Tim and another host argue that car dealership retention is everyone's job, not just sales. They contrast the short-term pain of doing things right with the long-term regret of ignoring it, and note that last year's 17.5 million vehicle sales created favorable conditions to invest in keeping customers.
Approximately 17.5 million vehicles.
If something's going to happen, right? If something's going to happen, whether you're a leader or salesperson doesn't matter and you fail to prepare for it, then that's just a failure of leadership. Whether it's self leadership or leading a team. If you know that potential is there and the probability is there, but you do nothing to prepare, then shame on you. Because right now is when we got to be preparing. That's it's all, it's the time to train. Well, we're too busy. That's when you need to train. Well yeah, but we're selling too much service. We don't have time to train. Yeah, well you better make the time. If you don't make the time to do it right, when are you going to find the time to do it over? It's reality of it.
Tim, let me ask you a question. When you, you're talking to these dealerships about retention, how are they, how are they responding to that and what actions are they taking?
Depends where I'm at. If I'm in West Texas, I mean they're amen. They're all over it. They know they need to do it because, because they have to. Because they're ahead of the curve. Right. It's the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Right. The pain of discipline is doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Not because you want to do any of it, but does it take effort to do it? Yeah, but the best thing about pain and discipline is the pain only lasts till you do it. Your follow up, your retention problem is there's a pain of regret and there's a whole lot of people dealing with that. Only if I would have, could have, should have, but I didn't and that lasts forever. So I think the good dealers, the fred beans of the world we go into, they understand that and they're making the guys do their follow up and they understand that retention isn't a sales job. It's not a services job. It's everybody's job. Right. It's, it's a, it's a total dealership.
I mean it, we all have to be in this.
I think too, especially for me, like when I think about it, when I think about the cost of acquiring that customer and what they spend on marketing to get that guy in the door and buy a car and then we just, that's it, we don't care about them anymore. Like at what point do we decide that putting money into retention and keeping the guy around is worth more than trying to acquire a new customer.
Well, think about this right now. Think about, think about how great our times are. Take West Texas out, take some of the Dakotas out from the oil being down. Think, think of the majority of our country right now. We're in the best of times for car business. The last year, what we sold 17 and a half million. This year we're projected to beat that. I mean, what else is great about the car business right now? Cars are better than they've ever been. What else? Quality's up, quality's up. Banks are buying like you got. You got tier one banks buying like their subprime lenders. Interest rates are. Yeah.
Leases are low.
Leases are.
Phenomen are through the roof. Hyundai's got the same options as BMW.
Absolutely. Consumer confidence has never been better. Traffic, you know, the Internet is unbelievable. To generate traffic, we can think about advertising. Now, in the past, we advertised with radio, tv, newspaper. Right. Our advertising was pretty much target shooting with a shotgun. And every now and then you might hit that bullseye. Now with SEO, digital marketing, reputation management, social media, you're target shooting with a rifle. I mean, you can hit your exact demographic you want to. When it comes to marketing now, that we never had in the past. So all the Internet is unbelievable. Leads that we're getting is amazing. The tools, the technology. Think about CRMs. It's unbelievable.
