UI and UX - dealer sites 2.0

[Ryan Everson]

Dude, you gotta get into a store, and watch the 'dance' of commerce happen before your eyes.

The phones ring, the reps scurry, the customers wander, the F&I desk is busy and has a cue, the receptionist kindly gives an impatient visitor a smile and a cup of joe, the back office fat fingers data in the 1990's era DMS, the UCM has 3 auctions streaming and screams at his monitor, the lot worker is helping a sales rep to find the keys, the BDC has no appointments today and the boss knows it.

--The dealer's site feeds this beautiful beehive of activity--​

@Carsten, EVERYONE drives. In this beehive, the spectrum of personas & demographics will shift subtly between franchised brand and geo, but, every buyer in the store has a job to do and every employee in the store has a job to do.

After a few months, you will find that car shoppers bring into the dealership (or BDC) the questions the internet can't answer. The dealer's website highest mission is to help the car shopper visualize that this dealer will help them finalize the search and complete their mission.

Should you immerse yourself inside a store, and you launch your best ideas, if your ideas do not assist the shopper AND the store in 'task completion', your ideas will struggle to move metal.

I love your energy, find a store near you and volunteer or consult. Listen to the 100's of phone calls. Read the 100's of chats and emails. Sit with the receptionist. Shadow sales reps. Sit in sales meetings. Help the lot worker record and upload cars.

These are franchise operators, daily operations are the same all across the US... every store, a beautiful beehive of very focused activity.

Agreed. @Carsten I would encourage you to consider spending 6 months inside a dealership (not remote) as an internet marketing manager and it will be the best investment you've ever made in yourself. Attend every meeting you can. Ingrain yourself.

It will be a lot of work, and may seem beneath your talents at times, but It will pay off in dividends. The dealership will get a talented marketing manager. New ideas will naturally come to you. You'll be able to quickly iterate and test your ideas. You'll likely save yourself months or even years by making sure you land from the get-go on the right mousetrap that has a chance at making a positive impact on the industry.

 

[joe.pistell]

New ideas will naturally come to you. You'll be able to quickly iterate and test your ideas.

@Carsten, I spent a decade in a dealer group in NY as marketing dir. We sold 6000 used cars p/yr out of 3 roofs. 2/3's of my pay was on delivery counts. The payplan (and my long history in high end retail) made me laser focused on watching leads become ups become test drives, become bebacks

The owner loved tech and he gave me authority and budget to take share. I recruited a small dev team and we built our own site. I listened to "the beehive" and charted its activities. IMPORTANT: When your a dev and you are that close to the beehive, you launch our site, you watch it work, you look for confirmation or failure of your thesis. The ideas that will come from the beehive will astound you. Your ideas will be 100x better than a dev expert w/o dealership experiences. You'll create and launch and iterate 100x faster AND you'll get to fight with the sales reps that hate change (why did you move the button!!)

Read those emails and chats. Listen to those phone calls. Shadow the reps. Sit in the GSMs office and listen to the games adults play . Its the same all across the US.