AutoSuccess November 2015 Success Story

SUCCESS STORY NOVEMBER 2015 · NO 11

SCOTT WADE

NEW CAR SALES UP

44%

VICE PRESIDENT

USED CAR SALES UP

62%

BACK-TO-BACK

PRESIDENT’S AWARDS

4X

HOW VILLA FORD IS OUTSELLING THE REGION BY 400%

Å CONTINUED INSIDE

Success Story Ä CONTINUED FROM THE COVER

BACKGROUND In June of 2014, Scott Wade was recruited by the David Wilson Automotive Group to lead the turnaround of a newly acquired Ford store in Orange County, California.

At that time, the newly acquired store was struggling in virtually every area. Financially, the store was losing money. Operationally, the store was ranked in the bottom 25 percent of the zone. And, culturally, the store was suffering from negative online reviews for both sales and service.

In addition to the store’s internal struggles, Villa Ford also faced stiff external competition. Within five miles of Villa Ford there are three competing Ford dealerships, as well as the David Wilson Automotive Group’s flagship store, Toyota of Orange — the No. 2 Toyota dealership in the world.

Faced with the prospect of capturing and keeping market share against more established stores with bigger advertising budgets, Scott Wade, vice president and general manager of Villa Ford, launched a daringly different sales and marketing strategy. Instead of entering the market with expensive traditional media buys and trying to recruit traditional sales talent from competing stores, Wade launched a datadriven marketing strategy that exclusively uses targeted media channels, and replaced the traditional sales roles at his dealership with a team-oriented approach that allows him to recruit sales talent from outside the automotive industry without sacrificing close rates.

This unique combination has not only transformed the dealership’s culture, but it has radically transformed its business. In just 16 months, Villa Ford has become the No. 1 Ford dealership in the zone, with sales growth that is outpacing the region by 400 percent. Year-overyear new car sales are up 44 percent, used car sales are up 62 percent and Villa Ford is now one of the most profitable stores in the David Wilson Automotive Group, a 19-store group that is one of the top 10 privately held dealer groups in America.

MARKET

“There are three components to successful dealership…. inventory, traffic and competence.”

HOW THEY DID IT

“There are three components to a successful store,” Wade said. “Those components are inventory, traffic and competence. We knew that we needed to get control of all three of these areas in order to take Villa Ford where we wanted to go, so we started by looking at the data — not just the data in our DMS, but all of our market data in order to clearly identify where our opportunities were.

“This process allowed us to compare our historical sales and service transactions against the available opportunities within each ZIP code,” Wade said. “More importantly, we could see what in-market customers were buying and trading by model in the ZIP codes with our highest conversion rates. Once we had a clear picture of where we needed to focus our efforts, we began putting a strategy together for how we were going to capture these opportunities.“

The first step in Villa Ford’s new data-driven strategy was defining their market area. The factory had given Villa Ford a defined market area with a list of ZIP codes. However, a detailed analysis of that market area revealed that the majority of Villa Ford’s historical business came from only a fraction of the ZIP codes included on the factory’s list. Collectively, this smaller set of ZIPs demonstrated dramatically higher conversion rates and offered a significantly lower cost per sale when compared with the other ZIPs outside of this geographical area. Because of these qualities, Wade calls this geographical area his “Perfect Market.”

This “Perfect Market” represents more than 70 percent of Villa Ford’s sales and service business, and allows the dealership to acquire new customers for approximately $200 per car sold. That’s less than one third of NADA’s average of $616 per car sold.

“Learning to trust our data over our instincts was not easy at first, but developing this discipline has allowed us to get an average of 15-to-1 ROI on our marketing dollars”

All of Villa Ford’s targeted marketing is managed from a single platform. This allows them to deliver consistent branding and offers across all of their media channels and monitor the results from all of their campaigns from a single, Web-based dashboard.

VILLA FORD PROSPECTS

In any market — even Wade’s “Perfect Market” — only 1 percent of consumers are in-market to buy a vehicle on any given month. The challenge is accurately separating the in-market shoppers from those who are not in-market. To address this challenge, Wade once again started with his data.

“It’s all very scientific,” Wade said. “We looked at our historical data and created profiles for every customer who had ever purchased or serviced at our dealership.

Then, we cross-referenced the profiles of our most profitable customers against a robust national database our marketing vendor connected us to, called Apollo (ExploreApollo.com), to find prospects with similar profiles who live in our target ZIP codes. This process eliminates all of the customers who no longer live in our market, or who no longer own the vehicle we are targeting, and allows us to focus on those who have the highest statistical probability of buying or servicing with us that given month.”

MESSAGE AND MEDIUMS

One of Villa Ford’s biggest competitive advantages is its ability to consistently deliver personalized offers across all of their targeted media channels. These offers leverage multiple data sources so that each prospect receives a personalized blend of new car offers, used car offers and service offers, depending on where they are in the ownership cycle.

“The key to this process is the way these offers are created,” Wade said. “It would be difficult to duplicate the quality and consistency of our marketing if we used a different vendor for every marketing channel.

That’s why we use a single marketing vendor for all of our targeted marketing. Our offers look the same and have the same content because they are all created at the same time and from the same system.”

VILLA FORD’S DATA-DRIVEN STRATEGY OVERVIEW

Inventory Search Campaigns, and it is a technology that displays pre-calculated offers on in-stock vehicles when online shoppers search for any used vehicle the dealership has in inventory.

MARKET

This technology has significantly increased Villa Ford’s Page One search placement and is a key part of the dealership’s impressive 62 percent increase in YOY used car sales.

mass market

data hygiene

PORTAL

perfect market

PROSPECTS

All of Villa Ford’s marketing drives traffic to a single portal Website that allows customers to see all of the store’s new car offers, used car offers and service offers on a single site. Every customer’s personalized offer deep links to a specific page within the site. However, the site’s unique design automatically tailors the user’s experience, based on where they came from and how many times they have visited the portal.

active

lost

conquest

MESSAGE

custom offers

DEALERSHIP

Every campaign Villa Ford executes extends into the dealership. Point-of-sale materials mirror the language and visual appearance of the offers that customers see before they arrive in the service lane or showroom. This reaffirms the credibility of the campaign and helps to give the sales team a natural way to initiate conversations when they arrive at the dealership.

MEDIUMS

calls

mobile

social

online ads

search

“We can have the best widgets in the world but if we can’t greet a customer with love in our hearts and the authentic desire to serve, we will not be successful,” Wade said.

The media used in Villa Ford’s data-driven marketing strategy include targeted mail, email, display, search, retargeting, Websites, social media and in-dealership point-of-sale materials.

We congratulate Scott Wade and the team at Villa Ford for a job well done.

Their conviction to serve their customers, powered by their innovative, data-driven marketing strategies, have turned a oncestruggling dealership into a market leader who is outselling the region by 400 percent.

The space provided for this article does not allow us to expand on all of these media channels. However, one especially impressive tactic is Villa Ford’s use of a tool called “DISC.” DISC stands for Dynamic

New car sales are up 44 percent, and used car sales are up 62 percent. Lease retention is 2X higher than the regional average. And, best of all, customer satisfaction is at an alltime high.

email

PORTAL lead

CONCLUSION

As impressive as Scott Wade’s marketing strategies are, it is important to note that the cornerstone of Wade’s success is his conviction to serve his customers.

mail

call personal PIN

service

sales

walk in

DEALERSHIP

customer experience

RETAIN

To learn more about Villa Ford and the strategies outlined in this article, email: successstories@autosuccessonline.com

Success Story

Success Story

VILLA

VILLA FORD VERSUS THE REGION

43%

LEASE PENETRATION

+44%

2X HIGHER THAN REGION

+ 62%

USED CAR SALES GROWTH

NEW CAR SALES GROWTH

67%

LEASE RENEWAL

4X HIGHER THAN REGION

46% HIGHER THAN REGION

“I don’t look at how I am doing every month – I look at how I am doing every day... by model.”

– Scott Wade | Vice President | Villa Ford

IN A NUTSHELL In just 16 months, Scott Wade and his team transformed Villa Ford from a struggling store with a poor reputation into the zone’s No. 1 performer with back-to-back President’s Awards.

How they did it: Increased Close Rates

Increased close rates by replacing conventional sales roles with a team-based sales model that uses highly skilled communicators to demonstrate vehicles, along with highly skilled negotiators to manage negotiations directly with customers.

Increased ROI

Increased ROI 300 percent by replacing TV and newspaper advertising with a data-driven marketing strategy that focuses exclusively on in-market shoppers.

Increased Conversion Rates

Increased conversion rates by using a centralized offer management system that delivers consistent messaging and imagery across all media channels.

Search Market

Captured 80 percent of the search market in Orange County by combining organic SEO with Dynamic Inventory Search Campaigns (DISC) that display pre-calculated offers on in-stock vehicles when online shoppers search for any used vehicle the dealership has in inventory.

Single Platform

Simplified marketing fulfillment and reporting by replacing multiple vendors with a single vendor (TeamVelocityMarketing.com) that manages the creation, distribution and reporting for all targeted marketing channels from a single platform.

Å READ FULL STORY