Client Command, an automotive industry leader in providing data-driven automotive solutions for dealership, is excited to announce Michael Salicco as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). This addition to the executive team will empower Client Command to maximize its competitive advantage with data to help dealer customers, affiliate partners and company reach its business potential.

Salicco is a proven and effective automotive technology leader, building winning teams, driving results, and developing people. His 20+ year career, includes extensive automotive experience with Gannett and Cox Automotive, leading enterprise wide sales teams built to align dealerships with the disruptive digital marketing and data solutions dealers need to evolve with the changing automotive landscape.  

 “I am excited to add the difference-maker that is Mike Salicco to the Client Command team,” says Client Command CEO, Jonathan Lucenay. “Mike is a proven leader with a track record of driving results across organizations, for customers and for his people. He is a passionate advocate for equipping dealers with solutions that give them a competitive advantage with data that drives their business and the automotive industry forward. Not only does Mike give us an opportunity to accelerate results for dealers, he is laser-focused on helping people reach their potential and I am excited to see his leadership accelerate growth for our employees.”   

Salicco is passionate about people-development and leadership. He is the author of “Modern Day Leadership: Tips for Successful Leadership in the Board Room, at the Kitchen Table and in Life”  published in 2019.

About Client Command: 

Client Command®, an industry leading technology company, delivers data-driven sales, service and vehicle acquisition solutions for dealers.  Powered by the Active Shopper Network®, our products and solutions leverage real-time data to enable dealers to engage shoppers as soon as they enter the market.  These solutions, delivering relevant messages from the top of the funnel through the entire journey, drives results that empower dealers to reach their sales and service potential.  Client Command is built on its commitment to people, growth and values - being named to Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies nine times and receiving awards for employee engagement year over year.

Instead of spending this year wondering how many people will be buying cars, we need to invest our mindshare in competing for those that WILL!

We do not know the full impact tariffs, rising interest rates, autonomous vehicles, ridesharing and digital retailing will have on our dealerships.  We do know that even if the number of people shopping for a car holds steady in 2019, the competition to turn those shoppers into buyers is ratcheting up every day. So how do we win?

Winning shoppers starts with marketing and carries through the entire customer experience.  And that means, you must be continually evaluating your marketing strategy to engage with shoppers effectively and efficiently.   

To do that, we need to start thinking like a consumer.

Did you know that one-third of shoppers expect to get a relevant discount within an hour of interacting with a brand in a way that allows that brand to identify them?1

Or -- 79% of consumers will only engage in an offer from a brand if it has been personalized to reflect their previous brand engagements?2

• These stats tell us what we should already know. We MUST rethink our marketing if we are to meet these expectations and win consumers.

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• Here are four ways you can rethink your marketing in 2019 to engage today’s consumer:
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Run Toward 1:1 Marketing

In the world of mass media, we’re not just referring to traditional forms.  Media designed to deliver one message to the masses -- radio, television, newspaper, display or video  -- does not help us meet shopper expectations at scale.   

To win with consumers, you must run towards 1 to 1 or People Marketing. Instead of thinking about what medium or publisher you should be investing in, start thinking about connecting the right message to an actual person throughout their individual journey.   People marketing leverages personalized data to find and market to an individual through identity, location, and cross-device omni-channel solutions. 

Application: 

Take an inventory of your marketing spend. Ask yourself how much you are spending on marketing to masses.   If you are investing more than 25% of your marketing engaging the many – it is time to start cutting and reallocating to engage actual people!

Make Data your North Star

According to IBM Marketing Cloud, 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years.3   At Client Command, we are seeing 31 Billion data updates per day online.  Think about the amount of information being generated by consumers and the power it holds for 1:1 marketing.  It is possible to KNOW when someone is shopping for a car, why they are buying it and the intensity of shopping AND to act with responsive messaging that matches what consumers want.

It is widely accepted that processing this level of data at scale requires technology, specifically a data management platform (DMP.) In 2018, 55% of marketers were using a DMP and this year, projections say it’ll jump to 91%!4  A DMP provides access to the critical data you need to fuel sales – and without it you lack the fundamental infrastructure to compete in today’s shopper centric marketplace.  

Application: 

Make decisions today to be among the 91% of marketers using a DMP in 2019.  If you are not purchasing or building your own, find a partner built to process data at today’s scale.

Commit to Speed

Speed matters in the competition for shoppers.  We must be in front of shoppers as soon as they enter the market.   Today, that means long before they step onto a dealership lot or even visit your dealership website.   According to Deloitte, nearly 7 out of 10 car shoppers will be in market less than 90 days.5    Meanwhile, most companies are using online shopping data that is 45-90 days old.  My question is, is the industry too comfortable with data that misses more than half of a shopper’s journey?

To get to shoppers first, you must invest in the most advanced shopper identification tools available.  At Client Command, we believe you need to know as much as possible about a shopper, within 24 hours of that person entering the market and be ready with content that responds to his or her phase, purchase intensity and interests. Two years ago, 90-day old data was bad, today it is worthless.

Application: 

Evaluate your data and shopper identification tools and vendors... and ask yourself:

1. How quickly do you know when a shopper enters the market? 
2. How many potential shoppers are you profiling and following? 
3. How robust is your online behavioral data? 
4. How old is the data you are purchasing?

Personalize. Then personalize some more.

Personalization is the expectation of consumers.  It also has proven benefit to your bottom line. According to McKinsey, personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, increase revenues by 5-15% and the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%.6  With that much upside, why aren’t we doing more of it?

The easiest answer is, it is difficult. Personalization means delivering real-time responsive messaging and offers that are contextual to where the shopper is in their journey on their preferred device and in their preferred media. 

And it is impossible to do for all the shoppers in your market without technology.  I am talking about a marketing automation platform.  Most marketers have adopted the DMP, but the truth is, you need both.   Marketing automation tools take that data and leverage it to personalize messages.

Application:

Prepare to open your budget and start vetting partners now who offer marketing automation platforms ready to harness data to deliver omni-channel solutions.

Wrapping it up

Customer loyalty has a new currency – personalization.  If you look at your own life, you know it is true.  You expect companies, no matter what they sell or service, to know what you want and be ready to respond with immediacy.  In the past, we have been able to make changes gradually.  In today’s market, tomorrow is too late.  And although change cannot happen all at once, we can all take one step this week to win today’s consumer.

1. Segment, “The 2017 State of Personalization Report”
2. Marketo, ”The State of Engagement”
3. IBM Marketing Cloud, “10 Key Marketing Trends For 2017,” 
4. Salesforce Research, “Digital Advertising 2020””
5. 2018 Deloitte Global Automotive Consumer Study
6. Matt Ariker, Jason Heller, Alejandro Diaz, and Jesko Perrey, “How marketers can personalize at scale,” Harvard Business Review, November 23, 2015.

The world of retail is setting the pace for embracing how technology is transforming the consumer buying process. The companies who are winning with consumers (Amazon, Netflix, Apple) have stopped looking at marketing by “channels” and are looking at individual human connections. These companies have replaced cookies with actual people. 

Marketing to People: The New Marketing Paradigm for Automotive

In the digital age, marketers have treated a cookie like an anonymous, unique online shopper. Technology advanced, introducing multiple internet browsers and multiple devices. And guess what, consumers have advanced with it, actively deleting the cookies from their browsers. The result? The ability to market with precision declined significantly. With so much browsing, shopping and activity happening in anonymity, we were left with little choice but to market in an impersonal way to this unknown, anonymous cookie.    

However, retailers learned that they need a new solution to shift the paradigm from anonymous marketing to personalized and precise marketing. They have embraced a new paradigm connecting online behavior across multiple devices and ultimately to individual people; unlocking the ability to stay in front of shoppers with specific and responsive messages across all their personal devices in real-time. This is people-based marketing and its adoption by the retail world is shaping consumers of today and setting an expectation for consumers of tomorrow across every industry. 

The good news is, although retail has set the pace for leveraging people-based marketing, the tools and ability to do it is not exclusive to retail. It’s time that we, in the automotive industry learn from our peers and get on board. 

What is people-based marketing?

People-based marketing begins with leveraging technology to learn from anonymous online behavior, connect it across devices and eventually, when permissible, associate it to a known personal identity. This ability creates opportunities to understand what an actual person is shopping for, how often, their intensity and how far they got along the process. When you know that, you can respond in real-time with messages that match their intent and ultimately, influence the direction that shopper takes, hopefully towards purchase. 

How does this impact automotive?

It’s well known that consumers do a majority of their car research and shopping online. According to a Bain Consumer Research Study, more than 60% of customers decide on brand, model and price before visiting a dealership.1 The average car shopper is doing this research across all their devices -- switching from laptops to tablets to desktops to phones, and depending on the device, interacting with different browsers. In addition, they are not relegated to a single marketing channel – they are engaging with dealership websites, emails, social media, third party financing tools, and other websites that are strong lifestyle indicators of their motivation to purchase.

With a cookie-based approach, you might hire a different vendor for each channel and put general marketing messages across every channel where someone is engaging in an online behavior associated to car shopping. This takes a lot of wasted time and energy and in the not- so-distant future, it will work against you.

Why?  Because retail is changing consumers’ expectations.  A September 2017 study revealed that 32 percent of consumers expected to get a relevant discount within an hour of interacting with a brand in a way that allows that brand to identify them.2 This means, you need to be assessing your marketing technology and evaluating how you can influence individual customer journeys and deliver personalized messages and/or relevant offers to known individuals  This is the new currency to building affinity with shoppers and leading them towards your dealership. 

So, what can you be doing to get on board?

I strongly suggest that you:

1) Work with partners who are ahead of the curve in developing and leveraging audience identification technology to get the most precise data on the individual shopper. People-based marketing is built on the foundation of knowing who is in market and what they are doing now… not two-months ago or even three weeks ago…now. Knowing previous behavior, equity and a prediction of behavior is valuable, but only when layered with real-time data, otherwise it is not enough to move your dealership forward.

2) Look at your marketing messages through a more robust lens: omni-channel marketing. You can no longer remain content with multi-channel marketing, with different vendors and campaigns chasing people in siloed devices. Find partners who can help you execute omni-channel marketing now.  The key is to provide a seamless experience, regardless of channel or device. Consumers must be able to engage with you as they are now used to interacting with top retailers -- in your physical store, on your website, mobile app, through social media, you name it.  Omni-channel marketing anticipates that customers may start in one channel and move to another as they progress to the final purchase.  Making these complex hand-offs between channels must be fluid for the customer or they will not maintain that engagement with you.

3) Leverage technology to deliver one-to-one messaging. Make it all about the individual and implement personalization in your marketing.  If your partners are not helping you deliver; or cannot show you how to take steps to deliver product offerings to current or prospective customers based on their actual shopping behavior; you’re behind.

Partner with vendors who are on top of where culture and society are going… and start adapting now.  You can’t afford to wait any longer. In today’s tech market you can’t afford to spend thousands and even millions of ad dollars on anonymous cookie-based targeting. People based marketing, responsive messaging and personalized customer journeys are the future and here to stay.

1. Bain Consumer Research Study 2017

2. Statista Consumer Personalization Study Oct 2017