Will you post your article here when you finish it @HarryEvans? I'd like to read it.

Unrelated, but can you imagine the articles AI will write in 2065 about selling through COVID?

NIOMARVIN83 said:

Harry Evans is writing articles about the car dealership industry from the 1950s to the 1970s and is looking to interview people who were involved, like salespeople, owners, or mechanics. He's interested in stories about selling cars that were only made for one year and quickly became outdated as new models were introduced each year. Harry wants to learn about the challenges these dealers faced, how they handled orders and trade-ins, and any memorable customers or events. If you know someone who might have insights or anecdotes from that time, Harry would appreciate hearing from them. He promises to share the articles with those interviewed before publication to ensure they're portrayed accurately.

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thanks for the clarification...

autovantaofficial said:

If anyone has had any experience in the car sales industry

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You're in the right place.

autovantaofficial said:

I don't want to release the full thing here

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You're in the wrong place. DR has a tradition of open source idea'ing.

Yea, ideas are cheap. Not about who thought of it but who did it.

hahaha YOU WIN

Carsten said:

Got eyes on the 2022 BMW M4? It’s a powerhouse with 473 hp under the hood, handling that’s sharper than your ex's tongue, and a design that doesn’t bother asking for attention—it demands it. Tech’s so advanced, it’s like it’s from the next century. Want in? Fine. Don’t? Whatever. This car doesn’t need your validation to know it’s the apex.

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My guess on this difference is due to GA4 filtering out bot traffic while Shift does not.

I saw Tesla dropped the lease price on the Model 3 to $299/mo. With the extra $99/mo for full-self drive, there's nobody that can compete with that. Which is an interesting model. Car companies rely on parts and service, while Tesla will sell software subscriptions (FSD, Premium Connectivity), then eventually will use their own fleet to charge for ride sharing services.

Carsten, that's weak sauce. Come join the competition:

Contest: Who can make the best ChatGPT Comment Generator?​

It’s easy. Trust nothing from Shift digital.

My startup has me way down the AI rabbit hole. OpenAI's mega success has created an arms race funded by trillion dollar companies.

• $GOOG: Gemini,
• $MSFT: ChatGPT,
• $AMZN:Claude,
• $META:Lamma,
• $TSLA:Grok, FSD
• and more.

What is coming is a revolution. Everyone of these CEO's see the wealth creation that's coming, this creates a competitive environment will drive them to out innovate each other.

The franchised automobile retail industry is a perfect fit for AI's strengths.
Dealership world is filled with AI friendly structured and semi-structured data and compliance rules. Add to this, franchised dealer staff has a common business hierarchy, each player doing the same job, over and over, coast to coast.

What is genuinely different about AI humans create the framework, and AI is learning and growing on it's own. The more we build into AI's framework, the more robustly it grows, and, the faster it grows... by itself.

What else is unique is AI communicates to us with a voice of authority, even when it's wrong, and it's wrong a lot. Amazon's Claude, this months highest performing AI platform, has a 40% error rate on "Zero Shot" test prompts. Today, bleeding edge AI is building multi-agent, task specific swarms to dramatically reduce its error rate and improve it's relevance (google it).

How fast is the AI innovation coming?
I believe by 4thQ 2024, AI's task solving abilities and reduced error rates will create a totally new paradigm in damn near every industry on the planet. In 2025, AI's strengths will become so self-evident that the President of the US will 'finally' create a committee to try to put a fence around AI.

Ppl ask me if I am afraid of AI, I believe FaceBook is a bigger scourge on humanity's happiness than AI will ever be.

p.s. AI in Auto Retail, Personal Digital Assistants
--Linkedin, Jan 2024

Use your own numbers via Ga4, shift is aggregating data from feeds by the website providers and likely haven't been inspected for a long time. The data feeds include ad accounts and website data which they try to roll up across their accounts. There's some manual elements in this process to my knowledge also.

Haha. Carsten I knew you'd jump in on this!

I think the premise of agile is well intentioned. It just has morphed into a way for technology teams to insulate themselves from management and protect each others employment. Both of these things are necessary but not at the expense of the business aka pace etc.

The product decision making process is imo a creative one. Agile's methods for quantifying unknowns and the assignment of value via it's prioritization matrix seems antiquated now.

I just think about the math of the number of roles that develop + design / all.

Ryan Everson said:

more vendors should focus on constantly shipping new dealer-requested features AND not view new features as an add-on package to sell.

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To do this effectively vendors have to build in public, which nearly all won't do. You have show your roadmap. The argument that your competition is going to pick a part your strategy is bogus. I am not talking about large partnerships or new products, just existing products. The other argument not to share a roadmap is because they don't have one or it's all $ add-ons, back to your main point.

A lot of the product development world is transitioning away from agile because it's not agile enough, people have been saying this for years as a joke but the big tech layoffs were primarily to the middle managers between development and leadership. When you destroy all the bureaucracy you can actually build very fast and get something between a prototype and finished product out in a matter of days now versus sprints. AI has helped to close the gap between below avg developers and good developers so smaller teams can really move now.
Bottom line: Just let the devs build the cool ideas they try them on users. If the users like it then scale it, stop planning for the sake of planning.

The core issue is companies confusing a feature versus a product because it costs so much to build everything. Every new innovative thing your application does shouldn't be individual branded products. Remember the mission solve problems and be useful.

I've been researching as a customer and continue to get their results in my organic Duck Duck Go SERP. However, when I click on their results, it is just an SEO landing page. A few times, I have not been able to click into a way to search for vehicles. I'm guessing they have some landing pages out there that are solely for SEO. It is a bad customer experience.

I'm no Google user, so take this as you will.

Either way is going to come down to how your staff handles the "leads". I've seen stores go both ways with varying degrees of success so it just depends on your market. If your team is able to respond to chats right away and convert them then that's great. If you're going to rely on one of the managed chat auto-response systems then you're probably no better off than form-fills. Customers just want their questions answered with a timely and relevant response.

LilyBarnes said:

In my opinion, while KPIs like IRT, Connection Rate, and Close Rates are important, there are other factors to consider too.

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Do elaborate @LilyBarnes

BAD IDEAS:
"When can you come in?"
"Your presence is your leverage!"

According to the NADA '23 stats that were released recently, one of the reasons in today's market is affordability. Our data is in full agreement.

Not a pitch, just an explanation, we see this happening in live site data while tracking individual user. Consumers want the biggest, best-equipped unit and submit a lead on it... then they discover interest rates at 11.99%, trade values not as high as they were during the inventory crunch when every dealer wanted to buy THEIR car, and then they switch themselves down-market pretty quickly to lower trims and lower prices.

The dealer who continues to message and call on that first VOI is watering the seeds of disappointment. Not a great base for a longterm relationship. If you don't have technology to tell you what the individual shopper is CURRENTLY viewing, I'd strongly suggest layering some check questions into your follow-up.

A Kappler said:

I am testing it however if anyone has had success with specific verbiage of a CTA that is currently doing this or specific failures doing this I would appreciate the feedback.

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AK, I am a merchandising specialist.
Being creative needs ways to juice up your imagination:


Shoppers have a job to do. So do your reps. Shoppers want reps to answer questions that they can't answer (so the shopper can complete their mission).

What words will you place on this sign?
IDEAS:
Questions? We're here to help.
Questions? We've got Answers.
Questions? Fast Information, Free & Easy.

Carsten said:

Any stats on why they changed make/models?

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My wise used car manager from 30 years ago used to say, "80% of people don't buy what they set out to buy." 30 years later, I'm no longer pounding pavement and can look at nationalized data to prove him right.

The answer to "why a person does something" is impossible. My theory is that people like to change things when owning something newer. Think about how many times you bought the same make/model two times in a row. Out fo the 40ish cars I've owned, I did it once.

<-- Forum Troll

joe.pistell said:

I miss the live 'cast JB. I'll ck out the recorded version

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You came up a couple times, we were nice

I miss the live 'cast JB. I'll ck out the recorded version

Jon Singo said:

mine are very clean on the topic of current CRM offerings.

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How does one get their hands dirty on the topic of CRM offerings? Side question. What changes have you seen in your Used car inventory levels compared to last year at Performance?