DePaula Chevrolet Success Story - Car

Success Story
“
100%
NET PROFIT
SINCE 2012
(Sales Department)
Success Story
IN THE LAST
2 YEARS
We sell over 40 cars a month to customers
who
initially searched Google for a competitive brand.
(Chevy’s National Ranking)
- Paul Lynch, General Manager | DePaula Chevy
UP
UP
70% 90
UP
UNIQUE VISITORS
NATIONAL RANKING
100%
17,000/mo to website
Top 2% in America
2x Growth in Sales
SPOTS
NET PROFIT
IN A NUTSHELL
DePaula Chevrolet
Bold Moves! How DePaula Chevrolet jumped 90
spots to join America’s top 2%
Bold Moves! How DePaula Chevrolet jumped 90
spots to join America’s top 2%
Have a conversation with Paul Lynch,
GSM at DePaula Chevrolet in Albany,
NY and it will take you exactly 2
seconds to see why he has been able to
lead his organization into the nation’s
top 2 percent for new car sales. This
is a man with passion, focus and a
relentless thirst for understanding
of what separates America’s top
performers from the rest of the pack.
90 SPOTS
DePaula Chevrolet
“
Success Story
Under Lynch’s leadership, DePaula Chevrolet
has won the prestigious “Dealer of the Year”
award four consecutive times and has climbed
over 90 spots in Chevrolet’s national rankings in
just two years. Over that same period, DePaula
Chevrolet also became the number one CPO
dealership in the Northeast and increased net
profits by 100 percent in the sales department.
This is an impressive accomplishment, given
that there are 15 other Chevrolet stores within
50 miles of DePaula.
IMITATE AND INNOVATE
“I went to school on all the dealerships I thought
were really doing it right,” says Lynch, “I started out
by researching the nation’s top 10 Chevrolet stores
and dissected everything. I set up computers with
their zip codes and performed searches. I mystery
shopped them. I interviewed them - you name it,
I did it.”
Å CONTINUED INSIDE
• Imitate and Innovate: Studied the most successful dealerships in the country and recreated their processes
and marketing strategies to focus on targeted, measurable media.
Paul Lynch,GSM
DePaula Chevy
• Make Mistakes Visible: Implemented a call monitoring system that monitors 100 percent of all calls
to identify when sales opportunities are missed or mishandled and setup real-time alerts so that the
dealership can reconnect with customers before they defect to their competition. This allowed DePaula to
increase sales without increasing advertising.
• Push Others Off Page One: Implemented a targeted video marketing strategy designed to increase page-one
real estate for DePaula Chevrolet and push their competitors to page 2 of the search engines for the most
popular search phrases being used in their market.
• Use Competitors To Your Advantage: Launched targeted video marketing campaigns designed to interrupt
the shopping process for consumers who are searching for competitive makes and models.
• Turn Entertainment Into Engagement: Placed clickable, direct response videos in front of news stories,
highlight reels, entertainment videos and other video content on popular lifestyle sites.
Bold Moves!
How DePaula Chevrolet jumped
90 spots to join America’s top 2%
• Win the Appointment: Incorporated video content into their website and communications so that
customers get high-quality answers to their questions and sales persons get higher appointment rates
and show rates.
Å READ FULL STORY
See full story on pages 42-33
LEARN MORE Æ
Success Story
See full story on
pages 42-33
IN A NUTSHELL
Bold Moves!
How DePaula Chevrolet jumped
90 spots to join America’s top 2%
• Imitate and Innovate: Studied the most successful dealerships in the
country and recreated their processes and marketing strategies to focus on
targeted, measurable media.
• Make Mistakes Visible: Implemented a call monitoring system that monitors
100 percent of all calls to identify when sales opportunities are missed
or mishandled and setup real-time alerts so that the dealership can
reconnect with customers before they defect to their competition. This
allowed DePaula to increase sales without increasing advertising.
Success Story
“During this process, I found that many
of the top Chevy stores had contributing
factors that I could not duplicate here
in Albany, like having thousands of GM
factory workers living 10 miles from
my dealership. So, I shifted my focus
to the top import dealers. The top guys
like Paragon Honda in New York and
Rick Case Honda in rural Florida were
all very successful even though their
markets were all very different. They had
strategy-driven competitive advantages,
not just geographic advantages, so I
positioned our store to imitate a lot of
what they are doing.”
MAKE MISTAKES VISIBLE
One of the first things DePaula Chevrolet
did was to start monitoring 100 percent
of their phone calls so they could identify
where every lead source was succeeding
or breaking down. This allowed them to
adjust their internal processes and put
safeguards in place to plug profit leaks.
“I immediately understood why so many
of the dealerships I studied use this
methodology [of monitoring 100 percent
of calls versus samples],” Lynch says
enthusiastically, “It was amazing what we
didn’t know.”
“This is very common,” says Chip King,
managing partner of CallRevu.com, the
company that DePaula uses to manage
their phone calls and who monitors over
two million dealership calls every year. “53
• Push Others Off Page One: Implemented a targeted video marketing
strategy designed to increase page-one real estate for DePaula Chevrolet
and push their competitors to page 2 of the search engines for the most
popular search phrases being used in their market.
• Use Competitors To Your Advantage: Launched targeted video marketing
campaigns designed to interrupt the shopping process for consumers who
are searching for competitive makes and models.
• Turn Entertainment Into Engagement: Placed clickable, direct response
videos in front of news stories, highlight reels, entertainment videos and
other video content on popular lifestyle sites.
• Win the Appointment: Incorporated video content into their website and
communications so that customers get high-quality answers to their
questions and sales persons get higher appointment rates and show rates.
11
SEE FULL STORY
DePaula Chevrolet
Ä CONTINUED FROM THE COVER
Notes: Caller wants to speak with the Sales
Manager. Dennis’s VM answers. Caller hangs
up without leaving a message. Call ends.
percent of customers who call a dealership
never reach a live person. Of the 47 percent
of sales calls that connect with a live agent,
only 50 percent produce usable contact
information and only 11 percent get entered
into the dealer’s CRM,” he says.
To address these problems, DePaula
Chevrolet put processes in place to
reconnect with customers in real time,
when calls are missed or mishandled and
reorganized their management process so
that managers are personally responsible
for establishing the dealership’s first
interaction with new customers. As part
of this process, the dealership is sent
“actionable” text alerts every time
a sales opportunity has been missed or
mishandled. This allows his sales teams
to take immediate action from any cell
phone without having to manage app
downloads or updates. New customers,
who contact the dealership via email are
personally handled by sales managers
before being introduced to a sales
person. In both cases, DePaula Chevrolet
makes sure that their most capable team
members are handling the dealership’s
most important interactions.
PUSH RIVALS OFF OF PAGE ONE
“Regardless of where we spend our
marketing dollars the majority of our
opportunities were coming from digital
sources”, Lynch says. “This was a big
eye opener for us. We adjusted our ad
budget and set out to dominate the search
engines. We were confident in our team
and in our processes so we knew that
if we could own the search engines, we
could own our market.”
According to Google, consumers are 55
times more likely to click on a video listing
versus a text listing so search engines like
Google, Yahoo and Bing prioritize video
content over text content on search results
pages. To maximize this preferential
treatment, DePaula Chevrolet put together
a targeted video marketing strategy
designed to engage in-market shoppers
during every phase of the shopping
process – in-market and actively shopping,
in-market and not actively shopping, and
In-market and engaging with dealerships.
To engage in-market shoppers when they
are actively using search engines, Lynch
uses video search engine optimization to
increase page-one listings and push his
competitors to page 2. Because search
engines are constantly changing their
rules, they use a system that monitors
the most popular search phrases being
used every month for the vehicles they sell
and service. These search terms are then
used to create OEM compliant, dealership
specific videos that are optimized to
appear on page one and distributed to all
of the major search engines.
side-by-side comparisons that get top
placement for popular search phrases used
by Ford and GM shoppers. As a result of
this, DePaula Chevy’s conquest trade-in’s
increased 24 percent for Ford, 25 percent
for GMC, and 46 percent for Dodge year
over year.
“We knew that if we
could own the search
engines, we could
own our market!”
TURN ENTERTAINMENT INTO
ENGAGEMENT
The second part of DePaula’s video
marketing strategy is designed to engage
customers who are in-market but not
actively shopping for a car. To increase
their influence with consumers when
they are doing non-automotive activities,
DePaula Chevy began putting clickable,
direct response videos in front of news
stories, highlight reels, entertainment
videos and other video content on popular
lifestyle sites.
- Paul Lynch
GM, DePaula Chevy
Every one of these dealer-specific videos is
uniquely created to work in unison with all
past and future video content. This creates
a cumulative impact that began producing
results very quickly and continues to
improve over time.
USE COMPETITORS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
Although consumers continue to use
the Internet for nearly 70 percent of
the car shopping process, what they
do and their choice of content continues
to evolve. According to Google, over 60
percent of the time consumers spend
online shopping for a car is now spent
comparing vehicles and dealerships. Video
content, especially editorial content that
compares one vehicle to another is very
much in demand. To take advantage of
this, Lynch and his team launched a series
of conquest campaigns designed to interrupt
the shopping process for potential customers
who are searching for competitive makes
and models. These videos have helped them
capture conquest customers by showing
“These side-by-side comparisons result in
more conquest trade-ins for dealerships
and ultimately increase their overall
market share,” says AJ LeBlanc, Managing
Partner of Car-Mercial.com, the company
that DePaula Chevrolet uses for their
online video strategy. “This is a big deal
for DePaula and Chevrolet as a whole,”
LeBlanc states.
Lynch uses a pre-roll network that has over
300 popular sports, news, automotive
and lifestyle websites and that allows him
to control their ad spend by only serving
content to those who meet the ideal
criteria for each campaign. This includes
the ability to target customers by make,
model, year, payment range, geographic
location, number of payments remaining
and many other criteria.
“Using Video SEO and pre-roll together
has been very effective. Within 60 days of
implementing this strategy, we increased
our website traffic by 7,000 unique visitors
a month. Once we recognized the impact
video content was having on our traffic,
we also started incorporating more video
content directly into our website. That’s
when things got really interesting
because the same appetite (for
video content) that led the
consumer to our site was now
keeping them engaged longer
and increasing conversion.”
WIN THE APPOINTMENT
The final part of DePaula’s three-part video
marketing strategy is designed to increase
conversion with customers who are inmarket and engaging with dealerships.
Studies show that auto shoppers consider
multiple dealerships but only visit 1.4
before making a purchase. This makes
the window of opportunity between first
contact and showroom visit extremely
important. To give his dealership a
competitive advantage, Lynch gave his
sales teams a video content library
with over 300 full-motion, dealership
specific, OEM compliant videos. These
videos answer the questions customers
commonly ask throughout the buying
process and are designed so that they are
easy to insert into social media sites, email
communications and text messages. As a
result, customers get high-quality answers
to their questions and sales persons get
higher appointment rates and show rates.
“This strategy has been a big win for us”,
says Lynch. “We are showing up on more
searches, we are getting more customers
to our website, we are getting more leads
and our sales teams are generating more
appointments. Most importantly, all of this
helping us sell more cars.”
For the rest of this story or to learn
more about the strategies used by
DePaula Chevy, email:
[email protected]
See video.
DePaula Chevrolet is certainly is on the
path to success. They have achieved a
30 percent growth rate two consecutive
years in a row and they have no intention
of stopping.
“I’m constantly looking for holes in our armor
and keeping an eye on our competition. I’m
proud of our results, but this is only
the beginning for DePaula
Chevy,” said Lynch.
ONE-TO-ONE VIDEO MARKETING
VIDEO PRE-ROLL
VIDEO SEO & CONQUEST
Success Story