Our Approach

All of our process with DealerCMO starts with an analysis.

When we do an analysis of your store, one of our goals is to justify the investment in DealerCMO. The first thing we look at is: Can we get a lift with this store and drive a fresh measurable 250k in increased gross annually?

Sometimes stores might say “oh that’s not a lot”, but that’s over and above what you’re doing today. With a lot of stores, we go significantly beyond that. The first crack of the bat is to ask: How do we find that with your store?

We look at what you’re doing today to get the traffic to your website and to your store.

• How are you driving phone calls to the store?

• How are you driving leads to the store?

• What’s your conversion on each one of those individually?

When we look at your third parties, in a lot of cases, dealers are overspending. We’re a Google Partner, but we’ve been doing paid search since before Google existed, so we have a deep understanding of its mechanics. A lot of times, stores are overspending and competing against OEMs with paid search. What we’ve found, and you’ll find this if you listen to your paid search calls as well, is that there are a lot of Service calls coming in on paid search. One of our philosophies in the analysis is we want to balance out a budget where we’re getting enough people on your cars in unique, measurable ways so that we can grow the eyeballs on your cars over and above what you’re doing today. 

When we do an analysis and for any reason we can’t see a way to get to your goals, we’re going to have a candid conversation with you about that. If we both agree here’s a more realistic goal for your store, then the analysis objective will be tailored to the goal we’ve agreed upon.

If we can’t set a goal that makes sense and we agree to that we can make accountable to the strategy, then we won’t sign you up for DealerCMO. That may sound cocky but it’s actually not. We will not bring on stores that we have no chance of getting to their goals with DealerCMO. Will we have to do a lot of work together? Yes. Will we have to be accountable to each other? Yes. The end game is we want to win with our stores, we want to partner with our stores. In the analysis we’re trying to make sure we can win.

You would think in this day and age we wouldn’t need to talk about Merchandising. But Merchandising hasn’t gotten simpler, it’s actually gotten more complicated.

Some of the principles we consider are:

• Do we have good photos in the right quantities?

• Do we have good descriptions that sell the car? Sometimes descriptions are loaded with VIN decoding, sometimes we’re trying to sell the store before we have anyone on the car. One of our philosophies is if we want to sell a car, we get them on a car first, then we sell the store.

• Do you have some kind of price to market strategy that makes sense? We tend to have great success when a store is on a pricing tool like vAuto because we can all quickly see that we’re on track and we’re focused on being competitive in the market. For stores that don’t have vAuto, we find ways to work around that and still bring it out in Merchandising.

As we unfold our process if you’re on Auto Trader, Cars.com and CarGurus, here’s where you’ll see that we’re different. We’re going to make each one of those accountable. We’re going to help you set the budget correctly at each of those third parties.

In a lot of cases, once we get this process going, they drop one of these third parties. Sometimes they’ll drop two and sometimes they go off of them completely. We’re going to make sure wherever your inventory is, we’re going to show up correctly.

The other part of Merchandising that we put in process are things that we need to do week to week, including third party process. An example would be we put in a process with third parties where we send a report to our stores every week so they can see opportunities where they can be more competitive in the market. If they want a shot in the arm for that weekend, or maybe they’re trailing this month on their used car goal, and we keep it in front of you every week so you can optimize those third parties. Most stores aren’t optimizing their third parties to the degree they should and that is what we do at DealerCMO with Merchandising.

We call it demand generation because our goal here is to get more traffic to your website, more phone calls to the store and more leads in your CRM.

With demand gen, we’re going to make all points accountable. As we all know, there are a lot of ways in the car business to waste money or run unaccountable marketing. So when we do our analysis we look at how you’ve been getting people to your website today. We look at what’s working and what’s not.

Every single week we’re going to make sure that with each marketing campaign we understand what we’re supposed to be getting out of it from both sides. We’re both going to know, and if you’re not familiar with some of these strategies we’re going to educate you so we all know exactly what we’re getting out of everything we’re doing.

We’ll look at:

• What are the trends with traffic to our website?

• What’s our trend with phone calls?

• What’s our trend with leads by source?

Then we’ll continuously rinse and repeat and optimize until we find the optimal mix where we’re blowing out your goals. Then we’ll start removing the lowest performing campaigns.

In phase 2 with the stores we work with, our return on investment goes through the roof. This is because of one thing—we make everything accountable. Nothing is allowed to be in there that we don’t all understand what we expect out of it. It’s that accountability that makes us able to drive your return on investment through the roof.

At DealerCMO, what we’ve found with demand generation is that we’ve increased the number of eyeballs on your cars, so we know we’re going to get a lift with your store while we stay within the constraints of your budget.

With Conversion were going to take it a step further. We have some advanced tools that allow us to improve conversion on your website. It’s shocking how many dealers today have subpar performance with their website. They’re not converting well enough or they have so many gadgets on their website that end up sucking conversions out of the website. This makes the user experience poor. We’re going to make sure that your website is converting optimally and that we have the right tools in place.

The other thing we do that’s critical with conversion is that we work the funnel above the lead, above the call, above the website. When we clean up the marketing in demand gen so that we have clean, accountable leads coming in, we know that your conversion on your website is going to be higher even without any changes to your website.

Then when we optimize your website the conversion is going to go higher yet again. The reason we do that, and this is an absolute fact in the car business, is we can increase a store’s leads from its own website instead of you signing up for every third party provider out there. We all know that your website leads are of higher value to the store and have higher conversions than third party leads. A typical store will convert on their own website leads at 20% or better, and a store like that might be converting on all leads at 8% overall on good leads from all sources including all third parties.

If you love spending a bunch of money on a TrueCar, if you love buying third party leads from your OEM and hand raisers that’s great, but if you want to maximize your return on investment then we need to get away from those third parties and maximize your own assets. This means maximizing your website conversion and maximizing those campaigns that are pouring into that website.

The last element we work with is to look at what’s going on with phone calls. A lot of companies give you reports that say “here’s all your phone calls” but how do we know what the heck happened with the call? How are we doing with these calls? As an example, if we run a Craigslist campaign where you have phone calls coming in, are we listening to those calls? Do your managers have time to listen to those calls?

We put in a process, so we know what’s happening with these calls. If your team is doing poorly with phone calls on one source vs another, we’re going to figure that out.

The other thing we’re looking at with phone calls is: How are we logging these against the CRM tool? There are multiple ways we pin that down. The last one is CRM usages and what we’re doing with leads. We all obsess over CRM and response times. Everybody has key performance indicators there. We do like to get our stores north of 10% and our ideal target is 14% overall on good leads in the CRM.

Some franchises have a more difficult time getting that than others. We have enough experience to know a reasonable expectation for a GM store vs a Mercedes-Benz store vs a Toyota store. We’re going to be able to give you a realistic expectation of what we expect out of internet leads that are coming into your store for your franchise. Then we’re going to look at every single source that’s dumping leads into your store and optimize them. We’ll remove stretchy leads or leads that are difficult to close. Then we’ll go a step further, if your team needs training, if we need to establish a process with leads, we’re going to help you put those processes in place. This way, of the highest value leads coming to your store, you’re going to capture the most out of that high value lead.

Conversion is multipronged. It’s improving higher up in the funnel the marketing that’s coming into your website so that the quality is better than what we have today. It’s maximizing that website conversion so we get more of the good stuff to your store. It’s optimizing all third party lead sources so we get less of the bad stuff. Then we work at capturing it all and making sure it’s all accountable. That is the DealerCMO conversion process.

Even though we start with most of our stores in sales we all know that a lot of gross is made on the back end of Fixed. We have to address Fixed Ops.

The way we address Fixed Ops is looking on the campaign level at what’s coming into the store. We have some advanced paid search campaigns, some advanced social campaigns that we can use to drive measurable activity down to either the coupon level or the RO level on what’s happening.

In fixed, we’ve built campaigns for retention and equity mining with service so we have a lot of opportunities there. We also have a lot of experience with driving revenue at an eCommerce level if you feel you have a parts operation that can actually sell parts online. We can help you put a process in place for that.

Just like many other businesses, it's easier to sell more to an existing customer than it is to find a new one, so retention is key factor in our process. When you work with us, we put in place systems and processes to help you retain those customers you worked hard to win.

Our goal with retention and reputation is to position your store ahead of its direct competitors. We have some effective processes we can put in place to increase your positive reviews both in sales and service. We also do something different than most folks in the car business in that we look at your direct competitors and we measure you against them to make sure you’re constantly jockeying ahead of your direct competition from a reputation level.

We also put in a process where you give us those two or three guys you’re working against in your market and when we put the DealerCMO process in place not only do we measure against them but those folks will not be able to sign up for DealerCMO. What happens for your store is that you get a competitive advantage. We keep an eye on those competitors so you’re always aware of where you stand. If your reputation needs work we have some great process to get that handled as well.

As we all know in the car business, we’re swimming in data. There are a lot of marketing companies that put so much data in front of you, and you look at the millions of this and the thousands of that that, and you think “Jeez if I’m getting all this I should be selling more cars.” A lot of times the data doesn’t correlate.

• What DealerCMO does differently with Analytics is:

  We don’t believe in postmortem reports. Most vendors will come to you when the month is over, and somewhere in the first or second week of the next month and as long as you can get it scheduled, you’ll have a meeting to go over last month. You’ll look at good and bad, and maybe you’ll hear about some new stuff they’re doing, and that’s cool.

  At DealerCMO, we don’t believe in postmortem reporting. The way DealerCMO tackles analytics is by meeting with your store twice a month to ensure we’re putting together your month to ensure nothing is drifting that might sabotage your sales that month.

  Anything we can do to optimize to sell more cars we’re looking at it twice a month. Within one of those meetings you’ll see the complete digital strategy that we agreed upon with all parts accountable in front of you. This way we can all see exactly what’s working and what isn’t so we can run our winners harder and cut our losers and continue getting better.

  Really, the magic with DealerCMO is not that we have data, it’s that we know what to do with that data to continually get better. We’ve had clients for years that we continue to optimize. Their budgets haven’t changed but their sales are through the roof. That’s the whole point of optimization, and that’s the whole point of data.

  Data for data’s sake doesn’t mean anything. What matters is how we take this data and make another play. How do we keep getting better? That’s why we love the car business—it never stops and it’s constantly changing.