Chicks In Charge: Automotive Edition

Shasta: What's up guys?

Jess: Hey hey!

Shasta: What's up? This is Shasta Haddock of Epic BDC, I am the BDC Director here, um, and obviously part of Chicks in Charge: Automotive Edition. This is...

Jess: I am Jess, and I am the National Sales Director here at SCP Agency and Epic BDC and we are so excited to get started with everybody.

Today's episode is just going to be a little bit of a get to know us and an introduction and then we are super excited to announce our guest for next week's episode at the end of this one!

Shasta: Absolutely! Um, so, we are obviously brand new to this so we are going to try to make sure that we have comments popping up.

So if you are commenting along on Facebook and LinkedIn, we are going to try to make sure that we can see

those and respond to you guys while
you are watching, we hope that we invited enough of you guys so that you can watch along with us,

we know that we had a lot of excitement building up to this and a lot of people that were very interested to join along with us this is something that was a long time coming our very first comment Scott thank you oh thank you Scott hi so uh we know comments are working so thank you Scott um and thank you we are amazing too so um awesome so we know comments are working so shoot us all the comments and we will respond to them as we see them Jess: yeah we'll also do some Q&A here at the end so if you guys have any questions for us we came from where we started how we got into the automotive industry by all means pop them into the comments and we will be happy to answer those as we go absolutely hello Isaac hi Isaac Isaac is uh our implementation manager here at Epic BDC he is one of our Killers he's been with us about two years um so hello Isaac and um so we are very excited so obviously this is episode one um we wanted to absolutely as just said make this an intro episode those of you who don't know us we um tried to share this out with a lot of people who don't know us um who don't um you know know where we come from or know what we do and I don't want to make this all about um if you know who we are where we where we come from I don't want to make this all about BDC um but obviously it is a big part of who we are what we do every day so there will be some episodes that are focused on BDC and I think that this one today we were talking about what we wanted to focus today's episode on and something that I'm very passionate about right now is BDC process is absolutely man we did that perfectly um and and how easily you can either do it right or do it wrong um and I think that it applies to the whole dealership not to be not just the BDC um fixed ops Parts um having one thing fall out of process uh can very quickly um mess a lot of things up it can it can ruin customer service it can ruin the customer Journey as far as when they're shopping um it can drop your uh your lead to sold numbers especially in the BDC so um something that I've been working on especially this past week that I've been back week week and a half now um I just came back from a BDC boot camp down in Belize where I was training an off-site BDC um is rebuilding processes in the CRM um and every CRM has a different name for it whether it's automated follow-up and Promax a process in Vin Solutions um Cadence and eLead whatever you call it in your BDC it is the tasks that are generated to know when to call text email the customers after they come as an internet lead phone lead showroom follow-up anything like that Shasta tell me like what is your number one process in our bdc that you could not live without ooh and mind you we we manage multiple dealerships all at once so we're managing multiple bdc's where most bdms only have that one BDC sometimes it's a centralized location where they'll have a couple of um sister stores in the group but primarily you'll see a BDM with one store and so we are constantly managing multiple stores at one time so go ahead Shasta so so to clarify do you mean like myself as far as a virtual BDC manager managing all of these stores or if I were to focus on once or what's most important if you were to focus on one store what is your what is your favorite process that you can't live without making sure that we have calls text emails um built into the CRM um and I made a post about this on Facebook last night if you're friends with me on Facebook you probably saw this I don't know I posted around midnight last night because that's how late I was working um that um for a while I took away um templated text and emails away from my team and it's because um there is a way to do it incorrectly um I don't I don't like templates um for a few reasons um I've seen so many of them be done incorrectly um as far as some of the ones that the CRMs automatically come with we've we've all seen them the hey customer uh thank you for shopping with dealership name um we're so excited that you chose to shop I mean they're just they're Bland um and sometimes the the vehicle um doesn't even populate in correctly like the merge code doesn't match the um fonts don't even match I mean they're awful and then the BDRs get going so fast that they don't think to stop and check and then they um they send the email and then this customer gets an email that says hey hey customer thanks for your interest in blank tell me more about your blank That's supposed to be trade and um it's just a whole mess and so templates we're getting so messed up um so I I took away templates um personally and we introduced um as everybody's heard we introduced openai chat GPT

first first um verbal screw up of the podcast we introduced chat GPT um more so the open AI playground version of chat GPT for the BDC um and what we used it for um was um help me construct an email to a customer who's interested in a Ford F-150 and is probably trading in their uh you know Ford Escape looking to upgrade to a truck um they were shopping on trade pending or they were shopping on AutoTrader mentioned where they came from where they were shopping so that we can get this email as personal as possible um sign it you know uh Shasta Haddock from ABC Motors so we're going to throw all of that together into openai we're going to reread it to make sure a the email makes sense B that it is personalized and see that it addressed all of the things that we wanted it to address um and this this went well for a while yeah absolutely and rereading that what the AI sends back to you is so important you cannot have your agents or your reps just go go ahead and copy and paste whatever it says I'll give you guys an example from what was it last week we had an email that said an email template said was offering driving lessons for the dealership and it's so, so important to make sure that your agents or yourself um you guys are double checking every single thing that the AI says it'll do most of the work for you, you have to proofread absolutely because it took it somehow took test drive and turned it into driving list yep um so that went well for a while um and then even still um burnout burnout in BDC is unreal um and until you've done this job and done it for longer than a minute um you don't understand it because listening to that phone ring all day long because if you're making 20 to 25 calls in an hour and you're only connecting with one to two people that's 23 to 25 rings that you're just ringing for 20 to 30 seconds so that's a lot of rings back and back and back and back all day long um for eight hours a day sometimes longer we have agents that work 12 hours shifts six days a week so that's a lot of ringing so that burnout and trying to get creative every single time I've I have um pretty I don't know what I want to say strict um I have pretty solid measures on how often I want um customers texted and emailed um yes grammarly on steroids I've absolutely we definitely use grammarly around here um so absolutely um the sending the the text and emails I have them sent um no less than 10 emails an hour and 20 texts an hour but um what I came to realize when I couldn't get them to hit those metrics they were they were hitting the dials because those they could control but then they weren't hitting the text and emails I'm like guys why aren't we doing this guys why aren't we doing this and I would hammering them every day about it and I would go and sit behind them and while I would sit behind them they would force it out of themselves and then they wouldn't hit their dials and then the second I would walk away they would hit their dials again but they're not their texts and emails so I had to dive into the root of the problem and why are we why are we not doing this and um I realized when I was sitting with them they were struggling to come up with the creative responses every time and the um the fresh um fresh take yeah the fresh take every time and let's be different this time um if they have to think about it every single time and how do I readdress this customer that's different than the one I just did five seconds ago what do I do differently um and it puts them into decision overload like when we do it to our customers by asking when do you want to come in which is why we don't ask them when you want to come in we ask them how close to right now can you be here or today or tomorrow we only give them two options we don't put them into decision overload so I had to take that back away from the team so I started building out those texts and emails into the work plan um I spent literally until midnight last night rebuilding my own templates um that I didn't take from the CRM I didn't take from anybody else I built them myself because I want them to be built for engagement I want the customer to respond absolutely I don't want to just send it to send it I want to send it so that we can a be different than dealers I want them if they're shopping with four to five dealers at the same time I don't want to be sending the same thing that you know the three to four other dealers are sending right what's gonna set you apart yeah um and I want to be the one that's getting the engagement so I think that um our years of social media um absolutely you know posting and stuff like that um and always being designed to get the engagement I feel like that really um helped me in really working to build those templates out so um I think that is so so so important so that was a really long answer to that question but if I have to pick one absolute most important part of the process it is making sure that you have the the calls texts and emails balanced out properly and that they are 100% going out when they're supposed to and that there's somebody there answering when the customers respond yes if I if I have these beautifully worded texts and emails going out and the customers responding like they have been and nobody's there to answer them what's the point yep absolutely absolutely yeah good job always good answer thanks was very long well I want to take just a second um we have had several very special people to us that have helped us get this podcast up and running um it has taken endless phone calls endless text messages hey what are we doing wrong hey help us with this so a couple of those people I'll name off is Fred Lennartz and Lou Ramirez have been absolute Lifesavers and helping us get this up and running and we are so thankful to them they actually are the ones that really inspired us to get this going to begin with at NADA and we just kind of jumped in head first and said let's do the thing I don't know that we even had a full idea of it until Fred said something we didn't no no not at all I think that yeah I think he's the one that said you should do a podcast like I'm trying to think if there was a thought before then no I mean I think it was just a comment that was made in passing and we're like hey let's do it we're gonna do the thing and so we did and we're super excited to be here so Fred and Lou thank you guys so much for your help endless thank you yes and a couple of other people that I wanted to point out too is Brooke Furniss she has been amazing at helping us find vendors for swag and for music and whatever we could think of that we needed help with Brooke has been there and she has answered our phone calls and she has answered Our Endless questions um no matter the time of day so we really appreciate you Brooke if you are here and you're watching us thank you so much for all of your help and another one as well is Kaylee Felio um she as well really helped us get up and running she helped us get started helped us figure out what software we needed what worked what didn't work you guys are amazing our tribe in the automotive industry has been phenomenal to us and we cannot thank you guys enough and the dozens of people who have been sharing our posts um excited with us I know I see Wendy in the comments and Wendy has been sharing our posts like crazy um like Robin said in the comments Mike wooden came yesterday and literally helped set up all of our sound for us it has lent us microphones and done all of the things that we had zero idea how to do so absolutely we absolutely couldn't have done this without the help of some amazing friends and let's not forget Robin herself she designed our entire backdrop if you guys can see it back there she did an amazing job she put it all together she got it ordered for us most of the equipment was hers yeah almost all the equipment has been her she's helped us get set up today she's spent endless hours helping us brainstorm and collaborate on how we were going to get this up and running and aside from her and all of the amazing people that we have Wendy Reeves your support has been so appreciated Scott trainer you as well you guys have been amazing support um we can't thank you guys enough yes absolutely and of course Bev and Robin and as our bosses letting us you know um been a lot of company time doing this yeah obviously you know it's it's for the business and um helping spread the Amazing Word of of uh what's going on in the automotive industry and and what we as young women and other young women in the industry are here to do um but you know we know it takes away from company time and that's probably my biggest um heartache is having to step away from my desk for for longer than 10 minutes to stop what I'm doing and come do a thing that's you know actually for me for us um and not just focused on the dealers is probably my my biggest um if I'm not doing something for the dealers it kind of breaks my own heart so I know I know it's hard for me right right so so if you guys have any interest in being on the podcast on us for future episodes please either comment here in the comments so we can reach out to you or reach out to us personally send us a Facebook message text us if you have our phone numbers and we are more than happy to schedule a time for you guys to come on the show we are super excited we want all the guests that we can get and we're ready we're ready to kick this thing in the ass absolutely we should ask I think that is that the first time we cussed probably did I cuss you know oh I usually do okay normally you're dropping f-bombs oh

so Robin wants to know what are you doing SCP that's a good question I handle all sales and onboarding so if you need social media help or BDC help you call me and I will get you all set up I'll give you all the information that you need and then I'll get you onboarded and ready to go so that you guys are set for lead generation and also lead handling what is what all what all does SCP do I know that we talk about epic BDC a lot and a lot of our friends who join us here probably knows that we do Outsource BDC but um it's probably been a while since a lot of people have heard us talk about SCP so what does um what does SCP do so I think SCP is really cool in the industry because there's a lot of companies that do social media and they'll post for you and they do a great job um however it's really hard for companies to mass produce customized content and so what we do is we just take it up a level and we create more of a boutique style social media engagement um posting for dealerships and also lead generation so part of it is organic and we also offered the paid the paid version of it um for Facebook ads but the organic portion is 100 tailored to your store it is customized posts that is tailored to to give me a dealership name uh Robert here uh tailored to Roper Kia not Kia not the OEM Kia but to Roper what is their culture like who are they who how is it ran how do they treat their customers um that's really what we focus on on our organic social media side of things and then we also have our Facebook Elite response team which sits inside Facebook Messenger all day they um help you respond to your customers and Facebook Messenger they work those leads down the sales funnel they build that trust and Rapport they set appointments for you and on top of that they're also responding to your comments so we we really live by the three E's educate engage and entertain and so we're educating our customers about what we do who we are as a company we're entertaining them online where they're at already on social media and we are educate entertaining and we are engaging with them as well we're engaging with them as well on a on a dealership level essentially we like to say we are the voice of your dealership absolutely what is uh what would you say and I know what my answer to this would be but what would you say is the number one thing that dealerships get wrong on social media oh my gosh um I truly believe that dealerships focus a lot on posting sold photos and inventory photos and they forget that not all of your followers are car people they might be in the market to buy a car for a day or for a week or for a month they're not going to be later on and it's all about how you can keep that top of Mind awareness and engage with your followers engage with your community where they're at and that might mean making a post saying what's your favorite Girl Scout cookie or iPhone or Android it has nothing to do with cars or the automotive industry but most of your followers aren't in the automotive industry yeah yeah once they buy a car with you why would they continue to follow follow you if all you're posting is inventory and sold photos that's all you're working to do is is uh convert them as a car buyer absolutely I mean do you want to watch an all day long commercial I sure don't I don't either I wouldn't follow that page I think a lot of times social media becomes more transactional and when really it should be um family and friends and people that you're really trying to get to know better and be a community absolutely yeah one of my favorite things that I see on social media especially from dealerships is when they go out and engage with the community when um one of the favorite things so I we use Roper kids it's a dealership that um the dealership I was raised in an automotive so it's here in Joplin and uh a lot of our friends work there it's where um I worked every years literally my husband and I met there like that's how I don't know um near and dear that dealership is to our hearts so um we use that dealership a lot and they are very very Community oriented um and so every fifth Friday if there is a fifth Friday in the month they go and volunteer at our local homeless shelter and make them breakfast uh it's amazing 5 30 6 o'clock in the morning um when Robin and I worked there we would go there on Friday mornings and go there as well um take pictures and they they're it's funny because they're so servant oriented that they're they're almost awkward about the taking of the pictures they're like why do we why do we need to tell people like the servant's heart doesn't need to like tell people and it says um we tell them if if people see you doing it they will do it as well it's not about look at us and how amazing we are it's um it's about being a leader in the community yeah you guys are a leader people are looking up to you and if they see you doing it they too will do it and so it's it's the example that you can set for the others if you have a Facebook page with a following of 13 000 people those are 13 000 people that when they see that you can impact their day positively instead of some political garbage Facebook post that they would have seen instead absolutely and I think a lot of times people or dealerships in general they don't realize how blind how quickly people go blind to the same thing so whenever you're running an ad for for six months on end um or even longer or even longer and so I mean I've seen ads up as long as three four five years that have been running Non-Stop and the dealerships don't even know their ads are running it's it's an old special it's an old it's an old vehicle that's not on the lot it hasn't been on the lot for five years and they're still putting money behind it and they don't even know um I think that they don't realize that it only takes a couple of times before your eyes stop seeing the exact same thing it's really really important to change your ads up every month hi Rory hi colby colby I was wondering if you up and I haven't seen you on social lately Hi friend yes and so it's so it's funny sorry I had a thought and then I saw a couple being got distracted add um I had a thought as you said that there um is a dealership locally who does that and um I see their posts all the time and I don't think of it until somebody brings it up and it's the same oil change post all the time or a detail post or something and it never changes it doesn't I know exactly what you're doing it's the same freaking post all the time and I'm like oh my God are you guys gonna change that up like why are you running the same post also at least change the freaking graphic that's the easiest thing you can change if you've ever run Facebook ads literally I didn't look hard enough maybe maybe my algorithm just isn't feeding you to me I don't know so I think that um I think if you're honestly just too lazy to go in and change something as simple as a graphic then um you know it just goes to show that maybe you're either not in the right business or you're getting too complacent with your work well and I don't want to get too far into this topic but something else that just popped in my mind too is I had a conversation with a dealer probably a couple months ago now and he said you know I think I'm just going to hire somebody in-house I can just hire somebody you know to do social media and post for me every once in a while and I said Mr dealer I respect that and if that's what you choose to do by all means go for it but please make sure that the person that you you hire you bring on actually knows what to post and how to use social media for your benefit otherwise you're wasting your money no matter what yeah well and you can very quickly and it's funny as I mentioned that about um Colby you can very very quickly mess up your Facebook algorithm um and you can very very quickly um lose your Facebook audience as a page so when you have um a business page we're going to school right now apparently from going to church and school at the same time so when you have a Facebook business page you can very quickly lose that audience the second that your your audience stops um engaging with you on a consistent basis Facebook says these people are interested in these posts so We're Not Gonna We're Not Gonna serve it up to them as much anymore we're only going to show it to them twice a week and then the two times a week that they do serve it up to them they're still not engaging I'm really gonna start rip him once a week and then after a while you're 13 000 15 000 followers are seeing your posts one to two times a month if that if that because Facebook stops eventually stops pushing your posts out at all yeah imagine there's only so much um

land is the only way that I can describe it um there's only so much land in Facebook world so imagine as you're scrolling through your news feed there's only so much news feed um for the people who have the maxed out 5000 Facebook friends plus all of the pages you follow there's only so many rooms for so much room for news feeds Oh Derek has a good question sorry I didn't interrupt you go ahead um yeah I'll get to you get to that in a second um there's only so much room for news feeds um and there is um only so many room for ads so I believe that if you're sorry I'm like my the back of my brain is now also running on that question so like I've like completely lost my training plot now um so if if there's only so much room Facebook is only going to serve the posts up that are getting the most engagement from the pages that are getting the most engagement if that makes sense I hope that makes sense let's spend the last five minutes of this let's start answering a few questions I know Derek has one right here that we'll go ahead and get to if anybody else has any questions go ahead and pop them in the comments and we will get to as many as we can in the next few minutes so on Derek's question Derek asks pages are pay to play what do you all think of tick tock ads for dealerships um so I always try to think of myself as a consumer um and that I'm always taking in content and taking in um how I receive ads um and I at the same time I also don't want to speak for an entire um population um I recently as of I don't know probably two or three months ago have completely deleted the tick tock app um uh because I was spending too much time on there mindlessly scrolling however when I would get an ad on there I would not even pay attention to the ads I would immediately scroll past it because you could immediately tell when you were getting an ad the the form out was different everything like that because I would Escape Facebook and all of its ads to go to tick tock to be mindlessly and consumed and yeah that was my sole purpose of going to tick tock was just for entertainment so I didn't have any if I could have paid for tick tock to be ad-free I would have that was how much I wanted Tick Tock to be ad-free so um personally um even as a consumer of ads and somebody who will slow down on an ad um on Facebook to see how it was constructed how I feel I got targeted on that ad um I completely feel like um tick tock's not the place for them that does not mean they will be completely useless that is just my personal opinion well anything that Robin has a good point and I mean we're streaming live on Tick Tock right now but I agree with Robin I think and I agree with you too Shasta I think that whenever I'm on Tick Tock the second I feel like there is an ad or I see an ad I don't even my brain doesn't even register what the ad is talking about it's just scroll right past it and Robin said to with the volatility of where tick tocks future lies I would you know I would be careful and I don't disagree with that either I mean I 100 agree with her on that there's a lot of times that people have said that about Facebook too that that Facebook future was was volatile as well um and tick tock's future has been said to be you know uh volatile a couple of times as well so I don't I don't know um that that would be the the kind of thing that I would use to say that um I think that Our Generation that is hugely impacted by ads I think that that is what we use tick tock for is entertainment and even education I know a lot of people go there and use it almost as a search engine recipes and um how to change the oil on my car like now that they've gotten up to the 10 minute long videos um I've heard so many people using them for the educational type of videos um but the algorithm is so completely unreliable on Tick Tock and so hard to control that um you're almost better off trying to go organic I feel right then I agree than trying to go paid on Tick Tock and um you know hope for virility I definitely think that Tick Tock has its time and place I reality I know I said that wrong you did I don't even know what reality means and now I feel like that's gonna definitely come back to bite me someone is going to bite you By Me on uh no I I definitely agree I think that Tick Tock has its time and place I don't know that I am all for the paid version yeah I agree like I'm telling you if um if when I used Tick Tock if I could have paid for a an ad free version I would have um but again I've I've been off of tick tock for about three months now and um no regrets I don't even I honestly don't even partake in the Facebook reels um they honestly just take up too much time for people like us we're too freaking busy yeah um I I'm barely sleeping four hours a night as it is right now um I mean I work too much my brain doesn't stop I don't have time for it so and I know our consumers and our Shoppers aren't us um so it's so hard to engage that off of people like us but um that's just myself personally so um it's hard to be a consumer of something that you're no longer using but I agree when I was using it I could tell you that I would literally because I was there for entertainment only same all right well I think that it is about time to wrap up our very first episode um we really appreciate everybody coming here and showing your support we will be back next week with our special guest Laura Berman and we are so excited to have her on the show with us she's actually going to be here in person to visit us so she will be in studio with us next week so tune in for that we will get an event up ready to go ASAP we will be a different day next week though we don't have an exact day yet but we will not be on Tuesday yes we are going to accommodate Laura's schedule so she will be here Thursday through Saturday I believe and um we will get we will get an event sent out as soon as possible and hopefully by the end of this week we will have this episode up um live on all of the podcast sites yay so as soon as that happens we will obviously post on social and let all of you guys know absolutely thanks guys for tuning in we really appreciate you thank you guys so much and uh Happy First episode yay