Dealer Spotlight: John Bartle of Hebert’s and Legacy Auto

I recently sat down (virtually) with John Bartle, Internet Marketing Manager for Hebert’s Town and Country and Legacy Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Shreveport and Natchitoches, Louisiana, to discuss how the dealerships are responding to social distancing. 

Our conversation focused on the changes they’ve made in response to a stay-at-home order that went into effect in March. Learn more about the new business model they’re building and planning on maintaining long after COVID-19, as John shares his insights below.

Note: Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is the current state of the dealership?

We're in Shreveport, Louisiana, so we're ground zero for every bit of this. We make national news every day in Shreveport. Where we’re at, it's bad. 

When we entered a stay-at-home order, we had to send everybody home. And we honestly had one hour to make a plan for the dealerships. It was nine o'clock in the morning on a Monday morning, and at ten o'clock we called all the salespeople in and told them our plan. I told them all goodbye and they all left. 

Our service department is open as an essential business, and we can still have the stores open as a condition of that. So the sales department is open, even though we officially have not been told that. We have a max occupancy of 10 people, and that includes service, sales, and whatnot. 

So we're open by appointment only, but we do not lock the door. If somebody wants to come into the store, that's fine. I've got 18 salespeople staying at home, four of whom have always been on internet leads. They are rotating working the floor, so they're alternating who’s coming in and working each day. We have one salesperson on the showroom floor at any given time and we're going to keep one F&I person at the store. We have three and they rotate as well. And we have four managers, two managers that are there desking deals, so everybody is rotating. 

How has your team responded to this rotating schedule and working from home?

I did the best I could explaining to each of these people what their role is. We made sure everybody had text alerts set up on their phones for our CRM. I made sure everybody had twenty-four hours access. And I made sure they had chat access. But, you know, this is totally foreign to them. They had never done this before. And this is their livelihood. If these people don't sell a car, they don't eat. I mean, it's an incredible amount of pressure and we really have to make this work. I'm asking salespeople to do their job from home in a completely foreign manner. And I mean, it's tough. My heart goes out to these people. They're working as hard as they possibly can.

I really expected a lot more pushback because you're going home and now everybody has leads. Say before you were getting one out of every four leads, now you're going to get one out of every 18 leads. But I mean, everybody's just thrilled to be employed and getting a paycheck.

How has sales at the dealerships changed?

We've been looking at digital retailing for about three years and actually ended up getting into a program at NADA. It went live two weeks before Louisiana had to shelter-in-place, so we're brand new to digital retail. We literally had it for 10 days before all of this.

Before, we had four salespeople that handled internet leads. Everybody else was a typical floor salesperson that, you know, sat on the little bench outside and waited for customers to come in. And that's just how it’s been done since the 1970s. Now, we're creating a new business model without a playbook, without any processes written down. In a conference room in an hour, a bunch of managers decided, okay, this is what we're going to. 

To start, I expanded our CRM hours. Obviously, in the past, our CRM hours would mirror the dealership hours. Now, that's not the case. People are shopping at home and I realized, you know, why am I waiting until nine o'clock in the morning to answer leads? That's foolish today. We're 24/7 now. I've moved our open and close time in our CRM from 8:00 AM until 9:00 PM, Monday through Saturday. On our website, we're saying shop from home and everybody says that, but my biggest thing is, I'm showing that we have live chat available 24/7, because we do. 

On Sundays, we're also handling leads from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM. We're answering leads and setting appointments. I cringed when I did that, but people are responding Saturday night or Sunday morning, saying they want to come check a car out Monday. And I mean, people are actively wanting that, so we're providing it. 

What tools and technologies are you using now more than ever? Are there new technologies have you discovered and found helpful?

If you have kids, you’ve probably used the app called ‘GroupMe’ before. My kids use it for their basketball schedules, their baseball schedules, and organizing all this stuff with the parents. And that's honestly what we're using, because it works for group messaging on iPhones and Androids. So we literally run the sales department through GroupMe. 

With the GroupMe app, when a lead comes in we announce the name of the lead and if a salesperson says they’ve had this lead before, it's assigned to them. If they don't do that and five minutes goes by, we reassign the lead. We just ask who's available and whoever responds gets the lead. 

We're relying 100% on our technology right now. We could not live without the GroupMe app. It's the only way we can all be on the same page, so there's no back and forth and have you talked to so-and-so. It has to be on GroupMe so that everybody in the company sees all the communication. I mean, my phone wears out by about one o'clock in the afternoon now, but it’s how we’re communicating with the team and how we’re keeping everybody on the same page

And yes, I got a lot of pushback from salespeople. It's a completely foreign business environment that we're in the middle of. But these are the tools and this is what we're going to have to do to manage this. 

What is something you’ve learned that you didn’t see coming?

The biggest issue that I didn't foresee was internet chats. I get chats from the website, Facebook, Google My Business, and a couple of other sources. It's busy and that's more or less like the telephone right now. The showroom floor and calls are now internet chats. And I've enabled chat for everybody. So when a chat happens, everybody has the ability to pick it up and start talking. First person that starts talking gets it. If nobody picks it up, our chat provider will take it over and their chat agents will handle it. 

The problem is, you can only pick up one phone at a time, but you could have five chat windows open. And so to train for that or to foresee handling a high volume of chats is difficult. It’s different.

Have you changed your marketing strategy or spend?

At first, I reduced our budget for several different vendors just because I didn't know what to do. I was battening down the hatches for digital marketing. And then my boss said absolutely not, I'm going to give you more money for digital that I'm taking away from other campaigns we would normally be running on TV and whatnot. We need to be everywhere on digital right now, because that's where the shoppers are. 

How are you using Foureyes?

Every morning I export yesterday's data into Excel, sorted by the salesperson, and email that, along with the Coffee Report, to every salesperson for both dealerships. And I've explained to them, these are the people who are still active on the website as of yesterday and these are the cars they're looking at. So these are the people you gotta reach out to. You can answer the leads that are coming in today, of course. But you also have to pay attention to these people that are active on the website and  that's going to make the difference.

We were getting a lot of leads already. Now, it's an overwhelming amount of leads, and I'm asking people who've never worked internet leads before to do this and do this from home. It's a tall task. I told them, we need to handle the leads, but we need to do it in the most efficient manner that we can. We've got to handle the people that are there, the most active shoppers of all. It's one thing to call 50 leads that you've gotten from the past week, that may or may not be serious. What Foureyes does is weed through every bit of that and give me the low hanging fruit right when I need it. And I'm able to deliver that to all my sales people while they're working at home in an easy format for them to reach out. 

I mean, why wouldn't you want that? Why wouldn't you want to know who from last week was active on the website yesterday or the day before, and what cars they were looking at? Why wouldn't you want that info and why wouldn't you want to give that to your salespeople as a tool? Why wouldn't you want them to have that tool at their disposal every day? Use the data to your advantage so that you can figure out who are the real deals, who are the buyers, who are the QSPs. 

It's what’s going to be the key to our success. We're watching Foureyes and our CRM all day long, every day. We take turns. But what we do is we're watching the responses that we're getting, watching our digital retail, our chats, and those three dashboards. And as leads come in, we're on it. And I mean, it's that all day long, every day. And now I'm ready for a vacation, I'll tell you that. But it's what we're doing and it's working. It's not what any of us expected. Nobody predicted this, but it worked at the end of March; we were the only dealer in the whole area that hit our numbers.  I just hope we can keep it rolling.

Tell us about your big realizations or “aha” moments. Any guiding principles you use to keep you and your team focused?

Ultimately, it's all communication. Before, you're always kind of thinking, okay, how are we communicating with our customers? How are we handling opportunities coming into the dealership, whether it's foot traffic, whether it's internet leads, or whether it's phone ups. But now, with the new set of challenges it’s not only how are we communicating with customers, but how are we communicating internally? And that's a whole other challenge. 

You need somebody almost like an air traffic controller. You need somebody managing the lead flow, the CRM, and then you need a unified method of communication so that everyone is on the same page. Not a hundred different individual group texts going out between people. Everybody needs to be on the same page and use the same technology. 

One piece of advice that you would share with dealers right now?

Well, number one: If you're not on digital retailing right now, if you don't have a digital retailing platform, run and go get it and get it installed as quickly as you can. 

If people aren't willing to understand the importance of the internet, then you’ve already taken yourself out of the game. If I could, I would never go back to having just regular floor salespeople. Everybody would have internet leads moving forward. Not just now.

What are some lessons you’ve learned about going virtual?

In the past, I was always thinking if I could have this really, really good salesperson on my team, how great would that be. You know, everybody's got a good salesman, and we do too, but that's not what wins the battle today. That may have won the battle in 1970 or 1980, but that's not what's going to win this battle. 

What wins the battle today is who is the most efficient and who has the most streamlined process. It's who can act the fastest. And I believe wholeheartedly we've got it. I believe our strategy and our processes are so much better now, that when we come out of this we're going to be something pretty awesome. 

Our processes are so much better now. Last month, there were less than five dealers in our business center that hit their number, and we were one of them. And that's Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma. It was a big deal. 

The virus will go away. Thank God, this is going to go away. We're going to live through all of us. But the world will never go back to how it was. I totally believe everything we do is going to completely change.

Is it safe to say this has changed the way you’ll do business after COVID-19?

We're going to keep working just like we're working now. Because I imagine if we could harness what we're doing right now, with everybody on the sales floor and a normal business environment where people actually called and came in the store, we'd be unstoppable. 

It's increasing our processes and efficiency. Our processes are much better, much smoother. We're so much more efficient now then we were, and the communication is so much better. All of the things we weren't paying attention to or you know, kind of waffling on, everything's gonna be more polished and be a little bit stronger because of this. Everyone now knows the technologies and the tools that we've ignored are essential. Now you realize what each tool provides. None of this is going to be forgotten. Everybody's going to go back much more advanced. 

I hope and pray that we'll get there pretty soon cause I'm ready. I'm ready for that.