NADA 2008 Review

[Jeff Kershner]

I didn't get much time on the floor this year as I have in the past. The crew over at MileOne kept me busy at NADA 2008. There were several people that I was supposed to stop by and shake hands with but I just never got around to it, so I do apologize to everyone that I was not able to connect with.

Being my first time there, I thought San Fransisco was wonderful. The weather was fantastic and the city provides an atmosphere like no other. However, in my opinion, this was not the best location for NADA. Having to travel outside between the West, North and South halls of the Moscone Center was a pain in the a$$. Thankfully the weather was nice and the AutoMotion girls were always out side to greet you with their sexy smiles and great attitude between buildings.

Compared to last years NADA Review this one will be a quickie. I only had the chance to visit a hand full of vendor booths this year;

I'll start of with onecommand (formally know as callcommand). The demo was impressive and they seem to really know their product. Having one program that can take care of your sales/service email, voicemail and text campaigns is strong. I also like the fact that they have aligned themselves with some great companies like ExactTarget to help guarantee email delivery.



I sat through a demo with Autobase CRM to review the new features (features that should have been apart of the CRM years ago). That's all I'll say about that.



Once I actually FOUND the Dealer.com booth (hidden in the corner of the West room) I was able to get a taste of their new TotalControl Dominator, allowing dealers to control their own SEM campaigns. If this works as well as it demo's, it's a homerun.



I made a quick stop at the Polk booth where they were touting their Polk Lead Scoring.

TimeHighway has added a few improvements and a new look to their online service scheduler.

I stopped by the ClickMotive booth to check out their new Flashy Websites. The sites look good, but I'm still a leary about all the flash and stuffed HTML in the background.



vAuto continues to build upon their product and continues to impress. Their tool is so clean, it has one of the best looking interfaces for any software program in the dealer industry. I have never used it but if it applies everything that Dale Pollack teaches, then I would think this is one program worth taking a look at.

Last year the eBay booth was PACKED as they touted their eBay Local program. This year..dead. At least every time I walked by. I have to wonder how many dealers signed up for eBay Local last year but are singing a different tune this year.

Some of your more aggressive CRM's are learning how to tie in personalized video responses in their systems and are building action plans according to whether or not the customer actually watches the video email. NICE!

After attending NADA for the last 4 years, there really isn't a lot of new stuff to see. Yeah, some vendors will add new features to their products and every now and then you might find something that peeks your interest but overall it's the same stuff year after year.

I overheard several discussions where dealers are searching for quality SEO vendors. Does this mean dealers are catching on to the snake oil SEO vendors in the past and are now fed up with it?



WHERE ARE THE HISPANIC MARKETEERS? by 2050, Latinos will be 29% of the entire American population but yet I only ran across one Hispanic marketing vendor. Props to Larry John Wright Morales, Inc.

Of course the best part of any NADA is the networking and the PARTIES!

The Chase Bank tequila tasting party pulled a nice crowd. Getting to taste 1,2 or 8 different tequilas was intoxicating to say the least. I stopped by the DealerTrack party for a few minutes then ended up at a small restaurant and bar called Annabelle's while catching up Jesse and the Homenet crew.

Blue Flame6, DealerSocket and Century Interactive threw a way cool party calling it the "The 3 at the 4". Each invitee had to arrive in a group of three and they were serving these tasty drinks called a "Threesome". Very Nice!

The last party I attended was the ADP Reynolds & Reynolds party at City Hall. It was OK, the lack of Bombay Sapphire left me a little disappointed. The party had me feeling quite young, if you know what I mean.

A quick thanks to Joe Vraneza and the KBB crew for dinner Sunday night and Lance over at CarFax for a wonderful dinner at Mccormicks and Kuleto's Monday night.

So what did I take away from NADA this year?

Dealers are STILL LOST! Seriously. Sitting through some of the presentations and over hearing conversations from other dealers, it's crazy how much they still don't get it. They still don't get technology, they still don't understand today's consumer, they still don't train their sales people how to be effective on the phone and how to answer internet leads in a timely manor. The list goes on and it amazes me. How has this industry survived?

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

"Dealers are STILL LOST!"

I have to agree with that Jeff. So are a whole lot of vendors! It almost seems like the bigger the vendor, the more lost it is. There are a few diamonds in the rough though. Dealer.com's Total Dominator looks strong (I'll be using it soon), we did enhance our Call/OneCommand package, DealerSocket and eLeads have made some nice strides in the CRM race, and yes, vAuto rocks! Unfortunately most of the other vendors I met with seem to be just trying to keep up with competition.

Nice write-up Jeff. Sorry to those of you I missed - I didn't get half of what I needed to get done.

 

[Brian T in Etown]

Alex I take it that you use V-Auto? I am curious if anybody else is drinking the V-auto Kool-aid? I have been intoxicated from it the last few months. Dale's book "Velocity" is a must read!

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Brian, I did get my hands on Dale's book while at the show and read it on the plane trip home. Prior to reading Dales book, I had seen him speak at a few seminaries and realized the concept he was teaching was close to what I had implemented at my past dealer. It's what took the dealer from 10-12 used cars a month to over 40 used cars a month with an average of 1.3 million in inventory (all highend luxury). Like I said before, since I have never used vAuto, I can't testify that the software works as well as they say it does and the fact that they use a scraping technology sort of scares me (there is some controversy around this right now). But I do know the concept works, at least until everyone figures out that in order to make money with used cars you need to know how to price your vehicles. Before we turn this posting into a vAuto thread, I'm going to try and get an interview with Dale for DealerRefresh.

Alex, what advancements did elead have going on? I was only able to stop by the booth for a few seconds.

From what I hear and from past experiences, the DealerSocket crew are fantastic people to work with and since I believe the Van Tuyl auto group has a large invested interest in the company, they should have the inside scoop on what dealers really need.

 

[Brian in Etown]

Jeff,
O.K. I will try not to derail the thread. I know what your getting at with the data scraping and all the false traffic to sights, I.E.
Disclaimer on autotrader stating that their stats are probably not accurate.

 

[Mark Bonfigli]

I agree with Jeff,
not enough hispanic marketeers for sure!
Being brought up in an "Argentine" household and all of my direct family from South America and Italy I think it has given me a better perspective on our market and the needs of the hispanic dalers we serve. Much more needs to be done so thanks Jeff for bringing up this topic.

Mark Bonfigli | President, CEO

Dealer.com, Inc
[email protected]

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

Brian - yep, I'm drinking the vAuto Kool-Aid....but it tastes better than Kool-Aid

Jeff - I had not looked at eLeads in months, and then saw their program again at NADA. It looks like they've added some cool features since I last looked: more campaigning stuff, call center stuff, and read-email notifications. I need to take a deeper look at them though - every time I sat down at their booth something came up.

 

[Lightnup (blog)]

Mark Bonfigli wrote:

"I agree with Jeff, not enough hispanic marketeers for sure!
Being brought up in an "Argentine" household and all of my direct family from South America and Italy I think it has given me a better perspective on our market and the needs of the hispanic dalers we serve. Much more needs to be done so thanks Jeff for bringing up this topic."

Gee, maybe that's why AutoTrader.com now owns AutoMercado.com, the #1 all-Spanish online automotive marketplace (even the listings are in Spanish, unlike AT's competitors) and is integrating it into their solutions to help AT dealers better market to this rapidly growing segment of car buyers.

 

[bhoecht]

I agree with you Jeff... this industry is so ready for the next big thing.

DMS is sooo 80's, CRM is sooo 90's, websites too, 3rd party leads, eBay Local and AutoTrader are sooo early 2000-2003. Is it just me or is the pace of things accelerating?

Answer this though... bring along the next big thing... for argument's sake, what if it was transactional website capabilities (shopping carts for car dealer websites... ) how do you get the industry to engage? How do you get your dealers to get excited? Love to hear the ideas.

 

[mbayo]

Jeff and Mark, perhaps the comment that "dealers are STILL LOST" has something to do with the meager representation of Hispanic marketeers at NADA 2008.

Since we're talking about a group whose long term vision often suffers from a "make this month" mentality, maybe a look at the present and not too distant future might jog dealers into taking consistent action in the Hispanic marketplace and the marketeers will step up in numbers at NADA 2009.

The current cumulative buying power of over 43 million U.S. Hispanics is close to $900 million and is forecasted to eclipse the $1 trillion mark in the next two years! While I haven't seen numbers estimating how much of this will be spent in the automotive sector, Hispanics adults are also more likely to purchase a vehicle in the next 6 months as compared with the general public (16% versus 12%).

Many dealers in "gateway" cities such as L.A., Miami, Houston, NYC and others may have caught on long ago, yet the Hispanic population continues to grow at faster rate than any other minority community in the U.S. and is moving into areas of the country not previously considered to have a sizable Hispanic presence.

In many states much of the growth is happening amongst 2nd and 3rd generation families as compared to growth generated through immigration and while assimilation increases the use of English as a primary language among Hispanics, an affinity for the use of Spanish is often shown in complex transactions, such as the purchase of car.

Language preference, age, education, income, country of origin, and length of time in the U.S. are just some of the factors to take into consideration when marketing to the Hispanic population and dealers willing to jump into this market will indeed need experienced partners to show the way.

While being shown the way though, dealers will need to make a commitment to the market by hiring Hispanic staff to serve customers in all areas of their organizations or run the risk of losing out on the opportunity created by effective marketing and generating a negative perception of their dealership among the Hispanic community in their area.