Successful Strategies for Your Automotive BDC

With technology and people doing more things remote and over the Internet, the BDC really is on the front lines. Do we have any doubt that the BDC is going to become more important for a dealership in the next five years? I see a lot of dealers making this part of their strategy.

Welcome to the Strategy with Jason podcast.

Tune in for everything you need to know to stay in the know regarding the automotive industry. Here's your host, Jason Harris.

Hey, hey, hey. What's going on, Podcast nation? Is Jason Harris here? And thank you for joining me. Another episode of the Drive in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Kane Auto event today, I have Scott with volley with me. Scott, what's going on, man? How you doing?

Doing good, Doing good. I hope we're not going to be singing on this.

Like, we could if you. How are the vocal cords?

Yeah, they're. They're in good shape. I got to bed early, but I want people to enjoy this podcast, so we probably should.

Fair enough. We won't. We won't sing for you guys today. Scott, I'm excited. Jam with you, man. Your presentation the other day, if you guys don't know, like I said, we're at the Cane Auto event. Scott did a presentation the other day that just was just a knowledge bomb of some amazing stats. We're going to go through those, and there were some really cool stats in there. But you know, Scott, I love kicking off these podcasts with a little origin story, a because I'm just fascinated because, you know, no one just wakes up one day and goes, yeah, I'm automotive industry. That's where I'm going to go. So let's start there. How did you get started in this crazy little world we call the automotive industry?

Yeah, I love it, too. I got started because we owned a bunch of pizza places in Iowa, and we owned 10 pizza places. And we were really disappointed that we weren't getting the marketing done for the stores. So we hired someone to do the basic marketing that a pizza restaurant would do. Kids club, database marketing, birthday club, fundraising, that type of thing. And pretty soon I'm doing it for the entire pizza chain. And we had a local dealer who were friends of ours, and then I'm. They wanted us to do service retention. So I'm doing service retention for 80 auto dealers in the Midwest. 70 to 80 auto dealers. And this was in 2002. And that's how we got started. And it's been great ever since. I love. I love the auto business, though, because, you know, just things like this, you guys are all My friends, I come to these events, I see people again, you know, isn't it. It's. There's. There's nothing better. It. The only real difference you can have in business nowadays are the. Are the personal relationships you make. Technology is flattening most of the other things. So it's what makes business rich.

It is like, this is a fun business. Once it gets into you, you know, you just never get it out. And I can definitely see the connection with pizza. I imagine as a pizza owner, like, I mean, I was a dealer, principal, we ordered a lot of pizzas. So I imagine you would have friends in the automotive industry. So that's.

Well, yeah, we grew up with them. The real connection to the pizza business is. Is. Is the same in all business transactions matter. Measuring transactions, making sure you don't have negative transaction growth, repeat customers.

Yeah, no, totally makes sense. Okay, so tell me a little bit about volley. I mean, you guys have just exponential growth. You guys are analyzing millions and millions and millions of different data points and phone calls. You know, what was the. What was that aha moment? That was like, hey, here's the problem. This is how we're going to go solve that. What was that for you?

Yeah. My previous company, that Team Velocity bought in 2015, was called Drive in Loyalty. We had an equity mining marketing platform, and dealers would always say, well, geez, we want to call these people. We sent payment perfect marketing with multiple vehicles that they could trade out of. And maybe digital retailing before digital retailing in some ways. But dealers would always say, hey, I want to call these people. What do we do? And we say, well, why don't you just start with these people? Well, why do we go to them first? Sure. What do we do if we don't get them, who do we call next? And we realized it was a broken system. When we developed Volley, we saw a good opportunity. The other common theme that we always heard when we were in the business was people would say, oh, yeah, I've got a bdc. It was great until Jason left and it fell apart. Or, yeah, I've got a bdc. It's expensive. Well, it's because they're working off desk phones and printed lists and, you know, or out of the CRM. The CRMs are very, very good in automotive, but they, they don't manage workflow.

They're still very analog.

Yeah.

As much as it is on a computer, it's still a very analog process.

And they're necessary. We don't. We're not a CRM, but we work with them. But. But as far as managing BDC productivity, you know, the most expensive part of your bdc, that's the opportunity we saw and we just love it. We love it.

That's cool. Well, I mean, you guys. So tell me a little bit about this presentation. It was 20. How many millions of calls you guys analyzed?

Yeah, we took 25 million calls. It was somewhere around 10 million inbound calls, 15 million outbound calls we had, depending on what data point we were measuring. You know, for instance, if we had to look at conversions over the next 90 or 120 days, we just went far, far enough back to do that. If we had to look forever, you know, some of the ramifications of, of disappointing your customers, you know, we had to go back quite a ways to see to, to give the benefit of the doubt forever. You know, did they ever come back in, et cetera?

Well, you know, the phone is, I mean, I mean for anybody out there in the industry and we know the phone is, you know, one of the most important tools in our industry and you know, we've invested, you know, you know, tons and tons of money over the years to get our team to be better on the phone, utilize the phone more. You know, you guys, because of the way that you guys are connected to the phone, you guys are able to measure a lot more than we ever have in the past. So let's talk about some of those kind of key things that you guys are able to measure that maybe for a lot of dealerships out there, they just currently cannot do with their current system.

Yeah, and Vale does email and SMS as well. You know, we're an omnichannel.

Yeah, it connects it all together.

The thing is that most of those things happen automatedly. They're campaigns that get set up or they're alerts that go out. And the reason why you need to focus on the phone because a lot of people think the phone is passe. Now there's a lot of occasions where I text instead of phone, but 33% of the people answer. You're paying your agents to be productive. They don't need to be productive by watching an email blast go out or whatever. So that's why we focus on the phone for this study. The data points we're able to capture, we're able to capture because they spend 100 volley is the phone system for the BDC agents. They punch in, they are literally in Valley 100% of the day. So things that you can cannot measure out of a CRM or Click to call or with a desk phone or a VoIP phone is the amount of time they are efficient. What is their wrap up time? How productive are they? Are you benchmarking inbound, outbound? What time between phone calls are they taking? How, how are you squeezing the amount of time out of them that you can and you don't need them on the phone? 60 minutes, an hour? If, if. But a typical agent can spend 50 minutes working every hour.

Okay.

And if you do that, you can really have incredible numbers.

Well, that kind of makes sense. I mean, even when I was running my BDCs, you know, we had, we, you know, you get into your Sprint mode and take a 10 minute break, walk it off, you know, get ready for the next one.

Oh, they need the brakes too. BDC agents work really hard. Everyone in the dealership is their boss. The customers are their boss. They're working hard for the dealership. And, and the thing is, with technology and, and people doing more things remote and over the Internet, the dealer, the BDC really is on the front lines. Do we have any doubt that the BDC is going to become more important for a dealership in the next five years? I see a lot of dealers making this part of their strategy.

I definitely think it's going to continue to be a large part of their strategy. Let's get into. Because volley is used by everybody at the dealership, it's touched in many different ways. And you know, I'm sure if I was talking to a BDC agent versus if I was talking to a floor manager or a gm, there's going to be many different reasons why, you know, or what I'm going to appreciate in volley. So let's, let's actually, I'm curious, let's take it more from like a, like a BDC perspective. Like, you know, what can an agent really kind of, you know, get from the efficiencies and just how it can help them to be just better at their jobs.

One of the great opportunities for a BDC in the dealership is to be able to incentivize the agent on the processes that they want. Typically, if you're using a desk phone or click to call, all you can measure is outcomes because you can't measure how efficient they are. So one of the great opportunities that a dealership has is, is to put pay plans together to, you know, also measure outcomes along with the behaviors that they want. The agents will then benefit because they clearly know what it takes for their job to be successful. If they're able to make like a service BDC agent can do 100 or 240 calls a day. If you combine inbound, outbound, where with volley, where, you know, typical BDC is 60, 80, 100. If they're riding them really hard, they can make more money. If you need less, less workers and you can pay them more. By the way, the goal isn't to eliminate workers. There's a lot of jobs not being filled in dealerships right now.

Yes. It's to empower them and just make them stronger, better, and faster at what they do.

Well, we have a good example. Most of our customers are service BDC just because when we started selling direct to dealer, there were no cars. No one was interested in talking to this, and it just naturally gravitated that way. But we've, We've. We're now adding a dozen sales BDC stores every month. We have one sales BDC. They have. It's a 10 store BDC. They had 40 agents before volley. Now they've got 24 agents. They're making more appointments. They're making 30% more calls with 40% less agents. And their agents are happier. They're all making more money. The dealership's happy because they cut 40% of their. So that's a lot of what an agent gets out of it. Gosh dang it, Jason, that was a really long answer. I hope you weren't hoping for a short answer.

Details are much better, but. So that's okay. So let's, let's get into the manager side because, I mean, like, I. I remember one of my first jobs as a floor manager. I would get in the morning after I did my little walk, right? Saw what cars weren't in the right place, who didn't, you know, park what. Who. Who didn't. Who forgot to lock this car, whatever, right? And I'd get and grab my coffee and I do the one thing that a lot of floor managers used to do back in the day. They would sit there and cringe and have to listen to about a dozen random calls just to see how things were going. Right?

Yeah.

So how does this kind of like, benefit, you know, from a manager's perspective to just make that process even easier?

Well, from the most basic point, setting aside, listening to the calls, which is hard, hard for anyone, they have total dis. Total visibility to what's happening.

Okay.

There's live dashboards of all sorts where they can see what people are doing. Since your work plan is, you know, in. In volley, they can see what calls were made. What weren't how successful they were. You, you've got a lot of visibility. It'll eliminate a lot of the arguments when, when you know, these are just the numbers. How do we get better? As far as the recording goes? It's, it's funny you said that our, our major rollout for the end of the summer is we're going to use AI to score these calls. Oh. So that, so that agents don't have to do the typical listen to three calls, grade them with people. Because it's hard.

I mean it is.

But hopefully we can very quickly help them focus on, on what they need to and they can shorten the ramp up time for a new agent also.

Well, you know, that also helps just from like a training and coaching perspective as well. Right. You know, it's, you know, I mean, to know how many, you know, conversations. And we're not just talking about phone calls too because like I said, you guys do an email, you guys are doing text message. So like, I mean you're able to provide that number, you know, to a manager, to a general manager say look, here's how many active conversations are actually happening at your dealership in this given moment. And it sounds like with this new launch you'll be able to kind of put a score, attach it. Here's, here's some good ones, here's some not so ones and here's maybe some training opportunities. So that is, that is really cool. I do want to kind of get back to some of the stats from the other day because, you know, as I was kind of watching, you know, and you presented a lot of really great stats, but there were a few that I noticed. People's body language start to change. By the way, I don't know if you know about this, about me. I'm a people watcher. I thoroughly enjoy watching people and how they react to certain things and you know, especially around status checks. That was kind of like, I mean there was a lot of different data1. So I want to kind of explain to the audience kind of what we're talking about here. But I saw the body language really change. Some notes started to get taken. But can we dive a little bit into that?

Yeah, that one shocked us as we were putting this study together because we didn't look at it last year. We weren't tracking it by the service advisor like is standard in volley now. I really don't even have good benchmarks. It was, it's a hidden cost in a BDC20, almost 25% of all calls are spent on status checks in the bdc. Think of that hidden cost at an average status check call of 3 minutes and 59 seconds.

Sure.

Look at how much money you're spending where you could be proactively growing your business, focusing on customer loyalty, making people happy. It was, it was really surprising. It was also. I wasn't surprised. No one's going to be surprised to hear that, that in the high 30s, they're, you know, they're unsuccessful transfers. So we in, in any business, we break our promises to our customers all the time. But in the case of people calling for status checks and they're not connecting, 37% of the time, that's with the service advisor. 38% of those people never came back to the dealership.

Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, talk about, like, we talk about the, you know, the holy grail of the customer experience. Right. And like, you know, the experience happens regardless if you're intentional about it or not. That's just the unique thing about experiences. They just happen. Right. But it's those little things that will make it and break it.

Yeah.

When you, when you saw that, when you presented that number, there were some people that went well.

The shocking thing was of the people who call in for status checks, they averaged one and a half calls. This is over. Over hundreds of thousands of status checks. We looked at. They average more than one call, one and a half calls a time. So some of these people are calling a lot. Do you think they're happy with the dealership when that happens? Do you think the dealership, if they realize how much money they're spending on that or if they could take that 24.57% of time of the BDC agents and even get half of it back.

Yeah.

Proactively reach out to help your customers. Everyone needs service. They don't just think of it. When they're ready to come in, their light might come on. They might be going past Jiffy Lube or whatever. So you need to proactively reach out and help these people.

And that creates a new process. Right. I mean, here's the cool thing I found about our industry. And for everybody out there watching, listening, I know you're all like this as well. Is that. I don't know what. I don't know. So now since I know, I'm going to go fix it, you know, we're going to create a process. We're going to. Maybe we're going to look at the big. The big three, Right. We're going to look at the People, we're going to look at the process, we're going to look at the technology and say, okay, there's a hole in the boat. How do I, how do I plug it? You know, and like I said, I think that was just one of the coolest stats that you guys presented.

I was going over this with a fixed apps director who was in the audience and he said they have 30 some stores and he said we've got superstars who have almost no, they set good expectations with, with the customers and those service advisors, they make way more money because they have people asking for them. Of course they've got other stores that do a terrible job. And he said they actually the BDC charges them more because they are, they have been, they're volley customers. They have been tracking this for a while and there, there's great opportunity and there's. But yeah, to your point, if you can't measure it, then it's just an argument, right?

Yes. Because you just don't know what you don't know. There was a couple other stats I'd like to kind of get your thoughts. Which one did you kind of see? That was one that I saw. But what, what were some of the other ones you saw that kind of people kind of perfect, perked up or maybe came back and you know, asked you a little bit more information about.

Well, the one that they were kind of disbelieving and really for me I was surprised was the percentage of people who call back if you leave a voicemail on an outbound campaign. So when we look at campaign effectiveness, 40% of all the outbound appointments set were from someone calling back in inbound from an outbound campaign.

Okay.

So when we heard 26.6% of the people call back if you leave a voicemail, if you don't receive that, you know, reach them, you know, it seemed high but then it, you know, it made sense because we have the, we have the back end numbers as well. It's very important to realize that everyone needs service. Like I said, they sometimes they're mostly not no's. They're not right now. So leave friendly voicemails. Be very friendly when you get a no use everything.

Right?

Yeah. So because people, they just need help. And so that was one of them that, that surprised me. The previous year we took a control group and we looked at who, you know, what the lift was on the database. If you didn't compare to the same ripe people, if you reached out to them and the lift was about 52% this year we took a group and this was a huge subset of it, like 9 million people and who were all due for service. And we measured the people who you actually made contact with and compared to the people that you didn't and you were five times more likely to have them come in in the next 120 days if, if you actually spoke with them.

The funny thing that's, that that's a big deal like that, you know, I would have never guessed that to be totally honest.

Well, and, and now that's a short measuring period. Right. But part of the reason why you do, you do proactive outreach. A, you want to catch the people who, who are due and might skip you, but also you want to speed up your database. If you can get a large amount of people to come in three, four weeks early, you know, in, in X number of months, you have an extra month of service revenue so that you know, those are the benefits. I was just very surprised. One of the crazy thing is we compared those people and keep in mind all of them met the dealers parameter for due for service.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but we narrowed the window for measurement. We all. And that, that's part. If we went forever, it wouldn't be five to one obviously of course, but, but you know, to measure effectiveness of outreach. The crazy thing is you, it was almost 2 to 1 if you just left a voicemail and you didn't reach.

Compared to, I think that was, I think I saw a lot of people. And that makes sense because that definitely was one of those very interesting sets. It's just, I just, I don't know, I don't never put that much emphasis. I gotta be honest with you, I never put that much emphasis on the voicemail. It was more of like a proverbial checkbox, like okay, we did it. But I never really put a whole lot of emphasis on it. And now that you're able to kind of, you know, you know, actually show the data behind it, it's like, wow. I mean I think for a lot of people that are watching, listening right now, guys, like what's your voicemail game? Because the stats are there. Like it's, it's, it's a big deal.

Yeah. With or without volley, folks. Write good voicemail scripts, practice them with your agents. You will move the needle with it and think about what's changed in the last 10, 15 years. Well, actually the iPhone has been out for longer than that. But you know, in the last 10 years they do a very good job of transcribing every Voicemail?

Yes.

So that is like you've sent a personal message to someone if you leave a good voicemail that you speak clearly that they can read on their phone even if they don't play it. Times have changed, and that is another hidden message. And, you know, if you're taking the time to dial someone, take the extra 20 seconds to leave a nice voice.

Right. And you know, look, I think that's an amazing takeaway. And actually let's, let's kind of go a little farther in because I think that's a solid strategy. I mean, to your point, I think, you know, anybody out there watching, listening right now, that is something that you can do right away and will just fundamentally affect your business in a very positive way. What are maybe a couple other strategies that, I mean, because you guys have seen a lot of good, you've seen the bad, you've seen the ugly, you know, like, what are some other strategies that dealerships should be focusing on right now?

Yeah. So with or without volley, if it were my bdc, let's say you have no technology and you're still working off desk phones, you should still benchmark inbound, outbound, separately. Most BDCs say, oh, we expect our agents to do 80, 80 contacts a day. Well, if you take 60 inbound calls on a business or, you know, you're not getting much to outbound, if you just benchmark those numbers separately and put a goal in every day, because the amount of inbound opportunities you get on A Monday is 24 more than on a Tuesday, 41 more than on a Friday. So a lot of Mondays combined, you didn't make any outbound calls. So benchmark those separately and then somehow figure out how to put a system in place where you can make more than one attempt.

Yes.

Most people, if you're printing off a list, it's really hard to make multiple it's attempts. But you're losing a lot of sales by not at least working through that list. Any, any service retention campaign should be four attempts. If you can do it.

How do you feel about multiple attempts in the same day? Because I found great success with two attempts in the same day. Someone sees the number on the phone, they didn't answer it. Maybe an hour or two later they see that call again and they're like, okay, maybe I should take this.

That I, I think that's kind of, you know, at the moment though, you kind of called me out here on something we should be tracking on conversions.

There we go. I gave the data guy who literally has measured every data point possible.

Yeah.

Well, a new data point to measure.

Well, yeah, I'll have it. I'll have it. We're going to start tracking that. But no, it's great.

Yeah.

I think that, you know, at the moment, the best I can tell you is that's, that's an art, not a science. I, if, if it were me running service campaigns, though, I would, I would try to get through those calls relatively quickly. I'd have no trouble with two attempts in a day.

Yeah.

On a sales campaign, you know, we have people making calls out to 90 days. We had an interesting data stat here on our sales BDC. No one answered. On the dealership's 42nd attempt, not one, not one person answered. But, you know, on an inbound web lead, you've got three attempts standard three attempts the first day, two attempts the second day, two attempts on the third is fairly standard in a dealership. You better never miss those attempts on a sales BDC because your answer rate on day four and down, it gets below 10, it gets under 5 pretty quickly.

Yeah. The first three days are really just the most important time to do so. Now, kind of going back to your first strategy and you know, it's funny, I, I don't do nearly as much consulting with dealers as I used to, but I still do on a fair amount, usually at the bigger group level. And. But I am still surprised to find some significantly large organizations out there that are not doing exactly the strategy that you were just talking about. And just, you know, just even if it has to be manually tracking the difference between the inbound and outbound. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a dealership I've audited to go in for a quick audit or a review around their strategies and find that what they think they have is a business development center. In reality, they just have an inbound call team.

Yeah, there's a lot of people just waiting around for the phone to ring.

Yes.

That's incredibly expensive. The business is changing though, right. And technology is coming alongside so they can measure these things. I can see it changing. You know, we are, I mean, we're just not that great at sales at the moment and we're still selling like crazy. So. I think I heard an interesting stat on that, actually.

And because I'm with you. Right. I mean, just, I think industry right now, there's a lot of reasons, but someone. It was a hiring company that put this on authenticism. I'd love to get kind of get Your take on this? The average salesperson has been in the industry for less than 18 months. Like over 60% of salespeople out there have been in the business less than 18 months. Is that crazy?

I don't know how to take that. I know for our part with Volley, it's great if we can have someone with a good attitude who has experience, typically in automotive sales, you know, there's the big achievers and then less. A lot of these guys who have been in the business for a while aren't used to working that hard anymore.

Yeah.

So, you know, I can see a lot of people want to, want to start over with someone who's optimistic and they can teach.

Well, I think that's actually kind of what was my takeaway around that statistic is that all right, it's almost kind of like a reset. Okay, so I got a reset of people. You know, I need to stress test my processes and look into technologies that, you know, are going to really kind of help me build out this next generation or this next, you know, this next group of BDC agents, sales agents, service advisors. Like, I mean, actually, you know, at first I was a little alarmed, but I actually, I was like, you know what? I think there's a huge opportunity here.

Well, and none of us want to be Luddites with technology, but the business is changing. Yes. You know, whether it be social, sms, monitoring, chat, the BDC agent is getting a lot more pushed to the front forefront, as poorly said as that was.

You're right, though, that you used to be kind of in the back, back, back of the building. That's kind of not the case anymore.

Yeah, I mean, I was, I was talking with a BDC manager this morning and she said, you know, our previous manager didn't really think the BDC was important and our new guy is really, really focusing on it and the dealership is really seeing the importance of it.

No, I've seen that a lot too. I think that, that, that line between the front and the back, you know, as far as, you know, BDC and variables of BDC and service has gotten a lot thinner and, you know, it's kind of blurring, which actually makes me excited, you know, and, and look, at the end of the day, you know, we're a people, process and technology, you know, business and, you know, we have to balance all of that out. And that's why I love, you know, technologies like, like volley and what you guys are doing and just the, the way that you can assist and support and just empower you know, the staff just to ultimately be better and make more money. Look, I know we're getting towards the tail end of our time right here, and this has been a great conversation for everybody out there that's watching and listening right now. Scott, who love to connect with you and learn more about Volley. What's the best way to do so?

Yeah, probably just email me scottvolli.com V O L I E dot com. I'll answer it. I'll get back with you. You don't need to be a Volley customer. I'll. I'd love to help you. We're at the David Kane event. One thing that really strikes me is a lot of people want technology to solve their problem, make all their sales for you. Technology does not sell cars. It allows people to sell, even AI this big AI boom. Mostly it's an assist for dealers to better connect with people. You know, David Cain's big philosophy is it's time for you to let your customers know that they're valuable to you and treat them such instead of transactions. And, you know, Volley's great software, but really what we do is we help the dealership, you know, help treat their customers like they're valuable. I'd love to speak with anyone I can help them with or without Volley. I really had fun.

This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. And like, look, everybody out there watching, listening. You do need to take Scott up on this because he is 100, this type of individual. Reach out to him, connect. I know you just have this big heart and willing to help everyone out there. Scott, this has been so much fun, man. Thank you.

Yeah, it was fun.

Appreciate it. Hey, thank you for everyone out there watching, listening. You guys have an amazing day.

See it. Thanks for tuning in to the Strategy with Jason podcast with your host, Jason Harris. Don't want to miss new content. Be sure to check out the full podcast library@strategywithjason.com to stay in the know. Remember to, like, comment and subscribe. Happy podcasting.