In Market Shoppers are Destroying Automotive Digital: Why Coca Cola Doesn't Only Advertise to Thirsty People

Presented by: Dave Lemmon & Brody Dezember

Instead of "magic moment marketing", dealers need to adopt a long game strategy to advertising.

• "In Market Shopper" chasing commoditizes your business down to inventory and price. You've missed the chance to build a relationship, a brand value, by waiting to the last minute to communicate.
• Build gross and build loyalty by talking to people OUT of market about the meaningful "who" and "why" of your store. When they're in market, you'll know...because they'll call you.
• Stop defections by continuing to market to your existing clients from day 1 post sale to the next sale instead of paying thousands to vendors to tell you when you should finally advertise to them.

Breaking the Silent Roadblocks of Growth and Progress

Presented by: Subi Ghosh & Ashley Cavazos

In a hyper-connected, consumer experience driven world, both internal and external culture is crucial to attracting and retaining both customers and employees.

Dealership culture seems to be considered almost impossible to influence or course correct due to the connotation of difficulty. Many don't even attempt to address it. Others don’t even see there are culture issues to address that are prohibiting growth and progress.

Both ideologies are wrong. Let's bust those myths, dive in, and fix your culture!  

• Break down dealership culture into 4 focused key steps (Strategic Hiring & Placement, Breaking Silos, Effective Leadership, and Total Accountability)
• Create a roadmap with easily digestible pillars that can quickly influence a dealership’s overall environment
• Discover a plan to continue to evolve and grow with your community and employees

AI: The Hidden Secret to Decreasing Your BDC Costs

Presented by: Josselyn Boudett

In this workshop, you'll uncover the weakest link in the dealership, along with the #1 automotive chatbot myth that's driving up BDC costs. We will unpack the communication process problems as well as the solutions that conversational AI provides to dealerships. Attendees will listen to real mystery shop phone calls and identify opportunities for improvement. Case studies will be reviewed so that dealers can learn from the successes of their peers. This workshop will then take a look at the future of AI in automotive so that dealers can be better prepared for future trends. 

If you want to find out how conversational AI can eliminate dropped calls, and dramatically decrease the time it takes to set service appointments, then this workshop is for you!

What HELPs and What’s just HYPE—Decoding Brilliance from BS!

Presented by: Sean Stapleton & Bryan Armstrong

Data Transparency, Marketing Automation, & AdTech, AI and more! Keeping up with automotive marketing trends is a BIG job. Learn top trends and implementation tips from top industry leaders.

• How to use audience and real targeting data to drive better results, how to use Business intelligence and analytics to increase your ROAS, and what’s just a Buzzword!
• How to do more with less – Less New and Used inventory, Less CO-OP, Less marketing budgets, and less wasteful spending.
• How to use the newest Buzzwords for your advantage, examples of real marketing platforms and automations that work, the newest real Google and Facebook AI campaigns, the latest LSEO and SEO best practices that drive measurable results not just the HYPE!

Hi, My Name is A.I. Will You Hire Me? Absolutely!

Presented by: Gray Scott

In this session you will see how a Dealer Executive has used AI to streamline the buying and appointment setting process, maximize budget efficiency in advertising, market to the people who need to be marketed to when it’s appropriate, and reduce friction on internet leads when they hit the CRM.

Discover how AI can:

• Enhance customer experience
• Reduce current headcount
• Grow revenues!

Family Feud: Digital Marketing Edition

Presented by: Eric Miltsch & Joe Stroffolino

An incredibly interactive digital marketing session done in the style of everyone's favorite game show: Family Feud.

• Top digital marketing & operational benchmarks to help align your targets & set expectations
• The newest marketing strategies that reduce costs, increase brand exposure & increase profits.
• Exclusive campaign tactics that significantly improve your performance, improve your business & make you look like a true marketing rockstar!

Bookend Your VDPs Like a Pro!

Presented by: Jason Barrie & Erika Maley

High-impact strategies to drive quality traffic to your VDPs while ensuring timely engagement after the consumer leaves your website.

As a dealer, you invest significant money and time in maximizing the value of your Vehicle Details Pages on your website. The VDP is the heartbeat of your website, providing consumers valuable insights to make an informed vehicle purchasing decision. Key takeaways for this session include:

1. Data-driven strategies to drive high-performance traffic to your VDPs

2. Timely, scalable, and quality consumer follow-up post website: you invest a lot of money driving value on the VDP… What are you doing to ensure you are maximizing your return?

3. Hear how the Don Hattan Auto Group, one of the most progressive and longest-serving groups in the Midwest, upped their game by using cost-effective and targeted technology to merchandise their inventory to beat local and national competitors and attract more online car buyers to their three stores.

A Leader's Only Silver Bullet: Creating a Coaching Culture at Your Dealership

Presented by: Sean Kelley

This presentation shows how coaching impacts business. Training and coaching are contrasted. Four coaching processes will be taught along with implementation techniques (Metric, Aspirational, Turn-Around, and Observational). Overall, creating a coaching culture can be any dealership's ticket to trusting your team, eliminating employee turnover, ongoing growth regardless of market conditions, and true fulfillment for yourself and each person on your team!

• Learn the difference between training and coaching
• Take-home frameworks for the 4 types of coaching
• Find out how to create a coaching culture
• Uncover your leadership gaps around communication and employee engagement

A Case Study in First-Party Data with the Germain Motor Company and Clarivoy: How to Look at Your Consumer Data in 2023

Presented by: Steve White & Shaun "Niff" Kniffin

There is a lot of buzz around utilizing your first-party data in your marketing. Why? Attend this session to learn how Germain utilizes its first-party data and cookieless targeting to sell more cars.

• What % of your customers are actively shopping on your website in last 60 days?
• What % of your customers are defecting every month to another dealership?
• What are the most efficient in-market audiences? 

Laws Have Changed! Stay in Compliance While Saving Thousands

Presented by: Amberly Allen & Laura Mellencamp

The laws have changed! Learn how to recapture up to 75% of your Credit Card expenses without disrupting CSI.

• Create awareness about Credit Card Processing expenses and the hidden fees in your statements
• Educate on legal & compliance requirements
• Best training practices for customer experience and mitigate any CSI issues

Setting Up Your Service Advisors for Success Online Like You Do Your Salespeople

Presented by: Brad Paschal & Bryan Armstrong

In Depth look at what we do on your website to setup salespeople for success and reverse engineering for service advisors.

• We have all our vehicles on the site and get upset when one is missing but we don't have all our services we offer on our websites
• Examine the Customer Experience path on website: Sales vs Service
• Sales GBP setup vs Service GBP setup

Our Data Has Failed Us. Why This Happens and How to Fix It.

Presented by: David Steinberg & Chip Alvey

It starts by (fully) accessing and using your own data.

• Learn how to take advantage of “actionable data” to set your dealership up for success.
• See through the “fuzzy data” to spot new opportunities and drive powerful, positive change.
• Lead your organization through a framework that allows people to interact with data more effectively.

From Stressed to #Blessed Fire up Your Sales Staff using Tik Tok!

Presented by: Gail Rubinstein & Mark Rask

Promote a Fun Culture at the Dealership in Sales, Finance, Service & Parts while driving brand awareness and optimizing Sales using Tik Tok!!

• Empower your Sales Staff to create their own videos for brand awareness!
• Learn the 8 Must have steps for ALL departments in the Dealership to be successful on Tik Tok!
• Leave with Real Life Video Practice so you can guide your team when you return to the Dealership!

Single Point of Contact: How to Create a Customer-Centric Experience for Gen-Z and Millennials

Presented by: Heather Finkey & Mike Anderson

Single point of contact is a modern way sell cars that creates a smoother and more customized car-buying experience.

• Increasing transparency in structuring deals
• Empowering salespeople to take on more of a robust role
• Reducing friction in the car buying experience

What You’re Still Missing About Your Marketing: Eliminate These Common Mistakes And Your Operations Will Thrive

Presented by: Gary May & Nick Degnan

Understand how to find areas of your marketing that are delivering vanity metrics and discover the real metrics that will drive your dealership forward. Take steps to understand your metrics and what needs to be reviewed to deliver real results. Stop spending pointless money (including co-op) before developing an effective budget and strategy based on real-world data.

Gary and Nick will show you how to dig deeper into the data that your “trusted” vendors don’t want to talk about. Nick will speak to the decision making at the store level and how he drives month-to-month results.

Meeting Changing Consumer Appraisal Expectations

Presented by: Micah Tindor & Jonathan Hakes

Learn how consumer expectations have significantly changed and what dealers need to do to win trade-ins today based on research.

• How to position the trade-in/appraised amount to a consumer that already has 2-6 cash offers in hand when they come to your dealership for an appraisal.
• How to meet consumers emotion need of “feeling knowledgeable” that is deciding force for 60% of consumer’s trade-in needs as well as how to meet the “10 unmet needs” consumers have identified as missing from their dealer trade-in process.
• How to build a trade-in follow up process to win trades that do not transact after the first appraisal.

Employee Management Game Theory: Progressive Dealer Framework to Solve the Current and Future Workforce Problems.

Presented by: Jason Volny & Courtney Paschal

Let’s face it, we’ve always struggled with recruiting, engaging, and retaining our employees. COVID and supply-chain issues forced us to rethink the way we price, service, and communicate with our guests. For many dealers and employees, this was an unexpectedly-prosperous time. As dealerships and employees enjoy this temporary shift in supply-demand power, it’s important to remember that it is temporary. As the markets normalize and the power shifts back to the consumer, most employees will be left with poor habits and lower incomes. At that point, money will no longer be the only motivating factor and many employees will be enticed by other industries and their employee management practices: work-life balance, work from home, guaranteed compensation, etc. To future proof our dealerships, we must implement modern solutions and be more aligned with the needs of the modern workforce.

• In this session, you will receive the framework used by progressive dealers to engage, manage, and retain your employees.
• You will be provided with an assessment to help you measure your current employee management processes and compare your results against others.
• Finally, you will be provided with templates, examples, and step-by-step instructions on how to build, implement, and manage these key processes to help you drive engagement and high performance of your employees.

The Definitive Guide to SEO in 2023

Presented by: Greg Gifford & Max Lopez

Every sale starts with a search. Learn how to maximize your visibility in local searches with a customized SEO strategy.

• Learn why the OEM-approved SEO providers won't help your dealership
• Learn which signals influence your visibility in local searches - and how to optimize them
• Learn how to optimize your Google Business Profile to stand out from competitors

How to Modernize Your Sales Operations, Stay Compliant, and Become More Efficient

Presented by: Natalia Griner, Neb Yonas & Adam Silverleib

To stay relevant and competitive in the rapidly changing automotive retail industry, dealers need to refine their practices and incorporate new technology into their operations.  Join this Q&A session to hear directly from two successful dealers who have committed to modernizing the car buying experience. 

• Updating your tech stack will improve profitability and reduce friction throughout the sales process
• Attract, convert and retain loyal customers through a more transparent customer experience
• Implement operational efficiencies to grow and protect your bottom line

The Most Important Investment You Will Make

Presented by: Hugh Hathcock & Jeremie Leach

The way inventory is acquired and sold is often segmented and one department doesn't see the value of the next. Bring the inventory lifecycle full-circle and create operational efficiencies that will withstand the coming recession and volume slow-down.

• How to treat your inventory as an true money investment
• How to acquire inventory more efficiently
• How to connect the inventory journey/lifecycle (will compare to the customer journey/lifecycle)

How to Buy 100+ Cars a Month from the Public MasterClass

Presented by: Danny Zaslavsky & Rob Ruth

Learn how Danny, Rob and other dealerships have transformed the way they acquire, merchandise, market and sell vehicles resulting in a $3.4 million yearly increase of profit.

• Adopt a multi-channel sourcing strategy that combines auctions, dealer networks, and private-party acquisitions channels to ensure healthy and stable inventory levels and profitability.
• Communicate the highest authentic value of each one of your vehicles through leveraging leading edge technology that helps master each marketplace your cars live in - all to increase gross and turn.
• Learn how leading dealers are spending a fraction of their marketing on cars through dynamic vin-specific targeting. Each vehicle's market day supply and scarcity is unique - the spend should be too. Gain access to transforming your approach from the race to the bottom to achieving the “highest value” for each of the vehicles on our lots. The race to the bottom ends today.

Adopting a Less-Is-More Approach in Modern Fixed Ops

Presented by: Ashley Fedor & Joe Castelino

In a world of excess everything, savvy dealership operations are learning that less is best when it comes to fixed ops. Learn how less paper (or none at all), less need for face-to-face interaction, less manual or double data entry, and less money handling all means increased efficiency and a better experience.

• How to improve your fixed op processes to become more efficient and better manage parts inventory
• Transitioning your service department to a paper-less operation
• How to improve customer experience by communicating and transacting digitally

Constructing a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy in Today's Times: Looking at Insights and Trends on Consumer Buying Behavior

Presented by: Kristin Thompson & Robert Baugh

In this panel, Kristin Thompson, Sales Director at Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, along with Robert Baugh will discuss how to leverage the insights and takeaways from the Cox Automotive Car Buyer study to help dealers construct a winning digital marketing strategy. We’ll examine the top 6 takeaways from the Cox Automotive Annual Car Buyer Study and how they’re affecting your dealership - such as the online search journey, digital engagement and retailing, and the benefits of a streamlined purchase - but backed by extensive research and data from all of our brands, we’ll provide ways for you to construct a winning digital marketing strategy in today’s times.

• Increase exposure and reach - innovative ways to stay alongside customer during buying journey
• A deep look at insights and data and the top challenges dealers are facing and how to navigate and use them for opportunity and innovation
• How to close deals faster (deal seeker to Deal Doer) / Lifecycle ROI - winning digital marketing strategy

A Deep Dive into Vehicle Listing Ads

Presented by: Alex Melen & Ben Stewart

Vehicle ads, the latest SEM functionality from Google, are a performance-focused, lower funnel ad format which allows auto advertisers to promote their entire inventory of vehicles to interested customers shopping for vehicles on Google. This session will take a deep dive into what they are, how to implement them, and how to get ahead of your competition.

• Learn about Vehicle Listing Ads
• See Case Studies of how they are implemented
• Walk away with key examples on how to jump start your car sales with VLA's

What Are the Advantages of Building New Technology Rather than Buying?

Presented by: Colton Ray

More and more auto groups are building their own technology instead of going with a vendor. There are some tempting advantages, but it comes with a cost. I'll explain how to decide if it makes sense to develop your own tech and give you insights on some of the bumps you may experience while navigating the build process.

• When it makes sense to build your own technology (and when is does NOT)
• Top mistakes to avoid during the build process
• Case studies and examples

You’ve Lost Your Marketing Data. Now What?

Presented by: April Simmons, George Jones, Dave Spannhake, David Lemmon

While lockdowns are essentially behind us, the changes that the pandemic coupled with supply chain constraints have had a profound impact on your dealership’s digital marketing. You’ve come to embrace new methods of retailing, found ways to overcome targeting limitations post-privacy updates, and even placed much-needed focus on promoting your fixed operations. Now, 2023 is going to herald more changes — the most significant being the total loss of the third-party cookie.
So, how do you thrive in a world that continues to change at a more brisk pace?

• You will acquire an in-depth perspective on the impact that GA4 will have on your data strategy, including the potential loss of historical data that has provided the insights to judge agencies, growth, and new vendor partners.
• You will build a greater understanding of how to leverage video in your digital marketing campaigns and the results video can deliver.
• You will be equipped with targeting methods across channels that do not require cookie-based signals, so you’re maximizing your reach to potential shoppers, including VLAs, Display Ads, Local Ads, and On-Destination Automotive Inventory Ads (AIAs).

Personalized Video Bootcamp: Interactive Training Workshop

Presented by: Steve Roessler & Heath Patterson

Increase engagement, enhance customer experience, and have fun doing it! We all know video is a valuable engagement tool to break through today’s noise. But how can you use personalized video techniques throughout the sales cycle to connect, convert opportunities and close deals more quickly?
In this session engagement experts, Steve Roessler & Heath Patterson will share what types of videos to make, when to use them - from prospecting to closing - and how to get your team on board. So you can start leveraging personalized videos like a rock star to fast-track higher conversions and crush your sales quota.

• Proven tactics dealers are using to close more deals.
• Tips for personalizing videos that engage customers faster.
• Tricks for team collaboration to stand out from competitors.

Using Google Analytics 4 To Power Your Online Service Marketing

Presented by: George Nenni & Owen Moon

In this session you will learn how to implement and inspect online service marketing campaigns using the new Google Analytics 4 platform.

• Learn the importance of GA4 and dealer specific tricks to properly integrate tracking
• Learn how to set up events and build audiences within GA4 for service campaigns AND specials management
• Showcase use cases and documented data and ROI when implementing online service campaigns
• Learn best practices for GA4 reporting to measure the results of your online service marketing campaigns