Our Fixed Ops Feature Vegas LIVE editions made a stop to the Driving Sales Executive Summit 2019 back in October and we have 4 great interviews to share with you!
Our first one being Jeff Vaughn from the Cable Dahmer Auto Group. Their group consists of 6 stores in the Kansas City area as well as a Collision Center and even a Car Wash. Jeff is a very savvy CMO for the group so we appreciate him taking the time to sit down with us and give us some insightful information.
Jeff hits on what he hopes to gain when he attends conferences like DSES 2019 as well as his favorite session so far and some key takeaways. Plus some key strategies Cable Dahmer has implemented to drive customer retention and focus on growing their Service Departments (including our Drive Service Solution).
Jeff says they actually use their carwashes as a powerful marketing and retention tool. He has spent time learning how to get someone to go thru the wash and then turn around and go to them for sales and service.
Jeff’s mission for this year’s Driving Sales Executive Summit conference was service focused. “A lot of dealers think sales, sales, sales. We have kind of switched that for the last two quarters or so and the majority of our budget is going to service marketing. I noticed on their agenda there were a lot of great presentations and speakers on service marketing so that I decided to make the trip out here to Vegas to see what we could learn in order to increase our service marketing and customer retention.”
The session “Do You Want to Be a Marketing Millionaire” piqued Jeff’s interest. “Key takeaways were about what brings a customer back to your store after they have made a purchase and the speaker had great points about how to retain customers and then how quickly we need to follow up with customers after they purchase the vehicle to start servicing with us and being lifetime customers vs just being a one-time client with Cable Dahmer.”
What was a top tip to share? Jeff said, “One thing that I think I didn’t have enough focus on is the mobile side of things with service customers and I believe that they talked about that over 70% of customers that come in for service go through on the mobile side of things. We focused a lot of times on the desktop experience getting them to book an appointment thinking that the customers are at work they’re going to schedule service with us not thinking how easy can we make it for them to schedule that appointment on a mobile device? So getting back and really digging into the service side of mobile as we have on the sales side of things. Is going to be a big focus for us.”
Another key highlight from Jeff about our work together, “we have been a partner now with Fixed Ops Digital for a year if not more so it’s been a while and we have tons and tons of content pages and those are obviously there for Google, which is why we do them, but they’re also great information for the consumers so we send out with declined services emails as well as we’re big into postcards still everybody says they don’t work but we still see them come back in. We have seen such growth and return from that we opened up our own print shop within the dealership just so we could cut our printing costs. The cool thing is with those that we promote these custom landing pages that FIXED OPS DIGITAL has built for us so it has driven consumers so they feel more comfortable and it builds that trust with us for them to come back in and spend a couple of grand on getting something fixed.”
Check out the full interview above to hear more!
