Dear Diary,
When we evaluate ideas here on DealerRefresh, sometimes we're all in agreement, other times, we're all over the map. This observation has been dogging me for years. Here's my $0.02 on this billion dollar problem.
Admit it, we all are flying blind...
We have no Internet shopping cart to score our ideas. In ecommerce, the shopping cart is a score card where all ideas will be judged. In automotive retail, we have no cart. Our cart is the shopper walking in (...and leads are not a shopping cart 
. With no shopping cart to test ideas against, we're left to human opinion to guess what is best. Worse, we can't agree on what the best outcome is (e.g. a lead, a VDP, T.O.S., bounce, etc...).
This causes all kinds of wild ass guesses about what works and what doesn't.
We all agree we want to sell more cars, but, we can't see invisible shoppers, so howinthehell can we score an idea if we don't know what a win looks like?
So, what tool do we use to know what a car shopper wants (i.e. "the gut call")?
Empathy. Empathy is the ability to experience the feelings of another person. Working in a store does not automatically give you car shopper empathy, you need to see the world thru their shoes.
So, ask yourself, how strong are your empathy skills? Can you take off your car guy hat and put on the car shopper's hat? Not everyone is wired the same way which means not everyone has the same empathy abilities.
/rambling
Joe
p.s. Don't forget the person you're listening to (or reading) is using empathy to evaluate ideas.
p.p.s. This is a record for car guys in 2020 to look at and wonder how hard it was to work 'back in the day' (our industry will have solved this ROI puzzle by then)
