Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Mets Kramer and Ron talk in more detail on the Digital Dealership.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This conversation focuses in more detail on the Digital Dealership. The internet and the digitization of our business have changed things dramatically. Mets and I talk about the foundation of our businesses, machinery. The ownership lists and data elements that allow all of us to manage the relationships with our customers. How the internet has evolved over the past sixty years and how most of us have been left behind continuing to do what we have always done. This is the first in an ongoing discussion on "how to" adapt and innovate your way to the "New Reality" in our Industries.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Welcome to another candid conversation. Today, our conversationalist is a gentleman from Canada at the moment called Metz Kramer. Metz has been a rather strong advocate of what is called the digital dealership. Metz and I were just chatting in preparation for the discussion, and I was suggesting to him that he was perhaps the only advocate of a digital dealership because hardly anybody is trying to do for dealers or help dealers digitize their businesses like Metz has been. Metz, welcome aboard. Good to have you with us. Thanks, Ron. It's good to be back. That was rather a laborious introduction. Why don't you restate what you view as a digital dealer so that we can start from a common platform?
SPEAKER_02For sure. It's actually something I've been trying to write out in a clear way. But I think the simplest way to start thinking about it is to look at the dealership as the execution arm of what really is already, in some ways, a digital business. Everyone at your dealership sits in front of their computer screen for large amounts of time putting all this information in. And so a large part of the business is digitized. But the problem is it hasn't become a single entity. And it remains like a bunch of silos. We often complain about how our business is too many silos, but it it also stays information silo. And we have groups of people who are responsible for marketing, who are doing our website, which is a bunch of static pages. We have departments doing parts, and they have their online function. But really, I think probably the best comparison, and I uh always try and bring something that's relevant to our own experience, because I think most of us are better at living in the digital world than we are at working in it in our in the equipment industry. So we come on to, for example, Facebook or Amazon, two of the easiest examples to use here. Um, and and we find a world there that is tuned to us. We don't show up on those platforms and find a whole lot of things that are of no interest to us. We find things that have been curated through back-end processes that have collected who we are and what we like and what we're there for, and present us with that from day one, right? From the moment we first arrived. And I think that's probably the most easy way to consider what would a digital dealership look like. It's like if we are working digitally, then our entire goal is to make sure that our digital experience is as easy as being held handheld through our physical dealership.
SPEAKER_00So stay stay with that point then, and use your your two examples of Facebook and Amazon. They collect information on what you and I look at what we do when we're there. What technology is out there that has allowed that to happen? That they will be able to track us and what we're looking at and what we like and what we do. How's that done?
SPEAKER_02Oh, the the simplest piece of it is the thing that everyone gets asked to okay when they come to a website is your cookies. Cookie is a small database on your computer in your browser that when you return to a website, allows that website to remember who you are and use that information to customize um your experience.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so stay there, stay there for a second. Who at a dealership today is responsible for designing and and creating those cookies?
SPEAKER_02In the end, the cookies developed by the developer, the software developers, but it's really beyond that. It should be people in the dealership that recognize, like, hey, when my customer comes to visit, because I happen to be away for the weekend, uh, and they go to the website to try and get self-service, what are the things that they're that site's going to need to know about my customer so that we can customize it? You know, and even if something as simple as a cookie that remembers um what your email address is and feeds that into the site so the site can go look up all the data about you in their CRM or other business systems, that's enough to then turn that into an engaging experience.
SPEAKER_00So is it fair to say that there's a job function at a dealership that should be driving all of that? Absolutely. And have you found many dealers that that has a job function that does that?
SPEAKER_02Um there unfortunately aren't. And that is, you know, if for the larger dealers, it's probably um oversight. Uh, and for a smaller dealer, that's just a limited resources. You know, those smaller dealers should be working with uh partner organizations or consultants or et cetera, to provide that.
SPEAKER_00So on the size differential, the bigger dealers are probably going to have somebody on staff that would be able to look after that. The smaller dealers would probably be outsourcing that to a specialist that helps them with IT. Fair fair comment. Exactly. That's I mean, we do that for a lot of small and medium dealers. So let me let me get a little bit more technical for a second. With HTML, I know that you're on my site. With XML, I can track your cursor. So I know everything that you're looking at. Do you want to talk to that just a little bit so people understand what really is there technically without overpowering them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so really, I mean, aside from the the technology that does it, what you're doing is um you're really tracking the user's engagement, what what they're doing, so that you can understand that, so that you can then use that, analyze it, and predict what they're going to do next. So if people are hunting through different pages or different areas of the site to see, you know, to find the information they need, then that becomes a profile of that visitor. And that's what it's like uh like you mentioned the cursor, it's like digital eyes. You you watch where the eyes are going, and then you know, like, oh, this person came on this page, they never got to this part of the page, um, and therefore they weren't interested in the bottom of the page, they then went over to this side. So, I mean, if you can track even something as simple as a user comes in every single time and he goes through the home page, and then this site and that page, this page, this he's memorized the path to where he really wants to go. Why why is the site making him do that all the time?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so that's that that's perfect. So let me draw other one other distinction before we get into application. I'm I'm gonna say that most of the part what we're looking at and dealing with is data, which is raw, and very little information. Um, and I think that's an important distinction as we go forward and how we can use the digitized dealership. Um Google Analytics, for instance, will not tell me who you are because I don't they don't want me to know the inside of their system, and that's a privacy issue, that's cool. But I do know how long you spend on whatever page, how often you come back to it, how if there's new people, old people. I I got a lot of statistics that I see on our website. Yeah. Do you find that there's dealerships out there that have people that look at Google Analytics relative to the dealer web page?
SPEAKER_02I can honestly say that even on my websites, I probably don't spend as much time as I should trying to understand. It's complicated. It takes work and it takes people who want who start to understand it. And for someone who really understands it, it's like 10 minutes work. You know, give a prof a specialist in that area your Google Analytics and they can tell you a lot. Try and figure it out yourself. You probably spend a really long time. Um and I like kind of that distinction. Like in the dealership, like you have the people who drive by because they like to look at machines and they want to see if there's something in the yard. Those are like the equivalent of your anonymous website visitors. But a dealership's a relationship machine, right? Where we um we build relationships. It's the best part about the industry, and why I love it, is it's a repetitive business. You get to deal with the same people. You know, if you just like selling stuff, then you go sell TVs because it's different people every day. But if you like relationships, you sell equipment because you get to see the same people for 20, 30 years. Uh, and so you have to kind of look like once you recognize who a visitor is, and there's lots of ways to get the cut that get the visitor to identify themselves, and once that's in a cookie, now it's like, oh, you're you're not my visitor, you're my customer. And yet, so many sites treat every single person the same way, including all of their um customers who are coming all the time for for service.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the repeat buyers, the repeat visitors are treated exactly the same way as the new guy, the newbie.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_00It's it's it's kind of distressing. So, with that as a background framework on the digital side of the dealership, the information technology sign, the artificial intelligence, the cookies, the movement of the cursor, getting that information. Let's move over to how what's the foundation from your perspective? What's the foundation piece of data that we need in the digital dealership?
SPEAKER_02Well, as charming as we all are, and as much as we like relationships, you know, the the the truth is that the people, the connection is equipment. Your customers come to you because they need equipment, they own equipment, they need serviced. It's always about equipment.
SPEAKER_00The machine itself.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The fleet of equipment that your customer owns is what drives their purpose for having a relationship with you. We can augment it lots of ways by having better relationships, better ways of doing business, but if they didn't own machines, they wouldn't come. So I have I always found it really surprising when I especially when I went on my own and and some of the other dealers that I was with uh earlier in my career, when the dealership couldn't track that information. It was kind of stunning. And I was lucky enough to see like both dealers that did it well, and their system was built for tracking all kinds of information, and then other dealer systems that you know couldn't even repeat a customer's previous machines that they had either worked on or something, like it just forgot it all the time. And those are the two extremes that you see. And so um step one is make sure that you can write down or record digitally all of your customers' fleet data, and often in the way that they talk about it, right? My customer calls me and says unit 27 is down. Like, which what's the serial number? I don't know what the serial number is, it's down. Well, then my job as the digital dealer is to be like, oh, unit 27, you're talking about you know, serial number such and such. That that is the heart of um both your customer relationship, but also then I think everything that comes from what you then know about the equipment and the customer because of that information.
SPEAKER_00I I I couldn't agree with you more, and let's resign there for a second. What I've said for decades is that if you do not know the machine population, the machine ownership of your territory, you don't know your business. And you're using the two extremes that I know, Unit 27, and I'll go further. Unit 27 has operator Archie, and that machine works 1,742 hours last year. Uh, was bought in 2003, it's got a meter reading of 12,000. Its cost per operating hour for parts and service is $92.72, and the mean for that machine is $80. It's time to trade him in. Now I've got information from that one little piece of data called the machine. Exactly. The difference between data and information. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Bring information is what you derive out of different data points.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_00I used to call myself, I was like a mule brain in a tin barn in the parts and service world. I made a lot of noise but didn't get much attention. It's it's the same thing for where you're going. You're kind of plowing new ground for the dealers. You've got to get the hearts and minds of the dealership to understand and accept that that truth that we just talked about is something that's beneficial for them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it I think one of the easiest ways to point it out, and I've done it with almost every person that we've worked with, um, is to find, you know, that that customer that you sold some machines to five years ago. And then only to find out that five years later they just bought new machines from some other dealer. And you ask yourself the question why? Like, well, I have a customer who's a low-engagement customer. You know, they're two machines, there's not a lot of money there. Um, and the sales rep just doesn't call on them. I mean, sales reps, as proactive as we want them to be, are still very reactive. They tend to work with, you know, the 20 80-20 rule and spend most of their time with 20% of their customers, if not more. Um, and so they're not calling on them. And that's where that data, who owns what, becomes information that says, hey, Bob, um, this customer over here has five-year-old machines that we sold them. Uh, we at this point we really need to start talking to them every six months. And so get a notification up in front of Bob so that that doesn't slip through his fingers.
SPEAKER_00So let me let me take that a little bit further in in poking. The salesman as an individual is going to determine the success of the dealership. You agree with that? Always okay. So let me go further with that. The salesman then is motivated to get to a point economically that he's comfortable, that he has satisfied his needs financially for him and his family. You agree with that? Yes, there so once he gets there, how do I know how much more there is in the territory that I've given to him for us to be able to get because he's not going after it anymore? Correct.
SPEAKER_02Correct. So that that's um a combination of data gathering, like you know, your your primary source of data is I think still your sales route. Yep. You know, they're they know the people, um, but that's not to say that there isn't stuff missing, you know. I I'm I'll be honest, when I started down this road, I I estimated in my head how many dealers there might be in North America. I was like, you know, a few couple thousand. And then we went looking and documenting, and we found something like 15,000. And it stunned me. So there's always more out there than you think. Uh and that's data gathering. Turning that data into something then, and then deciding, like, oh, we we did do an analysis of that territory, and we did have some data gatherers go through, you know, especially with digital tools, and found everyone. And we realized that that territory has 30% more potential customers than we even knew about. We're simply not touching them. And now, you know, you probably've got lots of history in territory analysis and and how to reevaluate designing territories. It that makes you realize that you're just not getting to everyone and that that territory needs that different focus.
SPEAKER_00So, so come further up in the helicopter. How did you find 15,000? Where'd you go? How did you get that?
SPEAKER_02Well, there are lots of websites that are very happy to present long lists of dealers that use that website. And I simply got people to go in and find them all.
SPEAKER_00How about also traditional print media? Same thing. It's it's it's amazing to me that people looking for machines still use their traditional print media. It's regular, it's been around there for 50, 70 years, but it's still there and still used.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'd say there's like uh it's still used. Um, there's definitely a generational divide there on what they like. Um, and I and there's a little bit of um source bias is I guess the best word I can think of. What you know, when when you're asked by someone um in a survey, where did you find us? And you don't really remember, you give the answer that you think is you're familiar with, you know, so it's like, oh, where'd you find us? Oh equipment journal, I have it in the bathroom, you know, um, and so that there's a combination there.
SPEAKER_00That's kind of the way it's it's kind of interesting if you look at the used parts business. There were two sources for people to go through to determine if they had a part you were looking for used, uh, an axle, uh a blade, or whatever. Yeah, comes to find out it was the same family, they had a breakup in the middle, yeah, and they ended up competing with each other, and nobody really picked up on that. And if you if you look at Amazon and Facebook, where you started, Amazon has really devastated bookstores, haven't they? They've certainly made a really big dent in it, yeah, for sure. They came from nothing into the and and took market share away. So here we are in the digital dealership, with the salesman being the limit to our sales volume based on their comfort economically, yeah, and our lack of data, equipment facts. Yeah, the dealer doesn't know that they're doing well or not well.
SPEAKER_02No, they don't, they don't really understand the size of the market, right? You have you have dealers that look at pins data to see what's being sold, um, but those are deals that are happening, it's not market size. And I'll go back to um, so I spoke at AD, I did the educators series in 2018. The topic of my uh presentation was a granular data-driven approach to strategic sales, and and it all came from uh my time very early on in my career. I I went to see the the CIO uh at the dealership, and um we created a good relationship. And he's like, Hey, take a look at this. Here's a here's a list of 10-year-old backhoes. They're all case 580s, I think. And he's like, Here's our next marketing campaign. And it was it's never left me, you know, that he was sitting in his office digging through the equipment file and identified, you know, so easily that right there staring you in the face is every single person that you need to go talk to, because you know there's a high percentage of them that are going to be in the market.
SPEAKER_00And and it's all about timing. Roughly give me a timestamp on that. Is that 1990, 1980, 1970? Be like 2003, 1980. So 20 20 years ago. Yeah, right? Yep. If I looked at a unit. Of 100 dealers, how many do you think have people that do what he did?
SPEAKER_02Um probably say are in the 5% range that are actively using that data. Even the ones that have the facility to do it have admitted to me that they're not doing that quite yet.
SPEAKER_00I agree with you. So come in a different direction. That's for the brands that we represent that we sell. Yep. How do we get the information for everybody else? Relationship. Bring value. So that works if I have a relationship with a customer who's bought a piece of equipment from me. What about the universe of the customers that haven't bought anything from me yet? How do I find them?
SPEAKER_02So there are uh there are definitely stores for that. The US's market is great for that. Um, all the financial filings, the UCC filings that go through. There's several uh organizations out there that scour um all the UCC filings and clean that data and make it available. There are people who scour you know every um auction to gather that data with that information, it's fairly straightforward. Uh, but then like that's like a traditional data gathering exercise. But what's stopping a dealership from finding excuses or reasons why a customer doesn't give them that data? You know, even all those visitors that come by and come to your website, even if they don't do business with you, they're probably price checking or finding specs on your site. What's stopping you from finding ways to gather that information? I mean, if someone walks through the door, you ask them for their name.
SPEAKER_00Why don't you ask something on the website? It's that's a that's a perfect segue, Mets, because where I was going with that was yes, there are people that do that, that scour that data. It's a narrow and and they've made they've monetized that term because they sell that information. It's public information. I mean, everybody can get that. Yep. The dealers haven't spent any time doing it because that's not what they view to be their primary function. They got to sell equipment, period. Yeah. If I've got a guy out there lucky enough to find a customer who wants to buy a piece of equipment, then I can engage and away we go. I do not, however, have anybody on board that goes out and looks for new customers. Yeah. I can't afford, I can't afford to do that. Oh my goodness, you're spending money. I can't afford to do that. Doesn't it kind of pay for itself? Well, market coverage has become a bit of a trap, also, hasn't it? I have the number of salesmen that I can afford. Yeah. I uh end up having a market capture amount. I have a sales volume in my territory that's determined by the financial comfort of my salesman. Yeah, and I'm okay. Yeah, there's a bit of complacency there. And it's here's a lot of people. Yeah, my my my performance criteria isn't particularly challenging, is it?
SPEAKER_02No. And I'll be honest, I think that's where, you know, just like we keep using the same example. I got to find some better ones, some additional ones to keep it spicy. But you know, that's where Amazon came from. They figured out how to take where everyone was weak and be strong at it and make it so easy that they just took over all that market share.
SPEAKER_00And and we we have other examples to keep it spicy. One of them is Walmart. Yeah, you know, Amazon is viewed as one of the largest retailers in the world, so is Walmart. Yep. So we can see how they compete with each other back and forth, and and it's all digital. But your comment about somebody comes to my website, yeah, and I don't trap who it was that came in. Oh my god, what's the matter with you? Yep, they're coming in and checking specs when they're evaluating because they don't trust the salesman of that brand, whoever it is. Maybe I should go see what the fufu valve is on a such and such machine. The case 580 is a perfect example. That's that particular loader backhoe used to have astounding market share. Exactly, doesn't have it anymore. Yeah. Um, it's it's it's kind of amazing how all of this thing evolves. Shift over for a second to parts and service. In the terms of my career, the published market capture rate, market share for parts, yeah, has gone from somewhere around 80% to somewhere around 40% best practices. Yeah, and I'm gonna not gonna challenge us the numbers. I don't want to get more precise, they're not precise, but it's the market capture has roughly shrunk by half. Yeah, it's where's it gone? It's gone to competitors. Cool. Why'd it go there? Because that competitor paid attention to them and I didn't. Yep. With the digital dealership, I don't need to have hundreds and hundreds of man hours. I've got hundreds and hundreds of machine hours that can do that for me and pop something up and say, hey, wait a second, George bought a machine six months ago, he hasn't bought one filter from you yet.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there's your there's your hidden person at the dealership that everyone should be considering is your data analyst. Yeah. To to tell you where those weaknesses are. But also, if if uh I forget the person who hasn't bought anything in the last six months, the name, but you know, when that person does visit, like why is he navigating through a complex system that he's not used to to try and buy those parts?
SPEAKER_00Let's let's look at a statistic. About uh 15 years ago, one of the manufacturers I was working with was complaining that the people that bought a machine in one year, 44% of them bought nothing from the dealership in the following 12 months other than warranty.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, boy, boy, that's an astounding statistic.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I I I was when I was running parts and servers, I was stunned at the when we started doing some math on the machines that we'd sold and what they should generate per hour and what we were getting, like 20% of the business. And that was like a really, a really unique brand. We still weren't capturing very much of it. It was kind of stunning. Yeah, you know, I I think you know, you you've done a lot of work on like part sales and stuff and the whole idea of selling maintenance contracts. And I mean, if those aren't indicators that we knew that we were not capturing the business, uh if we let the customer buy the machine and take it home, I mean, we we knew that if we didn't sell maintenance contracts, someone else was gonna do it. And that's why we sold them. We sold parts kits because and and several kits at a time on a good deal, because we know that if we don't make it an easy buy, that they're gonna find other sources for the same parts. We we allow the door to be open, and so we've known this a long time.
SPEAKER_00And the the thing that astounds me is we've known you're right, we've known it a long time, but we haven't done anything with it. And and now, where I've got sensors all around the machine as far as the health of componentry and the usefulness of the machine, temperatures, clogged filters, all that stuff, and I've got telematics that'll take it from the field into my my shop, my office, and I still sell a machine by itself for a price with this warranty rather than packaging. A here's a full service contract back in the 70s. I think it was we we started offering a buyback, machine buyback.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, then it went so far as we're gonna give you this machine for $39.43 an operating hour, and after 8,000 hours, we're gonna give you a new machine. Yep. Um you like it. We we we we kind of lost that, haven't we?
SPEAKER_02I think one of the challenges there, and I in a sense, the challenge you see on the digital side too, is that you know, pulling off all of that coordination means coordinating different people. If I'm selling a machine and as a sales rep, I'm motivated to sell machines, but if I have to sell maintenance contracts, then that means I have to get quotes. And getting quotes means I got to talk to this guy over here to get those numbers and present that, those are all like things that get in my way of getting the deal done. You know, and when I was with the cat dealership, I was responsible for uh all of the technology products, including all the grade control systems. And that was like an $85,000 add-on on a you know, $600,000 machine. And although we paid a 25% commission on the stuff, um, it couldn't, the the sales reps couldn't sell it. And it was very simple. It's like it's too much work to call the guy who's putting those quotes together and explaining it to my customer. I'm just gonna focus on selling the machine. And they just did the math in their head. You know, I can sell the machine in a day and make this much, I could spend three weeks on it and make like an extra five grand.
SPEAKER_00I I agree with you, but uh I'm gonna color it a little bit, saying you're giving them more credit. I don't think the salesman wants to ask one more question that the customer can say no on that gets in the way from him saying yes on buying that machine. So if it's a maintenance, I don't want to talk about that. If it's a brake, and you're perfectly correct. That brake system was wonderful. Cost effectiveness, safety, everything you want to talk about. Another beautiful example was the John Deere 844, first hydrostatic. Yeah, best best fuel consumption. The Caterpillar 980 ate it. Market share the 844 never got anywhere. Unbelievable. Yeah, it it I used to say we've got fat, dumb, and happy. We're comfortable where we are and and don't rock the boat. To some degree, that's where we're at today with the digital dealership, isn't it? I think that's the grounds that we're starting from.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think the the great the great thing is that the digital dealerships can solve that. Like selling a maintenance contract with a machine if you're executing a huge part of your your inflow digitally and allowing customers to take that further. Don't don't do like a click this contact me button and a sales rep calls you two days later. Like take it farther. And for the rest, it's math. Like, you know, it's just data applied to whatever the customer wants and offering it. You know, why do you see so many websites selling the machine and offering a button to get financing? It's because that's when they're gonna want it.
SPEAKER_00You know, why are you not presenting information on maintenance contracts or at least preventative maintenance contracts, which there's you know very little risk in showing numbers on, you know, the service costs service, or even an inspection after a certain if you don't if you do the maintenance, that's cool, but let us come out and do an inspection. One of the things I used to do, and everybody laughed at me from those data mining sources for the financing company, the competitive machines. I used to send the customer a birthday card for the machines that he had purchased that weren't mine. Yeah, I like that. That's funny. And and and then I I called them afterwards and asked the question. I said, other than that birthday card from me on that machine, have you seen the guy that sold you the original machine? Yep, because savor survey data used to say that was the worst thing that ever happened. The salesman sold the machine. I I'd I'd need salt to find them from that point forward. He's gone, he's on to something else.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we we've done a project exactly like that with a small dealer, where we took that sales data, the the UCC data, um, we enriched it as we entered it into their CRM. And really what it was is like we started with machines that are a year old. It's like, you know, whether it's because their sales rep hasn't gotten back to them or because that customer after a year may have bought a machine they don't really need anymore, it's for a project, or it was the business has changed. I mean, these are opportunities and a reason to go and talk to that, you know. Many times it was a way of finding new customers because you didn't know that landscape or existed even until you saw that they bought, you know, a bobcat's kids deer from someone else. And so it's it's taking that data and then creating the information of value and then creating an action plan for this kind of data. Like when we see this data show up, we point it in front of the sales rep and say, part of your job is getting in touch with these people who bought machines from another competitor a year ago. We want to know them.
SPEAKER_00From that work where you're the outsource data analyst, how many people are you seeing, based on what you've been able to prove to people, how many of them are bringing in their own data analysts at some point in the future? A lot or a little?
SPEAKER_02Most of the people that I've been working with are fairly small. I have one dealership that's invested in an analyst. Um, and it brings all kinds of richness. I mean, he's putting up um information screens in service in parts, and you know, people are so much more aware of what's happening. There's so much more on top of things because the cue boards of all the work orders are just hanging there, or you know, this report. I'm not a big fan of like the reports going out in email. We get so much email that you know, I used to get emails from 50 different systems telling me something new, and you just don't read them anymore. But like being in situ, hanging a digital board of what's happening in the business is harder to ignore. When I ran the customer support center, we had one big screen and all it had only four numbers on it, and one of them went red if we dropped a call. If someone tried to call customer support and we lost them, and it was like a game to find out who called, and we didn't get to answer them on time, you know. And that's the kind of thing that takes data, dropped calls, and turns it into something that we can get value out of.
SPEAKER_00We used to have in the old days, it's almost like the before the internet and after. In the old days, we used to have the phone companies come in and evaluate every single phone we had. How long was every phone call? How long was it before it was answered? How often did they get a busy busy signal? How often did we not call them back? Trunks busy, blah, blah, blah. Yep. That's a fundamental that's gone away, also.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's that's surprising. I mean, the phone systems are easier than ever. Every parts department and service department should have phone data.
SPEAKER_00And I'm gonna I'm gonna suggest something that might be a little off side, but um I got voicemail, I don't need to worry about that.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00That's a whole other blog, Ron. No, I'm I'm with you, but that's that's part of how we've we've we've lost the personal touch. Yeah, it's it's uh it's it's remarkable. The guy one of the things that I believe and I've I've preached about is that if I assign a customer to a salesman, I expect that customer to be my customer with that salesman forever. If I assign a customer to a salesman and that customer defect stops buying from me, yeah, I want to hurt that salesman. I'm serious because you know, think of all of the people in the company that are dependent on the success of that salesman doing their job, maintaining the relationship, keeping the customer happy. I've got clerks, I've got financial people, I got all manner, they're the face of the outfit. And if they don't do their job well, we all get messed up. Yep.
SPEAKER_02Yep. Hey, but here's a thing like that. That was a somehow like the change of technology and eventually some sort of technical limitation that is now, you know, you can step over that. I mean, have your phone calls go to voicemail, have the voicemail, you know, auto-translated, have it show up as a lead, you know, or an action item on your sales rep's CRM dashboard.
SPEAKER_00Like let me let me go further. It's your largest customer. They ain't going to voicemail. The counter's busy, the parts managers busy, the branch manager's busy. That's going to end up in the president's phone. Yeah, right. You know, there's it it used to astound me. We have uh uh hotlines for customers that are not happy with something. Yeah, and the ones those offices that were most effective were part of the president's uh responsibility. Yeah, if you got there and there was a complaint and the customer was called back by the president of the company, ooh, there's something different about these dudes. Yeah, people stop complaining because nobody pays any attention, right? And a complaint is the best gift we could ever have. They're still talking to me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. The the silent customer is your your worst customer, the most dangerous customer. Yeah. So, and and and at the same time, you know, we're in the golden, it's beginning of the golden age of being able to offer alternatives. Like people, yeah, it's hard to get through on the phone. People don't want to be on the phone anymore, but there are four other channels we can create really easily for me to ask for the same thing, you know, and and one of them fits. You know, you talk about the sales rep that loses a customer. I mean, I I've talked to sales organizations who do like more of a dating game between customers and sales reps, you know, like, oh, these two guys like each other. Great, there's your sales rep, you know, and customers are the same, you know. Some someone wants to sit in their machine with their phone and realize that their machine is due for service, scan a QR code and say, come service my machine. That's really great. The other guy likes calling up because he, you know, he knows Jim in the service department. He doesn't mind a little chat and to order his service, you know, like we should be, and and I think that's the integration of like a digital dealership is that there are so many channels and we need to like integrate those channels together into the same flows, even though they're they're coming in. You know, too often you see like, oh, my online parts orders are going through this channel, and the parts guy doesn't see it, it just goes straight to the warehouse. I mean, you know, the parts store isn't that really just an extension of the parts department? Isn't there value you can bring? Um, you know, it shouldn't be one or the other, they shouldn't be necessarily be separated. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'd call those customer service delivery systems.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it's it's it's the face that the customer's telling me how they want to be treated. And if if I don't want to satisfy that, there's there's there's there's something wrong with me. It's it's kind of it's kind of strange. The this this digital dealership having as its foundation piece the machine, and everything that we need to know about that machine, make, model, serial number, year purchase, year made, hours to date, hours used, application, operator, who does the main and blah blah blah, all that stuff. If we have that, we can do remarkable things. If we don't, it's like giving six of us a pistol and putting us in a dark room and saying, hit the target, yeah, start shooting, just make sure you don't kill the other five guys that are in the room with you. It's kind of a missed, it's it's a it's a wishful dream, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think it's kind of like a ground up rethink of, you know, when we talk digital dealership, people picture websites and people leading into this conversation, you brought up like how website templates were created by one of OEMs, and then you know, everyone kind of did the same thing, and then it kind of got stuck there. And I think people get stuck on like, oh, my digital presence is my website where I have my contact us page form and you know, the inventory and um some stuff about our history, and and that's so there's my digital presence. And I think it'd be great for people to realize that people who are strong in a digital operation, they're they're not running a website, they're not running web pages. It's actually a web application. It is it is a singular piece of software that has all of the input information from the visitors and the people interacting with it, but also from the back-end systems.
SPEAKER_00We need to coin a term, Mets, because it's a door, it's another door into our business. We have physical doors, we have virtual doors, we have web page doors, we have QR code doors, we have telephone doors, we have all of these different doors. And I'm I'm afraid that we're at the place where we can only handle so much change in our life. When we're young, we're dumb, we think we can do anything, right? And we don't know what we can't do. So we're gonna try stuff things. We have lots of time to recover. When you get older, you start becoming more careful. Yeah, this works, don't mess with it. Yeah, the trick is acknowledging it doesn't work. Yeah, and that's looking in the mirror saying, God, I screwed up for the last 40 years, because that's what the truth is, isn't it? Going from 80 to 40 on parts on our watch, yeah. Boy, that's a hell of an indictment, I think, of our performance. Yeah, for sure. I I hope that the audience has um paid attention to this. There's an awful lot of stuff here, and we're carving new ground. And I this piece being the foundation piece, talking about equipment being the foundation for everything that we do to develop the relationship with our customers and and have them be friends, which is the joy of this business, because we do end up having our customers be friends, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, for sure. I'd I'd like this to be the first of many chats about the digital dealership, if you don't mind. I'd like to do another one of these things in the next couple of three weeks. Are you are you game? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it's uh it's going to become a critical topic, and and someone is gonna come out on top, and we may not even know who they are yet, or it'll be someone we do know. But someone's gonna figure this out and it's gonna change the industry a little bit.
SPEAKER_00And it might not even be somebody who's in the business today, yep. Like Amazon came out of the blue, and the bookstores didn't know what hit them. Yep, exactly. Yep. Mitz, that's I I think this has been very beneficial, very good time spent. And um I'd I'd like to stop here because I think we've probably reached a point of overload and uh set up a date where we can get together and continue this thing if if that's good with you. That's great. Thank you, um Metz, for being with us today. Um, and I look forward to any comments or thoughts that the audience has on the content that we've been discussing. So at that point, Mahalo, look forward to chatting with you and others and another candid conversation.
