Learning Without Scars

S2 E26•May 30, 2022•58 min

Mets Kramer and Ron are joined by Stephanie Smith for a Candid Conversation on Marketing in the Digital Age

Send us Fan Mail This discussion addresses marketing in the digital age - dealer websites. Stephanie Smith, the Vice President of Marketing for Newman Tractor, provides some insight in her work at the dealership. Taking us through all of the needs and wants of customers in this digital age. It is comprehensive and exciting to hear of her work. Enjoy 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.

Transcript

0:21

Aloha, and welcome to another Candid Conversation. Today, we have a special event going on that Metz Kramer is going to lead us on. Metz, as you all are aware of, has been a really strong and forceful advocate for the dealership, the digital dealership, and transforming your business into a digital dealership. So with that as the introduction, Metz, what are you wanting to do today?

0:51

I really wanted to expand on our last podcast, which was only like last week. But in between that time, I had a chance to talk with Stephanie Smith from Newman Tractor. And it was a great conversation. One of these ones that just like, how have we not talked about this well before, even though we knew each other existed. And I just thought it was, you know, this really relevant opportunity to. bring, in a sense, the voice of the customer into the ring. We've talked about your digital presence. We've talked about that it's important. We've talked about generational change and how different people see the world differently now and how we have to accept that. And I really wanted to take a look at this from a different perspective, which is like we all understand. the real world, the analog world, and the things that bring value and the purpose of interactions. And yet somehow we seem to struggle with them on the digital side. And I thought Stephanie had some really great points on how to see the value in having a real digital interaction and really change this idea of not like my website is high, here I am, here's some info on me. and change the narrative to, hi, why are you here? How can I help you? And that should be the approach that your digital presence is taking. So with that, maybe Stephanie can say hi. Like I said, she's from Newman Tractor and brings like a whole world of experience that isn't from our industry, which means she's from the future.

2:39

Well, just the fact that we have in this misogynistic industry, chauvinistic industry, we have a woman on the screen with us, is progress. So thank you, Stephanie, for your involvement in the dealership. And thank you for joining us. Why don't you give us a little bit of your background and how you got to where you're at now?

3:01

Sure, sure, sure. Thank you guys very much for having me today. As Matt said, I am with Newman Tractor. I've been with the company for a little over a year now. And I am the VP of marketing here. Prior to coming to Newman, I was in the produce industry, a very similar industry in that digital change. It shakes people up quite a bit and helped other small family-owned businesses prior to that get acquainted with marketing, get them understanding what these foundations could really do for their business, and then just kind of took it from there and landed this great opportunity to be here today with you guys, but also to be with Newman Tractor as well.

3:45

So how about we go to Metz's question? Not that we've got a bunch of pages that we think people should be interested in, but actually flipping it and getting to the world of what do you want? Why are you here? What are you looking for? How does that fit into marketing at Newman Tractor? Because marketing by itself is an alien term, isn't it?

4:13

Absolutely. Absolutely. And everybody's got their own definition of what marketing actually is. If you did a poll of everyone that works at Newman Tractor, even though they had an idea of what marketing was from Justin Newman being in my seat prior to me, they would say it's videos, they would say it's making pretty pictures, or they would say it's creating flyers. But it goes beyond that. Really, what marketing does is it's sales enablement and it is learning your customer inside and out so that you can help create opportunities to bring them in to do business with you. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. We're talking today specifically about the digital presence and what that looks like. It's not just your website. You have to couple your website with many other things. It's your digital footprint. It is your social sites. It's your Google ads. It's so much more under the surface that nobody even knows about because it's working behind the scenes instead of in front of the scenes. All that other stuff that we just talked about, that's what people know of marketing because that's what they see. But we have to go deeper. We have to... Find out what our customers like. We have to find out how they want to do business. And then we have to treat them how they want to be treated, not how we want to treat people, right? Meet them where they're at and bring them in.

5:36

It's interesting. You mentioned videos and digital things to start with and then flyers. My generation, people were thinking marketing was brochures and trade shows. And marketing to me, you've used a nice term, sales enablement. Marketing to me is anything and everything that we do to influence the behavior of the customer. And that's, I mean, everything. How we answer the phone, what the phone system looks like, everything. And Mets has been trying to take us to that promised land. And, you know, I... I characterize myself, I'm like a mule brain in a tin barn. I make a lot of noise, but very little happens. And Mets is in the same boat. People that try to affect change in this industry are few and far between. This industry is very much stuck in the past. How the devil, you've got to have an enlightened owner, obviously, but. Have you been given marching orders or is he relying on you to create those marching orders?

6:51

It's been such an amazing journey because he's relying on me to establish those marching orders. They knew what they knew of marketing and digital through the work that Justin Newman had done. And we are. going through our own set of changes and that we are getting ready to go through succession planning. We have a generational shift that's happening here at Newman Tractor. And so everybody's moved on to their next role, which led the opportunity for me to be here. And when I came in with the experience that I came in, not to necessarily talk about me, but just to talk about the power of what others are doing and bring that into the organization and say, we really need to be thinking about this. We were already thinking about things that other people in the industry aren't thinking of. Let's take it a step further. Let's integrate a CRM system with all of the work that we're doing behind the scenes to really capture what's going on with our customers and then use that to fuel our sales team. Because our customers no longer need us to be a walking brochure. They don't want our sales guys coming in with a handout and saying, hey, guys, look at this new. product that I have to offer you, they're going to look at you and say, yeah, I already know about it because I already did the research. I already made my decision on that. But by changing the way that you interact with your customers and how you arm your sales team with different sales tools like video and really not necessarily creating what I would call traditional marketing materials, but a new way for people to find you and decide whether or not. they like you enough to want to do business with you is really what we're all about right now, because there's so many different changes that are happening within our industry in terms of how people want to do business. COVID did a lot for us too, in terms of digital landscapes, right? It's the Amazon effect. Everybody wants to be able to find what they need online when they're looking for it. And if you couple what the customer is looking for and what you're doing in terms of your digital presence by showing up where they're hanging out digitally, they're going to find you a lot faster than if you just have a website or if you just have a brochure or if you just have your sales team showing up on the job site saying, this is what we have to offer.

9:17

So let me go backwards for simpletons like me. What is CRM?

9:23

Sure. How you're tracking your customer engagement. So it's a customer relationship management tool. There's all kinds of different ones out on the market. We chose the one that we did because it's got strong marketing functionality and it's got strong sales functionality as well.

9:41

Who did you choose?

9:43

We chose HubSpot.

9:45

Okay. And who's your business system provider?

9:49

We use eEmphasis for ERP.

9:51

Okay. And they integrate?

9:54

They do integrate. We had to write our own API connection for that.

10:00

Okay. Okay. So taking customer relationship management and using it as a sales tool, rather than what a lot of people look at that for being managing how many calls and what the salesman do. So if I flip it and say, I'm here to help the salesman, I'm here to satisfy the sales need. Do they know what they want? The

10:27

salesperson? Yeah. Not always, because we're changing the way that they have to look at how they service the customer. Some of the stuff that we're creating right now is a little foreign, right? We're creating templates within the CRM system so that they can now have something armed and ready to send out to the customer whenever.

10:50

So let me hold you there for a second. What's the age demographic of the Salesforce? What percentage would you say is over 50?

10:59

Well, we have a pretty wide range from 21 all the way up to 64. I would say primarily we're right in the middle. We're in the sweet spot. We're late 30s.

11:14

Okay. Early 40s. The reason I bring that up is that that means that they're much more attuned to adapting and adjusting and changing.

11:26

In some cases, yes. I honestly think through our experience and what I've experienced at other organizations, again, very similar in the produce industry that. It was the same type of demographics, right? It was very much male dominated. It was very much 55 to 65 guys that were running the show. I think as long as you have a strong leadership team who is willing to implement change and to try new things, then that filters out throughout the rest of the organization. And these guys who you would expect because they're older or not necessarily as tech savvy as somebody who may have grown up with technology, they're willing. And they're actually embracing it in a way that maybe some of the younger guys weren't, you weren't expecting that they'd give you any pushback.

12:19

So Mets, come over to your audience and you're providing software tools. You're providing consulting expertise. You're providing. reviews and evaluations of things. What Stephanie is describing with Newman, what percentage of your audience is in that group? Let me call it progressive for lack of, and I hate that word, but let's call it progressive.

12:51

It's a funny question because if you take it down to like the use of some tools. or having the check boxes beside, oh, I have a CRM, I have this system, then that percentage would be larger. Lots of people have them or have tried them. Many of them late at night because they're busy during the day. They're trying to figure this out. If you then look at the smaller group of people who understand why to do it, That's where it really, one, where you start to find the people who actually found the value. And two, they've pulled the information out of the systems to answer why they're doing it. You're kind of finding two things when you push it far enough. And if you just go in and get, okay, I have MailChimp. Okay, great. A lot of people have MailChimp. A lot of people send email campaigns. a very small percentage of them review what comes back from a mail campaign, who opened it, who it bounced from, who had a change in the organization that they announced in their auto response. All of this feedback and then reconnecting it to the business. And I love that, like you said, in the marketing piece is like we find out what customers want. And kind of also put it in this idea of what's happening behind the scenes. And I think when you look at those two pieces, I love that Stephanie and Newman have recognized that there is so much happening behind the scenes right now. There is more behind the scenes in the sense, because it's happening digitally, than there ever was. You know, for those people listening on the podcast, they couldn't see my face like glow. Stephanie said we don't need like the brochure delivery person anymore because they're finding it at night online, you know. And so I love this connection to say that it's good to have the tools and they're just tools. Like a tool is a tool you should be, you know, if you buy a hammer and it breaks, you buy a new hammer. You don't stop nailing things. You don't throw it on the nails that went with it either. So it's, and Stephanie, I talk about this. The data is what's important. The tools help you understand the data and take you to the next level. So HubSpot's a great tool for the, especially on the marketing side, like seeing what's happening and turning that into action. So you talk about your old. older sales reps or trying to understand, getting them to understand like this idea that they can now hear and see in a sense what's happening behind the scenes and you can feed it back to them. So now they can go talk to a guy about something that he's doing that otherwise would have been invisible or 30 years ago, he might've mentioned to the sales rep.

16:06

Let's bring Alex Kraft in here, even though he's not on the screen with us, but in his company, Heath. which allows a digital connection. I don't know if you're familiar with it, Stephanie, but it's kind of an intriguing situation that our eyes and ears on the marketplace are the sales force. The sales force motivation is different than ours is as a business. In the old days, the salesman would wander around with what we used to call his black book. It's kind of like you're single and you got a book, whether you're a man or a woman, the same thing. Who are my go-to guys if I haven't got a date on Friday night that I can go have a glass of wine with? And the salesman leaves and he takes his book with him and the dealership doesn't even know who the heck he was calling on. Those days have been gone for probably... 30,40 years. Let me share a short story. I worked with a guy by the name of Ian Sharp in Toronto in the early 70s. And Ian sold his business to Reuters and Reuters sold a piece of the business to Bloomberg. So what Ian had done was create a connection on the internet between every stock market in the world. And it was live. And that created the Bloomberg platform, which is $25,000 a terminal per year. And there's hundreds of thousands of terminals in use. Ian never dreamt that that's where it was going. What I'm trying to get to is that here's a guy who's a visionary. And there's few of those. It's not demographics anymore. It's not age blocks anymore. It's people who are change ready or disruptors. Or in the old days, the kid on the street is, why is this guy blue? asking the questions, why do we do it this way? Those folks have been suppressed. And the alphas, the Zs, the Xs, and the younger millennials haven't been. And that's a generation transition that I don't know that we've experienced before. And I'm going to put you two in the same age block. You guys are much more challenging of the status quo. than even I was. And that's going someplace, I'll tell you.

18:46

You didn't last long in the corporate world either.

18:48

Oh, no. Well, I made it 12 years.

18:53

That's not what I did.

18:55

Yeah, it's interesting. But walking brochures to now directing the salesman's activity, and I mean it that way, because the salesman will no longer have anywhere to hide. We know which machines are being changed out and whether we get them or not.

19:19

Absolutely.

19:21

That's got to scare the bejesus out of them.

19:23

Well, it does. And I think in some cases, and again, this isn't necessarily something that is special just to our industry. I've experienced it in other industries.

19:34

I agree.

19:34

The sales guy is very protective. of his relationships and rightfully so. You know, I think we're a little special here at Newman Tractor. Well, we all want to think that we're special, but, you know, we're lucky at Newman Tractor because you mentioned that the sales guys, they have a different outlook in terms of what their relationship with the customer. needs to be and how that translates back to the rest of the organization. In some cases, they feel like they operate independent of the organization. We don't really have that at Newman, especially right now because of what we're trying to do. And hey, by the way, you can't have sales as a silo and marketing as a silo anymore. You have to be working in tandem to make sure that you're creating. a very cohesive customer experience. And so you talk about sales enablement and you talk about these changes that are happening for them. It's not just with the brochures. It's literally how leads actually come to us. And we talk about, yeah, and we talk about data, right? And that's brought it up just a second ago. There is so much data at our fingertips. In some cases, sorry, you don't even have to have a CRM. There's so much data between Google Analytics, between what you're seeing from your website, social listening, listening to what your customers are saying through their own social feeds. That's where you're able to really meet them where they're at. And so what we're trying to do is take all that information and then package it up based on what we're hearing from our customers in each of these territories that we serve. And then give it to them in a way that they want to do business with us. And when I say in a way that they want to do business with us, the way that people have migrated over the last few years is people sell to people. That's always been a thing, regardless of whether you're in B2B or B2C. But you have to either relate with the person, the salesperson, or you have to relate with the organization's why. Can my why. Yep. be canned into this why. And if it can, I'm sold. I'm a loyalist. I'm now with this company for the rest of my life.

21:54

That's the answer that Amazon went for. What's the why? I consume books. I was a bookstore aficionado. I loved them. And some of them, but they never had the books I wanted. I had to order them, had to wait for them. So here comes Amazon and I don't need to leave home to order it. And it shows up the next day. And if I don't buy it, they're nagging my butt two days, three days later. Hey, it's sitting in the cart. What are you going to do with that? We, we, we've been there manually. Do you have anybody on staff who monitors social media as their job?

22:43

Yes. Well, there's actually three of us in our marketing department here at Newman Tractor. And we, we all have, yes, we have three. We have three. Yes.

22:53

Do you notice the difference there? There's three. There's three twice. You know, I like the three this way better, Stephanie. I mean, yeah. We got to get out of our triangles here.

23:05

We just want everyone to know that you said three, not like half or zero.

23:11

Oh, well, you know, that's the other side of things. You know, marketing is. Yeah. OK, sorry, Stephanie. Keep going.

23:17

So we all have our own set of responsibilities in terms of social listening. If you look at Liz, her dedicated platform is YouTube. She's our videographer. She's our storyteller. It is her job to be listening to what our customers are saying through YouTube. And then we report that back, whatever we're seeing. The other thing is, too, is...

23:41

Stop there for a second. So that implies to me that... You have given, what's her name again? Liz. You've given Liz a list of your customers that you want her tracking on YouTube. Is that true?

23:58

That's part of it. That's not always the case. It's also just social listening to find out. what our customers are doing in terms of demographics. So let's take it a couple of steps further, right? Then you also have Nicole, who her job is to pay attention to what's going on. And these are just the platforms that we're using right now. The platforms and the algorithms are going to continue to change. So what we're saying today may not be the case six months from now.

24:24

Okay, slow down a minute. Talk to me about algorithms. What do you mean?

24:30

So... Sorry, I may be getting way ahead of the conversation.

24:33

No, no, this is exactly right. And by the way, I already want to make an appointment for the follow-up.

24:39

Okay. Okay. Okay. So in terms of algorithms, right? So everything in terms of social is based off of an algorithm, AI technology. Hold

24:52

on. AI technology? What's that?

24:55

It's basically... robots who are scanning everything that's going on and then they're prioritizing stuff based off of what they're seeing. It's all happening on the back end of things.

25:06

So it's the computer doing it. It's artificial intelligence. Yes. Okay. Sorry.

25:10

No, great. Great. So the algorithms, well, let's just take Facebook because it's probably the easiest one to talk through. Facebook is going through its own set of transitional change right now. They started as a very niche. social platform that was more dedicated towards college students. You couldn't even have a profile unless you were a college student. That has evolved over the years, right? Now your grandma's there, your 13-year-old kid in some cases are, which is a whole other story. But so you have this wide net of people who are now on Facebook.

25:46

And stop there for a second. The last time I looked, it was more than 2 billion. Yes. Is that about right still?

25:53

Yes, they've experienced some different changes and fluctuations, but yeah, that's about right.

25:57

Well, just as a frame of reference, that's 25% of the population of the planet.

26:01

That you could essentially tell about your business just by being there.

26:06

Correct.

26:07

Let's keep with the algorithm now. So the algorithm, right? Everything is evolving. Social media is evolving. This platform has been evolving over the years. But the rate in which this change is taking place, especially with Facebook, has just been expedited. They are now introducing Meta, which is a new form of their platform. And what we're experiencing and what we're seeing is the algorithm is prioritizing people based off of the content that you generate, whether or not you can keep people engaged and active in their platform.

26:43

Is it what the people are presenting or what the people are looking for?

26:49

Right. Or both? It's both. But Facebook will prioritize you based off of the content that you generate. So say I'm showing you something through Facebook. If you engage with it and lots of people are engaging with it and you stay in the platform longer, Facebook says, I like Stephanie. What I'm going to do with Stephanie is I'm going to show her to a lot more people than just the people she knows.

27:14

So freeze the frame there for a second. In Google terminology, that's bounce rate.

27:23

Yes.

27:24

So how important is bounce rate to your algorithms?

27:31

It's tough to say because the algorithms are changing so fast. And that's part of the challenge that we're experiencing, right? Like, yes, we're playing in this space. And we think that we've got it figured out. And based off of the content that we're generating, based off of our customers' engagement, based off of all of the data that we're collecting, and then all of a sudden things go dark for a little bit. Well, why'd they go dark, right? We didn't change anything. And now all of a sudden something's happened. So you really have to be mindful of sometimes. Facebook will throw you a curveball. The algorithm will throw you a curveball to see if you're really, really relevant. And, oh, hey, by the way, it's still a platform. Like their whole goal is to make money. The way they make money is off of selling their ads and also off of keeping people in the platform.

28:23

So let me stop there for a second because this is a really significant change. It's in a really... significant different rate of change than we've ever experienced before. It probably left a whole bunch of people listening to us behind about 10 minutes ago. So the audience that has interest in this is shallow and our ability to penetrate that audience is very difficult. So, you know, one of the things in preparation coming is you gave me a headline for for a future writing, things are changing so fast. We're not going to be perfect. We're going to fail. But what you said to me really resonated. We have to fail faster. We have to get to the solutions faster, meaning we've got to try more things faster and fail. Is that consistent with how you're looking at things?

29:32

Absolutely. Because you can't stay stagnant with the digital landscape in which we're playing right now. And here's why. Think of Craigslist, especially for our industry. Craigslist was definitely a platform in which a lot of different people would sell inventory on. And then all of a sudden it tanked. It tanked because it became saturated. It tanked because it was no longer relevant. And the reason it became no longer relevant to even our audience is because something else happened. Something new happened. And when something new happens. People want to jump on that ship. And so it's you abandon the ship, you go here. So the thing that my team is constantly looking at and the thing that we have to be looking at is, yes, we have to serve our current customers' needs all day long. And if that means traditional means, absolutely, we want to serve them. But we also have to recognize that we have a bit of a hybrid mix right now in terms of traditionalist and futurist. And so we play in the space in which we play in right now in terms of creating that nice balance between the two. But we're always looking to what's next, because if you're not, you're going to get left behind because, oh, hey, by the way, those changes that are happening with Facebook right now are also happening in other platforms. We're just talking about one right now.

30:55

In fact, you're providing a bridge between the traditionalists. and the futurists.

31:03

Absolutely.

31:04

So I had this really kind of relevant related conversation last week, and I think it'll help tie it together for a lot of people. For years, dealers have received UCC reports. Lots of different dealers have paid for this information to find out what was sold in their area. The other way that it's done for a lot of the New equipment dealers is through AEM's PIN program where they report sales by category. And like the traditional, the old joke kind of is, or even the old habit that a lot of sales management had was to take that monthly report and drop it on someone's desk and be like, these are all the deals you missed. Why did you miss them? And then we were having this conversation last week and we were looking again at Heave. And the answer was right there. It's like, so here's this old way of looking at it retrospectively. These are the deals I missed. Like, how did I know those deals existed? Well, maybe in the past, unless you were driving around and talking to every customer, you wouldn't know they existed. You really had to have ear to the ground to know they were happening. But now you actually see them happening. You can go on Heave and those are real deals that are happening before they happened. You know, the customers are coming on saying, hey, I want this. That's a deal that's happening. You can see it coming and act on it instead of getting it as a report after the fact. And I think what Stephanie's talking about in like the social listening and like the website listening and actually not just having your website there and not paying attention to it is that those leading indicators of something that may happen are now visible. They used to be invisible unless you were in the truck and you still couldn't hit everyone. You had a great story, Stephanie, when we talked last week, which was, you had a sales rep there who didn't believe, and then you were watching a mail campaign and watching his customer in real time go through the page. Can you tell that one?

33:14

Yeah. So if you go back to the conversation that we were having earlier in terms of sales enablement and making this, well, helping bridge the gap in that. that transition for the sales guy, you have to make it easy for them and you have to give them proof case scenarios. And so we had a very seasoned salesperson who I absolutely love. And he says, I don't know about this stuff. Let me show you what the power of this can do. And so I said, hey, send out an email through the platform and let's take a look at what happens. And so in real time, he sent out the email. He was able to see the engagement from the customer come back right away in real time. And then he was able to call the customer as that quote went out and say, hey, do you have any questions? And so that was top of mind for the customer right then and there. But it was also top of mind for him because he was like, I just closed that deal way faster than I would have if I would have sent him the quote and then waited. to come back to him a week later, or waited to come back to him two days later, whatever the sales cycle was on that particular model. But that right there, that one instant created buy-in for him. And now he is an advocate for what we're doing.

34:32

And you win those one inch at a time. What's really interesting, the UCC filing, that hit the market as a byproduct of one of the owners of a Comazzo dealer in the East Coast. who created Equipment Data Associates EDA, which sold that, which is now owned by Randall Publishing. And what Mets is talking about is a traditional sales approach. Here's the things you lost. What's the matter? You got, by the way, I didn't see a call on that guy at all. You missed this altogether, right? Versus I sent a congratulations card to everybody on there who sold a competitive piece in that last month. And a year later, I sent them a birthday card. And follow that up with a phone call. And more than half the time the customer said to me, you're the only one that's ever talked to me about that machine. Imagine.

35:29

It's because you were top of mind. And Ron, you're speaking my language because it's all about the customer experience, whether it's through digital, whether it's through traditional handwritten notes, or whether it's through a really swanky new customer kit. a box is delivered to them after they bought the machine. Or it's the thought leadership that happens throughout the course of the sales cycle. It's all relevant and it's all important. We're not going to be successful just by having great sales guys. We're not going to be successful just by having great swag or great marketing materials. We have to have it all. It's a very holistic picture. And, oh, hey, by the way, let's go back to the customer, right? Things are changing for the customer. Yes, we're talking about digital landscapes right now and the power of being able to send email blasts that you can then collect the data on that you can then make actionable. But, oh, geez, we're now in this world where we get emails all the time. You can't just rely on just the email hitting that person's inbox. You have to couple that with a handwritten note from time to time. Because absolutely. When you talk about the customer experience, it's about making it relevant for them. What's important to them, not what's important to us as the business that they're buying from. It's, hey, I remembered that your daughter had a surgery two months ago. How's she doing? Hey, how is that new machine working on your job site? All of these different things, because in our business, there's years that go by in between sales sometimes. And it's super competitive. If you are not top of mind, if you haven't sent that birthday card, if you haven't sent that thank you note, if you haven't followed up in some capacity, you're not going to be top of mind. And if somebody new has just entered the game. They're knocking on their door too.

37:37

So here's a statistic. A major manufacturer was complaining to me, this is years ago, that, Ron,44% of the customers that bought a machine from me last year haven't spent a nickel in parts and service other than warranty. What's wrong? Well, nobody touched them is one thing. You know, nobody said congratulations. Nobody visited. Nobody sent the mail. Nobody sent the thank you, the birthday, whatever the heck it is. You can't just make a sale and disappear. A common complaint customers, dealers give me. I bought that machine. I won't see that salesman again for another couple of years. He made the sale. He's gone. I was putting a class on in a week with a dealership about customer service and marketing. And I used to use marriage and divorce as a customer retention example. So I said, OK, how many of you are married? A bunch of hands went up. I said, congratulations, you made a sale. If you were a woman, you purchased something. If you made a man, you sold something. Now, how many of you were divorced? And hands go up. And I said, well, with you guys, we've got to work on retention. And there was one guy in the room who had been married six times. I said, what the heck's the matter with you? She said, they want to marry me. I said, have you got any money? She says, hell, I've been married five times. I don't have any money anymore. What are you talking about? Then why'd she want to marry you? Must be my charm. You know, don't go there. But digital marketing, digitization, it's the wrong word. It's how we treat our customers. Yeah. You know?

39:28

We're just talking about one pathway today. Exactly. It really all boils down to the customer experience and how you treat people. And it's funny because we talk a lot about that here. And we talk a lot about how we can can that and package that up. And the NT brand experience, we're now five locations, which is crazy to think of. But at each location, you should have the exact same experience over and over again. It should not be different. It's the Chick-fil-A. mentality, right? You should not have a different experience, whether you're at Newman Tractor Verona or Newman Tractor Bartow, it's got to be the same. And the way that you make that consistent is you identify your why you identify how you're going to treat people. And then you get people to resonate with your why, because So it's in line with their values and how they want to do business. And oh, hey, by the way, it's because you treated them really, really well over and over again. Our industry has always been very, very transactional. You take them through the funnel, top to the bottom. See you later. It's got to be an infinite loop where you're constantly bringing them back in, whether it's they bought a machine or they're constantly coming back for different things from your organization because they had a really good experience. And oh, hey, by the way, let's go back to the digital piece of it all. Your reviews online mean more than anything because while you can have a gazillion great reviews, that one bad review may or may not be why somebody does business with you. And you have to be able to outweigh the good with the bad, but you also have to be paying attention to what people are saying. And as connected of an environment we live in, it's very, very easy for somebody to be upset and in the heat of the moment, leave a bad review. And then that stains you for a while.

41:32

And then to make things worse on that, just for a second, my wife just picked up her car from the dealership. There was a major job done. And as she was leaving, the guy said, there's going to be a survey come in the next couple of three days. I'd really appreciate if you gave me fives right across the board. So, you know, the customer experience, the rating, et cetera. Like the fact that he asked that question bothers me. They should never have to ask it. The reason that he asked the question is it impacts on his pay, which means that we're not going to get honest answers. And the guys that give us the bad review. You know, hey, Stephanie, I noticed you gave me a two last month on a transaction. Do you mind my asking what happened and what we should have done? Nobody does that. Yeah.

42:25

I had to think, Ron, when you talk about like your conversations of yesteryear of, you know, people saying, well, I only have this percentage. Why? And like we're living in a sense in the golden age of answers. Like all of that information is now much easier to get to answer the why you're only getting 40% of parts and service because you can see it, you can gather it. And I, I'm, I remember like the podcast we did a while ago on metrics and my distaste for report metrics, because, you know, it's a metric, like we sold this percentage and that's where it was left. It was like, we sold, you know,20% market share. And like, we got to do better. And that's where it was left. There was no, you know, let's take that step forward. Let's pull in some other data to see the why so that we can actually implement change. It was just like, you guys, you guys got to get those numbers up.

43:23

And I checked the box that I did my job and I moved on and nothing changed. It's really remarkable.

43:31

Yeah. So the answers are there. Like Stephanie is an example of people. realizing that the answers and the insights that we've been lacking in a sense are now visible because they're happening digitally and they can be gathered. They can be analyzed. They can be acted upon. In the past, it was just, you know, one angry contractor talking to another angry contractor about your dealership, but someone else's dealership, you know, and you couldn't listen in. But now you can.

44:01

But what Stephanie's exposing to us in this. discussion, I believe is really critical. The fact that marketing is sales enablement, it's a great expression. The fact that our salesmen are no longer walking brochures is a great statement. The fact that we need to be prepared to fail faster is a great statement. The fact that we're in a golden age of answers is a wonderful statement. All these things are wonderful statements. But our life, our success is predicated on implementation, doing something, not flapping our gums talking about it, but doing it. And that has always been something that's, I had a chat this morning with a dealership and he's overwhelmed. Business is difficult this year. It's remarkably good. There's a lot of action. I can't get equipment, supply chains, a pain in the, here we go. I said, well, what are you doing about it? He said, I'm too busy to do anything. Wow.

45:09

It's my fireman analogy.

45:10

Of course. Of course. Now, the only problem with that, Metz, is, you know, after 9-11, when you hear a fire siren in the distance, help is on the way. If you hear a police siren in the distance, there's trouble somewhere. The perception as firemen is we got the solutions coming to us. The fireman is an observer now in the way you're providing it. not a solution, not an answer, not a help. And Stephanie's trying to make it help. And I believe that salesman you love, that's how we got to do it. We got to win one person at a time. And there's no shortcuts.

45:54

There's not. But it's all about making disciples of disciples. If you get one to buy in, the next one's going to buy in because then they become influencers. They become advocates of what's happening around them. Because they see value in how it's going to impact them, their job, and their livelihood. And that, I mean, we're all individuals at the end of the day. We all care about what matters to us and simplification for us. No different than our customers. We've got to make it easy for our customers just as much as we've got to make it easy for those that we work with as well.

46:31

Mitch, that's looking right down your throat, isn't it? No, you're trying to make things easier for the dealership, whether it's in web page design. And there was a really interesting comment somewhere in the last hour or so where you spent $5,000, you got your website done. Congratulations. I don't need to see you for another 10 years. I think that was you talking, Metz.

46:53

It was. I think our

46:55

website changes every day.

46:58

It should. It has to. Yeah. And that's what I, that's, you know, kind of my point. And like you said, there's no shortcuts and Stephanie's experience and Newman's experience is definitely, they have made continuous and. and significant investments in building their digital presence, their website. They recognize that their website after a couple of years, they've learned a whole bunch of things and they're just going to throw it out. And because take all of the stuff they've learned and apply that to the new version. I think there are dealerships out there that spend more money in gravel every year than they spend on their digital presence. And that I find that upsetting now, you know, to think that you can spend a couple of grand and. it's good for five years, that it will just sit there statically and do its job. You know, that's, you may as well take a paper cutout of your salesman and post them around in your building, because that's pretty much what you're doing.

47:53

What Stephanie referenced earlier in this discussion was that there, Newman's going through a generational change. Yeah. I'm going to suggest to you guys that over the next five years,90% of the industries, companies, businesses, governments in America are going to go through a generation change. As baby boomers, we've hung around too long. We've found out we can live longer so we can continue to work longer. Instead of 65 and out, now it's 80. And some of those people are really meaningful advocates and really serious leaders, but a lot of them are standing in the way. And Stephanie, you're in an environment which is... Totally, that's different. That's an alien concept to you guys. Let's try it. Let's go. Does it make sense? Does it, you know, it's the old do your best, do what's right. You know, it's, and I'm trying to figure out how to change our website as we go through these discussions. And Met's the one that provoked this about a month ago. I want to have somebody pop up every time somebody hits our website with a question. Is there something that we can help you with today?

49:06

Yeah. So you bring up a very, very valid point, right? Going back to just the website in general, right? If we would have been talking five years ago, the question wouldn't be, how can I improve my website? The question would have been, why do I really have to have a website? Do I really need to have a website? Yeah, you really need to have a website. Oh, and hey, by the way, you've got to couple that with other things. You've got to couple it with things in terms of how people can find you. And it's not just having a URL where people can, pop that into Google search. They've got to be able to find you other ways, but in finding you, not only do they have to like what they see when they get there, it's got to be functional. It's got to be simple. It's got to be easy to navigate. It's got to be fast. And they have to figure out how to get in contact with you ASAP. And if that's not easy, you've lost them. They're gone. You've got to be able to answer the questions they have while they're there.

50:06

So selfishly from what we do in employee development and learning without scars, we have so blasted much information out there. It's easy to navigate. We can get you all over the damn place. But unless we ask that question, what can I help you with today? They're going to give up. They're going to leave. I got 1,200 blog posts up there that you can search it. That's fine. But dear Lord, what are you looking for today? How can I help you today? I got to figure out how to do that. I don't know how to do it right now. We'll figure it out. We might have to fail fast a couple of times, but we'll figure it out.

50:47

And that idea of easy is so tricky. You know, when you evaluate your own website and you know where stuff is, it's easy. You're also motivated differently. But when you're just a visitor, that threshold for easy is so low, high. You know, like if it isn't ridiculously easy, it's too hard.

51:12

A good illustration. Yeah, a good illustration. Sorry to interrupt, but Canadian Tire, a Canadian company. About 40 years ago, they started having high school students come in and use their computer system to find a part for a customer. And they compared the speed with which that was done to their employees. And every year from the very outset, the students were faster with no experience whatsoever. OK, so what are you going to do with that, Ms. Marketing? It's

51:52

operational efficiency. Is it ever? Absolutely. There's where we're at right now, not just as an industry, but as a whole is this hybrid mix, right, of ability and. of understanding and of understanding of new technology. And so why wouldn't we leverage the technologies that are at our fingertips to help us be more operationally efficient? We still need employees. It just looks different. I had a stint in the tech space where I actually worked for a company that helped build cobots and software that you would put on CNC machines to help with predictive maintenance and to help with some of those transitional changes because the manufacturing space is, again, very similar to our industry in that you have to have the human element. But when you introduced the technology, when you introduced the cobots, it scared people to death because they felt like they were being replaced. We're not replacing. We're saying let's do things differently and let us turn you out.

53:04

Yep. We've covered so many. different corners of this room that I want to bring it to a close. And I want to ask both of you, I want to repeat this next month and in another direction. And we're not really sure where it's going to go based on this discussion. I think, Stephanie, you can see we kind of wander all over the table, don't we? But there's no clarity. There's no uniformity, unity on what we need to do. There's a need to do something. We don't know what that something is. And different people are going to have different approaches to it. We all wear different clothing. We all have different barbers, whatever the heck it might be. We're going to have different solutions for this. Marketing, enabling salespeople. Marketing, satisfying customer needs, doing everything we can to influence the customer to have a relationship with us. Digitization, a tool to simplify the work we do. All of those things are alien to almost all dealers. And to some degree as an industry, we're dinosaurs. We're stuck. Because we make more money than we thought we ever would, we're happy with what we've got and everything's good. Changing that is difficult.

54:30

So I think I would end with, you have to start with that same mentality of the experience with the salesperson. You have to start somewhere. And you have to show them and make it relevant for them. And once they're understanding and bought into that one concept, then they're willing to take on another concept and another concept and another concept. And all of a sudden, you're stepping closer and closer and closer to the change that you need to take or make, excuse me. So there's lots of opportunity for us as individuals, lots of opportunity for us as organizations. We just have to make the first step.

55:12

Yeah, that's good. Mets, do you want to add anything to it to close up?

55:18

Yeah, I would. The step by step, the showing people the relevance and the value, the why we're doing these changes. I've always tried to think of it that my goal is to get people to the point where they ask for it. If you're trying to put enough things in front of people that you know can affect how they see things or that they can understand what's happening, then the measure of success is that you get like even salespeople asking, hey, can I get or can I do, could we do this? And like, that's my goal. My goal is to get people to that level of engagement where they're asking the question, where they're pulling for stuff. And if you're setting things up, in a way that just satisfies some other group, then you'll never get them to have that question in their own mind to say, hey, I want this.

56:18

You're smoother than I am. I used to say, God, that's a great idea you had. Might have taken me six to 10 months to get there. My wife looks at me and says, that's manipulation, Ron. I used to say it didn't matter as long as we got the right result. But the trouble with that is it's my result, not the team's result. Thank you both. I think this has been remarkable. And Stephanie, congratulations. And thank you for getting into the industry. Thank your owner for bringing you on my behalf. We need as many thinking people as we can get. And I look forward to the next iteration of this, the next session of this. To the audience out there, we hope you've enjoyed this. Thank you for tuning in and staying with us. And I look forward to having another. candid conversation with you in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.

Mets Kramer and Ron are joined by Stephanie Smith for a Candid Conversation on Marketing in the Digital Age

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