Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Hey, good morning. Hello from Utah. Yeah. Hello from Arizona. I'm down in Mesa for the gem show and, uh, you know, going to go and, and look at crystals and stuff and just a little bit and it'll be, it'll be a fun day. Um, you know, if you all are interested, let me know and I'll send you pictures of the stuff that I find. There you go. Whatever. But yeah, so we're not in the same place today. And so I'm back in the studio. And so Casey, our guest, as we chatted with him backstage before the show started, he asked me, Michelle, before you even joined, he said, so what do you do when she's away? Is it just like... wings and football or what are you I said yeah so uh he doesn't have to make the bed that's the biggest thing he doesn't have to make the bed when yeah and folks stand by we've got um our we got uh Marketing expert and fractional CMO, Casey Stanton, standing by. A couple of quick updates. I want to make sure everybody knew. We've got Friday, Michelle. Our topic is going to be the cost of repos, like the high cost of repos. And there's some extra math. I think we all understand the basic math of your lost car and how that affects profit and maybe a couple of car payments near term. But I've expanded it. And I think folks are going to want to see that math so they can better understand anticipate the longer term cost associated with losing those accounts. And then on Wednesday, we have Kristin Acosta, who joined us weeks ago to talk about their very low charge off rate. And keep in mind, this is a dealership that's been in business since the nineties and their history that she sent us to analyze was almost three thousand accounts, three thousand sales. And so that's a pretty good study by itself. She's coming back to talk to us in depth about their collections approach and practices. So that'll be really important on Wednesday. We'll just tune in and listen. I know from the conversations that you've told me about from our V eight groups that that when those kind of topics come up, it's like, how? I mean, she really does have, for the industry, great numbers. Yeah, and I think the approach is the part. I mean, we can all understand call the person, text the person. We can all understand the procedural things. It's going to be the philosophy and approach that we really need to spend more time on because I think then people can apply that to what they do and have a chance to have more lasting success like they do. Oh, all good. You want to introduce our guest? Absolutely. All right, everybody. This is Casey. Casey has been someone that I've known for years. more than a decade, I guess. Yeah. We've just, we kind of, uh, we worked with the same organization for a while and, um, and, uh, then, you know, we both went on our own journeys of, you know, our careers and, and what our paths were. And, and, uh, uh, Casey was more just like volunteering to help with high profile speakers and, and, and all of that. And so it was really fun to get to know him and, um, And, you know, just really a delightful person. We're really glad that you're here today, Casey. And Casey just comes with a wealth of experience in marketing. And this is marketing experience outside of buy here, pay here. Because I believe in this industry, we live in an echo chamber. And so this is, and I don't know if y'all are familiar with what an echo chamber is. But it's the same thing being brought back to you from different corners without any influences outside of this box. And so, Casey, welcome. Yeah, thank you. Excited to be here. So, Michelle, you breezed over that phrase about buy here, pay here. So, Casey, that's the terrible name that they call our industry of self-financing. Like buy here, pay your payments here, buy here, pay here. That's mostly what our audience is and that's who our listeners are. But yeah, happy to have you here to talk about marketing and how they can obviously apply it in their work. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So first, Michelle, I wanted to find out from Casey, like, tell us the backstory. Like, how did you get into marketing? And what attracted you to that particular area? Yeah, great question. So, um, I graduated from Michigan state university with a environmental policy degree. When I say graduated, I mean, I begged one professor to give me a D so that I could actually, I didn't know if I was going to walk. My parents already had like the hotel reservation come down and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to graduate guys. So I graduated, but I graduated into the housing crisis of two thousand and eight. And I interviewed with one job with Canon and I was going to go door to door and sell copy machines. And I thought it would be something great. I didn't get it ultimately. And I was kind of left, like, not knowing what to do. There just weren't jobs available. So I moved back in with my parents, and I was mowing lawns. And all I knew is that I had to figure something out. So I went to the library. I got Tony Robbins tapes. And I just got interested in, like, his material, but also, like... how he was saying it like there was something infectious about his tonality delivery too it was like what is what is that thing and I got into it more and more and I started to learn about marketing and copywriting and just really fell in love with that and um I was driving downstate to see my girlfriend at the time and a guy that I had known who had an information product business who sold binders of information for a lot of money. He'd sell a thousand pieces of paper for a thousand dollars. He called me one day. He's like, hey, I've got a money-making opportunity for you. Do you want to run ads for me? And I said, yes. And it was my first real paid gig, fully remote. And I just ran his ad. So he trained me up. I studied under a copywriter that he had on staff. And I worked with him for a couple of years and then started adding on additional clients. And then I met a marketing agency owner at a bar on a date that was going south. I just like wasn't working out. So I went to the bar and it was like a five dollar pitcher of PBR. So I got that and I bumped into, you know, Mike, Michelle. I bumped into Mike at the eight ball in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And we just kind of hit it off and. I was going to Burning Man and so was he. And so we connected there and he made me an offer to come join his agency for a while. And I was there for a number of years. And while I was at the agency, I got to cut my teeth working inside of big companies like Tony Robbins. I actually worked inside of his CRM system called Salesforce. I helped rethink the marketing strategy of it. So how they were doing marketing, how the data was piping. And it was a lot of fun. So I did that. I helped with the Jordan Belfort's Wolf of Wall Street movie launch. And because he's a felon, he's not allowed to make money on the screenplay. You can't sell your story as a felon and make money. So he kind of hijacked his movie to sell his information course on how to be a salesperson. So I got to support that, which was a very interesting... He's an interesting character. And that was just an interesting opportunity. And then working in all sorts of other projects from small mom and pop businesses to large... fifty million dollar year like you know online based businesses and everyone in between so uh that's how I got into marketing initially yeah just kind of it found you almost like it's what I say about my own career sometimes I think you touched on a couple of things that I know give a hint to our listeners about your technical expertise. Before we get into that, I want to kind of back up to a broader thing and ask just for those dealers who are listening and when we describe you as a CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, so you would be in a C-suite, a larger company that had multiple executives, you would have marketing responsibility. Yeah. And when I look at that, I first have to ask you, what is your definition of marketing? Besides just advertising, what does a chief marketing officer find themselves doing? Yeah, good question. So I think one quick way to describe the chief marketing officer role is that it's the one throat that the CEO can choke for all things marketing. If you want one person who's responsible for all of marketing, it's the CMO. And the CMO rolls down that responsibility to individuals for individual parts, campaigns, build outs, ads, whatever. So what is the difference between marketing and sales? I really like the quote. It's by kind of an unknown guy named John E. Kennedy. And he says that marketing is salesmanship multiplied. So if I went door to door and knocked on doors to sell a vacuum, that's sales. But if I took that same pitch and the same objections that I would get from all the doors that I would knock in a neighborhood, and I just wrote that in such a way that I could disarm all of those objections, and I put that in an ad in the newspaper, I'm now doing the sales work of a salesperson, but I'm multiplying my efforts. And you have less time to connect with the consumer. If I'm standing at the door, door to door, I have a little chat. Right. So you have limited and it's even more limited day than it was ten years ago. Right. The scroll moves so fast. Right. So that's an interesting thing. So we talked about Michelle. I asked him, I said, you know, we're headed into Super Bowl weekend. Obviously, people will throw huge dollar amounts at the Super Bowl, which will be some of the largest audiences on television of the year. I just wonder what you might tell our used car dealers. When we watch those ads, what lens do you see them through? What do you think a small used car dealer could learn from watching Sunday Super Bowl ads? that some businesses are so profitable that they can waste ad money at the Super Bowl and feel cool on the golf course when they talk to their other CEO buddies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I think it is. I think the only ad that sticks in my mind is one that's worth emulating is when Kanye West did his shoe drop. It was a crappy ad with a cell phone, and he just blew out... I forget the numbers, but he spent, let's say, four million dollars to run the ad, and he made twenty million dollars with the ad. And it was clear and direct, and it was just like... It was a pattern interrupt... It wasn't high production value. It wasn't with anyone famous besides himself. But he's also the business owner. So I'm never the kind of person who wants big glitz and glam. I just want direct. If I said to you, Jim, I pulled my back. I pulled my back a couple days ago. Sucks. Sorry. Yeah. Just one of those things that happened. And if someone had this big, beautiful ad with Chuck Norris about... I don't need that. I need someone very specific talking to me that says, did you pull your back? Have you tried these different things and nothing's working? We're a... What do you call the person that would help you? Like a chiropractor. Sure. At our chiropractic clinic, we help people just like you. And here's what we've done. And come in now and we'll do a free assessment for you. And I'll tell you, seventy five percent of our patients that come in after one adjustment, like, you know, like skip out of the office. Like they feel so good. Like that kind of direct. So valuable. A better example. I love this one. I have a financial analyst on my team. He is Indian and he's a Jane. So Jane is one of the major world religions. Oh, okay. Yep. And his wife now, when he was engaged, he's from North India. She's from South India. He's a Jane and she's a Hindu. Okay. So culturally different food is different, right? Like everything about a North Indian and a South Indian is different. And then two different religions. And the joke with him was what's the one thing he would buy? Like, what's the one thing he would drop everything and pay for? He would pay for the North Indian Jane's Guide to having a wedding and marrying a South Indian Hindu where the families had a great time and it built lasting memories for everyone. How much money would he spend for that thing? All of his money he would spend on it. His biggest pain point. His biggest pain point. It's not some funky name. I don't have to twist it into some perfect name thing. Although that's fun. If I'm making a protein shake, I want to name it Muscle Milk. Yeah. What's a better name than muscle milk, right? Yeah. There is none. Like Quest Protein, that's not it. But muscle milk is like the best name ever. So if I can do that, I'll do it. But I'm fine with just naming things very on the nose. Yeah. It's exactly what it is. Good. I like that too. Yeah. So when I see ads, Jim, that say things like no money down, no background check, no credit check, like those kinds of things that are really clear to people, that just ticks off boxes of objections in their head and overcomes them kind of automatically. Good. And that's what you got to do with marketing. It's not glitz. It's not glam. It's not high production value. It's just direct, clear offers. Yeah. So what about the storytelling emotion side of this? Again, recognizing that we have very limited time. If we're going to stop somebody in their scroll, then how do we do that? Because as I'm thinking about Super Bowl commercials, some of the ones that last in my mind are some of the ones that were more emotional around Clydesdales at Budweiser. And like you say, they're just growing huge. They got the huge production value and big budget, right? That's a different thing. But I still love that it sticks because of the emotional element. So is there something that you can help us know about? Yeah. So the motion, the thing that we want to do, the best way I've ever heard it described was sell the toes in the water, butt in the sand. Don't sell the packing your bags and flying. Oh, yeah. Okay. Right. Sell the outcome. Yeah. So I remember there was a Dodge Caravan commercial and it was like, get the Dodge Caravan now with a DVD player. Yeah. DVD player. What does that mean? It means nothing. Yeah. Yeah. How about the later commercials that came out, which was get the Dodge Caravan and like the kids are in the back with headphones on having a great time. That tells an emotional story of how the kids are entertained and then the parents are like getting their moments of peace. Right. In an otherwise like loud day. Sure. Sell the benefit. Don't sell the feature. Yeah. Good. And and it also elicits and the parents in that case are the buyer. They're the ones who are going to make the buying decision. So, you know, it's it's kind of strikes a chord with them. So, yeah, I love it. That's good. So, Michelle, you must have questions of Casey. Well, I appreciated that with the, you know, the sell the benefit because. We sometimes get really caught up in our industry of selling, here's this car, it's got this many miles, this is the price. There's a mileage probably barrier Right. Like there's a mental block. Like if it's under a hundred thousand, if it's under two hundred thousand, if it's under three hundred thousand, it probably matters. But like, I don't care if it's eight, eighty seven thousand versus ninety five thousand. There's probably no difference in that. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's it's we get we tend to get really caught up in. all of the straight line things about what we have to offer and you know jim and I we speak in in terms of straight lines and squiggly lines um straight lines are like these this is your this is your interest rate this is and and the squiggly lines is it's the intangibles it's the way you feel it's the it's the experience it's it's all of the things you can't put on a balance sheet And so I love this when you say you sell the experience. And it's not the experience of buying the car. It's the experience of what the car can bring you. You ultimately sell that first. And then the thing that differentiates you is your process. I don't ever want to compete on price because I want to be the most expensive person. That's my preference. I think a lot of people try to drive to the bottom and then it's a tough place to live. I'd rather be at the top and then be able to do whatever I want. When I go to the esthetician for Botox, I like to go to the one where I get the free San Pellegrino. Yeah. And I could go to a cheaper one and not even get a cup of water. But I like the San Pellegrino. There's something nice about that. It's a better experience. The people at the front desk are calmer. They're not aggressive to extract money from me because they have their profits baked in. They're not begging for the upsell. So I like premium prices, even in a market where generally prices need to be low. Finding a way to offer premium prices so that you can offer premium service. I'll say I drive a Kia Telluride. We love it. It's a great car. I mean, it's perfect for a family. I've got two kids. The dealership is the worst experience in the world. Oh, boy. See? Because it's the dealership of Kia of old. Okay. And the new rebadge, right? What was it? What was it? I think the quality of Kia's have gone up for certain models, at least. But the dealership is awful. And it's just like, it's really hard to stay with it. We want to get a second car. Yeah. I want a Kia because I like the car. I think it's a good value. I think it's smart. It's got everything I need. But I don't want to go to the dealership ever again. That's pretty bad when you'll go to some length to work around your local dealership, right? Absolutely. I've wasted full days waiting for their technicians to not do stuff. You know, it's awful. So like the experience of buying when you're at the Kia dealership the first time around, what was it about that that were like the major things that you were like, uh-uh, I just hated this? I can almost tell the story with that. I mean, I can tell you a couple things. So we live in Philly. So we bought it during the prime of COVID. And you know how everyone is marking up cars. Like, ten thousand dollars over sticker was what was happening in the city. So we found someone on the internet in the Pittsburgh area. It was cheaper, Michelle, for me to fly and buy the car in Pittsburgh and drive it home than it was for me to buy it locally. Like, nine thousand dollars. Wow. So ultimately, that's what I did. And I talked to the guy. We ordered it. It took a few months to get it in. He's like, we'll sell it to you at MSRP. And I go there, Michelle. And he just, the guy, like I'm done. Like it's a done deal. We talked through all the stuff beforehand. But he's got to take me through the whole ringer of like waiting. I flew in. They picked me up. I drove for like forty five minutes to get to the place, you know, in their car, which was nice. I tipped the guy. No food around. It's like eleven o'clock. I think I'm in and out in an hour. It takes me five hours to buy the car because I got to wait for the finance guy and they're just like playing the whole game and they're eating donuts in my face. You know, it's just like it's awful. The guy's like going to order pizza. He doesn't order it. I have to order it. You know, it's just like it was awful. They didn't take care of me at all. The car had... Still some of the plastic that was covering the metal parts that you take off when you get the car and kind of get it prepped for the consumer. There's a stain on the roof when the technician touched something. It's like that kind of stuff. It's like no pride in their work. But I drove the car away and I got on the highway and I realized that the roof racks were reversed. So it was making like a thumping sound. So I had to get out and get the Allen wrenches and flip everything. It's like that kind of lack of detail. But still, I like the car. It's still a very good car. and then I went to a dealership again to look at the van as we think about upgrading to like the carnival and I'm thinking okay maybe I had a bad experience with one guy and I go and we're like hey this is the carnival like we're very serious like kind of like ready to put the money down to order the version that we want and the color that we want and my wife's in the car checking out and I go talk to the lady inside and we're just chit chatting and this dude comes over and sits next to us and he goes Casey what's it going to take for me to get you to put a deposit down right now Like you blew it, dude. You blew everything. We're having this great conversation. I was ready to do it. And now you just like try to force me. Yeah. You know, like I'm making an honest decision and I'm happy to work with you guys. And I just turned to the woman. I said, he blew the deal for you. I'm leaving. Yeah. You know, it's just like the sense of like yucky pressure. I'm not being treated with respect. Sure. So we just haven't bought a car. And that was, I don't know, eighteen months ago. We just haven't had the need for it. They blew the sale because of a lack of appreciating the customer. You know, that's an interesting thing that you, you know, we're obviously talking about a new car experience, but one of the things that we found in this industry prior to COVID that many of our customers had no choice. You could do that. You could, you know, it's like, it was, it was like, they're here because they have no other options kind of thing. Since COVID that what, What I've observed, and we talked to a couple of different dealers about that, is that the mentality of the customer has changed. They recognize that they have the right to be treated like a human and they have the right to have a good experience. in the process and that, and that, um, our, our consumer, our customers, the dealers can customers are, are shopping more than they ever did before. There's, there's just this, it's just because they land on the lot does not mean you have a sale anymore. So, um, one thing it's that COVID was just like such a pivotal time for people, um, experiencing something that they had not experienced before in our, in our, um, the sub sub prime and gone are the days where it's that pressure, pressure, pressure. It's like you, it's, it's about the experience and the relationship and the relationship. So I can buy a second car and third car from them. Exactly. Yeah. I went, um, I was at the mall a couple months ago and, uh, Porsche has a spot at the mall. And I'm like every other guy, right? I want a nine-eleven. And when would I buy a nine-eleven? I don't really need one, right? It's like pretty silly to get one because we've got kids that are in car seats and wanna have another kid. But I'm gonna play the game. I actually want one. And I could see myself in the next, maybe, I don't know, nine, twelve months buying one. So I went to the Porsche dealer and I was like, hey, tell me about them. I kind of know enough about it, but I'm not a big car nut. It's just like kind of a sweet looking car. super nice guy answered every question I had very like gentle like wasn't pushing anything he's like do you want me to put your name down so he can call you you know if we get any models and they go kind of quickly just so you know I was like yeah that makes sense sure go ahead and I got a call back the next day a guy like welcoming me and saying like hey I hear that you're down for this you know you want it in green I think a Porsche should be green because they look like frogs and I don't need to buy a new one I don't need a new car, right? I'm happy to take that depreciation on a used car. And just like walking through that process, I got a message from them recently, like last week. And the guy's like, hey, it's this guy from Contra Haken Porsche. And we just had a black nine eleven come in. I know it's not the color you're looking for, but at least you want to come in and give it a spin. Let me know. No pressure, all the help in the world for a very expensive car. But really, is it really that much more expensive? You know, at the end of the day. So it's just a way better experience. And these guys don't feel a sense of pressure because they know that like they're offering something of value. Yeah, that's good. And I think one thing that makes a little different in our line of work with the used car dealers that we serve, for the most part, they're not negotiable on price. So that just means, you know, they'd laugh me out of there, Jim. Right. If I was like, can you guys cut ten percent off? Yeah. Yeah. Go across the street to Toyota. Yeah, well, in this poor credit sector, if all three of us were buy here, pay here dealers, like I could run ads that say, I have cars and we provide, you know, easy financing. But the two of you could both say the same thing in the same market. Like, I think what we're trying to help dealers understand is what's a separator? Like what you touched on is the relationship piece, the service side of it, the experience side, right? We can definitely win on experience. And then back to the toes in the sand thing. And I know, Michelle, we want to get to the technology side. But the toes in the sand thing, I got to tell Michelle, I used to work with a guy named Billy. And this is when I was a salesperson on a sales floor in Oklahoma City years ago. And he was the most talented salesperson I've ever worked with in any capacity. He was a young guy, just a charming guy. And when he would do his test drives, we eventually learned that what he was doing is he would go out to an abandoned kind of strip mall that had a glass front, and he would pull out to change. The salesperson would drive out, then the customer would get in. And as they would get out, he would look at the glass and tell the customer, doesn't that car look amazing? Don't you look amazing in that car? That's great. That's good. And so it's really, it's, you know, forget the horsepower, forget all the, you know, all the. You look good. How does that feel? Right. Feel amazing. You know, that's great. Yeah. Just one other differentiator that I think is useful here. Claude Hopkins, incredible marketer from the early nineteen hundreds. He was asked to support a beer company that was relatively unknown called Schlitz beer. And he was like, I don't really want to do it. And kind of begrudgingly took on the work from a buddy of his. And he had to find a way to advertise Schlitz. And he realized that Schlitz was no different than any other beer. When you think of Schlitz, does it taste any different than Budweiser? It's like the same thing, right? Yeah. What did he do to make it to go from obscurity to the number one? And it held number one for, I think, decades. He just described the process. Okay. That's it. We take the water and we filter it this many times. And we take the barley from these farms and we do this thing with it. We make a mash like this. And this is the yeast that we use. And it's a hundred-year-old yeast mother recipe that we've had from, you know, we brought it from Germany or whatever the thing was. He just described it. Every other beer company was like, we do the same thing. Yeah. We even have the same yeast. We both have the same river. We have the same farmers. Our beer is the same. But because he described it in a way that was so clear, that was a differentiator. So this belief that you have to have like Nona's secret tomato sauce, like the secret ingredient in the tomato sauce. You don't have to have that. You just have to describe what you're doing in a way that's clear to the person. Yeah. So just like describe the process by which you help someone get a car. Sure. And be really honest about it and disqualify people that you know are a bad fit so they don't come knocking and waste your time. Yeah. And like that's a lot of it. Most people just like try to sell too simple and just like lay out the steps. Yeah. Step one, two, three, four. And then you guys just hold them to those steps. And it's that easy. Yeah. Yeah. And then if I can add that I do that with some love and respect, you know, for the family operation and you'll talk to me or my wife or my sister in law. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's one of the things that we've been with some of our clients as we've walked them through branding and marketing. it's like, let them get to know you. I mean, get to know you and your story and why you're doing what you're doing and the people that you work with and all of that, because it really humanizes and makes you much more known, liked, and trusted in your community. The line that I like on this, Michelle, is the more personal it is, the more universal it is. Oh, good. So when I said something about shopping for a van because I've got these kids and stuff, someone listening might be saying, well, I don't have kids, but my daughter's having kids. So they're relating to the story through other people, but they're still relating in a deeper way than me just saying I was looking at buying a car. Yeah. Now, before we get into tech, I want to ask him a question that we, I didn't prepare you for this, but I know you'll know the answer. If you were to step into the CMO role with a larger buy here, pay here dealership, that's got, you know, pretty good volume. What would you be looking for in terms of a closing percentage of all leads coming in from all sources? Like, you know, we've got Facebook leads coming in. This has been a topic on our podcast in the past. We see dealers kind of struggling with that. But just just without any understanding of the segment, like what would your best guess? If you if you had good quality marketing. and you were all of those kind of things, what would you consider that? Yeah, so I would just differentiate real quick. So I've got leads. And leads are just mostly people, right? Sometimes they're robots. But like a lead is an email address or a phone number or something. And then I've got a marketing qualified lead. Okay. Yep. So I differentiate what I call an MQL. Well, it's known as an MQL, uh, as in like, they have the money, they have the need, they're close enough to drive to the location. Like there's some kind of qualifier that says that they're a good fit. Good. If I got someone who wants to buy a car, but they're So you have your MQLs. And if you want to even take that one step further, you grade your MQLs. I've got bronze, silver, and gold. A gold MQL is I need a car this week and I've got this amount to put down and this is my credit score. Like you could define that maybe as a gold. So that's the first thing is to know not just leads, how many leads am I getting, but how many MQLs and how many golds, bronzes and silvers. And then the next step is I want to have a conversation with them, with a human and that human then further qualifies them and we call them a sales qualified lead. Okay. Sometimes people fill out a form and they lie or they don't fill out the form correctly or whatever. So I want to just double check it with a person. And then the person, you know, the salesperson has always been on the form because they're just going to extract better information about need. And you know, what would happen if your wife's car broke down and then you guys didn't have any car, you know, like that kind of conversation. So that's an SQL of the people that are qualified to buy. The next number I want is offers made. Okay. So how many offers were even made? Because I don't sell things to people that I don't know if they can buy it or not. I'm not saying, hey, Jim, I got this thing for sale. Do you want it? I say, Jim, tell me about you. Tell me about what you need. What are you looking for? Why is that important? I understand you. And then I'll present an offer. I want fifty percent of offers to close. OK, but I want to be stingy on offers. Yeah. So. Let me say that a different way, that last part, not stingy. I don't want to offer to people that can't say yes. So in my company, my salespeople, they report on offers made and closes. So if we had eight offers made and two closes, man, that kind of sucks. But on Friday last week, we had four offers made, three closes, and one deposit. It's amazing. So that's what I'm looking for. And that's not how many calls they had because they were on calls with people and they were like, this person's a joker. They don't have the money. They're not the right person. Let me lay out another thing for you. Ten to twenty percent of deals are laid out. I like that language. They're laid out. They're easy peasy. The person's like money in hand, ready to go. You guys got the car. Can I have it, please? That's a lay down. That was me with that Kia Carnival. I was a lay down and they blew it. So of the remainder, we'd say like thirty five percent will never close. No way, no how, never going to close. And then the other thirty five percent or forty percent you got to work for. That's when you got to be the salesperson. That's when you got to be crafty and creative with financing options and helping them out and maybe delaying them getting the car because you don't have the right one in. But you're going to go do some in-network trading of the car to get the one in the right color for them or whatever the thing is. Yeah. So when you start thinking about that, I'm never going to hold my salespeople to a standard of closing people that aren't closeable. And I need to respect that they're not going to juice those numbers and say, you just drove me a bunch of bad leads. Yeah. Yeah. You want to look at the aggregate of how your salespeople generally do. Yeah. So if one person does poor than all the rest, it's probably a them problem and not a lead quality problem. Which follow up to that. Yeah. We're going to have to have Casey come back and talk about tech, but I will ask one quick question before you go. Yeah, no, of course. I think when I hear you talk about that, it begs the question about agencies, because, you know, we what we hear is dealers saying, well, we paid an agency, but we got a and we got a lot of leads. But, you know, we only closed two percent of all leads. Right. So so they don't have nearly the the qualification requirements. funnel or track that you described sure but so they're generally looking at um you know all leads and so when we see one and a half two percent closing I feel like in our line of work that that's low because we just we're in a business where you know the customer who shops us pretty well knows we're we're in the business of writing financing for folks with credit trouble so you know, when they click that link, I would expect a higher closing rate than that. So I just wondered if just, is there, it might be flighty though. I mean, subprime is subprime, you know, like these people just like might not be able to show up to the appointment. There's a, there's a bunch of potential problems. Also the way that the traffic's generated. So if we just talked about different traffic that we can get for ads, the number one best traffic for like pretty much every business is Google search. If I only had one place that I could advertise for the rest of my life, it's Google search. That's someone on google.com searching for a twenty twenty three Kia Telluride. I want that search query. I want to show number one for that. If I pay for the ad for that, it's expensive, but the person has a lot of intent. Right. It's not like they're just cruising around on Facebook looking at reels from their ex-girlfriend. They're actually shopping for the car. That is a very, very, very different thing than we're hearing within our industry. You hear from a lot of the marketing, it's like Facebook is where it's at. Facebook's great for scale. Facebook to me is like a number two. I like Facebook because... Think about Facebook, though. You have no intent on Facebook. We can surmise intent based on things that you've done with big tech, so we can know that you're the kind of person who isn't shopping for a car. Recently, I was looking at... I don't even know. You know how your algorithm on Facebook changes, right? It changes because you looked at one thing. I looked at a bike for my son. And then all I started seeing was ads for all the different types of bikes. Facebook is just optimizing because they know I have an intent and they're just saying, all right, well, we're going to give you every possible permutation of an ad that someone's running to see if one of them gets you to buy. Yeah. Like they're just optimizing for the purchase. So I like Facebook absolutely as a number two, but Google's number one. Facebook is number two, but know that the intent is lower and therefore you need more leads to get the same amount of sales. Gotcha. Which is why you were saying, I know I'm going to pay a higher price for Google, but it's going to be a much more qualified, you know, it's like someone who has real intent to buy a car. And they might have the money and they might not. That's a secondary kind of consideration. And that adage, Michelle, where people talk about the shotgun approach versus a rifle approach, like you're zeroing in on somebody who's got an active current intent to purchase, right? Exactly. So, you know, and when someone's doing a Google query, there's an awful lot involved in that. That's not about ads, but it's about making sure that you're positioned in a place where you come up. quickly as a place to go to. So it's like search engine optimization, which is the most important marketing campaign that sucks to run because it takes a year or two of effort to be in a great position. You can spend money, a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks a month to get your SEO position up, but it might take you twelve or twenty four months to get to the number one position. Yeah. And Google, Michelle, I don't know if Google knows how to sell to me. Like my searches are things like, what's the lifespan of a cricket? You know, I don't know if they know. What are you looking to buy a cricket? Yes, exactly. So Casey, I feel like we're kind of out of time to go into tech, but there were some really fun things that we talked about when we kind of got together and I had the opportunity to introduce Casey and Jim. And so I really want to have you back because- Can I just share just like real quick, a couple of quick things in tech that I think are exciting. Okay, so I think AI augmentation of humans is important right now. AI is not replacing stuff, but if we think of it augmenting people. So if you're writing, if you have a salesperson who's good at sales, I don't know what it is, but like the best salespeople tend to like not be able to write their own name with a pencil. I've seen that. Right. So like using AI to write those follow up emails, text messages, absolutely left and right. You should be doing that. Don't rely on people to do that. bringing in a marketing technician who you pay twenty five to thirty five dollars an hour to who manages that kind of connective tissue between the salespeople and follow up and all that can keep the salespeople selling and then all the follow up happening through marketing. The quote I love on that is Frank Sinatra never moved his own pianos. So why would your best salesperson do follow-up? They can't spell. So you're going to ask somebody on a cell phone and type? No. Have automation that handles that and have a marketing technician that's in-house or overseas if you want to drop the cost even more, do that. I like ChatGPT just for a majority of stuff. ChatGPT just came out with two big things. Jan. thirty-one, twenty-twenty-five, so five days ago, they came out with ChatGPT Omni three. It's their new reasoning model. Crazy. So that's interesting. They have different models like statistical models and reasoning models. A statistical model says the next sentence or sorry, the next word I'm going to give you statistically makes sense. Statistics are bad for math because it's like, what's the next number in the sequence? Well, statistically, my best guess is this. It's like, don't guess in math. I need you to be able to reason. So ChachiPT just came out with a reasoning model. So know that these different models exist. You just click them from a dropdown. And if you want to say like, okay, what's our current sale rate of cars and what's our current profit and what happens if we add this and multiply this and get this many more salespeople and all these different things, you can start modeling that in Chad GPT Omni three, but not in four Omni. Like they're different models and they're supposed to be doing different things. Also like two weeks ago, which feels like old news, Chad GPT released Operator, which is only available on their two hundred dollar a month plan. But the idea is important. Operator is a computer use operator. So it is if you have a computer in your office that an AI operates and they operate the keyboard and mouse. So you can have it do stuff like open up your CRM, click something, complete tasks, send emails, all that kind of stuff. And it thinks critically at each step along the way. So it's not a macro that you program. It's a AI that you prompt to do this stuff. And my commitment is that by the end of this year, there's going to be AI agents in the businesses that are winning. These are like, instead of hiring people, I'm going to hire an AI agent. And that's going to be moving the mouse and typing on the keyboard for me. Sure. And they won't call in sick. They won't call in sick. They're going to work twenty four hours a day. You can boot up four of them at the same time, Jim. It's going to be nuts. They're going to be like a little slow because they like have to stop and think and go and think. Right. They're not going to be really polished. So you just boot up ten of them. Yeah. And then you have one human that manages all ten of them just to make sure that they're on track or if the AI has questions. Listen, the AI could text you, Jim. It could send you a text message if it had access to a soft phone on the computer. Right. And say, like, hey, I'm stuck here. What should I do? And you're like, do this thing. And then it goes and does it and gets back to work. Yeah, cool. That's where we're going. Yeah, for sure. Well, I would love to, when we have you come back, let's dive into that and about how someone with... with possibly limited funds and maybe not being super techie, you know, what are the steps that can help them really leverage that? Because, because the thing that I get from, from what we talked about before and a little bit here is that you don't have to have an agency to do this. It doesn't, it's, you just need to have a curiosity. You have to know what kind of problems can get solved. I know that I have a post hole digger and it's really good at digging post holes, but it's really bad at shoveling the driveway. Yeah. So you just got to know what these tools can do. And then you just start like thinking, where can it be applied? But it's very cutting edge right now. Yeah. Well, and it is AI is like the, it's you, you hear all the time. It's like, if, if you're, if you're looking for something new to add to your, uh, your tool belt for your resume or whatever, learn how to do this. And that can get you, there's, there's an awful lot of, uh, opportunity around this because there's so many people that don't understand it that just a basic understanding can just open up the whole world to you. I agree with your suggestion about that the businesses that are going to be more successful are going to be those who are really tapping into efficiencies. They are really going to be optimizing through this artificial intelligence. So, yeah, it's exciting to see where it's going. Google just announced twenty five thousand employees that are doing a buyout, an early buyout for. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because they don't want to just can them overnight. But they're effectively canning twenty five thousand people. They're just doing it slowly. So it doesn't make them look bad. It's a PR move more than anything. And their commitment is to move more towards AI for efficiency. Uh huh. Right. Right. So, yeah, we're approaching this thing, one person, one billion. One P, one B. One person is going to create a one billion dollar a year company. And they're going to do it with AI agents. That's coming. I won't be the guy that does it. That's not my intellect. But someone's going to come up with it. And it's exciting. And we all need to be figuring out how to just not lose. Mm-hmm. I don't think I have to be the one P one B guy. I just got to be the guy that doesn't go out of business. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for joining. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We may, I will, I'll get with you about the next time we can have you come and, and I've, I've got a couple of other ideas potentially of diving deeper into some of this potentially with our V eight groups. So, yeah. All right. I'm going to put you backstage if you want to hold on for just a minute so we can say a proper goodbye after we've closed out the podcast. Great. Thanks. See you. Thanks. All right. Good conversation. Yeah, for sure. Folks can tune in Wednesday to find out if it's the real Jim or is an artificial version of Jim. And I'm actually out playing golf. Right. Well, you know, and I keep seeing like different technology is is just growing leaps and bounds. And I know in the conversation we had before with Casey, he said. What used to be an annual release is now happening monthly and sometimes weekly. And it's just like the the playing field, the map is changing and it's changing for the better every day. So, you know, we just opportunities, more and more opportunities to learn and get there. Hey, everybody. Friday. Don't forget. That's when we're going to talk about what repos are really costing us. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Again, thanks so much for joining. We will be back on Friday. I hope you guys have a great rest of your week and we will see you on the other side. And I realized I didn't get. our closing pile up. So I'm going to do that right now and get it on the stage. All right, everybody. Have a great day.
