There are a number of different challenges that are affecting marketing departments and staff in today’s business climate. For example, the Great Resignation has seen staff members jump ship to other businesses or industries to secure upward mobility and a bigger payoff. While dealers try to find the right candidates to fill these roles, they’re relying more on outside agencies and resources to fill the gap.
Does any of this sound familiar? Is it the right direction for our industry?
On top of this, it’s more important than ever that sales and marketing teams begin working together as a single revenue team for growth. Other industries are successfully doing it. Why can’t we?
Yes, we can continue in our old ways of having a small marketing team to create collateral, presentations, business cards and proposal templates. Alternatively, we can build a marketing team that takes ownership of our brands, websites and expenses while also working with sales to generate leads and convert them. At the same time, they can meet our customers online to build trust through content (written and video), keeping the company top of mind throughout the sales process and staying competitive.
This is really up to us, the dealers. Do we think an agency is an efficient way to craft our message and tightly integrate with our sales team with the knowledge of our customers’ needs?
When I began working for AIS almost five years ago, they didn’t have a single person in marketing. Our president, Gary Harouff, had the forethought and vision that a marketing team would be needed to listen to sales, service, help desk, finance and our customers in order to communicate information and develop the tools needed to support the growth of the organization. We’re still a relatively small dealership, and today we have a team of six (content manager, videographer, web designer and HubSpot specialist), and one of them is working at a large customer of ours as a director of marketing. This is part of our marketing-as-a-service offering. We found that by building a strong marketing team, we could help our own customers grow their business by providing marketing services or even installing a staff member on site to learn even more about their business.
Better Mousetrap
Having a director of marketing in your customers’ businesses is a smart way to go, because it means the customer is naturally more loyal to you, and you’re providing them a stronger service than they could have accomplished with just one person.
My company is at the infancy stage in offering this service, but it’s looking good to becoming a fixture in our business. We just don’t have the time to sell this to all of our customers.
Currently, our marketing and sales teams meet, and we’re teaching them how they can help us create better tools and information they can integrate into the sales process. Our goal is to provide content that shortens the sales cycle and helps them drive more business.
Many of our sales team members have more than half of their meetings online or over the phone. Marketing can help guide your team on how to approach customers digitally, implement online video meetings and then use your content for discovery in Google Search and to educate buyers, streamlining this process. We’ve established KPIs in every one of our roles so that we can get a better understanding of what we’re doing and how it affects the customer.
Maybe your dealership hasn’t reached a point where this is viable yet. But with every marketing team member you lose, you need to start small and grow your business while educating your sales team on the value marketing has and the role it plays. Just look at some of the larger and more successful dealerships in our industry. Most have strong marketing teams, and some are selling marketing services to their customers. There’s a reason for this. We need to ensure that marketing doesn’t continue to be an afterthought in our industry.
Tough Questions
We might want to ask ourselves what a can marketing team can do for our dealership now and in the future. Sure it’s an expense—with people, salaries, plans, ad buys, content, etc.—and these costs continue to rise. But how are we mapping our dealership to what our future prospects and customers need? We have a sales team with a lot of this information about our customers, but what are we doing with this information, and how can we leverage it for the future of our business? It’s with marketing.
If you’re part of one of these dealerships that’s losing marketing staff, you need to choose smart replacements immediately and treat them as a priority so your marketing and sales teams don’t slip back to our old ways of working without a team.
Don’t take my word for it. We work with an agency that teaches us to do the work ourselves. Recently, they published an article that was relevant to this topic: Do I Need to Invest in Marketing When My Business is Thriving? Marketing has evolved over the years, and we need to understand how to leverage it to achieve our business goals. If you think you should invest in marketing during tough times, know that you should be nurturing your marketing even more during the good times.
I know this takes work and focus, but you owe it to the growth of your dealership. Don’t just hand off all your marketing projects to an agency unless it really knows your business. Who knows your business better than anyone else?
You do.
We do.
Take the time to build, replace and nurture a marketing team inside your dealership. Your customers deserve—and are searching for—content or providers of information when looking for their next technology purchase.
