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Alex Snyder · Tuesday at 12:21 PM

From the moment I met Jim, I immediately loved that guy! He was so funny and absolutely stood out from the crowd. He is one of my favorite characters in this industry. This was the first RefreshFriday we hosted with him and that was a riot :rofl:

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@Jeff Kershner - do you want to tell the story of our first encounter with Jim at Digital Dealer two decades ago?

For those who don't know, Jim isn't expected to make it much longer. Stan Sher has been keeping me up to date on what's happening.

Here's Stan's latest post on the topic: Stan Sher on LinkedIn: #alphadawg #jimziegler #automotivelegend #prayersforjim…

jscole86 · Tuesday at 9:27 AM

Goxee does it and it's pretty slick, automated and fairly customizable.

Car Dealer Software – Goxee Dealer™

Car dealer software that manages includes Inventory, Website, CRM, Craigslist, Window Stickers and marketing so car dealers get more leads and sell more cars.

www.goxeedealer.com

Dan Sayer · Tuesday at 9:02 AM

@WeShipCars in your experience, do dealers typically offer some sort of credit for a carwash post delivery since I'm assuming transport vehicles will be dirty once they arrive to a private buyer?

Alex Snyder · Tuesday at 7:08 AM

BillKVMotorCo said:
Biggest problem on the FB pages is that no one knows anything about the other dealers responding. What a dealership in New York sees is going to be way different than the small Buy Here Pay Here lot in Nebraska. There is never any clarification on that.

I recently got back on Facebook after avoiding it for years. Primarily, I’m visiting the GXOR, Fuji Camera, and Life in a Car Dealership groups. It is the latter one that gets me concerned. Making jokes about things and discussing how things are going with the industry are great topics, but when someone asks something like “what’s your favorite CRM” 100 people chime in with whatever they’re currently using and I know quite a few of them have only ever used that system. They give zero reason why they like it. And nobody challenges them.

I made the mistake of asking about a better tire for icy conditions in the GXOR (off roading) group and got horrendous advice from people who have never driven on ice. Mostly from people who live in SoCal Who admitted they drove on a snowy mountain once for a ski trip. FYI SoCal folks: snow and ice are very different things.

Seeing so many posts like these made me realize how bad Facebook is for getting direct advice. I started this thread to give people a reference point to share in places like Life in a Car Dealership to help them understand they’re getting bad advice.

They are getting good intentions. Good intentions with a short attention span.

flosho · Monday at 1:45 PM

Question for some of the "slim down the CTA" folks.

What is a better converting call to action of "Check Availability" or "Schedule a Test Drive" or "Contact Us" plus then "apply for financing"

We have all 3 on our VDP (The contact us button is more of a fixed scrolling button on the side on desktop).

I'd like to slim the CTAs down to 1 or 2 plus financing CTA. Just not sure if there is any settled science behind WHAT the CTA should say.

flosho · Monday at 1:12 PM

Balboa Bill said:
While the earlier response looks suspect, Wyoming address with an international number...

I was about to ask the same question. I'm looking to simplify posting to CL and possibly Marketplace. Do you have any opinions on this? I saw a website for Wizposter; it looks like a possibility. Do you have any recommendations for a good product?

We use Automoxie and it seems to be very useful.

It will accept your inventory feed and you can post all your inventory and when a new vehicle is added (you can set it up to) it will post the new vehicle to 1 city or 100 cities.

It gives you filters to check each vehicle and repost if: over XX amount of days old or no longer ranked in the top 10 search results for that model and a bunch of other tweaks.

no affiliation with them, but they've been responsive with CS and I like their flexibility.

jon.berna · Monday at 10:51 AM

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Just in time for NADA, I am excited to introduce Collections, the easiest and most flexible way to organize, manage, and share vendors and their products with your team and peers. This idea came up during the beta period over and over. Here's how it works:

Create private lists to organize potential vendors for your dealership. Build an “on-deck” system to track vendors you’re considering, schedule demos, and collaborate with your team on decision-making.
Share public lists with your peers across the industry. Showcase the vendors you recommend, compare notes before conferences, and get feedback on who to connect with next.

How dealerships are already using Collections:

Private use:

Organize vendors you’re evaluating for new initiatives.
Track progress: scheduled demos, completed evaluations, or signed contracts.
Collaborate internally to align your team on key decisions.

Public sharing:

Showcase vendors your dealership trusts to help others in the industry.
Plan for conferences by sharing a curated list of who you’re meeting with.
Ask for feedback from peers on new vendors you’re considering.

Collections is designed to help dealerships like yours make smarter decisions faster and it’s just another way LVL Up empowers you to take control of vendor management

jon.berna · Monday at 10:38 AM

Yeah Reddit is really useful in narrow corridors, it's new user adoption is quite steep and the older users are whiny for sure.

Alex Snyder · Monday at 10:26 AM

I had a little thought in the car this morning. What makes Facebook Groups different from Reddit and different from forums?

It is a mindset.

If you ask a question in a Facebook Group you'll get a lot of answers. More than likely, that will be an overload of answers and many will be terrible advice. People on Facebook are killing time or feeding an addiction. It is a spaz show on there. Much like walking around Vegas. There are so many things to lose your attention to that the advice one may receive is going to be quick and less thought-out. I believe this is one of the many reasons why grammar can be horrendous on Facebook. Whether you're in a product-focused group or in the Car Dealership Life one, this seems to be the case.

Reddit leans liberal and negative. The nature of the site allows one to focus a bit more on the question, and people are incentivized to earn badges. Because you can't control who joins a subReddit there are not any car business-focused channels, but product channels exist. There are some smart people hacking leases, but many product-focused channels usually attract those who are researching problems. It makes for a lot of negative posts.

Forums are highly concentrated. People are not distracted and usually know other members of the community. The online interactions of forums move into the real world. People who visit forums are on a mission, and people who regularly visit enjoy the community. When it comes to answers, the best ones are in the forums because people put thought into their responses and are usually available for follow-up questions.

Deep thoughts with Alex Snyder ...not that deep.

Tallcool1 · Dec 14, 2024

BillKVMotorCo said:
j. this one might be controversial but the market pricing showing savings on used cars is bunk - it creates mistrust IMO

I agree with this!

Dan Sayer · Dec 13, 2024

Louis Norman III said:
Glad you liked it!

I'm unsure if you've seen the second one, but it's much better than the first.

Our 3rd one will be released at NADA this year. It will be out of this world! (hint, hint)

Do you integrate with VinCue? And does adding you as the photo system add a "middle man" delay on syndication like Homenet did with vAuto?

jon.berna · Dec 13, 2024

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The section of the application that saw the largest overall amount of development time was vendor management. From an architecture perspective this is where everything is effectively merged together. In the last 1.0 update we added the ability for dealerships/groups to create custom deal tags, polished every component in the UI and simplified the contract management.

You can also quickly download all deals to excel. One of the things that also cool is deals can be assigned to the group or a location.

joe.pistell · Dec 13, 2024

Mock

Merchandising is art and science. Building Blocks are:
Hero

Comparison UI

CTA

Best Practices:
• This comparison data stays with the shopper onto other VDPs -and- it pre-populates the trade-in form.
• #GradualEngagement Strategy (goal: create a reward for the user to add PII).

AutoMagic Labs (AML) is a merchandising design powerhouse. We are especially good at creating scalable solutions to universal challenges that are hiding in plain sight.

This is the tip of the iceberg. We are building a LLM centered products. We are looking for an innovative partner that can leverage our magic. ping me: [email protected]

carmudgeon · Dec 12, 2024

Automatic cameras will give you varying results. If you’re looking for consistency buy a DSLR and send one of your people to photo school to learn how to control it.

Shooting in full sun is difficult but when done right it, the metallic in the paint shows, aluminum wheels stand out etc. provided you are facing the car into the sun.

Photography is about recording light. It’s better to have plenty of sunlight than to go cheap on studio lights and not have enough light to make the car look good.

joe.pistell · Dec 12, 2024

"Compare With Your Current Car..."

DISC?

#GradualEngagement

jon.berna · Dec 12, 2024

joe.pistell said:
FWIW, Fantasy Football has the best interactive dash i've ever used. Very FF player oriented.
If only we had dealer dashboards so well thought out.

I call not it

joe.pistell · Dec 12, 2024

joe.pistell said:
Anyone find some Analytics gold out here?
I am on a quest to find or create an analytics system that is shopper centered

FWIW, Fantasy Football has the best interactive dash i've ever used. Very FF player oriented.
If only we had dealer dashboards so well thought out.

jon.berna · Dec 11, 2024

I checked Joe's sourcing and yeah 19m - that's nuts up from 15m YOY last year Nov. Also consider how close CarMax and Carvana are to each other now and they compete with listing sites.

jon.berna · Dec 11, 2024

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The LVL Up Auto database contains 584 auto specific vendors with powerful company and product search filters. Vendor Search -> LVL UP Auto | Dealership Vendor Management is mapped to over 30 company and product attributes. Each vendor has a details page with their information, products, reviews as well as a quick way to reserve a demo. It's also public :woot:

Posting more feature videos over the next couple weeks

We are also working on something I am really excited about to end the year. It's required an insane amount of manual effort to develop and I can't wait to share it with everyone on here.

Shawn Ryder · Dec 10, 2024

There will always be the debate with the evil CRM - but with more folks submitting leads online - there needs to be a way to obviously manage them. Believe it or not I think integration is getting easier now... but sure some will throw up roadblocks.

jon.berna · Dec 10, 2024

haha Alex that is great -

Alex Snyder · Dec 10, 2024

The biggest problem with building a CRM: the feature chase.

No matter how innovative you are, dealers are very comfortable with certain features (at least they think they are). You're going to have to develop much of what dealers already have in decades-old tech that will allow your sales team to get 5 minutes into a demo.

This is one of the many reasons I say FUCK CRMs! They only serve three purposes: printing paperwork, desking deals, and doing last-minute email blasts. You won't change dealers' CRM utilization; you must change the technology genre. Or play the feature chase and duke it out with the old guard.

jon.berna · Dec 10, 2024

Wow what a big question Shawn. I'll think about from a 10+ year old CRM's perspective who is looking forward and how they see it.

They are focused on adding layers on top of their infrastructure to make it easier to use. They are polishing services like chat, email, customer outreach recommendations, etc. by leveraging 3rd party usage-based priced AI products. They are trying to pass these off as new products to increase revenue to pay for the dev labor and 3rd party AI costs but the reality is they are features. They are features because they will quickly be the standard and the price will need to reflect that.

So now flip this and think if they could build without this burden what would they do differently. How would the infrastructure look, what are features that are standard and where is the real innovation. Take DR embedded coms with vehicle media and AI, this is standard. What becomes interesting is how to build empowering user experiences that engage dealership users rather than alienate them, I think that's where the innovation comes in. If you are building this fresh you are able to think about human in the loop design versus human has to click all these buttons and that's pretty exciting especially when you think how light your application can be.

Shawn Ryder · Dec 10, 2024

TomLaPointe said:
Challenging road, but organic multimedia capability and integration into EVERYTHING is key

Thanks much Tom - when you say "organic multimedia" can you just clarify - adding own content to the crm?

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