering services like Hulu and Twitch and Netflix, and it's really hard for a company that's ten or 15 or 20 years old to adapt that kind of technology and get it implemented.

It can be very challenging. That is the software or the engineering culture in the industry. The dealers keep paying and we don't have to innovate and people accept the status quo. We talked to a very sizable company in the space that uses the KATL acronym. Keep on the lights. That seems to be one of the big challenges that we've noticed. They're just keeping the lights on instead of trying to innovate because they haven't been pushed or demanded to innovate in a long time.

What can a dealer do to improve their website today?

A couple of things that we often do is we look at a tool called PageSpeed and any dealer can go in and put their website in and PageSpeed will tell them exactly what's going south.

Another good one is GTmetrix, and any dealer can go in and put their site into one of these tools. It could be a little complicated. You know, it kind of gets a little nerdy, but you know GTmetrix especially is very good about sort of showing like this little ladder of how everything is loading and what's taking forever. They can pretty quickly see, "why did my marketing team add ten tag managers to the site?" It really spells out what the issues are and in a friendly matter, it even gives it either a color-coded score or a color-coded grade. So that's an easy one.

One that's really low-hanging fruit, if you want to understand if you have a good SEO vendor or a good SEO strategy in place, I highly recommend that dealers go to a tool called Semrush and they can put their business name in their directory listings management tool and it will show okay, of the 50 plus trusted by Google, here's how many your set up for. That's a really simple feedback mechanism. You have 50 websites that Google trusts that will index or website, make sure that all your name, address, and phone information is correct and it broadcasts that out to the Internet. That is the most low-hanging fruit thing any dealership can do. And nine times out of ten, when we talk to a dealership that's paying an eye SEO firm., that's the first thing we check, and none of their directory listings are on par. That's costing them a lot of organic traffic and really calls them a lot of opportunity.

What can a dealer do if they have an underperforming website?

I would agree that they're probably just going to have to find one to do the job. Unfortunately, there aren't very many right now, but you know, you brought up DMS, it's like we saw Tekion come into the space and they're working on some pretty exciting stuff.

There are more people sort of coming into the space wanting to do things a little differently. It's just unfortunate that we're also met with a lot of reluctance because as I look at it, you're the 50th DMS provider or the 50th website provider to call me. Why are you different? And so that's going to be an uphill battle for any company that comes into the space and tries to make an impact.

But what I will say is that if you have a great product and you can prove that it works the dealerships are your best friend in terms of marketing. If one guy starts doing really well they tell the next guy. And so that's just where I think the industry struggles, because I'm not sure what word you would use to describe it, but it's almost like dealerships feel a little defeated because they keep investing all these dollars expecting a different outcome. And I feel like they've been kind of let down for a while.

How do you approach digital retailing?

Digital retailing is a very interesting topic because it's kind of a kind of a loaded term. I think at the very basics, you should have some true payment calculation, some sort of input so the customer can put in to get their real payment. That way it's transparent because what we've seen with a lot of retail tools is that they present pricing with the best possible terms and credit rating and all of the above. Then the customer gets sticker shock when they find out the real price.

I think where a lot of retailing tools sort of overcomplicate things is that they try to package the entire deal into a single workflow, and for us that has been the lowest-performing plug-in across the board, not only for ours, we have our own retailing plugin, but we typically see it other retailing plugins fall short because they're just too complicated for the attention span of the modern consumer. That's where I was going back to, if you have something more actionable that's like, Hey, put down a deposit on a car and reserve it for 72 hours. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's much easier to convince someone to do that than it is to get them to go through a five-step credit application and then a three-step trade-in form.

Ultimately it's still a gray area as to whether somebody could do all of those pieces of the purchasing puzzle and actually complete a transaction. I mean, more often than not, what we see is that somebody will put down a deposit, the dealership reaches out, what are my next steps? So they get instructed to put in a credit application. They talk through the numbers over the phone and some of our dealerships ship 50% of their cars out of state. I think the expectation that you're going to wrap all of that into a single experience is going to be very challenging. 

Caravan and Vroom do that particularly well. I think it's a general generational thing. I think they appeal to younger car buyers. But I would think the average consumer, when you're making a purchase decision like that, you still want to talk to somebody on the phone. And part of the retail pitch that I've heard is, to your point earlier, is bring up more man hours or free up more resources. But you know, somebody is going to spend 50, 60, $100,000 on the car. Just give them the option to reserve it and sort of take it from there.

Digital Retailing needs to be simple

When dealerships often ask, do you have digital retailing tools, our answer is often yes. Carvana and Vroom and all these guys already have proven that people are willing to put the money down and buy a car online, whether that's the entire process or they're just putting down a deposit and getting started. But we know the desire is there for consumers to be able to transact online.

I think where dealerships get in trouble is relying on all of these third-party plug-ins with dozens of startups with this false promise that it's going to generate a ton of leads. We made that same mistake. We went down that road. Ultimately just making it one simple step seems to be the most effective.

How are dealerships calculating ROI on search activities?

You made a point earlier about dealerships looking at their budgets and trying to figure out how they quantify results and how they should allocate their dollars. I would tell you that the vast majority, 95% plus of dealerships that we talk to can't actually calculate the the ROI or the return on investment from different search activities or advertising activities. 

In large part that's because every time a customer comes to their website, they are sort of shuffled between a live chat product or an embedded credit app or some sort of instant cash trade offer. Once those people engage with those tools, you no longer have any visibility into what they did. So the reporting for dealerships is extremely challenging.

That's one thing that we're sort of aiming to solve. We have our own proprietary analytics engine that tracks every single interaction, every single detail. that's kind of the visibility that you need now because even Google Analytics has taken a huge nosedive with the release of Google Analytics. All the data is delayed 24 hours. The retention of that data is very limited. So you can't really compare time periods and what performed or didn't perform well.

They're really interested in selling looker subscriptions with analytics. It's not quite the tool that it used to be for generating reports. So it's very challenging across the board. As I said, probably 95% plus of the dealerships we talk to often couldn't tell you what their most effective marketing spend is.

The podcast is back! After a short hiatus, we're bringing back the DrivingSales podcast under a different name. We've changed the title from Dealership HCM to Defining Leadership.

Leadership in dealerships is constantly evolving, and we want to explore the different ways dealerships define it today.

In this episode, we review the criteria that make up a good quota, such as combining effort and performance quotas. We also talk about the five filters and use them to build a salesperson scorecard.

Click on the image above to check it out.