Best Marketing Vendor Experience of 2013 Ready? GO!

[Daniel J. Mondello]

My Auto group is very picky about who we choose to partner with. In fact most of our partnerships are few and far between as I have the gift of a knowledgeable internal Marketing and I.T. operations team and more often than not we choose to tackle most tasks and challenges in-house.
That said, in 2013 there was one partner that stood out in the crowd, Dealer.com.

Dealer.com has been a great company to work with! My advanced code writing team has really been able to spread our wings because Dealer.com has made several advanced accommodations for us. The partnership is one of the only ones that I truly value outside of our CRM provider which is also World Class!

Interested to hear who you have enjoyed working with in 2013. And I wish you all the best of luck in 2014!

 

[Jeff Kershner]

This comes off a bit "forced", but we"ll let it ride out and see how it goes. If I find this becomes a sales pitch or it's being gamed - I'll have to cut it. Let's keep this thread positive.

With that being said - too often we (dealers) are quick to call out the reason we don't "like" a particular service or vendor in the industry. It's not so often you get to hear the positives. And the websites that host vendor reviews come off, well...a little on the "played" side if you know what I mean.

Daniel, you mention DDC but they can't he the only vendor you receive great service from. If you're going to give a vendor a shout-out, let's include some results around why. With their advance code writing team - what have you and your dealership accomplished. What's positive results were contribute to the bottom line?

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

This comes off a bit "forced", but we"ll let it ride out and see how it goes. If I find this becomes a sales pitch or it's being gamed - I'll have to cut it. Let's keep this thread positive.

With that being said - too often we (dealers) are quick to call out the reason we don't "like" a particular service or vendor in the industry. It's not so often you get to hear the positives. And the websites that host vendor reviews come off, well...a little on the "played" side if you know what I mean.

Daniel, you mention DDC but they can't he the only vendor you receive great service from. If you're going to give a vendor a shout-out, let's include some results around why. With their advance code writing team - what have you and your dealership accomplished. What's positive results were contribute to the bottom line?

Hi Jeff - unfortunately the vendor satisfaction list is extremely short for us. Elead1 and Dealer.com have been awesome to work with because of their accommodations and great customer service.

Dealer gets thumbs up from me because their advanced editor access has allowed my team to build a dominate SEO presence in our market area. In a year where dealers are complaining that form submissions are down drastically, I am pleased to report that as a group our form submission went up 72% or roughly 30,000 YoY.

For this I want to thank Dealer.com but more importantly, I'd like to thank my incredible marketing team!

 

[joe.pistell]

my $0.02.

I've met these guys. Dan has a very special team* with great chemistry. They're all about selling cars (so every technical effort must end with more sales! Many times they have better ideas and they want them done yesterday. For some context, I see lots of requests for custom ideas come in, many are not fully developed and all too often they're used for a short while and then ignored. In the case of Quirk's team, the more custom tools we give them the more creative their whole team gets and they use it daily!

Kudo's to the *Quirk Digital Team:
Dan Mondello, Director of Marketing,
Patrick Walker, Webmaster (the advanced code writer dude!)
Rich Simard, Content Marketing Specialist

 

[joe.pistell]

p.s. I don't think the real story here is about DDC, it's about what happens when you give a deep and talented digital team the tools to create new ideas quickly! They remind me of my ol' team at UsedCarKing.com. All DDC's done is to build an advanced editing tool that allows their highly advanced webmaster to open the hood and build new stuff on the site.

(note: It is NOT a WYSIWYG editor, this is a high power coding tool. Any coding noob using this can blow up your site and take you down for days! It requires deep programming skills, so, only highly accomplished professional coders should apply.)

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

Thanks Joe we truly appreciate the kind words!

 

[cmjerry4531]

My vote probably counts a little differently as a vendor that works with vendors, but I've had amazing success with pretty much every vendor over the last year. If any of them disagreed with something I requested we would talk it out. In the cases where I had something to back up what I was wanting to do (case studies, interviews, etc.) I would present my evidence. Pretty much every request was handled within a matter of hours.

Some requests are just changing the color of some text, but others are a complete change of some of the hard coded features.

Is this not the case on the dealer level?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

For some context, I see lots of requests for custom ideas come in, many are not fully developed and all too often they're used for a short while and then ignored.

Too often requests are made with no real thought around the outcome. No base and benchmarks to track the effectiveness. Someone at the dealer says "let's do this or let's try that". The vendor thinks they're doing the dealer a service by saying yes, no matter how stupid the idea is. Hey, I'm sure back in the day I made a few of those stupid requests myself.

Three months later the ISM, GM or your "advocate" is gone. New regime comes in, clueless to the platform, never uses the upgrades and eventually cancels. Happens all the time.

I just took this thread a different direction. My apologies.

Back to the original conversation.

Many times it's not just the service / vendor but the relationship you've built with your representative. Their experience, knowledge and internal relationships that can get things done.

One of my best Reps was my AutoTrader rep a few years ago. He reported me to death (which I loved). Spent time with my people and helped roll out new services. Heck, he was even doing my Cars.com VDP Performance reports to match the VDP reports he would put together for me each month. He was always there to help and never missed a call or email.

Props to Matthew Handley at ATC.

 

[john.quinn]

Many times it's not just the service / vendor but the relationship you've built with your representative. Their experience, knowledge and internal relationships that can get things done.

Amen -- I miss a few people since moving out of the dealership a couple of years ago. Dyan Davis at Unity Works is certainly up there on that list.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Hi Jeff - unfortunately the vendor satisfaction list is extremely short for us. Elead1 and Dealer.com have been awesome to work with because of their accommodations and great customer service.

Dealer gets thumbs up from me because their advanced editor access has allowed my team to build a dominate SEO presence in our market area. In a year where dealers are complaining that form submissions are down drastically, I am pleased to report that as a group our form submission went up 72% or roughly 30,000 YoY.

For this I want to thank Dealer.com but more importantly, I'd like to thank my incredible marketing team!

That's what I'm talking about - Measurable Results!!

Thanks for sharing Daniel and thanks for your participation here lately. We hope to hear more from you in the future. We always value someone of your expertise and experience as a member of the community.