Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager
March 30th at 1:00 PM EST Cliff Banks, automotive’s Nostradamus, will be sharing his insights on Refresh Friday. Tune-in on the DealerRefresh Facebook page for the live broadcast.
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If you can’t make it the video will be available on Facebook and later on the DealerRefresh YouTube channel.
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I sit back, this morning, amazed at how unreliable email delivery is. It might be getting worse and worse every year. Due to abusive advertisers we all want to safeguard our inboxes from disgusting amounts of delete button presses. And so, car dealers suffer. Car dealers become email losers.
Sure, dealers’ practicing carpet bombing marketing tactics with “free” email campaigns can absolutely be given all the “I told you so’s” and “you get what you deserve’s” that we care to expound. Anyway, my point is not to get lost in a you reap what you sow scenario.
I haven’t worked in a dealership for more than 6 years now. Today I’m a vendor; one who works closely with OEMs and dealers… for those of you who don’t know me. During that time, I have been explaining to coworkers and manufacturer representatives how to make life easier for dealers. Unfortunately, neither will ever understand.
People who buy and have their car worked on at car dealerships are the root of all our communication issues.
That’s basically because they’re fukingz crazy!
Few people are driven. Few people have vision. If you want to find the ultimate in success, find your vision.
I have just finished Fast Company’s article on Jeff Bezos for the second time: AmazonFresh Is Jeff Bezos’ Last Mile Quest For Total Retail Domination and am inspired to say something about vision after my second reading.
If you haven’t read this article, that’s okay because I assume you know what Amazon is.
Amazon, on the surface, looks like a retail establishment that provides lower pricing, no taxes, delivery to your door, and the convenience of 24/7 shopping without leaving the house. That isn’t what Jeff Bezos set out to do. I don’t know exactly what Jeff’s vision is, but I know it isn’t to be the king of retail. I am pretty sure his vision is to be retail…all of it. Whether he gets there or not has nothing to do with why I’m writing this. I’m not even saying Amazon will be the future car dealer.
Jeff’s vision is to be retail. What that has created for him is the ultimate understanding of the consumer:
“In the old world, you could make a living by hoping that your customer didn’t know whether your price was actually competitive. That’s a very tenuous strategy in the new world. [Now] you can’t convince people you have the low price; you actually have to have the low price. You can’t persuade people that your delivery speeds are fast; you actually have to have fast delivery speeds!” – Originally Posted by Jeff Bezos in Fast Company’s Sep 2013 edition
In order to achieve his vision he knows he has to deliver and that’s his drive. That’s the focus of Amazon’s daily grind.
Do we obsess over making sure our marketing and mission statements are true?
Do we have a vision for what we want to achieve?
If you know what you’re after the mission becomes quite clear and the vision become infectious to the people around you.
I don’t see many dealerships who know what they want other than more sales….
Would you agree?
I would love for you to share your comments here or below.
We’ve always known about our phone answering problems, but I rarely hear anyone talk about what we’re saying to customers via email.
Did you know that you can measure all sorts of things around email to discover who is doing it well and who isn’t? My favorite is to look at the number of emails sent against the number of emails a customer replied to.
For example: Joey sends 800 emails in a month and only 100 customers reply to him …100 ÷ 800 = 12.5%. When I see this number at a percentage less than 35% I start reading emails.
And what do I find when I start reading the emails that aren’t being replied to?
If you’re going to talk about some death, you might as well do it on Halloween.
Jeff just called me to point out an article I wrote about the death of SEO (call it SEO 1.0) over two years ago. I forgot I wrote it, but it is coming true right now.
SEO is migrating to lean more toward site architecture and social presence than tags and on-page content. Rereading the article, and drawing on development challenges I see daily I think even the new SEO model will be short-lived.
In order to understand this we need to first understand the way the Internet works. It was originally created as a way to share static data (digital text…hypertext actually). The addition of pictures and video and forms and ecommerce and all the other things that have been incorporated into websites were not a part of the original design. In order to avoid all the technicalities, let’s just say the foundation of the Internet was designed to be really “flat” and static.
I was born into a dealer group. I never knew what it was like to be a real dealership customer. That all changed when I moved from Virginia to Vermont. I’ve been paying retail for service, tried to make a deal with a local dealership, and actually listed a car on Autotrader.com all as a consumer. It has been eye-opening! And I now fully appreciate why consumers perceive us to be monsters.
I write this article solely to educate and hope my experiences will at least inspire you to remove your dealer glasses and put on your customer glasses to look at your own operation.
Servicing my cars has been fairly standard, but one of the stores I go to has a luxury brand and a volume brand operating together. The luxury customers have the red carpet rolled out while the volume customers are obviously (and loudly) treated quite poorly. It actually hurts the experience for both customers.
One store’s sales department is a very typical sales department. It has a sales tower and the men in that tower make it very obvious they’ve risen to the rank of manager so they no longer have a need to communicate with customers. The sales agents have been brainwashed into thinking this is acceptable behavior, and are quick to tell you the manager can’t talk to you even though he’s sitting 5 feet away. Does that sound familiar? [Read more…]
That title might be slightly inaccurate, as it really should say DEATH to cable.
I cut cable TV out of my life about a year and a half ago. It is all Internet for me. Admittedly, it has driven my chicken wing and alcoholic beverage consumption up because I have to go to the local sports bar to catch a game, but I’m not complaining.
I’m not writing this article to talk about my experiences in relying solely on the Internet to deliver anything and everything to my TV – you can catch that here. I’m writing about how the TV was my last connection to the 3 big boys of traditional local marketing (Newspaper, Radio, Television).
Yes, I agree with you, I am a bit ahead of the norm.
As more and more people shy away from our marketing comfort zones how are we to get our messages out going forward? Sure, there is PPC, SEO, billboards, display ads and all that jank. But what we should really be talking about is a revolution in marketing. This is a revolution that is going to rip advertising to its core. It isn’t about shifting mediums; it is about a complete and utter shift in delivery. And guess who isn’t in control anymore: you the marketer.
Today’s marketing is about Push. Tomorrow’s marketing is about Pull.
Today we push our message to a broad group of people as far as we can reach. It doesn’t matter what media it is, we are simply trying to get as many eyeballs on our message as possible. That has been the basic way marketing has been practiced ever since we were able to purchase ads.
Consumers are shying away from this method. Supply is plentiful, deals are only a few clicks away, and your loud voice is just an annoying interruption.
Tomorrow’s advertising will be more about public relations than what we call marketing. It will be based on your deeds. It will be based on your image; your brand, and it will be shaped by your customers. We’re starting to see the power of consumer reviews. For car dealers, the power of reviews is still in its infancy. For restaurants, it is full bore.
But there is another piece we can’t see. It is a piece that lives behind privacy and topples governments. It is social media and it is mostly Facebook. For the first time individuals can quickly and easily rely on a lot of their friends to help them make purchase decisions. These aren’t just decisions about cars. Your friends are asking for advice on virtually everything. Think of some of the questions as practice for when they really start looking for suggestions that have massive impact on the way local businesses are viewed. If you’re on Facebook, you’ve seen your friends ask for advice. I see it every time I view my news feed. People flock to the most influential; the one with the most “klout” on that particular topic. This is the person you’re going to see marketers flock to as well.
It is just the beginning. Be cognizant of it. As marketers, understand this is going to reshape the messages we send. Don’t be the next Middle Eastern dictator.
P.S. Have you ever noticed how DealerRefresh has had some major impact on various automotive vendors?
I am a customer of the IT department. I am not an IT expert. I am just a customer.
Ed Shaffer asked a simple question in the comment string of the article titled “Does your Dealer block Social Media:”
[Why haven’t we addressed] The bandwidth drain that YouTube and Fb would have on our already thinly stretched pipe…
This question got me thinking about where the perspectives of IT administrators come from. As a customer of the IT department, who happens to be interested in history, I want to start to answer that question with:
The Evolution of the Dealership IT Department
It all began with the DMS. The original DMS systems were based on tapes, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that there was really only one user of the original DMS: the accounting department. In the case of my dealership, that was our CFO. Back then she had to be the person who maintained and managed the DMS system. Her responsibilities revolved around not only keeping the dealership financially sound, but also in safeguarding the data in our early DMS system.
In time, our DMS company added more functionality for other parts of the dealership and the CFO no longer could handle all the maintenance and needs this brought. This signified the birth of the IT department at my dealership.
Our manufacturers and vendors can answer this question easily about their own businesses, but can the dealers? A product is a “thing produced by labor or effort. “A “thing” isn’t always something physically tangible.
What is the product of a dealership?
This isn’t a question anyone ever answered for me directly. It wasn’t something anyone directly trained me on, as I think it was just assumed I knew it.
I must admit, it is quite the duh statement. There really isn’t anything special about it, but once it is stated so plainly it makes all the sense in the world. Was this ever defined for you?
Now that we know our product is our dealership let’s talk about what a quality product is. We also know what that is. It is simply something you want to buy. The level of the quality determines the price. It is a brand; it is a reputation. A quality product easily creates referrals, it doesn’t have to ask for reviews, and it generates fans.
Look at Apple. They build operating systems, but there are plenty of choices in operating systems. So why do Apple’s customers hang on its every new “thing” and talk about it like they’re part of a cult? Why do they pay more for it over and over and over again?
We can talk about Apple and everything they do all day long, but I’d rather you think about how your dealership is a product.
How is your dealership a quality product?
Is it time you define that for your coworkers and staff?
For further reading on this subject, check out Bob Lutz’s new book: Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business [Amazon]. Yes, this article was inspired by this book. It is definitely worth the read.
