#276 - Branding Your Dealership IADAU 2023

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

Resources property advertising resources.

Great.

So we're going to talk about. So my name is Jeff Watson, if.

You guys don't know.

I own Four Seasons Auto, a location in Cedar City and St. George. I may have been the one that traveled the furthest. Did anyone go more than four hours today? Okay, I think I went. I also have the unique privilege of posting a weekly podcast called the Independent Dealer. I get to interview dealers, talk about best practices. So I love this type of learning. This is my type of learning, learning from other dealers. We always say you don't know what you don't know, right? There's always someone that's doing it different. None of us know at all, but all of us know it all. So this is the great opportunity. So let me rete my first question, guys. Somebody help educate us on the difference between advertising and brand.

I can go.

So to me, advertising, I think of advertising where it's like here's a product, I'm going to list it on all these different sites. I'm going to understand my customer acquisition costs. I'm going to understand how much it costs to acquire that customer for that specific vehicle. Branding to me is more like what is the vibe of your dealership? What is like the general overall feel? Are you consistent across all platforms? If that's Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you're at, consistency in your brand, some of your core value propositions.

We've talked a little bit about what happens post sale.

I know me and Jaden actually talked about this maybe like a year ago. What happens when you have a bad, bad experience?

Right.

For us we, we have five day exchange policy. We exchange the car, right?

We don't care if you buy that.

Car or that car as long as.

You buy a car from us.

We exchange it if you have a problem.

Right?

That's part of like branding. That's like part of our core value propos feel like is part of what we do.

I think Brandon is just getting your name out there and advertising is giving a reason to come buy from you. I mean I'm a big believer in traditional advertising which a lot of people no longer do. It's certainly declined and we're not. But these people are desperate to sell media and you can get some pretty sweet deals. So I'm a big believer in traditional and I think it's important that people know who we are. I think it adds credibility and it makes me feel like they're buying from a big dealer. And I've invested an insane amount of money in making sure people know who we are that are our customer. I also think that, you know, we can't, we can't advertise in every segment. And I've tried a lot of the car listing places and that's just not my business. You know, I'm not here to sell you a specific car. I'm here to sell you my program and get you into reliable transportation. Whereas these guys are much more dependent on, you know, KSL, autotrader, etc. And I had to make that decision. It was one of the hardest decisions I made to just say, okay, I'm, I'm Google, I'm Facebook and I'm traditional.

And that's all I am.

And it's been a good decision for my company not to, not to advertise specific vehicles. But again, so many different business models, so many different ways to skim the cat. That's just me.

Yeah.

And we struggle.

We went on mix advertising because we, we have to put our product in front of everyone. We do a lot of Internet advertising, radio, tv. We just wouldn't see that kind of success. That brings back the point that there's just so many ways to be successful and it's hard to be good at everything, but it's really, it's a lot easier to be good at one thing. So we try to focus on again, Internet advertising being good price bars under $15,000. But when it comes to advertising and branding our brand, we need to get that out to customers. And that's where the advertising comes in the path. We can have the best product, we can have the best prices, but if we're not getting customers in the door, our brand doesn't mean anything. So advertising is extremely important. We spend a lot of money probably just on the Internet, 25 to $30,000 a month. So it's, it's interesting to hear Nick's philosophy versus ours. But Nick is very successful going his route. But our best customer is our repeat referral. And probably with you guys, that's the same thing. So we did the same thing. We have the five day exchange. We spend a lot of money on goodwill, so a customer will come in. I think we spent $50,000 last year just on goodwill. We didn't have to help the customer, but we want this customer to come back. So these are things that we do at our business that have been really successful and hopefully just continues.

This is an interesting business. I love it because I love change and this industry changes all the time. We talk about inventory, right? You don't know what a day suppliers or how to make a turn, turn your inventory over properly and stuff. You're not going to follow the market trends.

It's interesting.

Everybody panics, right, and freak out. You got to make all these changes and all these moves and they're so worried about the rates, worried about all these things are going to happen when you can't control all that stuff.

Control.

You can't control. The fact is that your inventory is going to follow that. Right now everything in the teams, right, Everything that's in the team is selling these one, you know, years in the teams. You know, high dollar stuff like 10%.

Of people are going to be, you.

Know, looking online to get that stuff. You're going to sell us a and whatnot. So, you know, and when it comes to advertising, I went from spending 310 grand a month to, you know, we had Donovan Mitchell and all this crazy stuff which who knows if it works or not, have no idea, you know, to $74,000 a month in Mitsubishi. And I think it's, you know, there's, there's top funnel, you know, bottom funnel stuff and it depends on how many eyeballs you want to get, but also depends on the resources that you got. So you got to work within your means and you've got to deploy those resources properly and you have to vet all of the people that you're deploying resources with. You've got to vet them properly because everybody now has lead attribution. Everybody's in control the attribution. They're telling you that, you know, you're, you're making all this money off of them and they sold you 20 cars. Well, everybody is sold 20 cars. Every vendor sold 20 cars along the way, right. So, and I love the vendors, don't get me wrong. And everybody, every single vendor has its place and they are great at what they do and they need to be used properly, work properly. We need to manage it, you need to watch it. And so I don't know, I looked at, you know, with used car supermarkets we're running all of our heyday, we were doing over 700 things a month. And you know, the staff, right, I'm, we're currently working on with two different cities right now, one being Eagle Mountain, another one here. We got to convince them of the ideas and things that we've got going on. And it's been interesting to get their take on what they think we do. And one of the important Things that all of us in this room. This is an incredible meeting. I'm thankful that Nick invited me to this and we're sitting here doing this.

But one of the things we need.

To discuss as a whole is how do we work together? There's so much competition in this room. There's so much backfighting. There's so much stuff going on. And I taught everybody who used our city markets over a long period of time, don't ever talk bad about another dealership. You're putting yourself in their place. You're now becoming them. Because they're not going to believe you're not going to trust you, and they expect you to say something bad about that other dealer. What if you said something fantastic about that? And so we really work hard and pride ourselves on saying great things about other dealers that are out there. And customers call us and they want to complain about something that happened at another person's dealership. We cited the dealership. That's. Unfortunately, that's not. That's not exactly how it went. Here's. Here's how we see that. If you go back to that dealership and you speak to them and you work with them and you're nice and like them. So I think, as a whole, if we just got all of our sales people and all of us talking politely about each other to the consumer, because everybody's got a plate, right? And we work together on. I know people owning cars is like this crazy thing out there. You can have any car I've got. I don't give a crap, man. It's just metal. It is what it is. I didn't buy the fancy star on the face of the earth, for heaven's sakes. It's not a uniform. Take it.

Right?

Make money on it. I don't care. You need help on the arm price?

Not a problem at all. I don't.

You know, money is money. You're always going to make a deal. So I don't know. I just think there's a. There's no. There's a lot to go. This is a huge question. I mean, it's a really, really.

I won't make the answer the whole thing, but what I really love is. You said top funnel.

Bottom funnel.

Right.

So if we can all think of marketing or branding our marketing stack as branding's that top Funne market, what do people think of us?

What's our.

What's our image in the community? Bottom funnel would be advertising. Can I specifically attribute that channel to a sale? Right. We track that how many KSL leads leads did I have? How many auto trader leads did I have? How many cargoes leads did I have? How many of those did I sell? Which ones converted? That's our bottom funnel. But back to our top funnel, which.

I want to get into more.

You guys both mentioned an exchange policy.

Yeah.

Who here has an exchange policy? Ah, pretty crazy, huh? Thought we all had as is statements, right? We get them to sign the documents, we book the deal and then as we see it roll over the curb, we block the phone number, right? Do not call me about this as a who has a goodwill policy budget. Does anyone have a budget for goodwill and goodwill guys? So, so we have recon, right? Which is stuff we should do before the sale. We all have recon, we know what and then we have that goodwill which is the gap between what we should have done to the car and what our warranty is going to cover, right? Because we also aftermarket warranties, right? It's the in between, right? What are we going to do that's not spelled out in the warranty. You probably should have done before we sold it. Or we would have done had we kept the car an extra day or demoed in an extra 10 miles, right? Who has that policy? Do you guys track that? You know what it is? We spend about $200 a month on average. Some are five grand, some are zero, right? We're buy here, pay here, car's gotta run, car's not running, they don't make the car payment, right? So we're in a unique position where we are, for better or worse, forced to goodwill. What are some other ideas guys that are branding high level that you put into play at your dealerships that give that image or I want our dealers here to take home specific actionable items. Everyone just wrote down, I'm going to create an exchange policy, put whatever kind.

Of fine print you want on it.

Make sure it's legal, post it in your dealership. We have a four day exchange policy, right? Four Seasons, four day exchange policy. We give a three month, 3,000 mile warranty with every car, right?

A lot of dealers will do the same.

You'll include some sort of a guarantee on the vehicle. What other type of items or things can we do in our dealership? The brand.

Well, you got to get your, all your employees on board. That, that's, that's the key. So we have a sales meeting every week and I usually tell my sales people, look, you need to put yourself.

In that customer seat.

They're complaining, but wouldn't you do the same if that happened to you. And that's been really helpful for our sales people because now they're putting themselves in the customer and they're reacting as that customer was there and it's helped. And if you don't have your full employees on board, your brand will not come through because your employees, that's the face you can be looking. So it really needs to start with them, getting them to buy in on whatever you're selling and then they'll sell it to your customer.

That's super true. I want to get the answer from you guys, but how many times have you guys heard your employees say something? You're like, where did that come from? Where did that, where did that wordage, where did that attitude, where did that vibe towards the customer ever come from? Because I don't do it. I don't talk to you like that. Why would you talk to a customer like that? Right? So there's a lot of disconnect. And so to your point, you got to make sure that you're harping that in, you're getting that to your employees that are actually that front line that are talking to the customers directly because they might be portraying something that is 100% not the way you want your.

Dealership to be portrayed.

Yeah.

So another thing for us is online reputation.

We spend quite a bit of money.

Just maintaining reputation online. We literally have a girl that full time, that's her full job is just online reputation. We have a little over, I think what, 2000 reviews between both stores. That's huge to us.

Think about the amount of traffic that's.

On Google running past your dealership, that if that Moneyline reputation or they find something on Google that they don't like about your dealership, you never even had a chance to touch that.

Right.

And if you talk about top of funnel, right. You never even got to experience that customer. If your online reputation does not match what you are as a dealer.

Right?

So yeah, we literally have a girl, a full time online reputation, she calls out post purchase and says, hey, how was your experience? She kind of feels the fields the response for the customer.

And if it's negative experience, we hear.

About it, we hear about it, we get it, gives us a chance to fix that issue with that customer, but also like safeguard a little bit our online reputation. I always tell the people, I always.

Tell the guys, we're only as good.

As our online reputation because we're both our dealerships are on state. But the truth is like the majority of our Traffic comes top of bundle from either advertising platforms like ksl. Thank you KSL by the way for the sponsorship. KSL is huge in our business. They drive a ton of traffic for us if we spend a lot of money on Facebook. KSL is still right there with Facebook. As far as the traffic driver and auto trader. Thank you guys as well. But yeah, that's advertising that leads into the opportunity to build a brand is the way that I look at that.

Okay, so I knew Craig, he's a latex at the Nissan store that I sold cars at.

Yeah.

And Travis, so how did he go.

From a lot tech at Nissan to being a high, super high volume dealer in Mountain couple? The only answer I have to that.

Is what if he had told those.

Customers at the beginning that he wasn't going to make that repair? What would have they said to their friends and family about his dealership versus he made the repair when he didn't need to. What are they going to say to their friends and family?

You know you, you.

I don't hear him on the radio or him on the TV at all but yet he's a super high volume dealer selling older cars with more problems than, than the two or three year old cars. So and then cheap Jason was, was a ring guy at Raiders auto auction and I'd go buy cars and there he was with his smiley face for years. And I'm thinking well this guy just being auctioneer like his dad was and here he is just killing the market and it's the same thing. He got your reputation. Google reviews are super, super super super important and you've got to be on top of it. You got to have a ton of reviews, you got to ask every customer that buys a car for you to do it. Facebook is also very large for us. We will screenshot our five star Google reviews, take a picture of the customer and put it on Facebook.

That's been really big for us.

But to just to reiterate what these young rock stars said, you know it's all about the customer experience and they don't have a good experience. We're kind of dead in the water.

But I, I'd like to ask something like Nick said, we do sell a five to fifteen thousand dollar car. That's a really hard car to sell. Our online same thing we use Podium. If you don't use Podium, a great software to look at reviews and we respond to every review but we struggle. We're trying to get our review over four and we have almost a thousand on there so it's not easy. You can have the best processes and you can try to get it there, but it's still hard. Like Jason does raise on his online reviews. We struggle and we, we have this five day policy. We spent a lot of money in goodwill, but we still get those customers. No matter what we do, they're not happy. And so like we're talking about things that work but it's not easy. We're still struggling with.

Well, the answer to that is bury the review, get like 10, 5 stars. That's the only real answer.

The answer to that is pretty simple. But QR code on the jets we.

Started a long time ago.

These first two markets we ended up being number two in the entire country reviews. Put a QR code on the desk itself, get that QR code and we'll get everything done. Prior to going into finance, after they're done with finance, make sure that you have yourself or associated.

They love management.

Customers love management.

Right.

So all of our managers, you have to go and talk to the customer before they leave premises to say hey, if you have any issues at all, anything goes on, anything wrong with the car whatsoever, please contact us. We're spending $102,000 a month on average in repairs. You can start supermarkets out of those units. And you know it's a little different in Mitsubishi. We are, our cars are completely different than what we're selling. The consumer traction too. So you know, that's a little different deal. But as far as Google reviews, that's solved right away. Yeah, get them in and out of finance as fast as possible.

All right.

Sorry to break in here, but we got to talk about the sponsors. Jeff.

Yes, absolutely.

So Buckeye Dealership Consulting, that's who I use for my all of my now Jeff. All of my reinsurance products. I tell you, I've learned so much more about reinsurance in the last four months. Switching everything from my old company to my new. I'm still trying to get it sort out. But you know what? I am learning things and I'm learning how to do it and everybody at Buckeye is so freaking nice and knowledgeable and they help me do it. You know, what else can I say? I use them. They're the best. What else you want to know?

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

You can. And especially one like me. I'm just a know it all. So you know then I didn't know it.

Oh my goodness.

But anyway, Buckeye Dealership Consulting, cpi, vsi, vsc, all the V's, all the P's and they'll help you get it done. So give them a call.

Very, very important. And I think it's going to be. Google reviews will become the Amazon review. You know, nowadays you buy something on Amazon, if it doesn't have like 10,000 or 15,000 reviews, you don't even look at it. You go right past it. Right. I think for dealerships, the standard is going to be a thousand reviews, you know, 2,000 reviews. If you have less than a thousand reviews, people going to shoot right past you. So you kind of get like a review inflation, you know, where it's like, so, so the next point, that's how.

To, you know, you got to vary.

Sometimes those bad ones because you're never going to make everyone happy 100 of the time.

But you got to add the good rooms.

And if they, if you do perform it, if you do go in bed.

And beyond, ask for it.

Yeah. Yes, I would say don't bury the bad ones. Confront the bad ones.

Put the information down.

That's correct. You know, and answer. I mean, you heard about Park City or was no Snowbird that had the, the biggest powder, one star, too much powder. You know, they were just basically answering their, their customers complaints out in the open. And we started doing that really, really heavy. And it worked really, really well. Consumers, I mean, they were almost embarrassed that they put that up. Right. And take it down. Heck, I have a doctor friend two days ago left a bad review about a dealership in Kansas. And you know, he sent. This Kansas guy called and he sent it to me, so I called him up. So why would you do that? That's petty, right?

It's.

The guy didn't do anything wrong to you, unfortunately, sold the car.

You didn't buy it in time.

It's not your fault. Right.

Well, and we've had customers. We respond even to every review. Like you said, we've had customers come.

In and say, hey, we like the.

Way you responded to that review. We can see in between the lines that that review wasn't real. So, yeah, I agree with Travis. You don't bury it, but you need to respond. But yeah, definitely we respond. Even the good ones, we do a QR code on our desk. What we probably could do is have management more involved. So that's a brilliant idea.

But I agree.

I, I wouldn't bury it completely, but definitely respond.

I think just, just what do you mean by barriers?

So many fire.

They don't necessarily see one. Char you have.

You should respond. I don't. I couldn't agree with that more. A lot of times, you know, we get like, they took my car when I didn't make my payment. I mean, that kind of speaks for itself, right? Crazy, huh?

And my input on the. On the response to a one star review is keep it classy, keep it the facts. Don't get into the mud when you fight with pigs, get dirty.

Right.

So super classy. Respond to sorry you had a bad experience. Please call my personal cell phone number.

But I would add, I'm not responding to the person who gave the bad review. You're responding to someone that's going to read it.

Yes.

So you're responding. How is the next person going to read how I handle it?

Yeah. And we have a great job. And Adrian, to his credit, he will bring that one star in and sit them down and try to get to.

The root of it.

Can we solve this? Can we make this better? To Nick's point, if I reflowed your.

Car, she didn't make payments.

Kind of the end of the story. There's no reason to knock you, but in some of those situations, you want to get there. So in addition, guys, this is something I've been really curious about. So this is a personal question I have for you and maybe the whole audience when we're branding our dealership. Are any of you guys using a charitable organization as part of your broader mission to be a car dealer or part of a broader mission to be.

Here and to sell cars to.

That, to me, is really interesting. You do see dealers that say, you know, legitimately, not hokey, not a sales pitch, not nonsense. We contribute a portion of every sale to this charity or our dealership is very much on this organization and this charity. And we want to put that out there as a way to give them exposure and help bring them more influence or give them money to better their cause. Are you guys doing that in your dealerships or anyone else?

No, we actually don't do much of that just because we're numbers. We're looking, going back to the point, we look how many of the advertisers you use come in and say, hey, we sent you this many leads this month. We just sent you 2,000 leads. I don't care if you send me a million beads. If I don't get a customer salad out of that, it's not worth it to me. So we actually track. We say, okay, how many cars did we sell off at ksl? How many cars, like the customer, before they go into finance, we are finding out how they came In. So we have a difficult time saying, okay, do you find a car? Because we donated to this charity and so that's been our business is how do we look at it number wise? How is this helping our business? Maybe just you have to look at charity sometimes not as probably business just being a good person because I think a lot of times charity, you're not going to see a value to your business. So we probably need to look at it a little bit different.

No, you're right.

Charities between you and your employees, charities between you and your employees and your staff to build value in yourself and equity in yourself and great character, great people. And that's something that you hold together as a team and you do special things with the team. And we we've done a lot of stuff. Lots and lots and lots of stuff. And yeah, we don't talk about it. We don't talk about it. Don't put it out there. I don't want to. Don't want to cheapen it. You know what I mean? Don't want to use it for. Use for record.

Well, I do talk about it.

We, we used to have a meeting.

Man, every Christmas time in K. And that was a really cool promotion. A lot of. We focused the autism community for several years because my sister in law has a special needs son. So that was really cool to kind of target that. Another cool thing is if your employee's son or daughter has a baseball thing, just say yes, just say yes. Unlimited budget for that kind of stuff. It just brings so much goodwill and gratitude from your employees and everything else.

Another, you know, and then think about.

Causes that might be important to you. I think homelessness is a huge problem. And I met my son, dated a girl whose mother worked for Salt Lake county and would house teenagers that were homeless. And as long as they got a job and set themselves up, I would sell them. I wouldn't give it to them. I would sell them a car for past conditions. It was a halfway east car for a thousand dollars out the door. And I thought that was just such a cool program because they actually have to have skin in the game. They have to save up money for that and it puts them on a really cool path. And I just found it just happenstance. So there's all kinds of cool stuff in getting you and your staff involved in it. And it's really fun and everybody just gets a good feeling when they do stuff like that. I think, I think it's definitely a worthwhile thing to look for.

Yeah.

So I, I can think A couple of scenarios of just, like, investing in your surroundings, right? Like, it may not be like something like that, but it may be just like something simple. Like, for example, this last year, we got a chance to buy the police dog.

We had. Police department, right?

They were asking. They were gathering money to buy new police stocks and just investing in our surroundings because, I mean, how many times do we leak with no dealer plate, back window, half slanted, you know, like, just investing in the community to say, hey, this is.

This is a good dealer.

If it is the sports team, we do Pleasant Grove. Pleasant Grove High School, every single year. I have cousins there, you know, Lehigh High School, we buy T shirts, like, and we don't even say much about it other than we just did, you know, our banners up there or whatever. And it's just good because it just. Obviously, your finance department, they should be, you know, sitting down with the customer. Oh, how'd you hear about us recording the ems? Like, that's good practice. But even if you didn't. Even if you didn't, like, get a direct sale because of that scenario, you know that, like, the brand results of good word of mouth will pay off.

So you get a name of the dog?

Did we get a name?

I don't think we did, actually.

No, it was really cool.

Yeah, it was really cool.

They, like, were super stoked about it, and they brought the dog by to see all the sales reps one day.

So one thing, the next step was really cool, is obviously, I'm 100% guilty of this, guys. I'm sitting at my desk. I can see the front desk, and I know when it's a little high school kid coming in, trying to get me to sponsor their 4H or cheer thing, and I just, like, shut the door and kind of, like, hide out.

Stupid guys.

What is it? $500 check, right? It's like the next point they stop, some kids gonna come hit you with the dealership, cut them a freaking check, right? If it's your kids, your employees saying, cut them a check, like, be a sponsor of those activities, it's just.

It's super cool.

And I think it also endears your employees, right? We talk so much about how to attract and keep, you know, millennials and that they want a bigger cause than just money or a paycheck or whatever. They want to be a part of something bigger. So maybe finding a cause that your dealership can get behind, whether it's homelessness or mobility or the food kitchen or handing dogs to people, whatever you're doing, like, Those are things you can do that get all your employees to jump on board and kind of go after something that maybe just more than a paycheck.

I just think you got to be.

Careful with charity, not to try to monetize. Yeah, charity, like Travis said, that should just be for you, your personal growth, not for money. Not growing the business, just because you're a good person. So we bought cars for people that need it. We don't advertise. We donate to the sheriff. We donate to bountiful. We donate. Kids come in. We do that. But you just gotta be really careful that you're not trying to use that to grow your business selfishly. That's not fair. Yeah.

When I got on the radio and talked about us.

I post my tithing settlement on my Facebook.

Hey, everybody. Just to break in real quick, one more time, Primal End. A great sponsor of the podcast and a great place to go to get your financial money lend on your property. We had a really, really great episode a couple of weeks ago where we interviewed them down at Buy Here, Pay here, United. So if you didn't listen to that one, actually our most popular episode on YouTube to date.

And it's great. Honestly, listen to that podcast. We can't. We can't do anything. We can't tell you anything that you can't learn from that podcast. They will help you get your financial stuff in order so you can get the money you need to grow and the growth they talked about. Jeff, after a dealer got a line of credit, it was like 186% in the first year. That's insane, right? How would you like to grow 186% this year?

Yeah, it sounds painful, but I'm.

I'm there.

I'll do it.

Well, give Primal in a call. Those guys can help you and they're the best in industry.

So we got just 10, 13 minutes left. I want to open it up. If you guys have questions, you've got four amazing smart men right here. So ask them some questions. As it relates to branding, we can step into advertising. Marketing or I guess.

Brandon Travis knowing.

For a long time.

Because back in the day, the new leaders aren't going to understand this. We did do business all the time together and we helped each other and it was healthy. And I'm the same way.

Now you want to.

No big deal.

We want and so much. Now you call leaders and number they.

Don'T treat you well.

Number two, they don't want to even talk.

Like, what do you mean?

Really cool that you're bringing that back. There's only a few of us doing that tonight.

Set a spread.

So thank you very much for that. And yeah, all these years.

The one.

Thing we gotta start, I mean, you get really happy. We have to think about what is the toughest job in the dealership. What's the job that you do not want to do? You don't want to be a salesperson. You don't want to go out and sell cars. You don't want to take enough. You don't want to make phone calls. You don't want to do all this stuff. Well, these are the folks that are. I don't know what they're doing. They're, you know, younger people in some cases and stuff. They're going to your dealership. They're intimidated up at the desk and they're looking at you. You're the.

You're the king.

You're this big, you know, person, this nice dealership. I think we need to treat salespeople with every bit of respect that we possibly can. And so when, when they come to our dealership, and I'm sure we've made mistakes, but we do everything we possibly can to try to put them on the right car. What situation are you in? What kind of car? What can we do to help you take a car back and go sell the car? Not because of what we're making. I don't care about the money, man. It's just, that's not the deal. Right. The deal is it's a network. It's working together. But these sports, they'll pay. And they're the ones that are representing us out with the consumer. And they need to have the best experience possible. If you want to have great customer experience, it starts with that great sales. And they deserve to be treated like gold. Yeah.

And that mentality is.

Yeah.

I want to tell you the next.

Five parts, not just right.

It's keeping that long story, long term customer relationship.

Yeah.

Yeah. Other questions. Well, I wanted to mention something like you're talking about harming a car, right?

Yeah.

From another dealer.

Travis has learned a lot of cars.

For me, but I'm up front with.

Hey, Travis, I bought this car. I'm in it this much. Like, I really need my document. Like, I need to make a little bit of money. And Travis will say, oh, I understand completely. So, like, if someone's called me to arm a car, a lot of times it's, hey, how much can I get it for?

Can you take 2,000 off?

It's just being honest. You know, I really need this car.

You can have it.

But, you know, we're all here to make. If I don't make business money, I'm not going to be able to earn that car, Travis, because I'm going to be out of business.

Well, that's not like Travis Climate all.

The way down that cell and that sell. When you make a check on his law and he's willing to give that vehicle, that's. That keeps the energy.

But I think the cell needs to understand that you need to make money too. If you're selling, Travis, all your cars at cost, that's not going to be.

Beneficial for you either. Well, so sell it to me at the online price. I don't, I don't.

I don't care.

Just sell it to me at the online price. That's not a problem at all. I'll give it to the customer for the online price and then I'll make a little bit of reserve or we'll make some back in or we'll do whatever. Well, that salesperson just got paid and I.

We sold you a lot of things. So just being up front, no, everybody's been great.

I'm looking around, I see Chico's up like this. I bet we've had great experiences with all of you guys, man. It's just a lot of reason we really, really need people in this room.

Make a point on that.

I always say yes, too.

And when 9 out of 10 times, the guy never even comes to get caught.

So, you know, just tell them yes and they don't show up.

I mean, it's not saying that it's.

Bad, but sometimes it doesn't work out. So you said yes?

Yeah, yeah. You want to turn your inventory too? So, yeah.

Any other questions?

Okay, so with you guys having. I'm a small dealer, you know, and I'm trying to figure out where to.

Put money to get the best ROI on advertising.

What do you guys. What are your recommendations?

Yeah, I mean, that would be my response is Facebook.

Facebook.

I mean, how many groups are on Facebook?

Right?

Like car groups or groups or whatever sell on Facebook. I graduate to ksl. KSL dominates the local market, kind of, you know, like, they're a huge. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, they are like huge traffic, rather in Utah. That's kind of true. Specifically for my model. Maybe not so much Nick's, but KSL does a great job. Auto trader. But first. First start would be Facebook and KSL for me. I thought that happened with a couple of reps for A rep that started zoneage and that's where we started to.

Sell was Facebook and ksl. I love that question.

Yeah, that's a great question. My question to you is, what's your business?

I mean, I sell everything.

So how many cars you sell?

Not many.

Just how many are selling?

About two a month.

Awesome. That's great, man. Right, so you've got a couple to work with. Start sticking some money away. Don't advertise at all right now. Just, just stash some dough, right? Put some money away, a couple hundred bucks a car, whatnot. But social, yeah, word of mouth social, right? There's tons and tons and tons of social. Social. Every one of your people could be putting it on their sites, tagging each other. It's tons and tons of Facebook. Right? Keep that rolling. Good deal. Let's stash a little bit of that though. Then when you have X amount of dollars, then you present yourself to one of these folks who, you know, party vendors and stuff and come up with.

A great plan and then always be a student. The fact that you showed up to this thing tells me you'll probably be a 40, 55 month guy in about a year because you're willing to learn and keep an open mind. And I can't tell you how many dealers think they know everything and never, never become a student. And so that, that, that's huge. I, I, everything.

Most things I've learned and most things.

That have gotten me better have been from other dealers.

Super cool.

Thank you.

Congrats.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about the free channels that we have. You know, we always don't explore those or exploit them to the point that we should, whether it be Facebook feeds, Instagram, Tick Tock, you know, react, repeat, referral, podcast.

Yeah, whatever it might be.

You know, you can, you can sell a lot and not spend a lot.

Right.

It's not always that a new tool. It's not always that new audience, whether it's or anything. What's the typical ad spend per car sold? Jim, I'm gonna ask you to think about that because I know, you know, what's the typical ad spend per vehicle sold?

Do you guys know that Miller Group is 350?

So 350, a car that was the standard Asbury is five bucks.

You know, when I was building my.

Business out like 350, 400 bar and people thought I was insane, but that's really what fueled my growth. It was a, it was critical and I felt like it was a worthy investment. But now that I'm established, now that people know who we are and we've got a good customer base, I can get by with low 200-undreds per sale.

That's what I was going to say. I'm like right around 175 to 200. It also depends on like how many channels you know, like you have three channels, you have big traffic. Do you have, you know, like there's a ton of different ways to acquire customers. Lead mapping, that's something we went through and said every, every single lead provider that we're on. Like how do all the lead map into the dealership? That's obviously going to bring down like that organization of that e flow into your dealership is going to reduce your, your like per car cost, right? Like how organized are you with that? How well you convert like all that stuff. It's a big driver of what established that per car number, right? Yeah, we actually traffic per advertiser.

So we have some advertisers $500, some that are $100. Because that money you're spending, you want.

To see a return.

You're spending $5,000 a month on that advertiser.

You want to look at it.

The more specific you can get, the better your business will be. So it fluctuates too because your business March, everyone does really well. That's a really good month. So people have money to get their tax return. So of course it's going to go down. But get very analytical because that's your money. Better the data is, the better your business will be. But we average about 203.

The old adage, I know half my advertising doesn't work, but I don't know which half.

Yeah, everyone in here, we've all been.

Geo targeted by Nick while we. And not all leads are creative. People do and that's one thing to know is when you're advertising they could be really, really cheap. Lead acquisition, what's the conversion to a sale? So that's when we talk about your sales per lead channel.

Right.

You do Facebook and you'll get a million leads and then you'll sell one of them.

Right.

Whereas you can do some higher, some lower funnel type lead sources. Right. And it's like, well those things cost me a ton in advertising $. But they convert at a great, great rate. Jim, what's the standard advertising dollar?

I hear 300 across independent.

Yeah, I don't know.

By storytelling I'm spending time. Great.

Okay, we got a couple more minutes. Any. We know it all, we've got it all figured out.

Like, what's the cost of a lead versus sale?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That comes down to your point of tracking, right? We. You need to have a sophisticated CRM that's going to be able to track with track your acquisition. And then of course, you want to.

Do that math monthly.

I mean, some of you guys probably do it more like weekly or bi weekly, but you're. You're tracking weekly. Do you guys have any. I mean, for buyer pay here, we're like 50 conversion rates, you know, kind.

Of down the funnel, which is super.

Yeah.

Which.

Which is more high intense. I guess I wouldn't even. I look at Jim so trying to.

Get him to give me a signal.

On what an actual buyer pay converts at.

But.

Do you guys have kind of a general rule of thumb?

You know, we.

I don't track it so much because. Because people know who we are and because they know what we do, we have the privilege of having pretty dang low funnel leads. You know, our conversion is huge. People that have good credit aren't going to call me, you know, and that's. That was one of the biggest benefits of focusing solely on, on that demographic and that customer. When I made that conscious decision, holy crap, it just changed our whole world. We don't need as many people making phone calls. And our conversion ratios are so much better because. Because people know what we do and they know who we are.

Yeah. We have two minutes left.

So I want to go off what.

Nick said to wrap this up, guys. And my, my closing comments will be that when we talk about branding your dealership, know what you are and know what you do, right? Figure out who you are, figure out where you want to be in the market. What is your dealership? What is that image you want to put out there? What is that key employee you know, or that key customer? What does that avatar look like? These are my customers. I want more than look like this. This is who I need to be as a dealership. Right. So I'm going to put that out there in all my advertising, marketing, everything's going to be uniform. My dealership, you know, the look of my dealership, the look of my marketing. Look at my employees, look at my salesmen, the way they interact with people. So when we talk about branding, guys, that's all I can implore is just always looking at your reputation. Look at the way you're setting yourself up in community and just continually improve that and check on yourself. So that's our panel. Thanks.

Dealers helping dealers. Please leave us a review and subscribe the Independent Dealer Podcast.