Mets Kramer and Ron wrap up their discussion on the Digital Dealership (4 of 4)

You apply it. How? Like we've done in every other part of the business. I mean, we have metrics up the wazoo in most dealerships. How many metrics have? you helped establish in dealerships.

Yeah. Part of the story.

It probably helps to compare it to metrics that we set up, say, in service. That's where I spent most of my time. I really started to understand service metrics over the years. And there was a purpose, right? There was a purpose that each metric existed or how that metric contributed to our overall goal. And the goals weren't that complex in the service department. We wanted to keep everyone busy. We wanted to get revenue going. We wanted to increase revenue. And we wanted profitability, right? The goals are pretty simple. And then we developed these metrics that... Each one of them tells a story. And as a group, by managing them and seeing them perform properly, they help contribute to that goal. And they're usually fitted together. So we had the most common one was invoicing days, invoice cycle. And in itself, it tells a story. It's related to other ones like it, like, for example, receivables in service.

Invoice too fast and do it poorly and your receivables go up. One metric looks good, the other one tells you a different story. And so I think when we start talking about the marketing or the digital dealership in general, using information, we create a goal and then develop a strategy. set of metrics that helps us know. So if we go back to our earlier discussion on marketing, you know, the entire point of marketing our business is to drive sales. And so we have to connect the sales information to the metrics and the information coming out of the marketing activities. Too often, I see dealerships that run various types of advertising and marketing campaigns and etc.

and they don't understand which one drove the sale yeah they don't connect that right like they we have a crm we run deals through it we don't connect that this where did this deal come from was this because i advertised on linkedin was it because i was on the right facebook group did it come from our email blast that went out on backhoes you know what drove this sale so we can Make sure we're applying money in the right place. I sometimes say to dealers, if we could do your digital marketing and guarantee that you sell every machine, but it costs $1,000 in digital marketing, you're like, oh, okay, we can do that. It's $1,000 per machine and guarantee that it's going to get enough traffic that it'll sell. I'm happy to spend $1,000 per machine. But if I come to you and say you want to sell 100 machines and you're $100,000, they'll be like, what? $100,000. And I can't tell you where the money went or whether or not it actually drove the sales.

So I think first step in using information is connecting the right pieces of information to you, like your overall goals, what the information tells you and making sure those connections are there so that you can then ask that question. Did what I do over here, whatever I did over here, did it actually get me the result I wanted? If I can't follow that through, then the information isn't connected properly.

Well, I think we still have to bring all of this together, right? Exactly. It's not until we bring these things together and understand all these different topics. and then how to tie it together so we're really just still running the same kind of business that we ever did. We just have more information available to help us fine-tune it.

Yeah, I thought that was really interesting.

Yeah.

But you do every single time we do one of these podcasts.

welcome. Thank you. It's one of those things that requires, you know, more than one mind and to figure things out or explain it and certainly your experience in seeing and how people react. through the years and the changes that have come across is a really good predictor of how people will continue to respond to these changes.

We're pretty simple people in the end. We're really not all that different. I think about it sometimes when we're sitting around even on a Friday night just with some friends and having a glass of wine. And you're like, really, this is what people have been doing for thousands of years. Like, this hasn't changed. People didn't do something different on Friday nights. They just all still just sat around, whether it was the fire or a table, and they had invented something to drink along the way. And they all sat around and talked, because that's really just who we are. And I think, you know, yeah, we've sold things, but we've sold things forever.

Yep. Yeah. Thank