#239 - Move Your Website From Good To Great w/ Lyamen Savy

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast. But before we start today, Jeff, what do we got to remind people about?

Make sure you guys have subscribed to the newsletter. It's called the Owner's Manual. It goes out every weekend, and it's full of great, actionable items to take into your dealership right away.

Yeah. And it's. It's not even for dealerships. Not necessarily for dealerships. For managing people and managing our businesses. Um, sometimes we get in a rut talking about dealership, dealership. But this is just another way to expand your horizon and get better at what we should be doing. That's working to own our business, right, Jeff?

Yeah, yeah. It's all. It's all work on your business type stuff. That's kind of our focus. Right? Like hiring, firing. We're going to get into, you know, marketing, and we're going to get into budgeting. We're going to get into, you know, security, like all these things that we need to be working on our business. So we're going to give you guys a video by Luke that gives you kind of an education and then an actionable quote and like a task list for the week, things to get done. So make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter. You can join it through our website, the independentdealer.com and of course, make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, Facebook, share this with the dealer friend and all that good stuff.

Yeah. And also, Jeff, one thing, one last question we want to do Ask Luke and Jeff section. And we really think it'd be cool if people could video themselves asking us a question. And then we'll put it out there. Something fun, something to get you on our YouTube, something to get you on our podcast. And Jeff, where could they send it to if they did that?

That's a good darn question, Luke. I have no idea. Probably info the independentdealer.com so down in the show notes is our email. Take a selfie video of you at your dealership asking any question you got, email it over to us, and then we'll include you, your video, your question in an upcoming episode. It should be a lot of fun.

Awesome, man.

And if not, then we just make them up. It'll be like my kids asking questions around the house or Luke in a skirt and a wig.

All right, let's get going with this. Here we go.

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Luke. We have stepped up a notch as far as our visual aesthetics go. So if you guys watch it on YouTube, you're used to seeing our ugly mugs. So I'm just going to go ahead and hide my screen. I'm just going to let you and Lyman talk this whole time and maybe our YouTube views will go.

I mean, I, I know I'm pretty. Thanks for. Thanks for letting me know how pretty I am this week, Joe. No, I think, I think you're talking about Lyman here. Lyman is, is not only better to look at than Jeff, she's also Internet marketing genius when it comes to fixing our websites and making them better. Right, Jeff?

Yeah. The founder and CEO of 321 Ignition. Lyman, thank you for joining us. This is a topic that is so important. Our websites. Right. Before we jump into that though, introduce yourself to everyone. Tell us a little bit about, you know, your company, how you founded it, and where you've got to, where you are now.

Yeah, so I started three to one Ignition three and a half years ago, approaching close to four years. And I came across this by pure accident. So my background is I've been doing marketing for 19 years, almost 20 years now. And my specialty is customer acquisition. So you know how like in marketing there's free sale, there's wholesale. My specialty is pre sale. How do you get customers to actually buy from you instead of, you know, how do you get a customer to renew or to, you know, buy again, things like that. So what I've done in the last, you know, 19 years, I worked at Microsoft Capital One House Values, which got acquired by Zillow Datasphere, which got acquired by Sinclair Bracket. So all these companies would hire me. The reason they hire me is because they want to increase their sales and increasing their sales, whether it's because, you know, generate a lead and pass to a salesperson to close, or how do you get actually customer to buy directly online without even speaking to a salesperson? So you know what we call now digital retail. And so I've done everything from paid medium, upper funnel, lower funnels like Google Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, TV ads, radio ads, billboard ads. I mean, you name it, I've done it. As long as it helps businesses to acquire customers. So my specialty is media analytics. Of course, you have to understand analytics really, really well because you don't measure, you can't improve. And so I'm a total nerd, basically. And so I came across automotive by pure accident because I had a friend who worked at a Car dealership, used car dealership. And then they're doing great. You know, pre covered, they were selling about, I think close to 200 cars. I don't know how many cars they're selling now. And she would come to me for marketing advice, you know, just like, hey, Lyman, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And the more and more I kept helping her, the more I keep scratching my head and saying, like, why do you guys do this? And then I realized that in automotive, a lot of the vendors are actually pretty outdated. And so, long story short, I decided to do this myself and build three to one ignition.

So now what's, what's, what's funny about that is I believe in the car business we have been outdated when it comes to, to the whole nine yards, you know, dealers. And I'm probably like the prime example. If we're not selling enough cars, we just throw more money at the problem, right? And we spend more money on advertising. And, and we know that that's not. We don't know. But, you know, and you probably told many of dealers, you probably don't need to spend more money, right, Lyman?

Yeah. The problem is not that, you know, number one question I always ask dealerships, every time I talk to a new dealer, I always ask them, what do you think is going to help you increase your leads and sales? And number one response, like, I remember vividly, my first dealership I spoke to was a Mercedes dealership, and I was actually buying a Mercedes from them. So I started talking to the GM and I'm like, hey, how are your sales doing? And he's like, oh, not so good. And I'm like, really? Why do you think? And he's like, well, we just need to do more marketing. We're just not driving enough traffic to the website. And I. But when I look at the dealerships, Google Analytics, most dealerships generate actually plenty of visitors. At least 5,000 visitors, some like 10,000, you know, 30,000 if you think about it, how many consumers walk into your showroom every day versus how many people visit your website every day? So the perception is the dealership saying they just need to spend more money on marketing or they need to do more SEO or they need to do, you know, more Facebook ads. But what I'm seeing is that they're actually getting enough website visitors. However, they're not converting those visitors to leads. Majority of people just, you know, leave and bounce the site. And the reason why consumers are bouncing, which is again, I looked at the Google Analytics and it shows the majority of consumers that visit dealership websites are doing it on their mobile device. Like over 80% in some cases, actually over 90%. Like if it's a dealership, it's usually close to 90%. Especially let's say, for example, if you're doing Facebook advertising. Again, Facebook is publicly traded company. It's public knowledge. Majority of their users are mobile. And so imagine if you're doing Facebook ads, people are seeing in their smartphones, they're clicking on your app, going to your website, but the website is not designed for mobile. So what happens? They bounce. So you just wasted all of your paid media or cost per clicks that you just paid for. So the problem, you know, is conversion. It's not the traffic, it's the conversion.

Well, that's, that's interesting because again, I'm this old white dude and if I want to look at something, I never use my phone, you know, so I always go to a desktop and pull it up so I can actually look at the pictures better and know this. But I know that I'm a dinosaur. And that's not how everybody's working.

Look, you really actually. So if you go to Macy's website, you will go to Macy's website or Home Depot website on your desktop or on your phone.

I always. Desktop.

Really?

Yeah, because I, I'm just a dinosaur because I can't figure out how to work my phone all the time.

But you got those big fat digits, you can't really get them in those little teeny phones.

Yeah, but I know that, that my, most of my customers probably don't even have desktop computers. Is that the case?

It actually is. So more people own smartphones than they do their computer. Especially if you go to more, you know, what's that? Not a lower income housing areas, you know, they can't afford to have, you know, laptop for a thousand dollars. Their phone is their only, you know, form of Internet connection. So 100%.

So is there, is there a difference between mobile, iPad and desktop?

Yes. So what we're talking about is mobile responsive versus mobile first. Mobile first. What it really means, exactly as it sounds, is when a user experience designer, UX UI designer. When we started actually designing car shopping experience, we started with the most difficult device, which is mobile. And the reason why it's difficult is because you have the most amount of limitations. You have a smaller screen size, usually slower Internet connection. And most importantly, consumers trying to complete an action with one finger instead of on a keyboard with two hands and ten fingers. So when you're designing for a smart small screen you're very conscious about. It's not an afterthought, it's the first thought that you have. What's the experience like a mobile? And once you've perfected the experience on mobile, then you go to desktop. So that's called mobile first. As a designer literally started with mobile first. And mobile first doesn't mean you're missing missing features. You actually have the same amount of features and more because a lot of smartphones have, you know, native features. That improves our user experience. The opposite is mobile responsive, which is basically where you started designing a website for desktop, which has almost no limitations. And then you're trying to squeeze it down to a mobile screen, which as you could imagine is a disaster. It's like imagine if you lived in a three bedroom house and you're moving into one bedroom apartment. Will you be able to fit all of your furniture into one bedroom apartment? You might, but you're going to have a couch on top of a table, on top of a chandelier versus if you're trying to go from a studio apartment to a three bedroom house, it's going to be a lot easier. Right. So the same thing with the mobile first websites versus mobile responsive. And by the way, mobile first is not new concept. It's actually been around for over 15 years. Zillow, you know, publicly traded company, billions of revenue, they've been mobile first from day one. Facebook. I don't know if I'm sure you guys have met Bob, the head of Facebook automotive division, he actually said it himself too, that Facebook has been mobile first from day one. And how old is Facebook? At least 15 years. So mobile first is not a new concept, but for some reason it hasn't really picked up a lot of steam and automotive and we were the first ones to do it.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Stuff you got to. And they're the best GPSs on the market, Jeff.

Yep. Back to the episode. And that's the issue a lot of dealers have when they go to check their website and see what's going on, they just naturally go to their desktop because they're at their dealership. Right, Exactly. How many times are we actually going through our website on our phones and maybe even taking ourselves off of WI fi, go on cellular and snoop through your website and see how long it takes for pages to load and see where text box are crammed over top of other text box. You know, it's really kind of an eye opening experience. Yeah.

And not only that, you know, what I've noticed is when I tell dealerships like, hey, did you know you have a mobile responsive website? They're like, what do you mean? I could see everything. Everything is fine. I'm like, did you compare it to Home Depot website? Did you compare it to Amazon? And when they start actually comparing, they're like, oh, now I see it. Because the perceptions, just because you could actually see the website in mobile, they think it is mobile website, but it's actually not because of the user experience design. So you really have to see it.

You told us something before we started recording about how what Jeff Bezos did when he started Amazon. Can you just talk about that for a second? Because I think that's very interesting to know.

Yeah. So Jeff Bezos is actually a very famous quote that he invested 10, 10 times more in the user experience in the first four years of Amazon than he did in advertising. Because I mean, if you think about it, Amazon started off selling books. The exact same books of Barnes and Nobles were selling. There was absolutely nothing unique about, you know, the selection or the quantity of those books except the user experience versus, you know, Barnes and Nobles was brick and mortars, you know, walk in store and they didn't have an online presence, but it wasn't as powerful versus, you know, Jeff Bezos. You really focus on a mobile or online user experience and look where they are now. Is Barnes and Nobles even around still? I think Amazon might have acquired.

There's one, there's one down the street, I think just one. But what's, what's funny about that is, I mean what does, how does the user experience Amazon? You can, you can get on their, their app right now and I can go and I can buy something and, and the user experience for me is very simple, very easy and I love it. How does that equate to the car business when you're talking about user experience and ease of purchase.

I mean it's exactly the same. User experience is everything. I mean, you know, without even thinking about the car. But if you think about. So there's actually a very, very famous quote. Have you guys heard of a company called Forrester Market Research? It's number one, one of the largest, most powerful market research companies. And one of their analysts actually said back in the days, you used to just compete across, you know, with a business across the street and you might be able to do things slightly, just a tiny bit better. Now you're competing against the, you know, technology companies. More and more companies are becoming technology companies. Like if you think about Uber, Uber took a legacy industry, which is taxicabs. And what did they do? They improved customer experience. So customer experience and customer experience is not just when you're talking to a customer, but is what is their experience like at 2 o' clock in the morning when they're not speaking to you or when they're on a, on your dealership website or when they're on a mobile device. And so the user experience, it's all about removing friction, eliminating friction. It's all about eliminating or reducing anxiety. Especially you know, when people are buying cars or especially used cars, they have anxiety about signing a five year, you know, car loan and what happens if the car breaks down the minute I drive off. So you have to think about what, you know, like if you're in sales before you call a customer, you anticipating what sales objection they're going to have and you're ready to overcome those objections. Well, you have to do the same thing with the website. You have to anticipate what are the sales objections consumers are going to have when they're visiting your website and be able to overcome those objections by either giving them tools to do the research and validate their assumptions, or whether it's with value proposition copy, but most importantly getting rid of friction and friction. Like let's say for example, if I'm doing credit apps. Credit apps is probably the most qualified lead for a dealership, right? Because the person just gave you their Social Security number. So for example, our credit apps, we have a 72% completion rate. Well, how do we have 72% completion rate? A person is completing an action, completing a long credit app with one finger, not on the keyboard, with two hands and ten fingers. So what do we do? For example when a user is typing in an address, instead of forcing them with one finger type city, street, zip code, we instead that a Google Maps API Integration. So as consumers start typing the address, it gives them little hints and it says, is this the address? And all the user has to do is click tap on it and it pre populates all that information.

I like those.

That's reducing friction. Or if you think about like if you're shopping at Macy's and if you have to put in your credit card versus doing Apple Pay, tap tap, you're more likely to check out. Right. Same thing with car dealership. So, for example, our websites, we have this feature called reserve a car with down payment. So when a consumer starts reserving a car, we get to the checkout part and it says, you know, $200 deposit is required. Some dealerships do like $1,000 deposit, but you don't want a consumer to get up and go look for their wallet. So we have Apple Pay and Andro Pay integration. So it's thinking about user experience, what smartphone native features you could add to enhance the experience.

What an interesting concept. Luke, could you imagine if we had a reserve a car on a buy here, pay here, like my buy here, pay here lot? You could reserve the car for 500 bucks. So you don't got to know anything about the financing. None of that's in place yet. I just want people to actually reserve a car.

So it's so funny you say that, Jeff, because a couple weeks ago I think actually after I saw your session in Myrtle Beach, Lyman, I said, alexa, I think this is something we have to integrate. And it's. And the reason is, is because I believe. And the reason I came to that conclusion and we talked about me buying a Tesla a while a couple weeks ago and. And you want to talk about user friendly. We've already discussed this, had a whole podcast about it. But the reason I did it so quickly, which I did on my, my desktop, because I'm a desktop guy, but I was able to give them my money immediately.

Yeah.

And so I had it locked in.

When the emotions are high and your commitment levels there, it's there. They're taking that commitment and locking you in.

So how much. And Lyman talked about how important it was for customers to fill out a credit app. We're good at getting credit apps. We can do that. But what if we just took it a step further and we're able to get a down payment or get a. Not a down payment. A refundable payment.

Yeah, immediately refundable deposit.

That is, I think that is something that I really want to implement in my website. And it sounds like, Lyman, y' all have Y' all have that integration and you've got, you've got dealers doing that.

Yeah, actually it, not only is it collecting a down payment, but it's also creating urgency. So one of my best practices also is creating urgency. Sales people are really, really good at that when they're talking to a consumer. Right. But the website should do the exact same thing. So as an example, if you go to Carvana, you'll notice that sometimes the cars will show purchase spending or a customer's about to check out, I forgot the verbiage they actually use. I reserve a car with the down payment has exact same features. So as an example, first consumer seeds reserve this car for 24 hours to buy it in person. So consumer clicks on that button, then it takes them to step one and it says reserve this car. Fill out the information below. You know, due to global shortage of, you know, microchips that there's a, you know, lack of inventory, blah blah, blah, user fills that out, they click next. So now one, use a dealer, you have their name, email, phone number. So now you can get a hold of them in the meantime because they submitted step one on your website, other consumers will see that it will say the scar is purchase spending. So it's creating a missing out. Other consumers, when they're in your website, they're seeing, oh my God, somebody's, you know, started, you know, purchasing this car. But in the meantime it also says sometimes consumers end up not buying a car. So click here to be notified if consumer doesn't actually buy the car. So now you're collecting a lead from the other person who's seeing somebody's about to buy a car. In the meantime, the original consumer on step two, they see, please put in a down payment. And the down payment could be customized, whatever you want. And it could be refundable, non refundable. It's up to a dealer what their policy is. And then, but in the meantime it tells the consumer, you could either do andropay or Apple pay or you could actually enter your credit card. So of course majority would do interview or Apple pay. And then if a consumer actually put in their credit card, then again everybody else on your website be notified that this car is purchase spending for 24 hours and so or how many hours you want. So yeah, the key with websites is one, reduce the friction. So you know, by doing like Apple pay, doing Google Maps integration, doing, you know, all kinds of stuff. But two, creating urgency and creating fear of missing out, creating that FOMO effect. So that's the key with generating more leads.

Yeah. So I like that. And you're going to give, you're going to share with us some more tips of things we're doing on our website that are wrong or we could do better. But first off, tell me how do I know if my website is broken? How do I know if it's not good to know what steps I need to take? You talked about bounce rate. What is an allowable bounce rate for my website? Or what is the. What do you see as far as a conversion rate, like how many people hit my website compared to how many land on my application or contact me page to compare to how many actually fill out an application?

Yeah, great question, Jeff. And actually, one of the issues that I see is dealerships are not doing a good job of training tracking and analytics. They really don't understand analytics. Some dealerships don't even have CRMs, which I don't know how you even run a business without a CRM. You know, data is like oil. It's, you know, the longer you've been in business, the more data you have, the more powerful you become because those are insights. So having the right tracking in place is absolutely critical. So first thing that I see is whenever we work with dealerships, a lot of dealerships don't even have access to the Google Analytics. They never log into the Google Analytics. And then some of them that do log in, the website providers didn't set up their tracking correctly. So as an example, in Google Analytics, there's this thing called goal conversion. Goal usually means, you know, actual leads or a sale. A lot of times I see website providers instead of setting up goal conversion to track leads. And the only thing that I consider leads is lead form submission or click to go and click to drive. Anything else is not a lead. So what I see or text message, you could also do like, you know, send a text message. That's also a lead. What I usually see other website providers do is they'll set up goal conversions to track page views or number of VDB views. That's not a lead. And by not setting up your tracking correctly one, it actually hurts your marketing. So for example, if you do Google Ads, I'm sure you guys have seen how in Google Ads there's this thing called the optimize maximize conversions versus maximize clicks. In order for Google to be able to maximize conversions, you have to set up your tracking based on conversions. So if you're setting up your tracking based on page views, then you're optimizing on page views. So tracking is extremely, extremely important. But in addition to that, you know, in addition to Google Analytics, is being able to pass that information to your CRM. A lot of times I see dealership websites, when they do generate leads, they don't actually pass what kind of lead it was like, was it a credit app? Was it a unlock manager special? Was it a schedule at TED Drive? As a. I used to be in sales, and, you know, if I was in sales, I don't even know how I would follow up with those leads if I don't know they filled it out. So being able to pass to your CRM what kind of leader was and where did the consumer come from, it gives more mo to a salesperson to know how to talk to the, to the consumer. So. And then, of course, most importantly, a dealership needs to be able to measure how many leads they generated. What was the cost and what was the cost per lead? And then taking it a step further, what was the lead to sale conversion rate and what was the cost per acquisition? Because some sources, some tools may generate low cost per lead, but those leads are not converting to sales. So cost per sale ends up being, you know, really high. So ultimately, did you get more sales, did you get more gross profit and what was the cost and what was the roi? So I'm actually going to be. I don't know if I get invited, but Niada reached out to me and asked me to do training for tracking, which I'm extremely passionate about, because you can't be good at generating leads and sales if you don't know how to track things.

Hey, everybody, real quick. Buckeye Dealership consulting. A great sponsor of the podcast and a friend of the industry. If you're talking about improving your leads, tracking all these things, that's one thing that Buckeye does great, is they give you a lot of good analytics on how your reinsurance company is doing, how your money is being earned out, not earned out, what you're keeping. So if you're a numbers freak and you love tracking stuff like we do, these guys keep you in the loop.

They sure do. And I'll tell you what, it's getting close to that. End of the year, you still have time to start setting up that reinsurance company. It's the only way to build wealth in this industry, and it's the best way to make extra money while doing that. So reach out to Buckeye, get that reinsurance company set up before the end of year. What are the three things that you really want us to dial in on and and measure.

Yeah, ultimately all that matters is total how many leads you generated, how many sales, and what was the total gross profit, and then most importantly, what was the cost to actually do that. So then you take the cost divided by total leads or divided by total sales or divided by gross profit to really know what is your cost per lead, cost per sale, and roi.

And what are those? Like, what should a dealership look at for cost per lead, you think?

Great question. So it varies because ultimately you have to optimize based on what are the goals of your dealership. So for example, let's say if I'm a software company, early stage software company, for me, the most important thing would be gross, how fast am I growing? Right. So versus mature company would be more about profitability. So if I'm an early stage company and I'm thinking about growth, then it doesn't matter what the gross profit was. It was more about how do I get the most amount of leads at the lowest cost per lead. Or maybe some leads might be higher cost per lead, but ultimately it's lower cost per sale. So ultimately it's all about what's the what, what channels and what tools can give you the most amount of sales at the lowest cost per sale. And, and then ultimately gross profit. Because some channels, for example, when I was at Microsoft, I was in charge of a $35 million marketing budget for Office 365, which is Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And we, you know, it's hard to spend $35 million in advertising. It's a lot easier to spend $10,000 on advertising. And so we used to optimize our budget. Like, okay, what, what are the channels that would give us the most scale and the lowest cost per acquisition? And maybe we've maxed out like 10 million of that. But to, you know, to spend another 20 million, I might have to go to less efficient channels, but it's going to give me more volume. So it depends on your budget. You first want to optimize what's going to give you the most volume at the lowest cost. But then you might have to go to less and less efficient. If you have, if you need more growth and you have more budget to spend.

Yeah.

And.

But shouldn't there be a bit smart for car dealership?

No, because let's say, for example, if one source is generating leads, let's say hypothetically, at $50 cost per lead, but those leads have maybe, I don't know, 2% lead to sale conversion rate. So then your cost per sale will be I can't do math in my head versus another lead. Might be a month. Huh.

And you gotta also argue that, say you're a high end luxury car brand. You can afford, you're getting, you're maybe advertising way, way more and you're only selling a handful, but you've got very, very large gross profits. So maybe you're way more than I would be spending per lead, but it's okay because you don't need to sell as many cars, you know. So you could argue that that lead is a more valuable lead.

Yeah, that's an example of, you know, the roi, when the ROI is actually.

Yeah. Do you track them across sources too? I imagine you'd be like, oh yeah, this is how my Facebook's converting. This is how my Google search is converting. This is how my.

Yep. And that's such a perfect example because a lot of times I will see Facebook leads a lot cheaper. Cheaper than Google leads, but Facebook leads have a lower lead to sale conversion rate. So then ultimately what was the cost to acquire a customer for Google versus Facebook? And, and it's because Facebook is. You're creating demand versus Google. You're fulfilling demand, you know, to create a demand. Yes, you might get a lot of people interested, but they're not lower funnel people, they're not ready to buy. So your leads of sale is going to be, you know, lower.

So, so tracking is one thing. What else are we doing wrong with our websites?

Well, branding. So, okay, trust is the most important thing with consumers and especially with millennials and Gen Z. They don't even trust a doctor. They go look things up on WebMD. Right. So how do you increase trust, especially as a used car dealership? Let's face it, you know how many people trust a used car salesperson? So there's certain things you could do to increase that trust. So as an example, number one mistake I see every website provider does is they use stock photos. Stock photos is the worst way to, you know, position yourself on a website. Unless you're Carvana or Carmax, you know, who has multimillion dollars to go do, you know, high end marketing campaigns or shooting campaigns. You want to use real photos of your dealership, real photos of your customers and your employees. And it makes a huge difference when you do that. Because now when a consumer comes to your website and imagine they're seeing your real showroom, even even though it might not be glamorous, it doesn't have to be glamorous, but as long as they see your real dealership photo the next time when they're driving by, they're like, oh yeah, I remember this dealership. I drive by it all the time. So it helps build credibility versus if you go to a website that has a bunch of stock photos, you're like, I don't even know if this is a legitimate business.

Yeah.

So increasing trust is so important. And with the trust also, by the way, is tools. So for example, I know a lot of times buy your pay or dealership, they don't want to show monthly payment. Right. But that's how consumers shop. And actually when I did a research, I noticed the number one search or high search volume keywords in automotive is payment calculator, car loan payment calculator. So consumers are still going up and googling payment calculators, but they're leaving your website to do it. You might as well have those tools on your website to let them, you know, calculate a payment because they know they have a bad credit, right? So it doesn't matter. They have good credit or background, they know their reality. But you want to give them tools to do the research on your website instead of an auto trader or cargo.

That's interesting. I never even thought about a payment calculator. Always we show prices on some buyer payer. Stores don't. But I figured payment calculator, they would always screw it up and not put in the right amounts. And then I would have people show it up thinking they could get 200amonth payments. You don't see a friction there.

I actually hear that all the time. So it depends on how the payment calculator is built. If you build a payment calculator where a consumer can actually select their credit score range and based on the credit score range they should see different interest rates or they could put in the custom interest rate. Then they're the ones who are actually in a driver. They're playing around with different variables. So it's like imagine if a consumer walked into your dealership and your F and I manager has a computer, you know, facing the F and I manager and the customer doesn't see it and the salesman just puts in numbers and shows it to a consumer. Consumer is not going to trust you versus if you turn the computer around to them and say, look at this, if you put in $10,000 down or $1,000 down, look what it does to your payment. Then you're building trust because you're like, these are just the numbers, simple math. Like, it's not my fault you're, you know, CEO of that credit. And so it's actually, and there's actually a very famous book called Leading at a Speed of Trust. And it talks about how the higher the trust consumers have with you, the more, the faster they make decisions. Because imagine like look, for example, my boyfriend, he, he's a, a partner in a wealth management firm and some of his clients, he was telling me actually a story. He had this one really wealthy individual who he needed him to sign a bunch of paperwork. And this first, the first meeting, this individual was looking at every single paper, reading every single little thing. A year later, when again, my boyfriend came to, to the same client to talk about something else, I had to sign papers. He signed this chunk of paper within like minutes because he didn't have to look at him because he trusted him. So imagine what happens if consumers trust you. No matter what you tell them, they're going to believe you. They're more likely to buy a car from you faster. So you, you want to give them the tools to do, do their research on your website. You want to show your real photos to show your real business, not some fly by night company is going to go out of business tomorrow in 2022.

Should we all have the prices listed on our website or do you think that's still a decision of the dealer and it can go either way?

No, you definitely should put it in prices. And actually, as you guys know, Carvana and Carmax are not the cheapest, you know, companies. They actually most of the time their cars. What is, I think I heard like $5,000 more, you know, than the local dealership. But yet CarMax sold 600,000 cars and Carvana sold, you know, 400,000 cars in 2021. So. And they all have prices. The reality is, you know, those are the prices. And why would you want to waste your sales people's time talking to a consumer who has unrealistic expectations?

I think that is all of them. But regardless, here's a, here's a point of contention between Luke and I and I wanted a professional's opinion as a, as an independent third party. Choke pages. Choke pages on your inventory. Is that old? Is that bad? I mean, I, I, we just switched over our CRM to a new one and I really debated on getting rid of the choke page at this point. You should have and I didn't. And I don't know, man, we get a, we get a ton of leads through that.

Tell him, Jeff.

It's like, it's like crack. Is that even appropriate for me to say it? But it's like, you know. Yeah, crack. And you can't, you know, walk away from it.

Yeah, it's caffeine. That's what we use in Utah, caffeine. I cannot walk away from it. You're right.

Yeah. So when I used to work at House Values, House Values was the, a startup company that became publicly traded on Nasdaq and then it got acquired by Zillow. And at House Values, I was in charge of their lead generation. So we had about 200 salespeople. And my job was to generate 80 leads per salesperson per month. And we used to do all kinds of doctor, you know, direct response tactics that were just a little bit shady, you know, tricking, you know, real estate agents to respond. Like, for example, we used to send direct mail campaigns that look like irs, you know, notice, you know, like we have to. And we used to generate leads like, I don't know, $10 cost per lead. And I mean, it was the best performing campaigns. But Real estate agents, who was our customers heated us. They absolutely hated us. Even if they would respond to us and be like, you trick me and just because you tricked me, I'll never do business with you. We were still growing. Like we were probably traded on Nasdaq, you know, within three years. It was one of the huge successories, but customers hated us. We had such a horrible churn rate. Then I went to work at ING Direct, which was a bank, you know, that, the Orange Little Bowl. And that's when I learned the power of a brand. Don't hurt your brand for short term results, for, you know, sacrificing the long term. Those squeeze pages, yes, it's a crack you're getting right now and you really want it because you really want to sell today. But it's damaging your brand. And I would not trade that, knowing what I've learned now working IMG Direct, which is also, you know, was publicly traded company that got acquired by Capital One, you know, Global, you know, bank versus working at House Values, which, you know, yes, generating a lot of leads, $10 cost per lead. But everybody hated them, you know, like they hated the brand.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely would, I would defend that a, that a squeeze page or a choke page is not deceptive or deceiving by any means. But yeah, I, I can see that. I mean, obviously we get people that get all sorts of mad, well, if you're not going to let me see cars, why would I? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, okay, fine, you're probably not someone I wanted to Deal with it to begin with.

But I mean, imagine if you went to Home Depot and Home Depot said, fill out this form before you could actually see our prices. Like, how would you feel about that?

Yeah, some people do, though, right? Costco. You can't see Costco's prices unless you're a member.

You gotta be a member.

You don't see. You don't see, like, the grocery store. It's like, I gotta be a member to get that sale. That price on the thing, for one. I got to have a value card.

Yeah, you have to become a member to actually get. But you see the prices. And actually with me, with my company, I publish our prices. So many website providers don't publish their prices. And.

That is a great point that you're saying. I think that's funny that some people would say the same thing about a choke page, but wouldn't actually be transparent enough in their own business. And you're saying that you preach it, but you also do it.

So. So I saw something on the. On the website the other day on one of the dealer forums talking about how much. They asked me how much I was paying for a website.

I was.

I'm not gonna get into all that. How much does a good website cost a dealer a month?

Average?

Ballpark question. So I always, you know, some dealerships will. Will argue with us about our prices because we're not the cheapest provider. There are, you know, cars for sale for $99 per month, but. But you get what you pay for. I always said it's nice. I always argue with my boyfriend about this because he loves shopping on sale. And I'm like, nothing good is ever on sale. It's just basic economics, you know, it's a supply and demand, you know, So I personally don't believe in buying anything for sale. Like, if it's on sale, I'm always skeptical, like, what's wrong with this product, with the dealership website? Dealership websites are pretty complicated websites. It's not like a. A dentist or a lawyer where you just have a bunch of texts. It's inventory managing, inventories and, you know, and having all these tools to be able to do different merchandising, different discounts, different pricing. Like, I don't know, how can a dealership possibly just pay 400, 500 for a website? Just doesn't make sense in my head. Like, if it was a dentist website, sure, I get it. But if you guys actually knew how much it cost me, my company to, you know, developers, QA people, DevOps, people, UX, UI designers, you know, like, it's very, very expensive. Actually, it takes us like five months to break even when we launch a dealership. And so, you know, a good website, I think is worth it. And a good website actually will save you money because let our prices start at 1,299 and they go up to 2,699. So let's say you average, you know, 1,500. Let's say, for example, how much money are you spending in advertising? So I think dealership spend like $10,000 on the advertising. Dragging people to a broken website doesn't convert money or do they just waste money?

Oh, for sure. And I, I'm with you, Lyman. I. When people talk about they're paying $200 a month for a website, I'm like, I don't, I don't understand how the website works. And if it works, it probably doesn't work very well. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of back. I mean, I can't even.

Yeah. No matter, no matter how much jet fuel you put in that little Kia Soul, it's not going to go any faster, you know, Exactly. It's not gonna, it's got limitations. It's not gonna perform any better. And that's what is funny about dealers is we, we just want to pour more water in the bucket and spend more money and, and do more Google Ads and Facebook ads, but we don't realize our bucket is like in. It's broken.

It's like, oh, we don't have, we don't have enough people to, to facilitate the amount of leads we're getting. Because, I mean, that, that happens as well.

Well, yeah, because dealerships don't have a lot of teams, don't have tracking, especially the buyer pay your dealerships, which is great crazy to me. And again, the dealerships, we try to save money on buying a CRM, so they're using spreadsheets, but they're actually hurting themselves because I can't imagine as a business owner running my, my business without having a CRM and having the right CRM to, you know, pull reports. There's so many CRMs in automotive that are, again, also very cheap, but their reporting is terrible. So what's the point of having CRM if you don't even. Can't even generate a good report out of it.

I agree.

Yeah. And you know, when we talk about, you know, the cost of a website, did you guys know the statistics? So according to Cox and McKinsey, which is a huge Market research company. They said in 2014, average consumer used to visit 5 dealerships before buying a car. In 2017, average consumer used to visit 2.7 dealers before buying car. 2019, average consumer visited only 2.3 dealerships before buying car. We're now in 2020. Guess how many dealerships consumers visit before buying a car.

Do I actually physically walk into the store?

Yes.

I bet it's 1.3 or 4 maybe.

Exactly. So that's because consumers are doing older research online and then visiting a dealership they're going to buy a car from just to do a test drive and sign the paperwork. So if that's the case, if we know that all of the consumers research and decisions are done online, how can we possibly try to cut corners with the most important thing that actually influences their decision?

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I used to track ups, you know, and every car dealership in the world, you track ups. People were actually coming into the store and I just cut it out because I said it doesn't matter anymore because that same up that's here has already been to your website. Yeah, we can, we can track that right now. So that likelihood. I hate this. When a salesman sells a car and that and they ask, you know, how did you find out about us? Oh, they drove by. No, no, they did not drive by. They drove by to get here. Yes. But they saw this car on the Internet before they even thought about stopping by here, correct?

Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, nobody wakes up and says, today I'm gonna buy a car. I mean, it could happen.

But usually I'm gonna go drive around. I'm gonna go drive around to, to 50 dealerships this Saturday to buy a car. No, that is not how it works.

Yeah, you usually start feeling a pain. Maybe your family's grown and you guys don't have enough cars. Maybe the car broke down or it's about to break down and you know, you need a car. But you started thinking about it at least 30 days in advance from doing all the research and your website, your dealership website is the first thing they actually interact with. So and you know, like in, on social media. I'm constantly getting retargeted by these ads, retail store companies and also dresses and shirts and once in a while I'll, you know, see like a really beautiful dress for like $50 and I'm like, wow, it looks really good. And you know, it's only $50. I can't believe it. And every time I would buy those cheap dresses though, when they arrive like my skin will be itching or like something wrong with my material. And I'm like, Lyman, you know better. Nothing in this life is free or cheap. Like, you know how in business operations they say you could either have something fast, good quality or cheap. Pick two. You cannot have three. So you have to invest in a website and your website is the cheapest real estate fund quite frankly compared to everything else dealerships have to pay for.

Yeah, well, that's a lot of great information. I definitely have some awesome takeaways that I'm going to do. And the one thing I mean, yeah, the squeeze page is one, but setting up my goals in Google Analytics, I actually looked at, I have had this website and my Google Analytics for probably 10 years. I do not have goals set up in my Google Analytics to trigger when someone hits the, you know, the, the thank you for applying page or the thank you for contacting us page. I don't have that set up. So how could analytics even know what I'm trying to achieve so that alone.

Even know what to achieve? You know, like when I was helping my friend when I worked with car dealership, she would send me reports from her marketing agency and the only thing that the agency was reporting on is how many impressions, I mean clicks they got. And I'm like, who cares how many impressions clicks, what was the lead? But they couldn't provide her the leads information because her website wasn't good enough to track that. So your agencies, their hands are tied behind their back and I have so many agencies that would actually when dealerships were switched to us, they would tell me they're about to fire their agency. I'm like, hold on, don't fire your agency. They didn't have the right tracking in place. They now they have the right website to convert. They let us first launch your website and then you could see how they perform. You have to have the right tracking in place.

Yeah.

I'm really excited to talk about the niada. Hopefully they'll invite me to speak about it because I submitted that. But tracking is number one problem I see dealerships have.

That's so important.

Yeah. And we've taken so much of your time and thank you so much. How do dealers get a hold of you if they want to learn more, if they want your expertise or if they want to make the switch and get a mobile first website.

Yeah. So our Website domain is 3to1ignition.com and of course I'm also all over social media, on LinkedIn, on Facebook. Our company is also LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. We visit conferences very quite often. So if you go to any local association or national association, conferences will most likely be there. And if we're not, you know, please ask your association to invite us. We'll be happy to come in and, you know, consult and advise and work them. Sign up and join. 3, 2, 1. Ignition. So it's pretty easy. All our prices are on a website where you don't hide things. We don't ask to provide email address to get access to us.

No squeeze. No squeeze. Page.

I'm gonna try that out.

All right, Lyman, we appreciate you being here. Thank you.

Well, thank you, guys. Thank you for having me. It was fun. Dealers helping dealers. Please leave us a review and subscribe. The independent dealer podcast. Sam.