Why Most Dealers Don’t Really Know Their Numbers| Episode 14

In this episode of Dealer Tech Talk, Simon Verona is joined by Neil Smith from Motorvait to explore one of the biggest challenges facing modern dealerships: understanding the numbers that actually drive performance.

From lead generation and conversion to technology overload and lost opportunities across the sales funnel, this conversation looks at where dealers are still falling short and what practical steps they can take to improve.

Neil shares insights from his experience at Imperial Cars, Cazoo, and now Motorvait, including how the right systems, processes, and data visibility can transform dealership performance at scale.

In this episode, we discuss:

•  Why most dealers still don’t know their real lead numbers 
•  How Imperial scaled from 80 cars a month to over 2,000 
•  Why tech only works when it fits the process 
•  The challenge of too many disconnected tools 
•  Where dealers lose customers in the sales funnel 
•  Why part exchange remains a major point of attrition 
•  How to identify the biggest opportunities for improvement 
•  The one thing dealers should go away and do today 

If you want to improve performance without just adding more systems, this episode is packed with practical insight.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm delighted to be uh well be joined by Neil Smith from Motivates.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

You know, fifteen years now working within the motor industry. Uh my expertise is use car volume retail. When the the the opening the opening question I ask Put your hands up if you know how many cars you sold. All put their hands up. Right. Now keep your hand up if you know how many leads you generated. Everybody put their hand down. You know, and if you haven't got your lead number, how can you work out your conversion? How can you work out your return on investment? How do you know which which sales of your sales team are doing well and they're doing better than others and which ones need help, training or performance management? I would say you've got to start to understand your numbers through the funnel.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Okay, and and welcome to the Dealer Tech Talk, the podcast where we explore technology shaping modern dealerships. I'm Simon Verona. And today I'm delighted to be uh well be joined by Neil Smith from Motivate. Thank you. Neil, Neil, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Thanks very much, Solomon.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

You've been involved in many sides of the motor trade, uh, from being in the dealerships with the people like Imperial Cars and more amusingly, I guess, with Kazoo. Um, and now obviously with Motivate with your uh with your with your advisory work. Um for those who don't know you, uh if I was to meet you in a uh in a lift, yeah, what would you tell me about you that would make me want to work with you?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Okay, so you're you're looking for that classic elevator pitch. So um yeah, look, I suppose I'd start off with experience, you know, 15 years now working within the motor industry. Um my expertise is use car volume retail um as ops director at Imperial um and then retail ops director at Kazoo, albeit for a very short time. Uh I was across every aspect of the business, so certainly with Imperial from sourcing, uh pricing, marketing, preparation, sales, contact center, uh, and probably most importantly, myself and one of the other directors there were the sort of product owners of everything we developed, which was ultimately a complete bespoke used vehicle retailing, preparation, marketing, sales system that was uh 360 view of the business. Uh so my is it's obviously I've probably got into this elevator on floor 30 and we're not down to floor 10 yet. So uh quite a long elevator pitch. But um yeah, effectively I can go into I can go into a business and look at any aspect of it. And what I try and do is find those incremental uh improvements across the piece rather than focus on one area. If we can add as motivated, if we can add uh a percent increase at every point, then it's uh actually quite substantial, especially when you're in that volume retail market and every pound on 2,000 cars sold a month makes a massive difference.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Yeah, thanks for that. I I think one thing that always amused me, I'm a technology guy, as you know, yeah, and numbers are my game, and and clearly numbers are your game as well. You you you mentioned a pound a unit when it's uh a lot of units over a lot of time adds up very, very quickly. Um you joined Imperial Cars. Um what was what was your original aim? What what why were you employed, I guess? And and how did you how did you take that transformation from where they were you were when you started there right through through the years to where you ended? I mean, it was you know obviously I'm guessing it's not a radical thing, it's more incremental, but what sort of process were you?

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Look, 100%. So, I mean, my involvement with Imperial started back in 2008. Uh, I was working for a creative agency at the time, and I took on the development with those guys of their first bespoke website. Uh, so they came out of the Autotrader Razor product, they were a site that was selling about 80 cars, independent, one site only, doing a good job, um, but wanted to sort of step away from that traditional used car retail um model in terms of being reliant on that auto trader piece and having the website with AutoTrader and all that sort of thing. So took on that development, worked on that for around about 12 months with the guys, got it to a point where it was ready to launch, and they approached me and said, Look, we need somebody in in-house now who's going to help push this forward, look at the marketing aspect. I mean, my background was prior to that, was 25 years in the print industry, working as marketing director for Snow's Business Forms. Snow's Business Forms was a print company that had contracts with 18 of the major motor manufacturers for supplying print to the dealerships. So I had an understanding of the transactional role within a within a sort of franchise operation. So it was a weird sort of introduction to motor trade. Um, and I took some of that with me, that sort of transactional piece as well, and looking at how we could digitize a lot of that within Imperial and reviewing everything that we were doing there from a digital perspective. And and probably weirdly, once we'd launched the website, looked at it and thought, well, is this the is this the best we can do? So within about six months, I was recommending we would go to somebody that had a platform that was recognised as being sort of best in practice at the time. So we ditched that original custom-built website, website, went into GForce's website just to get an understanding of what a relatively good platform would look like. Within 18 months of doing that, we had uh I'd then suggested we go back into a bespoke development because we'd learnt a lot from that experience, and actually there were there were limitations for what we wanted to do. And I think that was the sort of um roadmap from about 2012 was right. We we cannot do what we want to do as dynamically, effectively, and fluidly within our operation unless we start to develop a lot of our own tech. Because back then, Simon, a lot of the product we see now was just not available. So a lot of these SaaS-based products that actually added real value and are pretty competitively priced now. They weren't available. We had to develop our own pricing, automated pricing tools, our preparation management flow system. This was all 2012-2013. We started to use auto day uh uh auto trader data for pricing around about 2014-15. And I say we built that 360 view, and that's really what enabled us to start to accelerate the growth because where we'd automated everything, where we had an overall view of everything that was happening within one of our branches, we could spin up an additional branch, just plug that bespoke system in, and we had a fantastic view of what was going in on the branch without having to be hands-on. And I think that was always the concern in the early days. You know, when we had four sites in the South, all of us as directors could pop in within half an hour, check everything was being done as it should be. But when the when you've got a site, when your head office is Southampton, you've got a site in Falkirk, you cannot do that. So we needed that overall visibility, and it was really the tech, you know, it was the tech that drove that business forward and allowed us to accelerate. We built great relationships with lenders, funders, um, suppliers through that piece. Uh, but that's what took us from 2010 when I joined that business selling 80 cars a month with one site just about to open the second to selling 2,000 plus cars in January 2020 out of 17 sites with an 18th about to open.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

That's a pretty phenomenal um growth from when you started to when you ended there. That that that's that's not uh that's small, that is yes huge, isn't it? Um you talked a lot about data there. You talked a lot about tech. You're not a tech guy by trade, are you? You're not a programmer.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

No, no, no, no, look. When I was 14, I bought a ZX81 and I could program in basic, right? And then went from ZX81. No, in fact, I had a ZX80 first, then ZX81 all the way through probably 15 different up to Omega and you know everything that people of my age probably went through at that stage. But I understand coding, I can't code, okay? Um, I love the AI tools that are coming out now where you just tell it what you want to do and it develops the code. That's an interesting one, so worth looking at. Um, so I but what but what that gave me an understanding of what really was what is the art of the possible. When we had our seven developers, it was it was great because we could have we could sit around a table and I could explain the vision, they'd go away and and uh seek to deliver it. And if they were at any point saying, well, we don't know how to do that or we can't do it, I'd be trying to put solutions together to make that happen, really. So you're right, I'm not a coder, I'm not a developer. I say if you if you put a ZX81 back in front of me with a 16k RAM pack and I was programming away in basic, it would be fine. But that's a little bit backwards now to compare to where we are. So uh I think more for me, it was I'm I'm I'm a systems and a processes person. So, you know, I have been a salesperson in the past as well, so I understand how to deal with people, work with people. Um I've I've probably sold two cars in my life, Simon, if I'm honest, and that was on a day when I first joined Imperial and did a satellite, and it was absolutely manic, and I just stepped in and we sold a couple of cars. So, but my my where I get uh involved is is in that that process piece from start to finish. You know, when the customer first hits the website or first hits the aggregator channel, how do we bring that customer through the funnel? What how can we optimize those opportunities? How can we make sure we haven't got leakage anywhere in that in that process?

SPEAKER_01 9:25

That's that's I mean it's quite amusing actually how similar our our journeys have been, albeit we've ended up in maybe a slightly different point in the same industry. I mean, I also started with a ZX80 and through that same journey. Uh but obviously I went through the the software view.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Oh, I mean, you know, most people haven't got a clue what we're talking about when we go.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

There are people out there who just don't know the pain of seeing programming ZX81 for for four hours typing code in and having that little rampact wobble and lose the whole darn line.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Oh mate, and having to use screen memory to release some more coding space. And yeah, yeah, yeah, those were the days. But well I'll tell you what that did, Simon. That made us very efficient in coding.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yeah, I think efficient efficiency is everything. And I think that's that's quite interesting. I think I think um uh you know, I think one of the one of the things that always interests me in terms of uh what you've described there is you need by the sounds of it, I think I'm right, an awful lot of data points from an awful lot of points in the sales funnel, right? The way from when you collect a lead all the way through to when you sell the car and how much profit you made on that, and joining all the dots all the way along. There's a lot of data points that all need to be joined together. And uh from my experience, and I'm sure you're gonna tell me exactly the same, tell me if I'm wrong, that is uh not a trivial challenge.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

No, totally, and that's why in the end, you know, we we had to back then, and I'm talking again 2014, 2015, 10 years ago, we had to develop our own system, okay. We had we were working with one of the big DMS providers at the time, uh, and I'm talking one of the top three, and for after sales and uh accounts, it was it was it was okay, it did the job. But when we went into the sort of volume sale, you used car retailing and preparation, it just did not cut the mustard, right? And no matter what we'd been promised, it was never going to be on the roadmap because they were dealing with the big manufacturers. So we just bit the bullet at that point. And you're right, these you know, within a customer journey now, there's there could be up to 20 touch points in terms of not necessarily contacting the dealer, but what they're doing and interacting with on the website, on the aggregator platform. And look, you you were at the presentation back a few weeks ago with the IMDA, and it was just sort of highlighting to these dealers that there are so many lost opportunities in that journey where there are points of attrition. And when the the the opening the opening question I asked those dealers on that day was right, I'm sure last month you know how many cars you sold. And they all said, Yeah, yeah. I said, Well, put your hands up if you know how many cars you sold. All put their hands up. Right now, keep your hand up if you know how many leads you generated. Everybody put their hand down. Which was which was not great for my presentation because I still had another seven follow-on questions to ask, but we had to stop there. Um, but it's that level, and and you're looking at, and I know these guys are sort of owner drivers that we were talking to that day, but even when you go into some of the bigger companies, just getting a lead number out of them. You know, and if you haven't got your lead number and you don't know how many of those are unique customers, how can you work out your conversion? How can you work out your return on investment? You know, how do you know which which sales of your sales team are doing well and they're doing better than others and which ones need help, training or or performance management? You know, it's um but that's a that's a small part of it. You know, through that whole that whole journey and the time that customers take to research, there are so many parts to that journey where a customer can just fall off the edge of the earth, as it were, because and you will never know as a dealer they were even interacting with you because you haven't gotten to a point where they're gonna make contact by phone, WhatsApp, email, SMS, whatever channel they they they prefer to contact you. So it's a massive piece. And I understand, you know, that the the the the these dealers these days, especially the the small and mid-range ones, are time poor, but it's a huge area where these incremental increases I talked about earlier can make a massive difference. You know, get people, if there's 10 points to your customer journey, add a percent better opportunity to get them through each of those points. That's a 10% increase in performance. So you're selling 20 cars, you're now selling 22, making another three, four grand a month. So yeah, it's crucial, but I get it, you know, I get it that dealers are are time poor. So, you know, as per the as per the title of this podcast, it's about tech and it's about understanding how tech can help you deliver that, put those numbers in front of you in a way that's easy to consume. You know, we don't want dealers having to log into 15 different platforms because they never do it, and and I wouldn't do it. So that's why we built our own almost one sign on everybody gets access, you know.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

It's I mean, I think uh you you you you you steal a lot of my uh sales techniques and my things. I think the biggest thing that dealers challenge for me today is uh the amount of tech they have to play with. Uh they they have lots and lots of specialized systems at different points in their whole process, whether that's the actual sales process, the business process, the prep process, but also you then look at the website and the customer journey. There's just so much tech, and there are so many uh providers who have small parts of that tech. You know, you've got you know, look at like the top end of the chain, you know, there's a basic lead management. You've got people like you know, Auto Trader. Auto Trader's not really an advertising platform from the dealer's perspective, it's a lead management platform, it's generating leads for dealers, but then it does nothing with them once they've given it to you, and you've then got you've then got to join the dots together. Um I mean, do you would you do do you do share my view that the biggest challenge I guess I shouldn't lead you to the question, but I will. Um do you share my view that the biggest challenge for most dealers is they just can't absorb all this different technology and make it work for them? They they know it's there, they know they should be using it, and then when they try, the headache of actually making it work for them is bigger than what they perceive the benefit might be.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, and I and I mean there is a minefield out there, right? It's a it's a forest full of all these thousands of bloody trees of tech suppliers, and you you have to work your way through it and pick your way through it. So part of what I do around that piece with dealers is say, okay, you've got a challenge here, I've got a couple of options for you. These are people I know, these are suppliers I know, I've either worked with on the past or I work with now, who provide a tech solution for you that's pretty competitive, easy to access, easy to consume, and delivers value. Now, if I don't go in there and do that, these guys do not have the time, or not necessarily the experience, I suppose they're very experienced at selling cars, but they don't know where to go and look for this. So when they've got a challenge, so it might be a pricing challenge, right? There's a couple of really great automated pricing tools out there. But unless I go in and say, look, this product costs£250 a month, it's going to manage your price and across your 300 cars. You don't have to sit there every day now, or every week, or once a week. This will do it daily. You set the rules, you get it going, you leave it at run. That works fantastically for a dealer. But then I'll have a dealer who I get them on boarded with it, and then all of a sudden their sales drop for a week and they switch it off, switch it off. And I'm saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't switch the bloody thing off. Because if you switch it off for a week, in a week, you switch it back on, and then it's going to be making some big changes, which you should be making incrementally during the during the week. So let it run. Don't panic, don't knee-jerk. Um, and then there's and and others, I'll I'll get tech in there for a month, they use it, they see some good results, the second month they decide, or don't decide, that's wrong. They don't have the time to get engaged with it, they then don't think it's delivering value, so they then bin that out as well. And it's it's sort of building these ecosystems for dealers which are light touch for the dealer, right? So they're not having to log in. So if it's if it's a buying system or something, it sends an alert to the dealer daily saying this is the profile of stock you asked us to show you when it hits the site. Here it is. Go and have a look at it. Um, so I suppose, yeah, your point's right. You know, that I feel sorry for dealers now, especially when they're at that level where they're trying to, you know, the owner drivers do these businesses of buying cars. They're trying to get the cars prepped. They've got to manage a couple of sales guys, they've got all the issues around finance that they're trying to resolve and work through. All the sort of sort of the compliance, the the level of uh due diligence now and compliance, I get it, but it's it's stifling dealers. So when you go in there and say, Oh, how many leads you get? I haven't got time to look at that. It's like, yeah, but that's vital because at the front end, if you're not pumping enough in and your team aren't actually converting as as they should be, you are missing massive opportunities, and then you'll think that the tech's not working, and then you'll bin out of it and you're back to square one again. So yeah, I just think they're overwhelmed sometimes at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yeah, so I I'm guessing, you know, I know, that's where you step in with the dealers. That that's that's what you offer to them. You you you offer to help them through that minefield and get them to a solution that works for them.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Yeah, definitely. And it's it's just my and and also, you know, I understand that there's no point in me, I can go into a dealer and throw 10 products at them that will help them in every part of that business. But actually, what I've got to do is focus on the biggest pain points that they've got presently, and that might be in prepping the cars. They might be trying to prep 100 cars a month, they've got no system to manage it other than maybe a uh a traditional workshop system, which isn't ideal for prep. Uh, I can I can offer them a solution at£200 a month that manages that for them perfectly. Uh it might be pricing. I can offer a solution at£250 a month that suits them perfectly and does the job for them. But what I have to do is get I can't load some, I can't load a dealer up with 10 products that's going to transform their business, right? Because none of them will get the attention. So I have to identify the points of highest points of attrition, really, you know. If the pricing's a major issue because most of their cars are priced fair or high on AutoTrader, because they're not getting the time to revisit those price that pricing, that's a tool I'll offer them. I'll then explain why it works because it'll be, well, hold on. I've got loads of margin in my cars. Well, yeah, you have, and that's why you're not selling them. Margins, you know, margins of anity, actual profit is sanity. So let's get realistic here and let's start, even if we test it. So I'll be able to get deals done on supply products and might be a 30-day trial or a 90-day trial. Um, and and just get the dealer to commit, work with them, work through it with them, handle some of the reporting with them, and just sit get them to see the value. You know, sometimes the product doesn't work for them because they haven't got the right infrastructure to deal with it. But yeah, that that's essentially where I sort of add value to a dealer. I'll go through that whole chain from sourcing through the sale and then say, well, okay, the biggest problems you've got are here, here, and here. Let's see what solutions we've got. It might end up being, and a lot of the time, Simon, with the best one in the world, it ends up being a people problem. Because those people have people problems. Well, it does, and you go through the whole thing and say, Well, actually, your process is pretty good. The problem you've got is your people aren't following it. Very much.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

It sounds very much like whilst we work in slightly different areas of the same business, um, the way we approach it. I mean, I I have you know, obviously, we have a large-scale system, and you know, I think the challenge we have is exactly the same as the challenge you have in the uh getting dealers to absorb it. You know, it's the it's the classic how do you eat an elephant? Uh and the answer very well geez, one piece at a time. And and I I always think I always think of what we do, and I think what you've described is very similar to what you do, is kind of like like a staircase. You're at the bottom of your bottom at the bottom of the stairs here, and you know you want to get there. But if you try and do that in one step, you're gonna collapse onto the floor because the step is too large. And you have to break that down into small manageable bits where over time you can climb that staircase to the top and get to something that really was. And it sounds like at Imperial, that staircase took years to grow to go to or to walk up.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yeah, definitely. I'll say we started that development program probably in about well, we started it when we went on to the DMS. We noted there that there wasn't really any uh way of generating or or recording appointments effectively, the way that we wanted to do it through the contact centre. So we developed outside of that. DMS, our own appointment booking system. We then realized probably 2012 there was nothing out there that helped us manage pricing. So we got we developed our own pricing system. We then started to think, well, okay, we've developed a pricing system. We developed an appointment system, none of which can talk to the DMS because the DMS is a closed system. Why don't we just keep developing little modules and plugging them in until we get a fully blown system that works for us? And it sort of grew out of that. We didn't have the intention of setting out to develop our own bespoke DMS. That wasn't the intention, but it ended up that actually, as we increased our dev team from sort of one to three to five to seven, we then started to say, right, okay, we're starting to build a great system here. We just got a few areas we're missing now, so let's plug those in. Let's develop those. And at that point, we didn't use any third-party plugins or anything. We didn't want to have the issue that the third-party plug-in supplier would change some of the coding, which then wouldn't work with what we were already plugging into. So we just went full board, developed everything. We were one of the first to put 360 spins on the website, developed our own spinner. We were watching Kavana in the States at the time. 2012, we started to watch those guys and what they were doing from a vehicle presentation uh perspective. So we just went ahead and developed it all ourselves: 360 camera interior spins, uh, all of that sort of stuff. And you know, that that stood as well because we also started to get a reputation within the industry of being sort of market leading. 2014-15, we won multiple awards at Water Trader Digital Awards, and it was because of what we were doing with tech. Now, don't get me wrong, that didn't that created a few issues within the business because we were putting all the information out there and we'd have the sort of traditional sales team saying, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who hold on, why are people gonna ring us? You know, you're giving them everything. How are we gonna convince people to come in? You said we shouldn't need to. If we're confident in our product, if we're confident in the price, if we're confident in how we're presenting, they'll come. Yeah, but what what what's the field of dreams? Build it and they will come, right? And that that's how it worked.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

It's uh I it's quite interesting. I mean, I I you know that journey that you're describing that you went through where you took Imperial cars and one you're you're looking now. I mean, Imperial cars, you're talking about 13, 14 years ago you started that journey. You're now in Motivate, now going to dealers today. Where do you think that most the average dealer that you speak to today is actually in that journey before you start? So thinking of say 2 2012 when you started as like the ground floor, and where maybe Imperial would have been if you'd carried on, would be today. Where are where's the average dealer when you start today? How do you how how well advanced is the motor trade today?

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Well, I th uh uh if we if we sort of segment that, I suppose, to dealers, let's say dealers that are stocking up to 100 cars, for me, they're probably back in 2014-15, where we were in Imperial world, right? So they're probably and that's not that I'm not saying they're 10 years behind the curve, I'm saying they're 10 years back from where we we were at that point.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

Yeah, you're probably 10 years ahead or 15 years ahead of the curve in something like that.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

And I think when you start to look at that, and you and I say that that for me was crystallized at that presentation for the IMDA the other week, where you know, you know, the minimum you should know whether whatever size of dealer you are is how many leads you're generating at the cost per lead. And that's sort of basic, basic um a requirement for you to for you to step on and do anything else. Um, and and if you get if we go to the hundred or five hundred dealers, then clearly they're gonna be a little bit further forward because they may have better website systems, better back-end systems. But very few dealers, well, in fact, I can't think of any dealer that I go into today that is where we were probably 2017-2018, um, apart from maybe top 10 independents and some of the larger franchise AM100. Um, and you've got to have you've got to have the will and the want to get there. Having said that, there are there are products that are out there that can, you know, the the preparation system that I go and talk about the dealers is probably the closest thing I've seen off the shelf that matched what we built. And that that product that we built costs us tens of thousands of pounds. You can have that sort of technology now for£200 a month. Okay, so so there are there are ways to get there. Um, and I suppose another um one of my other clients, which is uh of all places, Baltic States, so the used largest used car retailer in the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland. Those guys built all they have built all their own technology over a seven-year period. Absolutely phenomenal business. Um, I was on a call with them yesterday, they are now examining the whole of a customer's journey from landing on the website through to sale using AI now, and they preloaded that AI with every step in the process. They're bringing in all the telephone conversations, they're bringing in all of the WhatsApp communications, email communications, and they're now scoring them with a rag rating. When the custom when the dealer says, when that site says it's a lost sale, they score it with a rag rating, and it then tells the sales manager there, without the sales manager having to listen or read anything, exactly what was said, what was done wrong, what was done right, where the improvements can be made. And this is a business that traditionally that region is sort of 10 years behind, 15 years behind UK, but these guys are stepping it up and going for it, and they've done a lot of what we did as well in terms of that development piece. And I would put them certainly top 5% of what I see in the UK.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah, it's uh it's it's got I mean you mentioned AI in there, and I think AI has got I think AI has got a lot to play in the next five years on that journey. But it sounds like that many in many dealers, and certainly my experience is is that uh AI, if it's not careful, is just another bit of tech that is disjointed with the rest of the tech they've already got and becomes another platform to go on with the 10 they've already got and makes existing business processes even more disjointed. And it's yeah, and then the most important thing is not only the technology you use, but uh integrating that technology both with itself and with your overall business process. Because if you don't achieve that, you're just literally throwing mud at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Yeah, definitely. And and and I say the reason it works with the guys in Latvia is they did what we did, they built out their whole uh their their web platform, their back-end office system, they built it out all themselves. So they can they can embed AI where it can deliver massive value. They don't use AI chat, they don't use AI agents, they use traditional sales teams. Um, but they're using AI to deliver more value, to not just randomly check a few salesmen's calls or saleswoman's calls to make sure they've said the right things. They're now able to do absolutely every interaction, review every interaction. So in the morning, the sales manager gets a report saying, Oh, yesterday you closed off these customers. Actually, that one didn't have enough tension given here. Even works out the cadence of the speech, it works out the balance of communication. So if it's 7030 one way, it should be 7030 the other. So they they they put an enormous amount of effort in building that knowledge base. So you know you've got to know what you're doing, and AI is a is, as you know, Simon, it's an often misused term these days. AI is the buzzword. Uh, true AI used correctly is phenomenal, but you've you've got to know how to use it right, you know. Is it AI, is it machine learning? You know, there are some great tools out there for automated response now. There are some great tools that will take customer part way down the journey, and then as long as that AI or machine learning knows when to hand off, when the time's right, and you've got that customer committed to hand off to a person, fantastic. And I'm sure we're not far away, you know, we're not far away from having almost fully automated AI chat agents, telephone audio agents. Uh, but again, it's about you're right. If you just if if I went and dropped that into a dealer now, it would blow their minds, and certain elements of it are probably not where they need to be at the moment, so it's a difficult one.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Okay. Um two things then. Yeah, one thing very quickly, you I said you were briefly with Kazoo after you left Imperial. Um, the Kazoo story is well known and it didn't end up well, but it wasn't all bad, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

No, and look, I mean, I got I got absolutely trolled on LinkedIn about a year and a half ago when I was on used car dealer podcast saying that Kazoo did some phenomenal things, right? Um I still stand by that. What they did was change the customer journey and change the way customers bought cars. Now, did they get it right? Clearly not. But what they did was give customers a better way to buy cars. And none of us in the used car market prior to that, 2018, early 2019, mid-2019, none of us were prepared to put our head up to the parapet and say, Yeah, you can buy a car from us, we'll deliver it to you. And if you don't like it, we'll take you back in 14 days. None of us. We looked at it, but we weren't prepared to do it.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Yeah, everybody does it now.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Yeah. Well, they've got the option to do it now, you know. And I think when you look at how they developed that platform, but even they were, they were not, they were not used car people. So they were tech, it was a tech company that that decided they wanted to sell used cars. Uh, and when we joined that business, we went through so many parts of that process with them. And and and this goes back to my points of attrition. We went through the journey and we said, well, okay, at the point of uh part exchange valuation, what's your attrition rate, Kazoo? What how many people do you lose from the journey? Because it was imperative to them that that customer journey flowed right and they get as many people through the funnel because they had no means to back it up with a customer service element, really. Not they that that journey was based on hitting the website, ending up putting the car into the shopping cart and buying it. But they had an attrition rate of 70% at the at the exchange valuation part time. They were matching one of the on big online uh car buying services valuations, and we said to them, well, that surely that's not good. You know, you're losing 70% of people at this point. And it was almost a lack of uh understanding of what that meant, because they were they were able to pump in so many customers at the top of the funnel because of their marketing spend that actually it didn't really matter to them because they were still getting what they needed through to the end of the funnel. But when you look at it, and and this is where I urge dealers today to look at these points in the journey, because if you're just putting out a cap below below value on your website and you're not monitoring how many people are getting that valuation on screen, and you're not monitoring how many of them are there and inquiring, you know, if you decided on certain make model derivatives that it was a retail car and actually you go to cap average on it, put a bloody cap average price out there so that the customer thinks, oh, actually, that's close to what I was expecting. I will carry on with my journey. Rather than just think I've got to give them a value, but I don't want to get caught out, so I'm gonna give them a cap below, below value. You've got to look at that and say, Well, how many times does a customer look at a valuation on your your website? How many of them go on to actually inquire? And if that's only 10%, you've got a problem because you're missing out on potential deals. You're missing out on and it's this lost opportunity piece.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

I mean that's fascinating. I think you know a lot of people focus very much on where they're winning, but yeah, your sounds like what you're saying is is actually you know, where you're winning is a pat on the back, but it doesn't really improve what you do, you improve by looking at where you aren't doing so well.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

Yeah, yeah, that's the areas for improvement.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

Yeah. So to final in that last question, uh if you were sitting in front of a dealer and you were saying, What's the one thing that they can go away today, after listening to this podcast, go away that'll make a real difference to their business, whether that's an imped maybe a maybe a medium-sized independent dealer, what could they do today?

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Okay, so today, if they're listening to this podcast and they go back to their uh office, I would say you've got to start to understand your numbers through the funnel. That's it. From website visit or aggregator impression through to interaction on the website, through the lead generation, through the lead conversion, right? Get your numbers, understand where those points of attrition are, work out the percentages through that funnel. Now, if they want to reach out to me and for a very reasonable fee, Simon, I can help them with some benchmarking through there and show them what goods look like. But for me, today, know how many visitors you get on your website, know how many leads you're generating, and know what your conversion is. Because from those three things, you can start to work out your cost per conversion, your return on investment. You know, if you can get to the point of acquisition, of customer acquisition, great, most dealers won't be able to. But at the very least, know what marketing channels are delivering, understand where the value is, and then you start to market a bit smarter, you move things around, you move budget around, and just look at that conversion. Once that lead comes in, what are you converting at? And is that acceptable? Are you blowing, are you burning leads? Are you blowing leads? Is there a lot of lead leakage? That's the starting point.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

That's yeah, that's brilliant. I I like that. Um thanks very much for joining me today, Neil. That's that's been an absolutely fascinating um wander through both your history but also I think looking at where dealers need to be moving today. Um so if one of our listeners wants to connect with you and catch, contact you, how can how can they find how can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Yeah, so they can go to the website www.motivate, that's m-o-t-o-r-v-a-i-t.co.uk, or probably simpler, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Uh it's Neil Smith on LinkedIn, or uh go to at motivate and just di DM me direct message me.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Awesome. Uh and that was the D Latech Podcast. Uh thanks for listening today. Uh if you found the episode useful, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an uh a further episode. And uh if you want to go to our website at uh www.dealertectalk.uk, you'll find some useful online guides which you can download. And uh I might find uh a link from Neil that I can put into the uh into the show notes or something that he might have that's quite useful for you. Um for listening today uh and a thank you to our sponsors, uh DMS Navigator and Miles a companion, and look forward to seeing you soon.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Thanks very much.