What Smart Dealers Are Doing Differently with Group Sites, Vendors & Marketing

In this episode of Word on the Street, we sit down with Aaron Dobrow of Glen Polk Automotive to talk about what sets forward-thinking dealerships apart when it comes to group websites, vendor relationships, and digital strategy. From dealing with OEM requirements to building one cohesive online storefront across multiple rooftops, Aaron shares hard-earned lessons and insights into what actually works in today’s dealership marketing landscape. Whether you're part of a growing auto group or running a single-point store, you’ll walk away with actionable ideas to streamline your strategy, improve website performance, and get more value from your vendor partnerships.

Listen now to learn:

• How Glen Polk Automotive built a lightning-fast group site that converts
• Why vendor transparency and performance tracking are non-negotiable
• The power of simplifying your digital ecosystem
• What to avoid when setting up digital retailing across brands

00:00 – Intro & Guest Overview
Andrew introduces the episode with Aaron Dobrow, VP of Marketing & Digital Ops at Glen Polk Auto Group, along with Dealer OMG's Ashley and Dave.

02:15 – Aaron’s Background
Aaron shares his unique path from agency work into automotive, and how his outside-industry experience gave him a different perspective.

06:20 – The Aha Moment: Protecting the Dealership
Aaron describes the moment he realized his value as a marketing director came from vendor transparency and defending dealership interests.

09:45 – Bridging the Gap Between Automotive and Consumer Brands
Why automotive marketing lags behind e-commerce—and how dealers can think smarter by borrowing from other industries.

13:05 – Meta Auto Agency Partner Program & CAPI Mastery
Dealer OMG’s role in Meta’s partner program and how early adoption of CAPI gave them an edge.

17:00 – Why Many Dealership Websites Fail
Aaron calls out iframe-heavy, slow-loading OEM sites and explains why modern design matters.

21:30 – Building the Fastest Group Website
How Aaron partnered with Motive to create a blazing-fast, user-focused site that actually converts.

26:10 – Ownership Buy-In & Real-Time Site Edits
Behind-the-scenes of launching the site without prior approval—and how it ultimately won over leadership.

30:45 – Why Traditional Sites Are a Missed Opportunity
Most group sites are treated like afterthoughts—Aaron explains why that's a massive marketing mistake.

33:50 – Impact of Domain Authority & Inventory Visibility
How Glen Polk’s group site attracts out-of-DMA traffic and signals to Google that the dealership is bigger than it is.

37:15 – Standing Out in a Rural Market
Aaron talks about building community trust, reputation marketing, and how being family-owned is their greatest differentiator.

42:30 – From Reputation to Results
How Glen Polk’s ownership team personally responds to reviews—and why this impacts loyalty and conversions.

47:10 – The Truth About Lead Volume
Aaron’s take on why dealers should focu

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Transcript

If you're interested in a dealer group, really figuring out their unified online storefront, their unified presence, you're in the right place. I'm talking with my friend, Aaron Dobrow right now, the marketing director for Glen Polk Automotive. I'm also joined with Ashley from my team with DealerOMG, who's our marketing director, who's got a couple of decades of experience as a marketing director of Germain and Dave Lemon, our director of client success. we're talking about building out how he built out probably the fastest corporate website in automotive that has all the inventory and it's a good behemoth for advertisers for customers to be able to pump traffic through and generate sales generate recruiting generate services for the group through their corporate site and they're not shackled to the OEMs restrictions about what website providers and he drops all of the names of the vendors and the things that he's used to create this super fast, simple website. He also talks about the vendors, red flags and relationships he's had with vendors and what to look out for. Great conversation. If you're at all interested in automotive marketing, and especially for groups, you're in the right place. I'm Andrew Street. This is Word on the Street. Enjoy this conversation with my friend, Aaron Dobrow.

All right. Aaron, could you do a quick introduction to you, your role, how long you've been there, how you got started, and how you balance just all the responsibilities that come with it? Yeah, I'm Aaron Dobrow with Glen Polk Auto Group. I'm the vice president of marketing and digital business operations. So I'm over sales, parts, service. I work with the girls in accounting, looking for tools and ways to make us efficient, to save us man hours. I got started, I've been working with dealers for about fifteen years now. I got started by working for a small boutique agency in Fort Worth. It's actually a production company. We had several local TV shows. We had a national show. that we had some pretty big names on. It's all sports related, high school sports specifically. Pat Summerall was our host of the national show that they did. But we kind of created digital play. We realized that TV wasn't the only thing. And so one of our clients was Moritz. We were doing SEO and SEM. Um, we did some stuff for, um, DNM leasing. Um, we also did stuff for plastic surgeons, roofers, um, and, and packaging companies and a lot of stuff. And ultimately, um, The GM and Mr. Moritz decided they didn't really understand digital, but they knew it wasn't going away. So they brought me in house in twenty thirteen. I was with them for seven years. I came up to Polk in twenty twenty last year. I took a little bit of a hiatus, went back to Moritz for a little bit, just didn't really love the role, didn't really want to have to work with customers, work Saturdays and do that. So myself and Trent kind of got back together and you know, figured something out that would work for all of us. And so about five years here at Polk, give or take with the time away. Where was the grass the greenest when you were there on the agency side? Was it plastic surgery, packaging? had some really cool clients actually. We had a company called Rotobrush International and they basically, I don't want to call them franchises, but they sell duck cleaning equipment and basically establish marketing plans and stuff for individuals who want to start their own Duck cleaning business. That was, you know, really cool. We worked with a company called ProMock. At the time they had sixteen, sixteen subsidiaries. They are up to like twenty six or something like that now. But they literally did everything with packaging, whether it was the assembly line, whether it was the cellophane wrap that goes over your chicken or your steak or whatever's in the grocery mart. They had a machine that would label it. They then had a machine that when it comes off the assembly line, it goes on a pallet and it wraps the pallet. I mean, they were end to end. That was pretty fun. You know, I think plastic surgery was tough. Very competitive market, especially here in Dallas-Fort Worth. But, you know, I think probably the automotive side, working with D&M Leasing and working with Moritz was... was probably some of the more challenging, but also more rewarding, um, stuff we did. Good answer. Cause there was a, there was a time when we were starting this, this agency that I was like looking at elective medical, which would be like largely plastic surgery. And, um, we were doing like app installs for mobile apps. Yeah. Okay. Automotive is pretty consistent and I can figure out how to integrate with those systems a little bit better. Yeah. So I was just curious, because if you're going to say like, no, plastic surgery was a dream, I was like, damn. No, it was pretty rough. It's very competitive. Okay. So was there a time, just curious, like in this role, once you started working for the dealerships where you feel like, aha, I'm in the right seat. I got this. Um, yeah, really actually kind of early on, you know, um, not coming up through automotive, uh, you know, not being a salesperson, not being an internet manager, um, you know, who, who becomes a BDC director and then ultimately a marketing director, um, coming in from what I call the real world, uh, cause automotive it's its own thing. Uh, it's a little bit different and learning and understanding, um, know some of the nuances with automotive certified programs and everything else but um you know pretty early on i realized that i bring a little bit different perspective to the marketing mix and the marketing strategies um because i worked outside of automotive and know so i i really kind of once i figured out those nuances i knew you know hey this is this is where i want to be um you know i think there's times dealerships are um targets there's there's good vendors out there but there's also vendors that you know they don't they don't care um they're gonna sell you their product and whether it works or not you know they got their money um so you know it just um I think that's when I realized it was, hey, let's really take a position of protecting the dealership and vetting the vendors and really making sure that what we were investing in was working. Aaron, I did something similar. I was in to work outside of automotive, whether it's like marketing or there's formative experiences Then when you get into the industry, you learn, you gotta learn the industry. You gotta figure out profitability, but fix the bottom line, the service department, the BDC, the internet, all that stuff and like how they all work together. But then to be able to, you know, even like looking at advertising or email marketing or, these types of strategies right now, it's like, we can look at other dealers and like, who's the gold standard and let's try to, okay, well, they're beating us this last month. Let's do more of what they're doing while making sure like, let's look outside of the industry for what, like the smartest, you know, e-commerce and consumer packaged goods brands are doing right now, that's still creative and not just be, you know, solely focused on ourselves and the competitors next door. And what can we do to continually jockey? I say all the time, my ex-wife works with a lot of, she's in digital advertising. She works with a lot of e-com companies and a lot of retailers and things like that. implemented here because auto trends behind yeah absolutely absolutely trend behind they're doing stuff that everybody else was doing three years ago and calling it brand new yeah it's it's amazing that the cars that are being built have the technology they have yet the tier one tier two and and definitely tier three are so far behind what's going on I I remember um you know i i went to a i'm not going to say who it was but i went to one of their digital summits and they were talking about this brand new feature in google analytics and we're talking universal analytics back then and you know they're talking about funnels and i'm like this isn't new i've been using this for the last three years with my clients outside of automotive but they were like this is the newest thing google has yeah and i'm like What do you mean it's new? This isn't new. And I know who you're talking about, but I'll let him remain anonymous. Yeah, if I don't have something good to say, I'm probably not going to. I will let him remain anonymous. I think I see more and more of that throughout this career and the growth of this company. It's like seeing other people like, hey, they figured out conversions API to be able to optimize their campaigns towards these more meaningful metrics on the website. And I'm like, you've been doing this for years, right? Okay. What we haven't been doing is taking credit and running PR and, you know, having a megaphone. No, I mean, we are, we're part of, Meta created a new auto agency partner program. And, you know, thankfully we're really happy to be in it, which we were lucky. We were the small company that got, because the spend requirements part of the reason we got in there though is because we do a lot of things somebody else does but they just had like a whole session to tell these fifteen companies that are in this group about Cappy and I'm like yeah we finished Cappy eighteen months ago and I and I think talking to Keith Turner that we were the only company on the call that had finished it that long ago and it had it implemented and then running it. But yeah, like we just forget to tune our own horse sometimes. So nobody knew. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think automotive, um, whether it's vendor side, dealer side, you know, we're really quick to jump on whatever the buzzword is, you know, for, you know, it's been CDPs. CDP. Did you go retail before that? Yeah. That's just always going to be circling back around. And it's amazing how many of these companies that did absolutely nothing to their product is now CDP. It's like, but you didn't, you didn't do anything like, and, and, I think it's just easy to jump on the buzzwords. And unfortunately, I guess that's where we're going back to my aha moment is dealerships just don't know. They don't know. They finally got comfortable with traditional and Now they're trying to figure out digital and digital has been around for a long time. But the reality is, is they still want digital be linear. They want to be able to put an ad in the Saturday paper and someone bring it in. And that's just not how digital works. And they just don't a lot of dealerships don't understand that. And I think a lot of the digital product creation. in automotive isn't great. I know one of the things that we want to talk about today is websites. And when you look at your normal dealership single store website, you've got half the most important things on there are iframed, which makes it impossible to optimize, impossible to capture the metrics, impossible to see how it works. They add in twenty five conversion tools, right? All the pop ups and all these other things, you know, and all of them on top of that are taking credit for your leads and your CRM, despite none of them generating the rates. Right. And it's so convoluted. And I wish that know tier three dealers as a whole would stand up and say stop like this enough like i don't want my crm to say all my leads came from dealer.com right because that was the point of conversion that wasn't the source though Right. Well, and to take it even a step further, a lot of the manufacturers now, you know, the leads go up to them and then come to the dealership. And, you know, depending on how that lead is sourced, it's going to show that manufacturer. And it's like, that's not what the lead was. You know, what was actually what, you know, what got them to the website, A. Yeah. You know, and then secondly, what... What did they engage with to submit their information and request stuff from the dealership? We're partners with, and it's a company that I think really highly of, Clearabloom. who does a really nice job of showing that multi-touch information journey that a customer takes to get through all the digital stuff and finally end up buying a car at your store. Right. And it's, you know, last touch is great. It's fine. But again, even last touch is broken in your CRM half the time. So, but when you look at that journey, it's like, there's so many pieces that are so important that, But most dealerships, you said it earlier, right? They got like their BDC manager is also their marketing manager and their digital person. And, you know, they have people that are so multitasked out that there is nobody doing what you're doing. Right. And really digging in. You know, we've had the pleasure of working like with NIF at Germain and, you know, some really smart folks that have been around this industry for so long in that digital space, in that super designated role. Right. And when we have a group, you know, Craig Atkins at Lewis Group, and, you know, there's a bunch of them that we have that we work with. When you have that person that is empowered to do this one thing, manage your digital marketing, A, they appreciate what we do way more, which I love. They help us do better work for them, which I love. huge like that i i'd love to see the numbers of hey we added a six-figure employee to head up all of our digital marketing but when we did that we cut three times as much waste out of our budget yeah huge Aaron's the star of the show, let's remember. In my observation, the handful of times that we've talked, I feel like you're best known for taking pride in the value you're able to bring to your dealerships. And you're also really familiar with the vendor side of the arena, but you've also Like one thing that stands out as like the website that you've developed for the group, how fast it works. Like when you were building that website, what were you, what were you really looking to, to solve for? Um, so. We had that website. It was with a different provider. It didn't really have any inventory. It was more of just a landing page that would link out to our websites. And you know, four of our stores, two of them sit on the same lot and share a pre-owned apartment. One of them's a mile south of there. And then our standalone Chevy stores, you know, twenty miles south of that. So which in Texas is, you know, might as well be a block, right? It's twenty miles is nothing. What I saw was in the CRM, I would see leads from the same customer. from each of my store's websites, the tier three websites. And I just went to the owners because I had done this at Moritz specifically with the Kia stores. They were all three Moritz Kia. Two of them were in the city of Fort Worth. So we ran stuff as Moritz Kia branded website that serviced all three stores. And I just went to the owners and I said, look, you've got all these customers cross shopping you. digital at best is an okay experience on most tier three websites. Some aren't the greatest, some are good. But the reality is, I asked them, how hard do we want to make it for our customers to shop us and to buy from us? I mean, right now they're going to four websites and you know let's consolidate everything let's put all of our inventory there let's put our service departments there let's put our parts departments there and you know, push people there and, you know, we don't have a problem competing against each other and let the best store win, the salesperson who actually did their job and, you know, actually answered the question in the lead, you know, which doesn't happen very often. And, you know, the purpose was to give the customers just a better experience and to make it easier to look at our inventory and learn about Polk. So in this short period since, how long has the website been live now in its current? Gosh, in its current state, close to four years. How did you find Motive? Actually, John Habeck and... One of the guys I think that was kind of helping represent them stopped in at my Ford store. They met with my GSM and the owner and they were like, you know, we don't know websites, but there's something different about it. And so, yeah. They gave me his information. I was like, hey, my GSM and owner said you stopped by. Why don't you come down and talk to me about the website? And as we kind of just started talking about what I was looking for and what they did and everything, I mean, I just on the spot said, send me an agreement. Let's make this happen. When I first started working with them, they didn't even have a content management system. They were creating all the pages and I worked with them. I had them work with at the time and still my SEO team that handles that website to build out a robust content management system. customization, customer support. If it takes more than thirty minutes for them to resolve something, then they've got something else that's going on or they're trying to put out a fire. I mean, they're super responsive. You know, I worked with the support team, but I also worked directly with John Habeck. And, you know, it's just that they really customized what we want and what we need. And they've brought ideas that they've done some other dealerships and been like, hey, we're doing this. What do you think? And, you know, it's just it's just a good working relationship. You know, they're easy to work with. I mean, it's a beautiful site and the user experience is phenomenal. Yeah. And I intentionally, ironically, I built it without showing the owner. And I told him, I said, hey, I'm going to share this link with you. You're not going to like it. So my owner's probably three years older than me. Him and his brother run the stores. Their dad officially retired in December and all the paperwork's been done and whatnot. But he's very uh visual uh very loves graphics that kind of stuff he's got two full sleeves of tattoos on his arms um you know and i was just like you're not gonna like the website and he's like well why not and i said because you're a visual person and it doesn't have all that stuff that a normal website has and i built it that way intentionally one because it's just different. You don't go to an automotive website that looks like that, that just jumps out at you with the ability to search, the ability to find anything. It doesn't have a hero image, really. It doesn't have a image rotator. It just doesn't look like anything automotive and really did that by design. they have the ability to have all that stuff. But what I wanted was I wanted a website, especially based off of Google being mobile first. I wanted a website that functioned, that didn't take as long as some of these other websites take to jump between pages. He's showing all the images on the listing page. So it gives a little bit different journey for people that are on the website who with a lot of websites, you've got to go down to the BDP to view all the images of the vehicle and to convert. So we're getting people converting off of the listing pages just as much as we are off of the detail pages because it's all there and it's there with multiple vehicles displayed. You can sort by location, you can sort by make model. I mean, it just it's just just a good representation for our customers. What's been the feedback from ownership and from the dealerships initially? Once Trent, who's uh the older brother uh trent and sean uh once trent saw it and kind of started playing with it and saw how quickly you could uh navigate through it and and really get to whatever you wanted to get and then saw how easy the back end was to use and and when i say real time literally i hit save and it's the whatever change has been made is made it's not waiting five ten minutes twenty minutes you know sometimes overnight it's it's real time um and so if there's a pricing error or a rebate not showing or something like that we we can fix it almost immediately um you know as soon as we catch it and can remedy it it's it's fixed um and so they like it uh you know the managers like it um you know our customers like it it definitely outperforms our our tier three websites Cool. So there's no pushback from general managers or anybody be like, Hey, let's, you know, let's put that under. They under, they understand, they understand that they see the CRM, they see, you know, that we're being cross shopped and you know, it's, it's not going to be a one-to-one evenly distributed, but everybody gets their share of it. You know, the customers have the same experience regardless of which brand or store they're looking at on that website. And so it comes down to really a customer that's lower funnel, that's done their research, that's really just trying to find the vehicle they want and which store do they go to to get it. And we have the four domestic truck brands. Two of our stores sell Chevrolet, but one of them also sells Buick and GMC. So we brand that site. We make sure that when we're doing stuff to that site, we highlight the the Buicks and the GMC. And then we utilize our standalone Chevrolet and kind of represent Chevys there. And, and so we kind of have it set up to where if, if it's something that's promoting a specific store, we're able to kind of land them into, I don't want to say a microsite, but land them into a, a page that is basically everything for that store. And with this, it sounds like I don't want to put words in your mouth. but you might've made the fastest dealership website. What did you prioritize with Motive while you guys were creating it to make it so responsive so fast? I look at What's going on in LinkedIn? What are the conversations and everything? And everybody from vendor to OEM to dealers trying to have an Amazon experience. And you can't have an Amazon experience, unfortunately, with a lot of the tier three websites. you know, the OEMs require you to have certain things like chat, like digital retailing and all this stuff. And all those third party scripts loading slows down those sites tremendously. And What Motive does is everything they have is native. They have their own trade tool. They have their own digital retailing tool. They have their own chat built into the platform and it just functions significantly better. I literally just noticed that I was looking at the trade tool. Yeah. And it's easy. Powered by motive, right? The AI chat box is powered by motive. So there are all these proprietary motive tools. Of course, that's going to speed things up and make everything work better. And I think, you know, I say it's the fastest out there. You know, I don't know whether it is or there isn't. Three to one ignition was just acquired by Overfuel. It's a pretty good platform. It's pretty fast website. Guys at Auto Genius, Ben Hadley and those guys have a pretty good website platform. I'm biased just because of the work that John and I have done to create this website. It was it was built intentionally and built intentionally. with the purpose to convert and it converts. And ironically, we were at NADA in Dallas and I was talking to a couple of vendors and they were trying to pull up their product on one of the tier three OEM certified providers. It was a tool that went into that website and and you know launched from the website and it took you know twenty thirty seconds for that website to load because you know everybody's pulling on the same wi-fi the bandwidth was slow and i'm like well here's where i want to use your product and literally it loaded in in seconds and they're like dude, the Wi-Fi here is horrible. There's so many people on it. How's that website so fast? And I was like, well, actually, the owner is going to meet me over here in a minute to kind of look at how we would want to add you to it, you know, type of thing. So I went and got John, went back. And ironically, the vendor had the page source pulled up and was trying to figure out, you know, what he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're like, how, you know, like, Nobody else's website's loading this fast right now at NADA with all the traffic that's being, you know, all the bandwidth that's being consumed. So it was pretty funny. No, you're right. I mean, there's a handful of guys that are starting, you know, a handful of companies that are kind of starting or have been, you know, trying to do similar things. And, you know, you mentioned Ben and, you know, Malibu Ben is an old friend. You know, the Coons website they did was their big first group launch. And it's a beautiful site. And it's very similar in the sense that it is super straightforward. It's what are you trying to do? Click a button and do it. Right. Right. And, you know, MXS we partner with and they have some, you know, I think their website product is along the same lines. But one of the biggest things that those guys talk about, and it's what you were hitting on a second ago, the group site always tended to be an afterthought. Right. Hey, you do all your store sites with us. We're going to throw in a group site for free. And it's just a two page throw away wasted time. Yeah. It's about the family. Yeah. Like what a missed opportunity. Yeah. Well, and you know, there, there are some benefits to doing certain marketing at the store level, you know, and, and, I appreciate that and where those vendors make those recommendations, I'll follow what their recommendation is. You know, there's some economies of scale, you know, where we're a unique brand. Glenn Polk, it's it's you know, it's there's not twenty seven other Glenn Polks out there. Right. We're in a very rural market. Google loves the website, A, because it's quick. It's mobile first. It's mobile friendly. But secondly, it provides a certain amount of domain authority in the sense that, we have a thousand new vehicles and two hundred pre-owned vehicles. And it allows us in a rural market to appear significantly larger than we are in the eyes of Google being Yahoo and some of these search engines and different things because the quantity of vehicles that we have. And with Google liking you guys a lot and having that online presence look so big with all the inventory, is it starting to result in people from outside of your DMA coming across your inventory? Yeah, yeah, we we actually while we don't do a lot of targeting, I mean, we target some cities in Oklahoma, but that's because we're a mile off the Oklahoma border. You know, we don't have a lot of competitors per se, but we are I mean, we get people. from out of state on a regular basis. My GSM at Dodge has a couple that buys every three years from them and they're in Alabama. They come in every three years to buy from us because of the family-owned experience. We know we're not going to get their service. We know we're not going to, you know, sell them parts or any of that stuff. But, you know, they've bought their last three vehicles from us over the last, you know, nine years. And, you know, they recommend people and they found us, you by searching and by looking. And I think that presence is beneficial. We do things differently. We are family owned. There's an owner or someone with the last name of Polk pretty much at every location at any time during the day. Trent's son Connor is now the general sales manager of our Sanger location, which is a brand new building. They moved into it in August. That's actually where Andrew came when we got together. And, you know, so you've got three generations working for and it is family owned. We care about our customers. You know, it's when Mr. Polk, when Glenn would come to the stores, even up until he retired in December, he was semi-retired for the last two years. He still spent an hour at each location every day. He saw customers he knew, remembered, greeted that He'd done business with them. You know, we recently it's been about three years now, two or three years recently had his celebrated fifty years in automotive and, you know, did a did a huge like eight, nine minute piece on it. and really showing what the family's about. I shared it with Andrew, so he had a better idea of what and who he's partnering with and kind of what we're about. And it's a good, it's great. Like the whole eight minutes sounds like a long video from a, quick response marketing world, but it's captivating to like, I watched the entire thing. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is really well done to where, I don't know, like if you're a customer or if you're a new salesperson at the dealership or if you're a vendor wanting to get a good understanding of who they were. It's like it's enough to pull you in. Or if you're just like a person wanting to get into auto or you're a scrappy entrepreneurial type that wants to see a cool success story of somebody starting out. with one dealership in the, when did he start, the nineties? He opened his stores in ninety five, but I believe he started in seventy four or seventy five in auto, something along those lines. It's funny because in the video it talks about how he took a two week vacation from his job as an electrician and never went back. started selling cars and then ultimately worked up to where he owned his own store and they live in Gainesville. We support the communities that we're in, whether it be, we do a thing called Fix My Ride, which is, We work with one of the local causes and we take interviews of people who need repairs to their vehicles and can't afford to get them done. So through a selection process, we repair I think last year we did forty vehicles for people who needed stuff from a basic oil change to, you know, timing belts and different stuff. And that's just time we donate. Our technicians take time usually on their day off. It's usually on a Saturday. And we have tents. They have their tools up there. And, you know, it's just something we do on an annual basis for the community. It's what's interesting to me is, and this is something we preach and we talk about all the time. What you're talking about is how dealerships marketed themselves for fifty years prior to the digital presence, right? It's reputation, it's community, it's what we do. It's, you know, we're part of the neighborhood, the family, the everything. Digital came along and all of a sudden everybody was like, oh, I want VDP views and all these other metrics. And they stopped doing those fundamental things that car dealers have always been so good about. And you're starting to see it. You're starting to see people reintroduce it back into their messaging and back. But the dealerships that never stopped- are so successful because- Yeah. Well, let's be honest. We all have the same vehicles. We all have access to the same pre-owned inventory through auctions, through peer-to-peer buying sources. Our biggest competitive advantage and something I try and put at the front of all of our marketing efforts is are that we're family owned and how we treat our customers and what we do for the communities. And it's our salespeople, it's our service advisors, it's our techs. That's what makes our stores. It's their personalities that, you know, that's our competitive advantage. It's not, We're not going to win the lowest price necessarily all the time because, you know, we are a little bit smaller and we can only go so low on certain stuff. And there are some high volume dealers, but you're not going to have the same experience in some of these larger corporate owned. dealerships that you are with us and and actually have an owner respond to your review whether it's positive or negative the owners do that i've tried to outsource it to third-party rep man companies that do it and the owners they don't want to do that um they they want to be accountable they want to be front and center they literally reply to every review um you know and and they a lot of dealer principals have done their time and are withdrawn from that. And Trent and Sean are all about that. And I think that really shows is, we had a guy who there was some confusion on a warranty on his battery and he put up a negative review and Trent, we found him through Facebook, reached out to him on Facebook and said, hey, please give me a call. I think there's some confusion. And it was there was confusion. The person who took the phone call didn't realize that Jeep had a particular battery warranty from the factory. And so, you know, we got his receipt. We refunded him. the money and he went back. But that's the difference of having an owner that's involved. And I've only worked at two dealerships. People ask me a lot of questions about other stores and this and that. I'm probably more more engaged on the vendor side with the people I know, people who I consider to be friends who started out as vendors, but I've worked with them for so long. Both groups I've worked for are family owned and they're great. They both treat their customers a certain way. And I think that value is overlooked a lot, especially with customers that you know, all they care about is, you know, the lowest, the lowest, the lowest, the lowest. And, you know, dealerships have, we put ourselves in the situations we're in. There's dealerships out there that just don't do things the way they should be done. And, you know, Because of that, consumers are hesitant. And if you read our reviews and you look at what they say, it's almost everything talks about how great the salesperson was. It was no pressure at all, zero pressure. They worked to help me. You know, I take pride in that. You know, all of our websites where we have control over it on the homepage is going to be some sort of feed of our customer reviews because that's they say it best. And that's what's most important. Well, and dealers have made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you just said about, you know, customers just care about price. Well, let's look at that. You showed them a carousel, just pictures of prices of cars. You showed them a VLA, just pictures of prices of cars. Your TV spot is literally just the incentives going across the screen. Right. So you've taught them to judge. As far as they know, that's all you offer. Right. It's car and price, right? Right. So until you incorporate what we're talking about into that, the experience that if you don't show them that, then you haven't given them a reason to care. Right. Absolutely. It's huge. Yeah. It's like, and I, and I feel like, where that vibrancy comes from it's hard to really define but it's very clear when you see it especially when you're in the store but as a marketing marketer it's like which i think is the most important thing in the world but it's like what are those moments that lead up to the person coming into the store what's that impression and then what is like the moments before the customer comes back into the store can we get them to come back for the routine services for their trade-in for the referral that they have and it really seems to start with like ownership or if you're working with a big public dealer group that is very bottom line focused private like you know it's it's very spreadsheet driven and everything's super cookie cutter the vibrancy is like that for the customer And it's very, you're getting in what you get and there's their cookie cutter stuff versus somebody like in my experience, somebody that in your shoes with the right type of group, with the right size, it gives you some buying power and some flexibility and some fun working with different manufacturers, which is probably really fun. But it also gives you autonomy. You know, you have autonomy where you're not beholden to the cookie cutter and you can do what you know is smart for your market, for your customers, for your staff. Automotive in the last. Eighteen, twenty four months feels like it's gotten very clinical. The attempt to. Get the data and try and, you know, find that attribution model, and I think we've just gotten so focused on some of the things that while they're important, they aren't what's most important. And, you know, it's, I come into it from a different perspective as we discussed previously. And it's tough coming into a new group or even at a Moritz where I was for seven years and telling them that I don't care about leads. I don't care about the volume of leads that we get when every GSM has come up through the internet and have gotten multitudes of leads. To me, leads isn't the metric. I don't know of any dealership or any manufacturer at the end of the month that hands out awards to their dealer for having the most leads, right? What's more important to me than leads is engagement. I'd rather have lower funnel, higher quality opportunities and make sure that my team doesn't drop the ball. If a customer is asking a specific question and one of our guys sends back a template that's, yeah, the vehicle's here, when can you be here? Hey, you know what? You just lost the business. Don't blame the lead. It's not a bad lead. It's not a crappy lead. You didn't take advantage of the opportunity you were given to engage that customer where and how they wanted to be engaged. And you didn't answer their question. You don't deserve that lead. You didn't earn it. You didn't earn their business. When you're working with vendors, you said leads isn't like your biggest KPI. which is hard, but it's healthy to veer away from that, especially if you don't have a giant BDC that can just chew through a bunch of garbage. In your experience, what are vendors doing that are great that's different than other vendors for you? What I look for in a vendor is someone who's transparent, who is willing to acknowledge that maybe this particular campaign or execution didn't work, who's willing to accept and admit that it didn't work versus, hey, your team didn't do this or your team didn't do that. Own it, just own it. Because not everything you do is going to be successful, but it's what you learn from that and how you then take that and repurpose it to where it is successful next time. I would much rather be in lower density ponds as far as competition and have a better quality and stand out as a unique brand with smaller audiences than I would to necessarily be in some of these larger audiences. And we're very rural, so that's easy to do. If you look at the auction insights in Google Ads, we really don't cross our competitors. A couple of them are really focused on fleet. We're not. So we're going after different audiences. you can take what they're doing in the market and make sure that you have enough of a presence there that you gain market share from. And so I think vendors that are just transparent, who are willing to work through the bad times or the things that didn't work, you know, think I'm pretty easy to work with. By no means will I ever tell a vendor what to do. I'm not bringing a vendor on board to tell them what they're going to do with their product. So really looking to let that vendor do what they do. what works works and i'm not the person that's gonna say um you know if something didn't work that it was the vendor's fault um i look internally first i look at the lead i look at how it was followed up with i look at this i look at that and you know and then let's figure it out let's let's figure out why something didn't work um you know the vendors that just want to provide you with what I consider to be hollow stats. They wanna show you all their conversion events and all this, and conversion events of VDP view or a page view or this or that. You wanna show these metrics that are just hollow. I don't care about that. What I care about is how do we sell more cars? How do we service more customers? How do we sell more parts? And how do we do it in a manner that's ethical? And in a way that provides an experience to that customer that they're not going to get somewhere else. Yeah. And you've got like, and you talked about like buzzwords. We've been around them and it's like, we've got the CDP that's for tariff uncertainty is special. You know, that's where we are. Do you feel like there's a buzzword coming up that whatever, whether it's, you know, going to be a game changer or not that you're starting to hear more of? I mean, obviously AI with ChatGPT, that's out there. Everybody now has some sort of AI incorporated into their marketing platforms. You know, I think defining certain things. But as far as up and coming buzzwords, I mean, I think the next year is just going to be more and more about AI and how dealerships can utilize AI, whether that's back of house for, you know, HR and accounting and reporting and other stuff, or it's conversational AI that is working to work with your salespeople in engaging with customers um but i think that we're gonna hear that buzzword throughout twenty twenty five and i think it's gonna carry on to twenty twenty six because it's growing faster than just about any technology we've had in at least the past decade i mean it's it's evolving so quickly and um you know i'm i'm not afraid of ai but i definitely think ai with human oversight is how dealerships will get the most success from it um i i i know some dealers that are trying to go full ai and and you know have their sales people um kind of be the the catch-all for you know ai but i i think um you know people people buy from people it's that salesperson it's the personality and so i think if you remove that part of the equation um as smart as ai is and can learn dialect and tone and and everything else it's still that individual's uh personality that that long live people yeah a lot of gain deficiencies i think yeah is really where you want it to be right right and even some of that is customer facing i think that You know, as somebody that's worked in sales in this industry, the number of times that I have called a dealership and the very first thing you get is the central voicemail. And oh, by the way, all of their options have changed is what every one of them says at the beginning. And none of it's true. That's a terrible customer experience. So, you know, even the, the AI assisted voice handling of inbound calls so that it feels like a live voice answering it, something that simple is huge. Whereas I don't want them selling, I don't want AI selling a car. I don't want AI converting a lead. But being the go-between, that efficiency and that experience can all be good, I think. Yeah, no, absolutely. All right, let me try to land this plan so you guys can get back to work pretty quickly. But if there was a dealer group looking to build a really efficient group site, is there anything that you'd tell them? Yeah, I mean, make sure you understand the platform it's on, the ability to enhance and customize, make sure that you've gone through it thoroughly on mobile and just be purposeful with your CTAs. I think we put CTAs on the website and You know, I personally don't like to have more than two, maybe three at the most. Yeah, having too many just confuses the customer. And the reality is, is if you're going to have a CTA, at least have it do what it says and what the customer is expecting it to do. And make sure you set that expectation with how you label your CTAs. there's enough number of statistics out there and studies out there that show if you have too many CTAs, people are just not going to make a decision. And I think we we overcomplicate a process that we feel we have to be a hundred percent in control of when the reality is with all the information that's out there about these cars the customer is in a lot more control than they have been and dealers get scared by that um don't lead gate everything you don't have to lead gate like My opinion of chat is way different than what the OEMs or even the chat providers want. I don't need to lead gate my chat. I don't have to every other Answer B, what's your name? What's your phone number? What's your email? And you literally watch the tone of the customer go from being excited to learn about this vehicle to being annoyed because the chat agent or the AI bot won't stop asking for their information. Some information is okay to be free. If you provide a good experience and you engage properly and you engage with a well crafted email or text, you're going to earn that business. You don't have to lead gate everything. And I would just, you know, I would just say if they're looking to do it, you know, make sure you know what you're getting into and don't, Don't overcomplicate it. It needs to be simple. It needs to be fast. It needs to be easy to navigate. And, you know, it doesn't you don't have to have lead gigs everywhere. I love it. And OK, so if you're. I don't even know who listens to this, maybe forty people, but if somebody is like a starting out marketing director, they're newer to a, you know, midsize, smaller group, what would you say to them? Be patient. There's going to be a lot of people who try and sell you stuff. Research. Find out about who you're working with. Have they been acquired? Who's acquired them? You know, just the ins and outs of the people that are trying to sell you because there's a lot of really good vendors in the space, but there's also a lot of people out there that just don't give a damn and you're just going to take your money. That's what stood out. I think the first time you and I spoke, your understanding of not only like the vendor space and the different players for different puzzle pieces, but also like the mergers and acquisitions that are taking place. And it's like, okay, you could be a broker. Yeah. Vendor broker. I'm fortunate to have worked with some really good people. You know, I grew up my dad started several different businesses. I moved I moved my freshman year in high school. I moved my sophomore year in high school. You know, I've I've lived in Michigan, Jersey, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Virginia. So I learned, you know, it's it's about It's about researching and understanding everything around you. And it's just a different perspective. And I've been fortunate. And surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Barely smart person. I've done this for a while. I, you know, understand stuff. I can read code. I can't write it. I wouldn't be able to write a code or anything, but I can look at it and tell you what it's supposed to be doing. But, you know, people like Sean Raines and Zach Hendricks and Aaron Sheeks and. You know, just some of these people that I've been fortunate to work with throughout their careers and watch them grow. I mean, I met Aaron Sheeks when he was employee number four at Gooba Goo, and I've worked with him ever since. You know, now he's the CEO of Pure Cars. You know, Zach Hendricks, Sean Raines. Sean's really kind of the reason I'm in automotive. We were both competing for Moritz's business. He was at Reach Local. And, you know, Sean being Sean, Sean was very honest with him and, you know, told him he can do all this pay per click for him. But if he doesn't have a good if they don't have a good SEO strategy, then it's really not going to benefit them that much. And Reach Local didn't do SEO and we did. And so we ended up getting the business. And, you know, Sean and I have been good friends from that from from that time on. And that's been Gosh, twenty ten. That's been fifteen years ago. It's really funny you say that because when you were talking about leads a few minutes ago. Yeah. My mind immediately went to Sean Brant's and his whole like lead addiction rants and everything. Yeah. Yeah. No, we you know, a lot of people. I think there's a handful of individuals and companies that are. I don't want to say new school, old school, but are just focused on maybe disrupting and changing automotive marketing and everything. I mean, we could do a whole episode on OEM certified programs. I think they're good for a lot of dealerships out there, but for the dealerships that have invested in someone in my role, which still isn't common, but it's coming along and Moritz was ahead of the game in twenty thirteen by bringing me in house. um you know i i think they're good but i also think that they're limiting um i don't know that a lot of dealerships know how they work and if there's any oem you know people that listen to this podcast i'm sure i'm gonna put my foot in my mouth but the reality is is it's a pay-to-play game and the vendors that are willing to give up their their The ones who are willing to do that are the ones that are on certified programs. They're a blessing and a curse. You get on there, you get exposed to a lot of dealerships. I've seen it hurt companies. I was there when Dealer Inspire was brought in house under cars and being on that program, they just didn't have the resources to take on as many dealerships as they did at the time uh they're a great company um they've since fixed this where you know this is eight years ago or whatever but i've seen it happen when someone gets acquired and and you know gets on a certified program and you know it ultimately it changes it um you know what we i used c four before c four was on any of the oam certified programs um and i used them because they offered an exclusivity You can't do that on a certified program. So kind of who you are, your identity as a vendor changes a little bit by being on those programs. And I think if dealers really knew why and how vendors were selected, I think enough of them would get together and say, this has got to stop. We got to change the way this happens. It'd be a revolution. Yeah, absolutely. Because there's a lot of vendors that aren't. And I'm fortunate. We don't have a lot of co-op. We want to use every penny we get. But we have so much of our marketing that's above and beyond co-op that I'm able to work with off-program people and do stuff at my group site, where as long as I keep the brand integrity and the logos correct, that the manufacturers really don't have a say in how I manage and operate that website. And that's why, in my opinion, it performs so well. You know, I don't have to have all this what I call carnival stuff, you know, the inflatable guy, you know, jumping up, screaming at you to chat or, you know, just just some of the stuff that we do in automotive. That's just not necessary. Yeah. And it gets customers to come back and come in and have a good experience. And I love having like the ownership shadow over things that like so many people see, especially like the reviews. Like I had a Mike, Mike Spiegel, who's a friend who owns a handful of stores up in Ann Arbor and in Tennessee. I don't know if he knows that I'm a friend, but I consider him a friend. He's like, you know who picks up cigarette butts outside of a dealership? i'm like i don't know the porter or like the cleaning crew and he's like the porters and the owner he's like and if you're not doing it and he's like and everybody sees me doing when i pick it up everyone sees me picking up these cigarette butts and i try to make a note to go out there every morning and scoop up i'm like i like that it's good to know because people see the owners getting in and responding to reviews yeah it's it's um you know i get a lot of reputation companies uh reputation management companies and like hey we you know we're gonna do this we're gonna do that and and this and that i'm like well you know my my owners respond to all the yeah all the dealerships tell us that and then they start looking at the reviews and they see the responses and like oh you your owner actually does do this i'm like yeah i mean i'm pretty transparent i'll tell you whatever you want to know um you know i feel that's what helps move a relationship, right? You gotta be honest with each other and, you know, our owners are front and center and my dealer principal, Trent, goes in the back end of the website and does stuff, whether it's creating specials or stuff like that. You just don't, dealer principals just don't do that. So just from top down, we're built differently and there's buy-in at every level. And I think that's, That's why customers like to work with us is just top down, we're all moving in the same direction. Yeah. Aaron, you seem like the right guy in the right seat. And I think Trent will admit this, and I think all the GSMs, we'll admit this, you know, I left and it was kind of a shock when I did. Um, but I think it helped everybody have a, a better perspective on everything I did and what I did. Trent took over the marketing while I was gone. And before I came in, marketing for this group was sending our inventory feed to third party. So that was the extent of it. Maybe a direct mail piece here and an email campaign there. And I've built i've built a you know a machine and and you know have an actual not just strategy but a mix of vendors and those vendors have specific jobs and specific things that they are responsible for and as long as they do everything correctly everything works well and that's just different than a lot of dealerships i think i'm working with a lot of vendors that dealerships don't even know about just because they're not on the certified program. That's frustrating because I think there's a lot of good vendors out there that are getting overlooked because of it. I'm vendor friendly. I try and help connect people if I can. Ironically, when Sheiks was building AutoMiner, he had an account that wasn't going to go with him because they didn't have click to call. And I had worked with Mike Hague for a very long time at Car Wars prior to Car Wars even being launched at a company called Century Interactive. I white labeled their call tracking source. I put Sheiks and Haig together, they worked something out, and he was able to use Car Wars for a click to call out an auto miner by using a Google extension. So connecting people, I just think you get good minds together and good stuff happens. Yeah, I agree. Well, Aaron, you said it all. This is me trying to be Howard Stern wrapping it up. You've talked about the vendors, the relationships, what makes them good. We've talked about dealer groups, making fast websites, making a good experience for your customers before they come in, giving them a good experience when they're there, creating customer loyalty. And what's around the corner for us in the auto industry? And Aaron, I can't thank you enough. If people want to connect, what's a good way on LinkedIn? LinkedIn's good. You know, my email, it's first name, last name at gpolk.com. So Aaron Dobrow at gpolk.com. One of the things that was negotiated when I came back is I can take on side projects. So if there's dealers out there that maybe have some questions or need consulting for ninety days or long term or whatever the case may be, I look to help dealerships. That's really what I envision someday. Someday, though, there's a couple of guys that I'm working with that I'm friends with that will eventually have some sort of consulting company put together really to advocate for dealerships. you know, help revolutionize the industry because it's a unique industry. You know, there's days I hate it, but most of the time I love it. And, you know, everything, there's frustrations everywhere. I'm at the right place, you know, leaving, you know, really allowed everybody to realize that, you know, we had the right place, the right people. What's next for automotive? Hopefully, we get back to prioritizing customers and knowing and understanding that it's okay to give up a little bit of control. If you give a customer a choice, they're likely going to make the one you want them to if they're not forced to do it. Love it. Well, this is one of the days that I love about the industry is talking with folks like you, too. I appreciate your willingness to hop on here, man. I appreciate you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk and to get my opinion out there.