Ok so this post got me thinking and now I am thinking enough is enough and here is why.
Zag made a big push in 2009 presenting themselves as a vendor
with a new pricing model that was going to better for the industry. No monthly fee, no cost per lead, simply a cost per sale. Sounds fair? Simply set ZAG up with a login to your DMS so they can cross check for their customers and invoice you when there is a match. Simple enough right? Sounds fair right? Good deal right? Don’t worry about being charged for bogus leads. Don’t worry about inflated monthly rates. Ok, I’m interested.
Prior to signing up with Zag they provided me with a Quick Facts about Zag sheet and here is how they addressed this process:
“Zag = Sales Matching
In order to track sales, we connect to your sales records through your DMS system. The sales information is used solely for the purpose of sales matching and is handled with the highest level security.â€
O.k. so far so good. Well….let’s see….
I’ll say this; I have been a Zag dealer for the past few months and have had some success with the customers that they have brought through. I will also add that a number of these are certainly customers who would not have come our way without Zag. These are primarily membership customers who are willing to travel a distance, and in many cases out of state, to buy from a member dealer. But at what cost to the dealership and is worth it? The cost is this; we are paying ZAG and giving them daily access to our DMS so that they can gather their market data daily so that they can turn around and sell it back to us as different vendor for their own TrueCar pricing product. Is this worth it? Do I need to say that again? No nor do I want to. Do I feel good about this deal? No. Is Zag doing anything wrong? No it’s right there in the contract and here it is:
“Zag may use certain information related to the sale of vehicles sold by dealer and Zag reserves the right to use macro-level, aggregated data to evaluate performance and best practices with the primary objective of better understanding customer behavior, pricing trends and other statistical insights that may lead to an improved implementation of Zag and it’s affiliates’ products and services.â€
Does this sentence contradict their quick fact sheet? I'll let you be the judge.
So they had a plan and so far it’s working. But dealers can take control and turn away from this pricing model and turn away from vendors accessing our data in this fashion.
I am sending out my cancellation today. Will I loose customers? Will I loose deals? Yes but I can certainly utilize the resources that are going to Zag and use them as productively or even more so and that is the good thing about digital marketing. That good thing being the ability to tweak your spend, fine tune your lead mix and optimize your funnel to flow baby flow. That sounds like another post brewing’ …
