Latest activity

Dan Sayer · Thursday at 3:26 PM

Chris Cachor said:
Yes. It's a little unconventional, but considering OEMs have both a approved website vendor list AND an approved advertising partner list, you could take a rip of ad spend and skirt the approved vendor rules, while still being able to use part of your co-op...

Oh, I see what you are saying. Yes, it is a considerable amount of money to leave on the table with Ford by not participating with vendors. We MAKE money in advertising with Ford. Kia, on the other hand, we dropped the approved site and went back to our own because the co-op loss wasn't very painful vs having control of our price stacks and site for our Kia stores.

Chris Cachor · Thursday at 3:22 PM

Yes. It's a little unconventional, but considering OEMs have both a approved website vendor list AND an approved advertising partner list, unapproved website vendors could take a rip of ad spend (ex: 20-25%) and skirt the approved vendor rules, while still being able to use part of your co-op to fund the website. That's what I'd do if I was trying to sell websites to dealers but I wasn't an approved vendor...

Dan Sayer · Thursday at 2:57 PM

Chris Cachor said:
Can co-op funds be used to buy digital media? Ex: Facebook, Google, etc. If so, is there a set budget allocated to each store?

Go home, Chris, you're drunk.

Did you mean to post your question on this thread regarding the DealerOn and Ford website provider issue?

Chris Cachor · Thursday at 2:54 PM

Can co-op funds be used to buy digital media? Ex: Facebook, Google, etc. If so, is there a set budget allocated to each store?

Dan Sayer · Thursday at 2:17 PM

A Kappler said:
Ingesting a CarFax & Cargurus phone leads into Vinsolutions. The lead source doesn’t offer a difference from traditional leads from these two. Need to assign these accordingly as to not disrupt our round robin lead process. The ADF source does show “phone” but neither of these sources are interested in parting them for us. Anyone known workaround? Thanks in advance.

I do the same as what @jscole86 does. Turn them off from pushing XML lead notifications. They're phone ups, not internet leads, so they need to follow your phone up process and not an internet process. Hopefully you have a phone tracking tool in place anyway which would allow you to track them for logging accuracy in your CRM as phone ups. Also, you can just go into the CarGurus/CarFax dashboard, view the phone numbers, search the number in the CRM to confirm it was logged and move on.

Dan Sayer · Thursday at 12:59 PM

Zack_AF said:
Yeah they try to hold rebates hostage from being sent through the feed automatically but there’s ways around it.

If you're open to running a non-certified site, the ideal way to hide the certified site is to obtain a new domain (which you'd need anyway) and use that URL for the certified site. Ideally you'd make it something a little more obscure so that the certified site doesn't populate as easily in a search and utilize your current URL that likely has years of building domain authority as your main site.

Says the vendor from a site company not on program with Ford... Just giving you a hard time @Zack_AF but we run our own WP sites and take this approach BUT we want both our FD DDC sites and our own URLs to take up space on Page 1. I would NOT recommend a dealer go through the added expense of adding their own "marketing" site to just bury the other. IMO. I still feel like @Mid-Grade Ford is having issues with 3rd party plugins, not the native platform, and I'd still love to know what his Ford URL is....

Dan Sayer · Thursday at 8:51 AM

@Mid-Grade Ford what is your URL? In my experience, and I've used Dealer.com, DealerOn, and DealerInspire, once you start layering in 3rd party scripts like payment calc, trade tools, credit widgets, hosted chat, etc they cause issues, not the native platform. I spent two years with DealerInspire so have first-hand experience on that side of the fence as well.

craigh · Wednesday at 10:04 AM

This is an area where I spend alot of my time - every minute I invest in making my AI setup better pays out in ROI on my time in the future.
For this I highly recommend ChatGPT with a premium account, which allows for better long term options.

I create a ChatGPT Project for every topic, product or common task I do
I explain to the Project everything I need it to do, tell it to be succinct and explain my knowledge level to it so it doesn't try to educate me
I tell every project to check it's own work before replying - for whatever reason this seems to reduce error counts
After every meeting, I take the Zoom transcript and just dump it into the relevant project and walk away
I upload many attachments to each project - anything from budgets to database schemas

With this workflow, I am prepared for the Agentic future but also gaining massive benefits today - I go into Project A and say "I am meeting with John Smith today to discuss X, prepare me a list of points from our previous discussions". You can also ask it to chart things, sort data, find duplicates, clean things, etc.

I have always said the hardest part about AI is remembering to use it.

craigh · Wednesday at 9:57 AM

Zack_AF said:
Yeah just like most OEMs, they're beholden to their digital program. The only work around is running duel sites. My understanding is that those dealers typically find the cheapest package with Dealer.com (unless things have changed and someone else is cheaper) and bury it in favor of their non-certified site.

That makes sense - most of the solutions I have or would suggest would not be on that list.

craigh · Wednesday at 8:33 AM

@Mid-Grade Ford do you know if you have to use a vendor from FordDirect program or is that optional?

jscole86 · Monday at 1:07 PM

I hate when those come into our CRM, becuase it's always a duplicate lead, since our sales team has entered it already. I normally ask for them to turn off the phone call leads like that.

Tallcool1 · May 30, 2025

Assuming you mean Simulcast or Live Auction, no you can't.

Alex Snyder · May 29, 2025

Brian Michael West said:
This is HUGE!

It is a very cool use of AI. Few sales departments have been good at consistently approaching service customers. Now, there really isn't a need whatsoever. AI does it all. And we were able to include this feature without raising prices!

Alex Snyder · May 29, 2025

BillVaughnAlWestNissan said:
I've talked before about sucking at outbound. One of the recommendations I received was to go back to past opportunities that we didn't close and reach out again. I went back to April and reached out to about 30 customers where I felt like there was even the slightest shot at. This took me about 45 minutes. So far one person messaged me back to tell me they already purchased. This feels like a waste of time. Am I wasting my time?

Content is king when doing this. If you did a “I’m the GM and want to help you” kind of message, people don’t believe that. Too many crappy managers spoiled it. If you sent them a price or payment or enticed them with more money for their trade, then you may get something.

We help a lot of dealers with this with an enticement to see today’s latest payments personally constructed for them. That gets a lot of activity and pulls the old/dead leads back into active.

Brian Tucker · May 28, 2025

I like the AI Summary. I spot checked a few against my dealerslink tool and they seem to be accurate.
Did I miss the ability to compare cpo's to other cpo's?

Tallcool1 · May 24, 2025

BillVaughnAlWestNissan said:
I've talked before about sucking at outbound. One of the recommendations I received was to go back to past opportunities that we didn't close and reach out again. I went back to April and reached out to about 30 customers where I felt like there was even the slightest shot at. This took me about 45 minutes. So far one person messaged me back to tell me they already purchased. This feels like a waste of time. Am I wasting my time?

I won't say that you are wasting your time, because as soon as I do someone will tell all of the stories about how they kill it with 6 month old re-engaged shoppers.

I will say that it is a very low percentage of success when following up with those people. I guess it depends upon what else you have to do as to if it is a waste!

joe.pistell · May 22, 2025

MarketCheck Team,
WOW, This is baaad ass! ***MIND BLOWN***
You have the foundation for a vAuto replacement here!

Tallcool1 · May 22, 2025

BillVaughnAlWestNissan said:
Thanks for checking in. I'm going to try to get more consistent at posting on here again. Got buried for a minute there.

As I mentioned in my reply to Dan, it's quite a slog trying to bring a dealership back up with no budget. Trying to do as much organically as I can.

It's honestly pretty hard to keep up with everything. I'm down to just me, my old sales manager who is now doing finance/backing me up, and 3 sales people. It's hard to do things to progress the dealership when I'm having to handle so many of the day-to-day functions; especially trying to learn their systems and processes along with how Nissan does things.

Unfortunately, while I see small gains in several areas, I think things need to really start moving soon or we might be in trouble.

No pressure to post Bill, I understand. I may go weeks without actually interacting on DR, even though I am logged in.

Alex Snyder · May 22, 2025

This is for you if you have a service department at your dealership! FRIKINtech has launched a full canvas of technologies to empower your team to get more leads on cars you can buy from your service customers.

Before the customer arrives for service

A pre-service valuation offer is made to the customer through AI over text. The AI is specially tuned to get an appointment for vehicle valuations and can have a conversation with the customer to answer any of their questions or concerns. Even if the customer did not buy their car from your dealership, the AI can still convert the customer into a sales appointment while maintaining the service appointment.

During the service appointment

A live dashboard of today’s (and future) service appointments is ready for any progressive salesperson or dealership with a manual process to fire offers directly to customers via text and/or email. It is perfect for anyone wishing to greet an old customer or for the agent already working the service drive.

After service has been done

When a repair order is closed, offers are sent to the customers who did not have an appointment or were not approached during their visit to ensure no customer falls through the cracks. The AI further engages the customers with this digital offer to schedule a VIP vehicle valuation appointment.

More details are in this deck - including an offer to you to trial this for 30 days! https://gamma.app/docs/Total-Service-Acquisition-Control-c4hf72ice03uzch

Alex Snyder · May 22, 2025

Do you mind sharing some of the pieces of that payplan, @Rick Buffkin?

Dan Sayer · May 16, 2025

Jeff Kershner said:
I thought this feature was mandatory. Looks like you need many more up votes.

I love Drive but this one blows my mind on to why they refuse to add it when they are so focused on CAN-SPAM for email and TCPA on SMS.

Dan Sayer · May 15, 2025

How's this going?

BillVaughnAlWestNissan said:
I'm also going to have to break my rule on trying to go with minimal to no advertising. I feel like I'm going to HAVE to do VLA to increase our presence on search. VLA seems to be the lowest cost option for this outside of maximizing our BGP.

I noticed that Al West doesn't come up for Used searches still. I tried this once only because my owner came back from a 20Group with a dealer who lead the composite and "doesn't do any digital advertising". I knew there were a number of other factors like he had all the Ford dealerships in the area and had been a loved dealer for 20+ years but for the sake of a grand experiment I complied and went cold turkey. This was in late 2018 and early 2019 so we were getting chunks of in-store visit data from Google at that time so could verify we dropped 700+ in-store visits and our group suffered. In fact, it took another 90 days after going dark for 90 days to just get back on track. I understand your controlling expenses but I'm a believer that going dark on digital is a high risk strategy. Have you changed your approach since March?

jscole86 · May 13, 2025

joe.pistell said:
CASE IN POINT.
I just completed a ChatGPT study into a technical problem in our space.

GPT's opening message:

Research completed in 7m · 13 sources · 90 searches

***DealerRefresh was cited 15 times in this study***

That report would have taken me DAYS to complete. Now, flip this scenario over to car shopping.

Don't forget to include when OEM's get involved... cough (D2 C2) cough

Tallcool1 · May 13, 2025

Hey @BillVaughnAlWestNissan , checking in on the dealership progress.

I know you are busy and documenting as much as you have is time consuming. This isn't a request for a 2,500 word write up. Just a check in.

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FRIKINtech Announcing: Total Service Acquisition Control

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