Mets Kramer talks about Websites

So I looked around at about 100 different websites over the last couple of days getting ready for this. And it's kind of what I used to call the yada, yada, yada Seinfeld. Everybody seems to have the same thing. They've got different approaches, pitchers, sliders, whatever. But it's a picture of equipment. It's got a banner line that lets me get after equipment. who our contacts are, where our locations are. It's more a here we are, aren't we good type of statement. I don't know that it's been designed for the customer. You got any comments of that as a, you know, high up in the helicopter starting point?

Something online, America online,

I think that's a valid point. If you think back to the beginning, and it's good to go back there. America Online allowed people to communicate. It was about instant messages. And then commercially, somehow we figured, well, let's do the, like you say, the aren't I proud? Here I am. And I'd like to suggest that the web page is, like their dealer location. You'd have contractors drive by the shop on the weekend. Just have a look, see what's in the yard, you know, that type of thing. Or if they're there during the week, go back to the shop, see what's going on, talk to the mechanics. On the internet, we really need to do the same thing. It's a door into the business, not a story about the business.

Yeah, and then, again, if we go up and look at the rest of the world, think automotive, with Trucar and CarMax and some of these other things, I can go in, I can pick a brand, I can spec a vehicle. I can see an inventory. I can specify new or used. I can get a trade-in value for mine. And I don't know that anybody's doing that.

And that's kind of intriguing. I think what that represents to me is that whoever put that webpage together is allowing whoever's coming in to see the webpage to determine what it is they want to see. It's all a bunch of selection criteria. You want a new car, a used car. You want parts and supplies. You want repairs. You want maintenance. You want specs. You want prices. What do you want?

Yeah. And rather, and if I look at the dealer websites that I have today, it's kind of like, we're glad we're here. Look at us. We're glad you're here. Have a look. But that's where it stops. It's our choices of what they're going to see. Yeah,

what do you want?

Yeah, well, Floyd's. Floyd's got a lot of experience and background on these things. And, you know, your comment, your last blog about the post-pandemic, you know, we wasted two years. We come back and we revert. And then similarly, Jennifer Albright made a very cogent comment that she was working from home before the pandemic. Part of the reason that she's ahead of the curve in how she thinks about things. On Tuesday night, we have a lady by the name of Sarah Hanks who's writing her first blog, and it's all about digital data. Yikes. You know, like, what are we going to do? It's, you know. Are you going to scare me? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, getting the dealer to recognize, and this is perhaps part of the dilemma, that their website is like a store. It's just not physical. It's virtual. Mm-hmm. And that they've got to design it with the customer in mind, not them.

And we got to almost prompt, and I don't know, comment on this if you would, and how you put together websites for people, because I know you provide that service. And you audit current websites too, I think. You have a look and give people suggestions as to what's good and bad and ugly. But as they come in, we really need... A series of questions before anything. Yep. How do you go about designing or how does your team go about designing webpages for dealers?

I suspect that's a very important distinction. A guy who owns, he's the president, he's the owner. He's going to go find a WordPress. He's going to find somebody who's got a canned package and adapt it. Because that's all he thinks that it is. Somebody needs to engage them in a discussion about, you know, my old argument always was the customer calls and they want parts. And the first thing that the guy on the phone answers, asks him if he doesn't recognize the voice is, who are you? What's your account number? What's your name? So I can look you up. And what he wants to know is, have you got it? How much is it? Yeah. You know, and let's get out of here. Say hi to Sam for me. She looks great. You know, just in a little aside, when we did webinars from Hawaii a long time ago, Because of the time zones, I had to start them at five o 'clock in the morning. Right. And Marlene's still in bed. She used to literally have to crawl on her hands and knees to get out of the vision of the cameras. Anyways. So the website, the person, we should almost make it kind of fun. You know, I've been thinking a lot about using cartoon characters. There was a word processing package that also a PowerPoint package that had a bunch of little gnomes running across the stream, you know, pulling the slide or doing various things. We should almost have somebody that is a meme that answers the, you know, poses the questions and artificially starts looking at the different choices. What do you hear? You know, you're good to see here, you know?

Okay. When I looked at the dealer's websites, I saw none of that. Not one. No. And that's it. And we don't use that either. Maybe we should, but that's an interesting place. You got a question? Here. What are you looking for? That's a wonderful way to get it started. Yep.

Yeah. I call that customer service delivery systems, you know, the walk-in customer, the phone-in customer, et cetera, the internet end. You're coming through my website. And Google Analytics doesn't give us the kind of data that we need. It's because they're so worried about privacy, even with cookies. So having add-on packages that allow me to, you know, just think for a second that you look at your utilities. There's people in a room looking at a whole bunch of screens monitoring water movement. natural gas movement, et cetera, et cetera. Imagine having a room in the dealership that's kind of mission control and there's a bunch of people watching the screens on the wall noticing, well, Metz Kramer's over there and he's looking at an excavator. Why don't I have our excavator specialist give them a call? Yeah. The customer would freak.

You're watching me now? Yeah.

There's a really interesting book that's just come out. A French author, he teaches at the University of Paris about the internet and how dangerous it is because of the social media and the fact that everything is predicated on getting a shot of dopamine. It's just like you're an alcoholic or a gambler or something. It's the same thing. Every time you get a text message, bing, there's a chemical reaction. Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get a shot of dopamine if the guy found a machine he was looking for or a powder he was looking for? And, you know, getting them to come on back, baby. You know, it's we're not that sophisticated yet, obviously.

Yeah. What's interesting to me is, you know, we post Tuesday nights and Fridays. And I do a similar thing. Yeah. So I just, okay. And there's this spike. Yeah. And here's the amount of time they're there. Yeah. And here's the percentage that just blow off. If they look at the titles and say, nah, that's no good. I'm out of here. So, you know, it's, so you're trying to figure out how the heck, once you got them looking, once you, and that's part of the problem with podcasts and blogs, there has to be some regularity. So it's almost like there should be campaigns going from websites all the time. Thank you for coming. Would you like to participate in such and such and have access to a draw?

There's so many things that we could do. Bonnie Feigenbaum, who's putting together our marketing lectures from McGill in Montreal, that's exactly what she's saying. Social media marketing is one of her lecture series. And we don't do that. We have to struggle to have campaigns in the business.

Yeah, and it's interesting. As you might have noticed, I put up a collage of people. I noticed. The one that went out this morning is 32, and I got criticized when I put it up. The comment that came back was, you know, are you international or not? And it was, oh, my, you know, it's kind of like the curse of knowledge. When you're a teacher, you know what you know, but you're assuming the student knows what they know. So we put that out this morning, and guess what? Because now the Volvo dealers in North America, Two different businesses are owned by Europeans. Yeah. The trading companies with Komatsu that are part owners in the Komatsu dealers, they're out of Japan. So we can no longer be thinking local. We've got to be thinking bigger. What Alex Kraft does with Heave is really interesting. You know, the guy who's looking for a machine, he doesn't care where it comes from. He wants that machine.

Well, it really opens up the whole field of marketing, doesn't it?

For many dealerships, marketing doesn't exist. Marketing, you know, it's trade shows and conventions and brochures. Brochures. Yeah, that's not what marketing, well, all we've done, what we were talking about early on in this is all the dealer did on their website is they put a brochure on the computer screen. Congratulations.

Yeah. And we're still rather new. I'm going to put Amazon at the birth just to pick an arbitrary place. And you and I have talked about this a lot. We need to get different examples. America Online is a really good example. I love that one. Yeah. It's, yeah, I was on there almost. within the first couple of months of existence. And Steve Case lives over here in Hawaii now. He made so much money when he sold it at the time. That was a terrible deal.

Well, it again is people chasing. It's kind of like Bitcoin and crypto. Everybody's chasing something they don't really understand yet. And that's the same thing with a web page. Most people don't understand what the purpose of the web page is. And you can't do that in a two-page, one-page blog. You know, it needs a discussion. Yeah. So let's have that discussion and think in terms of I'm a dealer and I've got one of those yada, yada, yada brochure type websites. I'm the same as everybody else. I don't have any pop-ups anywhere. Where do I start? How do you convince me or how do you attract me or excite me about changing it? That's a hard question.

Yeah. How do you get me excited about changing this?

To be honest with you, Mets, I don't know. What should the purpose be?

Oh, you mean mine? Okay, I thought you were talking. Yes. The purpose of our website is to provide information to people. It's to be a library, an internet library that can search, that has thousands of documents that they can get answers from, and then expose them to our assessments, which is where everything starts. So, yeah, and, you know, I'm using the resources, the blogs, the podcasts, the newsletters, the audio learning, all of that. I'm using that as the entry point. Come on in. You got a question? And we're starting to get traction on that. And as soon as I start seeing the questions, then the little pop-up is going to show. Yeah. Oh, you're looking at that. Have a look at this class. Yeah. You know, because that's how we'll move it around.

Yeah.

Always terrible, isn't it?

So that little character popping up on the right-hand side of the bottom that gives you a little bar to type things in, that becomes really important, doesn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. So Sarah Hanks, who's coming along on digital transformations. She talks about the example that she just recently went to a dentist. And she walked into the dentist's office and everything's manual. They look in an appointment book. They know all the rest of the nonsense. And she uses that as a springboard to go over. Somebody comes, walks into the dealership today. Physical plan. Forget the internet for a second. Walks into the dealership. Nobody keeps track of that. There's no sign-in book. Yeah. Where'd you go? Who'd you see? What are you here for? What, you know, we don't. So when I go over to the internet and expect them to be able to answer those questions, that's really alien, isn't it?

About 25,30 years ago, we started putting computer screens in the shop in a waiting area. We put them out on every bay as well to indicate all the action that was going on. And now Dale Hanna comes across with foresight intelligence and others do the same thing, but text messages, pictures going out. Here's all the action that took place today. That should be so common. You know, Marlene's got her car at the dealership. We dropped it off the other night. They were expecting an inspection yesterday. We got a call at 515. We need more time. It's Friday. Here's, you know, we'll get back to you. Well, we might not get the car back for the weekend. That doesn't matter. Yeah. What the heck's that all about? You know, and our service departments do that every damn day and week. Do we meet completion dates? No. Or if you find somebody that says they do, I want to talk to them.

Not a bad idea. No, I'm serious. It's not a bad idea. The situation, and again, I got to go back to Amazon and the target was a bookstore. And I read a lot and buy a lot of books and I'd go into a bookstore. They never had what I needed. So Amazon recognized that they had to bring it in. Yeah. So I said, well, I don't need to have an inventory. Yeah. Look at Tesla. It doesn't have a shop anywhere. No. What does that do to the cost structure of the business, of the dealership? Hell, hello. You know, it's funny. I used to be. A little bit more provocative,20,30 years ago, I would say to the dealership, I said, why don't you get rid of the equipment line? You'll make a heck of a lot more money. And they'd look at me and say, well, we can't, we wouldn't make anything if we didn't have equipment. I said, really? Well, where am I going to get the parts? You can get anything you want anywhere in the world. Oh, come on. And our customers are proving that to us every day on the internet, aren't they? Oh,

Well, what, where I was trying to take you was it's much easier to buy parts on the internet from a non-genuine than it is to find the OEM dealer have it available because they don't process it that way. The independent, the competitor, the JIPO, whatever terminology we want to use, they want the business. They're hungry for the business. They're doing things to get the customer excited. Yeah.

The trick with that, Matt, is that everybody kind of overlooks is your market share on labor is a direct driver of your market share on parts. The independent mechanic that's doing the repair for you, he chooses the source of parts. You don't. And what's his motivation? He wants to make some money. So he goes where he can get the best deal. And that is not the OEM dealer.

You know, there's another aspect of business. And again, Amazon, Walmart's doing it now, but. We think in terms of equipment, new and used. We think in terms of rentals. We think in terms of parts. We think in terms of service. Nobody's talking about customer services. Like, I've got sensors. I've got telematics. I can do a health check on your machine every hour, every minute of the day. If there's something wrong, I can send you an alert and tell you to stop your machine. We should start for that. The logistics, now that the supply chain has become such an issue, I've been saying for a long time, look, I'll guarantee you delivery today for nothing. But you're going to have to subscribe to a membership. So think in terms of Netflix and just use round numbers. They have 200 million people around the world that subscribe to them and pay them 20 bucks a month. That's not bad cash flow, baby. So extended warranty. You want a standard three-month warranty, six-month,12-month? What would you like? Would you like me to come out and do an inspection service like your doctor? You want to come in and have a checkup from the neck up once a year, twice a year? Do you want to clean your teeth? Do you want me to come out? And, you know, there's so many different things that we could offer that this company is starting to look at it from that perspective. They're trying to enhance the customer experience, aren't they? And we've left the customer experience alone for 30,40 years.

Yeah. Do you know where that all started? The auction online?

Thoroughbred horses.

No joke.

The horses that are running in the Kentucky Derby, nine times out of 10, those suckers are bought that $30,000 horse that won at 80 to one. Yeah. You know? And I saw that platform, I don't know,30 years or something,1990, somewhere in there. And I was thunderstruck. Here comes the horse. It's on camera. He's in Saudi Arabia. He's in Ireland. He's in Kentucky. I mean, Argentina. He's all over the darn world. He's a polo horse. He's a racehorse. And I'm thinking to myself, damn. So the moral of that story is we got to get out of our box. And look over the wall and see what other industries are doing, what other people are doing. That's exactly what those folks did. What does the customer want and need?

Yep. Yep.

Oh, it's... Yeah, it's, you know.

Well, before we go down that road, I think that's the next road we should go down. But that'll be another podcast. I hope we've provoked people to think about the fact that the website is an action center. Absolutely. And, you know, getting that little character in the bottom right-hand side of your screen, after you've been there for a second, you look at somebody and he pops up and says, oh, I noticed you're looking at excavators. Have you got an interest in excavators? And now you need to answer that question. Yeah. Uh-oh. Or the phone rings in your office. Hey, Mets, I noticed you're looking at that 345, you know, right now. You really need a machine that big? I didn't know that you...

So, you know, I think, I don't know. I think this is a reasonably logical point to end. You?

Yeah. What's the purpose and why are you here? Yeah. Okay, terrific. Thank you, Metz. Mahalo. And thank you to all of you that are listening, and I look forward to having you present at another of these exciting podcasts, these Candid Conversations. See you next time. 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.