@Ilana
If a dealer is going aimlessly to classes, hearing a traditional pitch will be a downer. If a dealer has a purpose for the show, lets say finding a new CRM system, wouldn't he want to hear what his 2 last candidates have to say to a large audience (hence being fact checked for the dealer by a group of peers?). And to that point, In would love to hear about AutoLeadStar... but with 40 other people in the room.
@reverson
Oh man, where do I start...
If you want to learn things like marketing, SEO, etc go to conferences like
http://martechconf.com or
https://moz.com/mozcon#register (there are many others). They are quite more expensive than automotive conferences, ridiculously more intensive (25 minute classes one after another), lots pf panels, and lots of people telling you how they do things at their company.
If you want to learn how to use a CRM, F&I, etc a 50 minute class is not going to help you other than to learn a trick or two (which is fine too).
I don't know how other companies work but in my company we implement in our daily operations (products and services that we offer) the absolute latest that we discover or figure out. So when I see technology companies from other industries "pitch", the good ones show their latest findings.
When you go to a class to implement the "free" things, you are getting the short end of the stick, by very far. Have you ever hear how hard it is to take things from a conference then implement them at the dealership? One reason is... we all know the reason, but another is that free ideas are usually very costly on implementation and self production. The easy ideas are the ones that you truly find a vendor that fits in a place were money can be made/saved then you work with them to implement with the vendor doing the heavy lifting. If each conference brings one success story like this, your dealer will continue to grow exponentially.
Don't think for a second that this is a Cinderella story, even though I'm a vendor to you I have LOTS of vendors myself, I want to know from them how/when/what is that they do, how that is better/faster/bigger than everything else is out there and how can we implement/use/squeeze the most out of it.
I think I've sold over 200 websites myself; every time dealers ask us to show them some of our sites and we show them the best looking ones we have at the time. Then dealers say things like "I like that one" or "I like this 'feature'". Very rarely dealers say: Here are my metrics, here is my site, here is my performance. Tell me how you would improve my numbers and give me a timeline to do so. A big problem in our industry is that in some cases dealers don't even know what metrics they should ask for, I don't blame them, it is too much. But vendors continue to be forced to talk about whatever side deal they have found outside their system so it doesn't look like a sales pitch while what I would like to see if I was buying a website is a system that measures my business and someone explaining that in PUBLIC.
A sales pitch is a performance pitch, it is what determines the implementation and the value of every company. But only if it is done in public.
