Transforming Auto Dealerships with Ben Sporn: Insights from CMO of VIP Auto Group

Where are the leads coming from? What are you doing with them? How fast are you calling them? What are you saying on those calls? What's the energy and tone that you bring?

Stop running your Facebook campaigns like they're tv. Take out your phone recording themselves on selfie style. You need to make ads that are relevant. You need to make ads that are organic. You need to tell a convincing story and you need to be authentic.

You're not relying on Cargurus to send you the lead. You have the lead. Connect with them and figure out where they're going to go. So, Ben, I'm super happy to have you, man. And why don't you introduce yourself and tell more about some of the, you know, some of your background. We'll dive in. I got some great questions for you.

All right, cool. Yeah. So Ben Sporn, cmo, the VIP Auto group, a group of nine stores. We just got our ninth. Indeed. So we've been cruising on that. But yeah, family run business. Used to work every summer here as an intern, sweeping the floors, filing, figuring out how to work Google campaigns. Earlier in my career, went to University of Michigan, graduated, started work right for Google out of college, hit the ground running on a couple things. We'll get into it. And then I left Google. Everyone told me I was crazy. My mom told me I was an idiot. Went to work for a marketing startup where I was hired to build out their Google team. Long story short, over a four year period, we 10x the company grew. The Google department eventually had an exit where we sold to Omnicom Media Group. So it was a cool little event. And now get to work back in my family's business.

That is so cool, man. That is so cool. I mean, your mom thought you were crazy when you were leaving Google, you know, and I'm sure, you know, I mean, was it always the plan or was it always kind of the, the right of passage to work for the family business? Were you ever seen as like a black sheep for going to Google in the first place or, or what was that like?

Yeah, quite the opposite. So I always knew I wanted to make it back into my family's business. One thing that my dad always taught me earlier in my career and early in my life really was to take as much risk as possible in your 20s, because by the time you turn 30, you know, mid-30s, 40s, you have a family of kids, you're not going to be afforded the opportunity to take as much risk. And I also felt that if I went right into the family business out of College. I always felt if two people had the same knowledge, if all I ever knew was what my dad knew, one person's useless, right? So I wanted to come with an edge. I wanted to come with something different that I could bring to the table. I didn't know how far it would take me or how, how much I would learn in that process, but it was basically a nine or ten year journey. Going out on my own, figuring it out, getting a ton of knowledge of digital marketing management, how to scale from, you know, small companies to large companies, how to build a startup and now bringing all that knowledge to, to our business here.

That's excellent man. That's excellent. So you went out, you got the knowledge and you brought it back to the VIP Auto Group. It sounds like your dad was a big influence in that. And was it your grandpa was that started the VIP Auto Group or what did that look like?

Yeah, so my grandpa and grandma started the first dealership. It actually started as a, as a gas station. They selling used cars out of it. Then they flipped it into a, a new car dealership as well. Westbury Rambler. They sold a bunch of different models over the years.makes started 1957 Westbury Jeep location originally. Yeah, they ran it for a long time just as like a small family run business. They had a couple partners but my dad took over in the 90s and really started to embody more of a customers for life mentality. Digging in, trying to expand the service and part side to make sure the business was more balanced and just satisfy every customer. Through that process they built it up to now Westbury Jeep is the largest Jeep store in the country. So a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into that store. And I've learned a lot about operations, management, how to manage a large workforce and how to constantly and consistently please and delight customers.

Wow, man. I mean you guys have done an incredible job. You know, as I've talked to a lot of other dealers and people from any of the areas, if somebody's from that area, anywhere, Long island, anywhere Westbury, they know you guys. You know, they know you guys dealership, they're familiar and some of them have even done business with you guys for years. And so that just goes to show it's like you guys have that recognition. And I want to talk a little bit later about tactical stuff and social media. You guys have been doing excellent social media content lately and I love to see that but a little bit more diving in the story. So like it's, it seems like your, your grandpa really Just, like, built that thing from the ground up, you know, and, like, I'm sure you heard some stories, you know, coming, and you probably been through some stuff, too. Like, what was some of the most challenging things that you guys as a family had to deal with? Building up these stores to where they're at today.

Yeah. So, yeah, my grandpa and grandma originally lived in, you know, in Manhattan, my grandpa in Brooklyn, my grandma in the Bronx, or vice versa, rather. And, you know, it was. They were caught up in this wave of people moving out to the suburbs. Right. So you have Levittown, the first plant community, and this huge wave of, you know, of immigrants and people from the cities moving out. And in that wave was a lot of people who were living and working in various parts around New York. Right. So what do they need? They need a car. So they were kind of swept up in a lot of the big demographic changes and urban and suburban changes that were occurring. Obviously, the more you research, like New York City history and Long island history, you'll come across people like Robert Moses, who built the great highways, who built the great bridges, built the great beaches that people were constantly traveling to and from. So it's interesting to look at it from a historical context of how, you know, of how they rode that wave. Right. A lot of times, it's not just about how hard you could paddle. It's also about making sure that you're going in the direction of which way the river is flowing, so to speak. So, yeah, they caught away for sure. But there was definitely a lot of challenges. You know, my grandpa would work a full day, come home, eat dinner, and go back to the office at night. He wasn't always the most successful and the most, you know, knowledgeable manager and business person, per se, but he was a phenomenal salesman. People loved him. He was a staple of the community, and he was just a great overall guy. And, you know, I learned a ton from him. My dad took it over with a much fiercer attitude, I would say, especially around satisfying customers, around the operational side, around management, around setting up the right processes and making sure that you're, again, just building customers for life. It was like a very early kind of LTV mindset. Right? Which is you're not here to just sell one car. You're here to sell cars for a lifetime to customers. And if you give them a great experience, they want to come back time and time again. And in just how the business model is set up, you know, you can make money on new car sales, obviously, but a much larger Margin on service, much larger margin on parts. And you want to make sure that you're bringing those customers into the fold and bringing them into your community so that they want to do business with you. Not just for buying the car from you, but servicing them from you. So one of the biggest things they launched was our VIP plus program, right, which is bringing in customers and giving them, giving them a package, giving them an all encompassing opportunity to do business with us. Not just on the best deal on the front end, you know, with the new car sale, but giving them things like oil free oil changes, complementary lifetime New York City inspections, making sure we have a good enough loaner fleet so that they come in and they're out of work, that they have a car they could drive away with. All those things help bring customers back time and time again. So there's been numerous challenges over the years and you know, definitely war stories that I've heard about different things that have happened. There's a cast of characters in the auto business for sure. But through it all, you know, the biggest thing that I've learned is to treat every opportunity with professionalism and to find your edge. I think, you know, a lot of times there's, there's different ways that you could create an edge. I would say the edge that we have in this business and something that I learned from my dad is obsession. You need to be obsessed with what you're doing. And obsession is an edge, right? Like a lot of people have edges through financial capital or through the intelligence that they have, or through their, maybe software know how and different things like that. When all else fails, if you're obsessed with something and you understand your business from A to Z, there's no problem that you can't solve. So, you know, setting up processes and checking that they're working correctly and being obsessed with all the small details is an edge that we've been able to create. Not just hoping and praying that everyone's doing the thing that they're supposed to be doing, but actually checking, actually following up and being 100% diligent and obsessed with the process itself. So it's not always about just getting the result. If you stop at the result, it'll only take you so far. You also have to make sure that you're working on the inputs that are getting to that result and optimizing those and, and driving up the performance of those as much as possible.

Wow, there's so many gems there, man, and I see that 100%. It's like a lot of people you know, we kind of deal with that a lot, working with multiple dealerships and businesses all around. It's like you can't just run ads to check a box. You can't just generate or buy leads just to check a box. There's a whole lot of things that has to be done. Well, where are the leads coming from? Okay, once you get the leads, what are you doing with them? Exactly? What's happening in that process? Okay, how fast are you calling them? And then what are you saying on those calls? What's the energy and tone that you bring? Are you remembering that the person on the other side of the line is a little bit skeptical, they're a little bit fearful, they need comfort, they need trust? Or are you just calling and trying to say, hey, man, we want to get you in here for an appointment, sell you whatever we can? You know, like, a lot of people miss that. What, what your. What your grandfather and what you and I, I. I assume also your father have been able to do so diligently, which is be able to people. You know, you mentioned that your, your, your grandfather, he wasn't the most savvy business owner per se, but he was. He was definitely a very likable and very personable guy that was great at sales, and that's kind of the guy that champions a business starting out. And then it seems like other people come in who are a little bit more, like you said, a little bit more obsessed, a little bit more fierce as your dad was, that come in and kind of take on that storm because they've already seen the groundwork laid. But I think so many people can benefit from that, just being able to go through and optimize their process. Like it's because it comes down to the little things. Everybody's looking for this shiny new thing. Is it AI? Is it going to be AI calling my leads for me? Is it going to be AI running my ads for me or doing whatever? And it's like, probably not. And at least not for a long time. Of course those things can help, but the reality is, like, there's no shortcut for the work. And whoever cares the most, whoever, like you said, is the most obsessed that can find their edge, they're going to be able to reap the words, the rewards, and the benefits of the fruits of their labor. And there's no shortcut for hard work.

You know, there's no silver bullet. Right. And yeah, to bring it back to the ad side. So, yeah, you need to make sure that you're connecting that Tissue. Right. Because a lot of times it's like two sides of the house. You have your ads over here and you have your BDC process over here. Right. And something that I've learned in my last agency that I worked at is connect the dots, right? And figure out which campaigns are driving the leads and which leads are converting to sales. So your company has been excellent in helping us understand not just what we're delivering overall we got, you know, most people just look at it like we spent this. How many car sales do we get? What we like doing is actually breaking all those things down into like a funnel. We have maybe, you know, five to seven campaigns at the top of the funnel and then out of those campaigns they're each delivering a different set of leads and a different set of lead costs. You could have a campaign that's delivering a cost per lead of $3 and that looks great. But if it's not delivering you sales, cut it. Right. And you have another campaign that's delivering you a cost per lead of 15 or 25 or $100. But if that's where all your sales are, press on the gas. That's where you actually want to spend your money. Right. So you want to look at these things and break them down individually and actually have a funnel approach where you're tying the bottom of funnel metrics all the way back up to the top of your campaigns. So you're able to identify not just what is the ROI of the spend, but what is the ROI of each individual part of the process. Right. And that happens at the campaign level, that happens at the BDC rep level, that happens at the salesperson level. Right. So that's kind of how we think about looking at these things. It's not just how am I doing overall? Because overall you could be in the green or you could be in the red, but you want to look at which of my segments can continuously be optimized and how can I make sure that I'm constantly dialing up those aspects of the campaigns that are weakest or just eliminating them entirely and doubling down on what's working. Right. Because if you have a top of funnel that's working and you double your spend, but you double your spend on campaigns that aren't delivering you performance, you might actually dilute your results even more or you're overspending in places that you don't really need to. So it's really about driving efficiency.

Yeah, 100%. And I think that's a, that's an age old issue in the car business is, you know, 50 of what I'm doing is working. 50 of what I'm doing isn't working. And if I knew which 50, I'd be a lot richer. You know, these guys have a lot of trouble tracking their attribution and they don't even know where to start a lot of times. So one thing that we've managed to do is be able to connect the exact ad to the exact car sale. And you're right, if you, if you have your guy in there thinking like a media buyer, he's going to be optimizing for the lowest cost per metric, the lowest cost per lead, the lowest cost per click, the lowest, you know, of any metric. And in reality, three dollar leads might look great on paper and yeah, maybe it's something to keep running on a low spend, but if, if you're not able to convert anybody on there, if it's, you know, a low intent traffic, then you might want to just look at the campaign that's 15, 20 or even $50 a lead and look to optimize people a little bit lower in the process. So I totally agree with that man. And when it comes to the BDC part of that process, like you mentioned connecting the dots there, what do you think a good BDC team or a good sales team on the ground has to do in order to connect those dots efficiently?

So two things. One, the way that most dealers, as I understand it, evaluate the performance of their leads is kind of three buckets. Is it a phone lead, is it an interleaved, or do they walk in the door? Right, but there's so much that goes behind the scenes in terms of where you got the leads from. How did that lead actually make it into your CRM? Right. Where did the phone call come? Where did the Internet lead come? Then some dealers will get a little bit better and they'll start looking at, okay, out of my Internet leads, where did they originate from? Did it come from dealer.com, my website? Did it come from a Facebook form? Right. And that's a little bit better. But really what you want to do is understand all of that pre click data. So what we do is we look at all of our UTM data, which is like a structured data file that gets passed into the CRM. And we're able to do that with, with your company that you're able to help us pass through those additional levels of detail and where we're connecting the dots between what we see in the CRM. In the CRM, we could very easily tell was it an interlead, a phone call or did they walk in? Right, but what we're doing is actually looking at the pre click data. So which of my campaigns actually got that Internet lead? Which of my ads from that campaign actually sent that lead into my CRM. So that way when we tie all that data back together, we're able to look at all of our campaigns on a more accurate ROI perspective. Right? So campaign one, two and three. Going back to that previous example, we could have campaign one at a $2 lead, campaign two at a $5 lead, and campaign three at a $10 lead. And if you just look at it in isolation, my campaign performance here and my sales performance here, you might cut Campaign 3 and 2 because they have the highest cost per lead. But that might be where all your sales are coming from. So unless you're looking at that UTM data, which is things like the source or the medium or the UTM campaign, and you're passing that data into your CRM and assigning lead sources for them, you're going to miss out on a big opportunity to double down on campaigns that are actually performing better or even worse. You're only running one campaign, right? That's what a lot of people do is like let's just run a campaign, let's just run a ad and it doesn't work and they turn it off and they wonder why. How many ads did you test? How many audiences did you test? How many campaigns you test? Did you have enough budget? You spent $5 a day for 30 days and you turned it off because it doesn't work and now Facebook doesn't work, right? Is not really an effective strategy. You need to be able to look at things in terms of what is my creative ad load testing, right? What is my open rates on these ads? What is my 3 second view rates on the videos that we're running? If you're just taking your TV commercial and you're putting it on Facebook and you're driving a bunch of clicks to your site and you're not even driving leads and connecting that UTM data, you're going to have no idea what's going on and it's not going to work, right? You have to do a couple of things. You have to get your data right and you have to make sure that you're able to understand across the campaigns that you're spending, what is the performance that those campaigns are driving. Get your UTM right, Get that UTM data as closely as possible to your CRM. Get a log of all the leads that are being driven from those campaigns. And if you have to go old school, print out a list of your CRM leads that you got. Print out a list from, you know, your Facebook campaigns and just manually match them up at the very least. Right. If you're not sophisticated enough to tie together with software, that's the first thing. The second thing is stop running your Facebook campaigns like their tv. Right. If you're taking your TV commercial and it's wide and it doesn't mention your brand and it has this big lead in, and you're just putting it on Facebook and you're hoping and praying or you're spraying and praying, it's not going to work. And trust me, just save your money. Don't even bother doing it. Right.

Yeah.

What you want to do is build natively to the accounts that you're driving ads for. And it could be challenging. Right. Because a lot of dealers are. I don't. I can't afford to make a million ads. I can't. I can't do landscape. I can't do vertical. Yes, you can. Take out your phone.

Yeah.

Get somebody on. On camera recording themselves, you know, in selfie style. These ads don't need to be $1500 or $500 to record. They can be very simple. And you could use the tools that are out there to write scripts, to record yourselves, to tag them, to caption them in a very cheap and ineffective way. And trust me, they're actually going to perform better because guess who you're competing with on Facebook. It's not. A lot of people think that you're competing with other dealers. Right. I'm running this ad. Well, if they're on Facebook and I'm on Facebook and they're beating me out, I don't want to go on Facebook anymore because I need to dominate. I need to win where I'm at. No, you're not. You're not competing with other dealers on Facebook. You're competing for attention in the same way that every other company is competing for attention. So who's your biggest competitor? It's Kim Kardashian. It's Ronaldo. It's all these people that are buying for people's attention. So you need to make ads that are more relevant to the organic feeds that people are in. Right. And how do you do that? You need to make ads that are relevant. You need to make ads that are organic. You need to tell a convincing story, and you need to be authentic.

Wow, that's so. So Good man. I mean, like from the. From the get go, it's like, yeah. So many dealerships, even when they start to try to make some ads, they. Even if they try to take their phone ads, they still try to make it like a radio message. What's up, everybody? I'm down here at Garden City Jeep and I can help you get approved. Come on down. It's like, you know, people. Even though that can be entertaining, it's like people want. They're on social media. They're not on social media to buy cars, but they are people. People don't like to be sold, but they love to buy things. So if something comes across that looks like it's educational and it's a good opportunity, it's a little bit entertaining, you know, that's something that actually catches some. Someone's attention. So, like, what we tell our dealers is like, hey, you don't have to do the big radio voice and go all gargantuan. Just simply tell them like, hey, hey, you see this Jeep Renegade right here? Did you know that actually we're getting people into these for $0 down and as low as $450 a payment, switching them out of their old cars even when they have bad or negative equity? Yeah, we're doing this consistently, actually. A guy named Tony, we just had him in here last week. We got him approved this easily in and out the same day, and he said it was the best experience of his life, you know, or even more organically with a customer you just sold. Taking out your phone. Hey, Tony, what did you think about this experience? And. And you can tell the people of Facebook if it was terrible, just let them know. Oh, no, it was great. I love you guys. Garden City Jeep is the best. You know, something like that, really. It'll attract people that you don't even expect. And the benefit to doing video and, and especially getting different people, get your finance manager, get the person at the front, des. Get the owner if you can. The. The cmo. Like, you get different people because different. What we've realized and noticed is that different demographics of people instantly connect with different demographics of people. You know, at one of the Subaru locations, we had a much younger guy. And. And we noticed that in the videos it just wasn't resonating as much. And it's like, well. And I think we were running acquisition campaigns for that too, trying to buy cars. And it's like, well, two things. People are going to buy with somebody if they can trust you and if you can bring them an Ro. So maybe they could feel the messaging. Okay, yeah, this seems like I could get an roi but do I really trust this kid? You know, everybody looks at a young person like a kid. Even me. I'm fighting that uphill battle. Constantly being, you know, in my. In my late 20s now, but people still look at me and they're like, this guy doesn't know anything about selling cars. Right? And that's just what you have to face. And so having David, finance Manager, Garden City Jeep, the guy just breathes professionalism. You know, you can't. You can't really fake it on video. Once you get on there, people can just. I. I have a belief that people are really, really good at sensing each other, even from a. A laptop, even from a phone, even from an Internet connection. Very good in person. Like, the second you shake hands with somebody and look at them, you know, if you kind of like this person or not, if. If you feel like, you know, you trust them. And I think it's the same thing online. And people don't realize, like, they're. They're great reputation salesperson, they have great sales exchanges and take care of their customers and. And they do really good business. But then they never put any of that out there online. And so people don't know. And new people don't get to connect with that when really, I mean, David says that he's got people walking in the dealership, and they. And they walk right up to him. They're like, hey, you're the guy. You're the guy from the video, David. And they act like they know him. How much better of a sale does that end up being? When it's almost like a referral hot person versus the person that just saw a picture of a car, a catalog ad, you know, a carousel with a picture of a truck, it doesn't create any emotional response or resonance with your audience. And so a lot of these dealerships, when they jump on Facebook, when they jump on Instagram, they're just throwing money at Creative.

Yeah, well, they're just. They're throwing the catalogs and they're getting the VDPs. I'm getting the traffic, so it must be working.

Exactly. And that's a brick wall, too. You send somebody to a website, it's like Cox did a study that 96% of the time when somebody clicks on a car and submits a lead on that car, they end up coming in and buying a different car anyways. So, like, that alone, it just goes to show that you're running you're running VDP traffic, you're sending people to your website and they're not going to convert the same way as if you just sent them to a simple form where, where you can connect with them and then you're in a conversation. You know, all, all lead generation really is, is it's the opportunity for you to get into a conversation with somebody and a lot of dealers are like, oh, this person wasn't ready to buy yet. Yeah, but you have their contact information off of these platforms. You're not relying on Cargurus to send you the lead. You have the lead, connect with them and figure out where they're going to go. So I absolutely love that there's so much good stuff there.

And you mentioned you touched on one thing real quick. So, so yeah, talk about the car gurus and all these other sites. You know, a lot of these other sites, for a long time they worked, they did work well. And what we're finding is that they're becoming more diluted, right? They're sending these leads that you're submitting on KBB to 16 other dealers, so on and so forth. And the big concept is you need to own your own audience, not rent your audience. If you're renting someone else's audience, right, through Cargurus, through Autotrader, that's, that's their traffic, that's their audience, right? So what Facebook gives you the opportunity to do is own your own destiny and own your own leads. You have to figure out from a data perspective what's working best. Auto trader and cargoes, they're doing that, right? And then they're just renting out their audience to you. If you could take control of your CRM, if you could take control of your audience on Facebook, if you could take control of your audience on Instagram, you'll own your own destiny and you won't have to rely on renting somebody else's audience.

Wow. Wow, that's so good. And I see so many dealerships are just, they're used to the old ways, so they're buying third party leads from, you know, like credit acceptance or whatever different site they have. And, and yeah, it's a problem because they're not exclusive leads. Those leads don't know it's going to be you guys calling them. They didn't inquire directly with you. Also, you have no transparency. I mean, you know, a lot of people have told me, a lot of mentors, they're like, hey, you should just go pay per lead and, and, and just Sell every lead for a premium. And my problem with that has always been it's in the best interest of whoever I work with to build the. The engine under their own brand, under their own ad account, and give them full transparency of exactly how much each lead is costing so they can have maximum upside to be able to scale their company. And, you know, in some ways, it limits us from being as profitable as we could be and some other companies are, but I think it builds more sustainability because we're really able to build these, you know, build your own brand. Like, not only are you building a lead engine, but you're also running your ad spend into dollars that actually help build your reputation. I mean, it's. It's insane, like, how many people are really on Cargurus and Autotrader compared to Facebook and Instagram? Dealers will say, oh, Facebook doesn't work. It's like, there's like, how many billion is it. Is it. Did they cross 3 billion last year, Facebook and Instagram? 3 billion? That's like. That's like 40 of the entire world's population. You don't think you can make that work for. For your. Your company, your dealership? I mean, of course it can work, but it's all about the way that you do it. So I think we've done an excellent job with. With Garden City. And, you know, I think we're. We're just getting started, and there's a lot more we can do. So I'd love to know, like, what's. What's a big opportunity that you're excited about, emerging opportunity, or even maybe something that you guys have been doing over the last year or the last few months that's really starting to gain traction. That just excites you that you want to go all in on.

So, I mean, it's not. It's not anything new, but it's. I want to double and triple and quadruple down on social the way that I see a lot of these platforms operating. And when I say platforms, I mean internal systems, right? There are all these. There are all these mechanisms that are occurring, right? You have CDP, you have CRMs, you have all these internal things. And for a long time, you know, dealers thought that the Internet was a fad and websites were A fad and CRMs were fad, right? And they didn't really build up their audiences. They didn't build up their CRM. We always believed in it. Even, you know, in the early 2000s, my dad was very adamant about building up the CRM. It's going to be a database of customers you can go after, right? And now look at it. You have hundreds of thousands of customers and leads of people that you could communicate with, right? And at the end of the day, it's like the difference between wholesale and retail, right? With retail, you're talking to somebody one on one. With your CRM, it's like wholesale, you're talking one to many, right? And it affords you the opportunity to get your message out there. You want to make it relatable, you want to make it professional, you want to make it personalized. But what we're finding is those mechanisms of delivery are that are becoming diluted, right? And you see this in the industry. A lot of people maybe don't understand it, but CRMs are changing. Google is making it easier to unsubscribe. They're making it harder to deliver into the inbox, and they're reducing your effectiveness for being able to reach those customers directly. Google is doing the same thing with paid ads, right? It's like a global tax on all businesses. Now. You have to buy your own brand terms. They're charging you more for the same terms that you used to buy. So for the same money you spent last year, you're now getting less leads. So everything that dealers used to do in terms of where they would get great returns is becoming less ROI positive, right? Like Google used to be the best place you could spend your money. It's still the best place, but there's a lot that's happening with performance max campaigns, with discovery campaigns, with all these things that are just making it less and less effective and more and more beneficial to Google. And they're owning more and more of those, those dollars. So how do you, to go back to our previous concept, how do you own your own audience, right? How do you communicate directly with your customers? Something that excites me is building what we're calling our social CRM is how do we get as many of our followers how do we get as many of our customers to follow us on Facebook? How do we get as many of our Facebook followers to follow us on Instagram? How do we get as many of our Instagram followers to follow us on YouTube? How do we get as many of our YouTube followers to follow us on TikTok? And how do we build a platform that delivers communication to customers wherever they're at in a unified and singular way? So we've been amplifying and increasing our production costs and our activation, you know, media cost, whatever you want to call it, for putting our content out there. So in the, you know, past years, it was, get your service specials, put them on your website, get your service specials, email it out to customers. Well, guess what? Now it's costing us more to get traffic to our website from Google. And our deliverability is going down because we're not landing in the inbox because of the changes to CRMs. So we're trying to build up as many of our customers, as many of the people in the local community to follow us online and to follow us on as many platforms as possible. Because guess what? When we get that message out there, we call it a triple threat, right? They see us on the website, they'll see us in, in email. Now, hopefully, they'll also see us on organic Facebook. And guess what that does? One hand washes the other, right? When somebody sees your ad, what do a lot of people do? They go to the channel and they say, is this actually legit? Is this the real channel? Is this a real profile? And if you have good, robust content that's being put out regularly, Facebook, you know, wants to push your content more. Customers, going back to your point about authenticity, they trust you more, right? There is. There's social authenticity. There's things that you can do in video that builds trust, but there's also things that you can do with your profile picture, with the content you're putting out there to build trust immediately, right off the bat. So we're double tripling, quadrupling down on our. What I'm calling our social CRM. And we're trying to get as much content out there and get as much content from our customers as possible. So we're delivering cars. We should be taking pictures of every single car that we sell, you know, posting it on our pages, tagging our customers, getting our customers to tag us. It's very simple stuff, and it's stuff that a lot of dealers do. I don't know if they do it to the point where it's consistent across all platforms and they're building mechanisms to create a platform around it, right? In which it's going two ways. So in one way we're pushing out content, another way, we're gaining content as well. And a lot of times you have to gamify this stuff, right? So we're thinking about gamification not just from a, you know, building a follower, so on and so forth, but I mean, people in the car industry, they love. They love targets, they love sales, they love reports, right? And we're trying to gamify it where we're making our stores compete to see, we're setting a goal to see who can get the most followers across our stores. And it's like a relay race, right? We're calling it like our social reputation relay, where we're trying to get them to compete to see who can reach the most followers relative to the goal percentage. We're trying to build up our followers that way, right? Just get, get our stores activated, get our stores engaged on it. Then we're taking that one level lower and we're actually putting out competitions and contents out there for salespeople. Where we're building like an online form where anytime you have a photo, right? Because, you know, great entrepreneurs, they don't just think about the. The product, they also think about the distribution, right? So let's say our product is social, our social CRM, right? That's the product. How do we get as much content as possible? Well, we need to shoot as much content as possible. Well, how do we distribute that? How do we make it an efficient process to actually get, receive and distribute that content online? So we're building forms where employees, at any point in time, they take a picture, click, click, click. I'm at this dealership. This is my name. This is the customer photo. Here's the video. They can upload up to, you know, a gigabyte of photos at one time. That goes directly onto our Google Drive or our OneDrive, where we're going to store that content. Our social media manager is automatically grabbing that content, collateralizing it, pushing it out online. Guess what else that does? We're also creating trackers and reports where we're understanding relative to each employee how much they're submitting, relative to each store how much they're submitting so that we can continue to engage them. And a lot of dealers do this with like Google reviews, right? If X number of employees get X number of Google reviews, they get a bonus or a spiff, whatever it might be. We're trying to leverage that moving over to our social CRM side now as well, for how much content they can, they can deliver to us. So that's what I'm really excited about. And I think that it's really going to help us protect our ad dollars, right? Because there's nothing that dealers hate more than having to spend more for the same amount, right? And Google is changing, all these platforms are changing. KBB AutoTrader, they're making you pay more and they're giving you the same. So it's really a dilution, right? If you can own your audience and you can distribute your content. You won't have to spend more because you're actually reaching your audience directly. Airbnb actually did this recently where they actually cut a huge portion of their performance budget, and they reallocated a lot of that to just what they're called, their own audience. Right. Which is how well are we educating our consumers on our products? How good are our emails? How good is our internal communication over our app? And they reallocate a lot of their resources to improving their communication with their owned audience, as opposed to just renting Google's audience, renting Facebook's audience, trying to spend more to drive more business, they kind of turn that paradigm on its head and focused a lot more on their own audiences and produce great results for them. So we're trying to do a similar concept, which is protect the ad budget. You know, you have a problem, you want more leads, you want more traffic, that's great. But what's going to happen is you're just going to go and just spend 10% more on Google, just spend 10% more on Facebook. And for every additional dollar that you spend, there's a less and less return. So we have to build the foundation, we have to build the platform, and we have to get out there on social.

Wow, that's incredible, man. I mean, you guys. You guys have it absolutely right. I mean, you know, when. When you can build an owned audience. Like, I'm working with a guy right now. He's got 200,000 followers on Instagram, on his Facebook, he's got close to 100,000 followers or likes or whatever it is on Facebook. And he's never run paid ads at all. And so now they're getting into paid ads. They're a big sportswear brand, actually, and they're. They're this close to collabing with Nike, and they've. They've never ran ads. And it's like, it's beautiful when somebody can build up their organic to that point. And actually what they did is really interesting. And maybe this would be something that, that would interest you guys. But what they do is they have a call in number. And so, you know, it's. It's a jiu jitsu. It's a sportswear brand where anybody can call in, you know, and if you're the different belt, like, let's say, like, I'm a purple belt. So it gives me a number and I call in and it's like they, they post this content and it's got a record and in the record, it's like the phone call. It's like, call in, leave a voicemail. And so I'll call in and I'll be like, yeah, I just went to class and people need to wash their, their stinky geese. You know, this is a public service announcement for everybody to wash their clothes when they're training jiu jitsu.

Beep, beep.

And different people say different stuff. So like a white belt will be like one stripe white belt here. I got my butt kicked all day. It was awesome. Beep. And they just put out this organic content and it gets a crazy buzz. It's not promotional in any way, in any sort, but it just, they've got their brand on it and then it allows people to call in. And I think unique ways of generating content from your audience is, is really like the key, you know, when you can have customers creating content for you in some way, shape or form that's. It doesn't have to be promotional if it's educational, if it's entertaining. I mean, 99% of people get on social media to be entertained sometimes. When we finally get to our scroll at the end of our day, the last thing we want to do is be sold. But if you got a funny message and it's like, you know, I mean, for car car dealers, it could be like car dealership horror stories or something. And it's like, I just went in, this happened, this guy's crazy. Or like, you know, something maybe, maybe more on the positive side, maybe, you know, differentiation, right?

Exactly, exactly what we're doing on that front, because I agree with you, it's all about differentiation. And it's also about delivering something unexpected, right? If you can, if you're delivering the same thing that everyone else is saying, it becomes white noise, it becomes banner blindness, right? When you have the same banners out there constantly, people are expecting you to say something, so you need to pattern disrupt, right? So we launched something not too long ago called our milestone moments. If you're celebrating a birthday, an anniversary you're buying a car for, for your child, their first car, something like that, we'll go above and beyond. And you could actually fill out a form and, you know, nominate, you know, the person that you're buying it for, and we'll deliver it to a restaurant with a dozen roses, we'll deliver it to their soccer game, you know, these things to try to differentiate ourselves. Because what car dealership is going to go above and beyond to do those kinds of things for customers, especially around those kind of milestone moments. So we're always trying to pattern disrupt and you know, show people that we do things differently and actually do it right. Like a lot of dealers will put great branding out there and they have these, you know, amazing messages but then you look at like their social or you talk to their salespeople and they have no idea what you're talking about. Right. So we're training our folks, we're putting materials in the store to make sure that we're actually capturing these milestone moments and that's going to be a differentiating factor for us. That's not just saying the same thing that every other dealer is saying. There's a place and a time for that. Right? When people are low funnel and they're shopping the price comparison, we want to make sure that we're pricing cars correctly, want to make sure we have the best deals online. But for that mid funnel, for that consideration or even that awareness level, if I saw a post for a car dealership that delivered a car to somebody for their anniversary with a dozen roses and they made an amazing special event out of it, that's something that would stick in my mind as opposed to just coming across anotherly special. If I'm not ready to buy, I'm not going to remember it. So you have to make sure that you're building content, especially differentiated content for driving awareness that's different than your low funnel content as well.

And I think the big thing that I take from that with the milestone moments is like, like you're not just promoting the product, you're promoting the experience, you're promoting what that can actually bring to somebody. And how cool is that, man? Like, you know a lot of, a lot of people and you know, I, across the industries that I work with and across the agencies that I've talked to too, they get so wrapped up in the money, they get so wrapped up in the sales, sales, sales, sales, dollar this, dollar that. And it's like, well, what are we really doing here at the end of the day? And for me I feel the most satisfied when I create an impact on a client that I work with. Like especially a life changing impact. They, they didn't have the key. We came in and we gave them the key and now the whole pathway is open for them. That to me is more beautiful or like my, my jiu jitsu academy, I helped close to 200 members start training Jiu Jitsu with like 15k in ad spend last year. And I mean the dollar amounts of that's insane. 200 members at 200amonth on yearly contracts. That's like some 500k if with just one year of lifetime value. If you look at two, three years down the road, which most people, they start training at one place, they stay there. That's all great. You know, we can look at the dollars and say, what a massive roi. But what I truly look at is look at those 200 people that are now better, better fathers, better, better brothers, better sisters, better mothers, better community members because they started training Brazilian Jiu jitsu, you know, and, and in the car sales business, it', like, well, look at all the people that now get to drive to work and not have to worry about their car breaking down. Or that single mom that you guys helped, you know, get approved with the bank. And you guys kind of had to, you know, do some different things to, to really get her into it. You had to work with her and you had to assure it's going to work out this time. Like, you know, the, the impact that we're able to create in business, I think is an exceptional opportunity. And it's one that I think a lot of people overlook. And if you're not thinking about that, I think eventually you just will get wiped out because it's like you have to be able to capture those milestone moments for people. And I love that term. And I mean, you could do some fun stuff with that. I mean, you know, we're exploring other programmatic platforms like Hulu, ESPN plus, and we've seen some even YouTube ads and we've seen like a lot of success with those with bigger brands. But I don't think at the local level people have really tapped into them. And so it's like, you know, you get a milestone moment. You get. You're delivering a car with a big bow on it and some flowers to maybe like a college soccer game, girls graduating. It's her last college soccer game. Parents want to buy her a nice, nice Jeep, and you guys are delivering it there. Imagine having just, you know, a nice little video showing that moment and capturing that. That's like a darn Hallmark movie. I mean, you guys can run that all the way up, you know, so that kind of stuff and putting your, your ad budget behind stuff that makes people feel good and then actually like you said, actually delivering on it, making sure your staff's there to deliver on that too. I think that's so incredible and, and really impactful for people. So it's no secret and no surprise why you guys are so successful.

Yeah. And it builds word of Mouth, right. Which is the most powerful form of marketing. You could spend.

Sure.

X number of dollars and you know, again, just going back to the concept of renting your, renting your audience, or you could build your own audience and you know, one plus one equals three. A lot of times with, with these referral rates, right, you, you make one customer happy and they're gonna, they're gonna tell X number of people.

Exactly. And that's why having your ads, right, and getting, getting people in from cold traffic into your funnel and turning them into a customer for life, having ads that actually cut through the noise, that get away from banner blindness because they're out of the box, they're different. And being able to earn that customer for life, I mean, they come, they buy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cars with you over the years. They send how many different customers. Now your cost per acquisition isn't just on that one sale. You actually have now for your cost per acquisition of, you know, anywhere from, I think, you know, we're running roughly 200 to 400 bucks cost per car sold at some of the locations we're working with with you. And if you look at that over a couple years, if you just turn that customer into a few deals, I mean, it's a massive, massive advantage. And like you said in the beginning, like finding your edge, you know, I think that's huge. So yeah, man, I'm curious what's, what's something that surprises you or, or surprised you when you were first starting out, when you left Google and you came back into the car world? You know, I, I remember one of the big things that you told us when we first started is you guys were like, you looked at the creatives, we were running on social and you're like, yeah, man, you guys are like five years ahead of the game. Like, a lot of dealers aren't catching up yet, but they will. And you just got to keep going. And that was like two years ago now. And it's getting easier every year because people are starting to catch on. They're like, you know, the carousel ads don't work. I want to do something different. So, like, what did you see? And it doesn't have to be about ads, maybe just anything in general when it comes to the, the car dealership space and, and going into that CMO role after working at Google, after exiting a big agency, like, like what surprised you starting out?

Say, having worked in a more software based business, there was always high leverage. You could always get things done with less people. You know, working in the car business, just with how many, how much red tape there is a lot of times with, you know, papers we need to file with the government and you know, the number of steps and paperwork that have to be completed. You have to work, you know, twice as hard to get a lot of the same things done. So having that grit and determination is going to be extremely important. It's definitely not for the, the weak hearted, right? You need to make sure that you're rolling things out and checking that they're getting done and you know, and making sure that you're, you're following that process through. So some examples, you know, might be with past companies, Google and the last performance marketing agency I was at. You know, for anything that you want to do, you use Zapier, right? You set up an ad, the ad goes into your CRM, the CRM automatically gets follow up, the follow up gets added to, you know, a subscription list, they get added to the webinar. And a lot of things can happen on an automated basis. But when you're dealing with retail, it's lower leverage, right? So your leverage in Software might be 1 to 20, right? You have a really high leverage point. But with retail a lot of things have a lot less leverage. So you need to work a lot harder to accomplish a lot of the same things. So I've had to level up my own skill sets in terms of communication, in terms of physical determination to getting things done. So you know, I think a lot of times software will make it easy and it'll actually atrophy your skills a lot of times in terms of communication, in terms of your ability to operate and manage a large workforce. So I've really had to up level myself and figure out how I can be the best operator I can be because I thought I was great. Like I thought, you know, I was an awesome operator and you know, I set the standard for what I wanted, you know, my employees to do and I'd give them the opportunity to rise to the challenge and rise to the occasion. But there was a lot of things that made it easier for me to do that. Right. And with, with this business, the systems aren't set up to integrate very well, right? So you have your DMS over here, your CRM over here, your finance software here. And none of these things are necessarily integrated. A lot of things aren't as smooth as possible. So it makes you work a lot harder to get into all these systems and understand and read the fine print and really make sure that you understand how things are operating and not just relying on software to make your lives easier. Right. So, you know, it's been, it's been a great learning curve for me having to up level myself as an operator and as a manager and as a, you know, as a chief marketing officer. You know, it's, it's definitely a lot more, a lot more challenging. But through that challenge, I've been able to, to grow a lot more as well.

Yeah, I mean, only the strong survive in automotive and especially when you're, you're battling some of these big, you know, online retailers that are trying to roll out, you know, like Carvana. Everybody hates them. Of course they've went bankrupt, their business doesn't show a profit. But there's a reason that they do a lot of sales volume. You know, their strategy online was just a completely different approach and they, they were finding any way they could to bring more leverage into it, which I don't think is always like you said, it's like you have to integrate everything and it's not always as smooth. Like lead generation is much, much more difficult than E Commerce because in E Commerce you get the conversion, you got the money good to go. What can we do on the back end? In lead generation, you got the conversion, the lead submitted their information. Now you got to follow up with them. You got to get them in the appointment. Oh, they no show, they have to reschedule. You got to make sure you can pull them back in. You got to build rapport, certainty. There's all these different things that have to go right from the moment that the lead comes in and how they're greeted on the phone to the moment that they step foot in the dealership and the first person that comes up and shakes their hand and, and offers them a coffee or a water, like all of those things are, are not high leverageable things. It's like you have to rely on your team, you have to rely on your systems, you have to rely on your processes. And I mean, even you could, you could just have a guy that's having a bad day that says the wrong thing to somebody when they first walk in the door and that could put a sour taste. You know, people are looking for a reason not to buy from a certain dealership every time. They're always going in there and it's the little things, you know. And so I love what you said about your obsession of all the little pieces and how much that plays into it, because that is what it takes. You know, a lot of times it's just one little thing that might need a tweak and that can revolutionize someone's success.

So yeah, man, like it's, it's, it's four things. I heard this somewhere from, from an operator podcast list too. There's like four things you need to do to be successful, especially in a low leverage business. It's work, hard work, intelligent work and more work, right? So you really need to make sure that you're really diving into all those details and putting in the work to be successful. Because there's no software that's going to make you successful, right? There's no like going back to what you mentioned earlier in the podcast. There's no AI shiny object that's just going to solve all your problems. It's up to you to be obsessed with all the details to understand your business backwards, forwards, upside down, left, right and center. And twice on Sunday in order to make sure that you're going to be as successful as possible. Because nobody, no software is going to do it for you.

Exactly. And that's like, I see a lot of people jumping on these AI tools and I talk to them and they're like, yeah, my sales haven't increased at all. And I'm like, probably because AI will follow up up, but it can't sell. So like it'll check the box of customer followed up with. But that was a really good customer that maybe they needed a double text. Maybe they didn't just need one text, they needed two and then a call and they needed somebody to make sure to call them the next day. I mean, AI will respond for you, but it won't actually get that conversion. So I mean, I see some potential with a blend of having AI and having a human operator AI for frequently asked questions, sending, booking links, but relying on it wholeheartedly for your whole follow up is just laziness and they're gonna get crushed by guys like you. You know, and we've seen AI.

The great thing about AI is that it never takes a day off, right? So it's not gonna call out sick, it's not gonna have an off day, it's not gonna be pissed off because of something that happened before work, you know, so on and so forth. But it's not gonna take you to the next level, at least yet. And even if it does, you still need to manage it. It still needs to be something that's part of your process that you're optimizing and continually tweaking and not just letting it run and then wondering why it didn't work.

Yep, yep. Well, Ben, I learned a lot from you, man. It's been incredible working with you over these last couple years, and I'm really looking forward to some of the things that we've got next coming up. We. I think we've got some unique ideas, and like you saying you want to double, triple, quadruple down on social, I think that that's very pertinent. I think we should do that 100%. And I also want to share with you some different tactical things that I found, some tools that we're using to have salesmen dominating on marketplace, building their own brands under your brand, things like that that I'll share with you. And. And you're a dad now, you know, so you've got. She's got to be one years old now.

Yeah, yeah, a year and a half.

Year and a half. Yeah. I remember when. When you guys were. Were just going through, you know, you were. You were taking a couple weeks off because you just had the baby and everything. Not a lot of time you took off.

Not a lot, but I think about a half week there. Something like that.

Yeah, yeah. And. And that's a lot for you. I know, but what's it been like being a dad, man, and juggling the business and. And also having that aspect to your life now? What has that done in terms of your growth personally and career wise?

Yeah, I would say it adds another dimension to life, and it helps you find pieces of yourself that you didn't even know it existed. So, you know, when you, you know, as you get older, right, when you start out, you're going to school, you have school, friends and family, right? And it's like you have that. That sort of aspect, and you go to college and you have a career, right? And that adds sort of a new dimension, a new aspect of your personality, a new aspect of your being. And when you have a child, to me, it didn't necessarily happen overnight. It wasn't like I had a child, and all of a sudden I was a different person. Right. It's like you constantly grow through that process, and you rise to new challenges and you rise to new occasions, and you're gonna. You're gonna have nights that are sleepless, and you're gonna have nights that are challenging. And, you know, there isn't a lot that you can teach somebody else about going through that experience. Just know that you're gonna come out the other end after that first year with a whole new dimension of yourself that you didn't even know existed. And it allows you to really have greater, greater respect for, for life itself and have greater, a greater understanding of what it is that we're really meant to be and why we're meant to be here.

Wow, that's, that's incredible, man. And I'm looking forward to it too. A lot of guys my age, they're like, oh, I'm not having kids until, or, or they don't want to have kids at all. It's kind of like the younger generation thing. And one of my, one of my good friends and mentors, he told me, he's like, you don't truly mature as a man until you have kids. Like, until then, you're just a boy. Once you, once you have a kid, once you have that crazy responsibility, that's when you become a man, you know, and, and like you said, adding another dimension.

So, yeah, man, I learned, I learned one thing from a colleague of mine when I was at Google, a phenomenal guy, Kunal. Shout out to Kunal. He, he always taught me. He said, you know, at the time I was dating my, my, my girlfriend who later became my wife. And I was saying something kind of similar to what you're saying, which is like, you know, a lot of people are saying, like, don't get married yet. And, you know, you should wait. And he just looks at me, tells me, you know, Penn, you should never delay a good thing. And if it's a good thing, you should never delay it. So, you know, if, if you want to do it eventually and it's something that's going to be good for yourself, just don't delay.

Wow. I love that, man. I absolutely love that. Well, you got like two more minutes or you gotta run? Okay, cool.

What time is it?

It's just after the hour.

Yeah, I got one minute.

Okay, cool, man. So thank you so much for being on here today. I really appreciate it. This was a blast. This went super fast, man. I think we could do one again because you have so many things to unpack and so much value to offer. So where, where can people find you guys for, for Garden City and for all of your different platforms and, and anything that you'd like to plug people to explore in the New York area just to shout you out and everything like that work.

The best place to go is this VIPAutomotiveGroup.com you'll find all our inventory, all our channel used inventory, all of our locations there, for sure. And I just want to shout out to you as well. You know, the work that you and your team has done has been phenomenal. And you've added a whole another layer of how I've been able to gain leverage by all the tools, people, knowledge, and know how that you've assembled. It's been like a shot in the leg. As opposed to me having to create all these platforms, tools and assemble all these people. It's been amazing getting to partner with you and your team and having the opportunity to accelerate all of that for our stores as well. So thank you.

Yeah, man. And you're, you're absolutely welcome. And thank you for being so willing to adapt, willing to jump into it, willing to send us the videos, do the scripts, everything like that. It's been incredible and I think we're just getting started. So I'm excited for what 2024 brings. We'll have a follow up call a little bit later where we can discuss some of the new things that we've got rocking and also kind of your new plans. And I know my team's getting with your team as well, so super excited. Ben, thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate you, brother.