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Oh Good! Another OEM Mandated Digital Partnership program horror Story

Better than expected. Yes. Yes.

I bet you all still had to put down the right tile in your Chevy stores! We kicked and screamed over that too, did no good.

Did you attend one of the required BDC meetings GM is having? They have no "mandated" BDC's, but you can read the writing on the wall. The 2 vendors they choose I have never heard of.
 
I bet you all still had to put down the right tile in your Chevy stores! We kicked and screamed over that too, did no good.

Did you attend one of the required BDC meetings GM is having? They have no "mandated" BDC's, but you can read the writing on the wall. The 2 vendors they choose I have never heard of.

No. They can try all they want there's no way that I'll ever willingly comply with something like that. Unless of course they plan on paying the BDCs' salary.
 
No. They can try all they want there's no way that I'll ever willingly comply with something like that. Unless of course they plan on paying the BDCs' salary.

Having a BDC is not required... yet. Going to the meeting was/is mandatory for a dealer or exec manager of the dealership. I foresee it like EBE or SFE, "no you don't have to do it, but we strongly recommend you are or we will not play nice with you"
 
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That will add to someone's retirement plan.

The two vendors GM selected are

Proactive Dealer Solutions - which I have heard of now that I remember

Traver Technologies

I am still reading through the info that was at the meeting. Which see,s to be better than I would have expected. I was not able to attend, was out in NV at the Corvette Dealer Academy.
 
Hey Eley,

I actually found the GM BDC training better than expected. The guy from Proactive had some good thoughts. I was not expecting to learn anything but came away with some good ideas for improving our process. The session I went to had about 100 dealers....only 25% of which had some type of process in place for handling internet/phone leads consistently.......this business never ceases to amaze me.
 
Dan about the only thing we disagree on is dealer.com here. The OEM is not your friend. It seems that because of some mystical perception that these big companies attract the brightest people in the industry, dealers often assume the programs they put in place come from great research and massive budgets to get that research correct and once in a while it does. But it is always done from the OEM's standpoint and never done from a dealer or dealer profitability standpoint.

The OEM is only interested in selling more OEM vehicles - NOT whether you are the one selling them. The best way they can sell more vehicles is through brand conquest. The best way for the dealer to sell more vehicles is competing against other dealers selling the same product. The goals are misaligned.

The scary truth is that most of these OEM imposed marketing initiatives happen because of a few drinks, a pretty girl and a dazzling powerpoint presentation based on charts and graphs with no real substance to support the assertions made by the presentations.

OEM mandated marketing initiatives are as effective at generating ROI as Obamacare is to lowering health care costs.
 
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My understanding is that you can use the spend on Adword PPC keywords or you can move it over to display. I already saw an issue with competing keywords from my current PPC campaigns with the OEM in the first couple months. So starting in March I am moving all the funds to display and will be focusing on 2 models (One for Ford one for Lincoln). That way I am not competing for the same spend and I will push it all to conquest where my current banner campaigns are all Retargeting. That way I get no cross over in my results and can use money from Ford to test the waters with a few highly targeted campaigns. My only gripe with the program is that it only goes to the OEM sites which I dislike and are not mobile friendly.