TRUE CAR and ZAG Cyber Bandits, Parasites or Good for the Car Business?
Jim Ziegler asks...
I am hearing a lot of discussion about True Car and ZAG. I continually scratch my head and wonder if desperate dealers are doing the marketing limbo "How Low Can You Go?"
Are we so bad at what we do that we have to line up and pay vendors to lose money? AND, who is giving these people access to your data that is used against you?
Who owns these companies and what might be their ulterior motive? Sometimes I ask questions to which I already know the answer.
Am I wrong?
What do you think... JIM
Jim Ziegler's Guidance and Recommended Action Plan:
Ten Areas We Need to Concentrate on to Bring This Monster to It's Knees...
- Government investigation of ALL Data Aggregators taking consumer information from dealers' DMS. Sadly enough, dealers who do business with TrueCar are exposed to liability charges. Cut off all access to unecessary data, no matter who takes it from the dealers DMS and make it illegal to "resell identifiable consumer data" and "transactional data".
- Educate Your Fellow Dealers; If anyone takes financial transactional data, they expose the dealer that allowed it to violations, especially if it is passed on to other vendors or shared.
- Educate Consumers to what they're doing with their information...
a. You buy a car from a dealer, do you really want your personal information, and maybe even your financial information, passed along and sold and shared by "God knows who?"
b. These People Charge the Dealer $300 which the dealers have to build into the deal
c. Your Privacy and the Security of your Information could theoretically compromise your identity if you do business a company that takes data from the dealership. - Educate Investors and potential investors they could possibly be mislead if anyone is telling them this is a safe investment because of all of the dealers pushing back, associations pushing back, and government regulators in many states coming after TrueCar's business model as NOT compliant, in some cases they're saying it is Not Legal.
- AMEX, USAA and all of their affiliates do not want the bad consumer relations this push back is creating with their members and customers.
- Cancel your dealership's Affilation with TrueCar. Tell people with TrueCar certificates that YOU don't honor TrueCar and you feel the company is NOT reputable. Educate consumers as to perceived data exposure if they buy from a TrueCar dealer. Make sure that each consumer knows that using TrueCar actually increases their vehicle cost by $300 to $400.
- Make the dealers selling at huge losses take all of those deals. Big problem right now is too many Nissan Dealers and others are taking huge losers to get the factory money. The TrueCar reverse-auction business model will continually push those numbers down until the factory money is non-existent. Consumers need to hear from many dealers, "We don't do TrueCar"
- Keep calling your National and State Dealer Associations demanding they get involved and stay involved... No excuses.
- Get the Manufacturers into the game. If GM, Ford, Toyota, and other majors change the rules about how we advertise and do business to protect the dealers, we can cut off their ability to set pricing. So keep it up at every dealer meeting. Call your Dealer Council Members and protest to your factory reps. Tell the manufacturers, if they want showroom and facility improvements, we need the ability to make fair profits.
- Tell everyone you know. Educate other dealers and industry people. Watch the Painter interviews... I believe this is the first time a vendor has publicly announced they intend to bring down the dealers and hijack our business, taking our profits and starving us out with our own data. Painter has said manufacturers and dealers should go bankrupt and he, in his God-like way "will control distribution..."
When the TrueCar-Yahoo Deal kicks in we need to stand firm and "Just Say No" we don't honor TrueCar deals.
Read this article as a reference: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110831%2FFIN...
AND, if you doubt the mission... read this... http://www.zag.com/websiteASSETS/whitepapers/ZAG-WhitePaper3.pdf
Comment
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Comment by Mike Betts on November 29, 2011 at 3:30pm
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Keith, i get it but its like Edmunds true market value? Here KBB and Edmunds have been around for a very long time and sometimes its a curse and sometimes i use it to my advantage. The truth of the matter is i rarely loose a deal because of it and maybe 20% of my customers come in with that knowledge. One of my ways of getting over a customers demand of a used car price is to use my head and overcome objections. Do i fail sometimes yes but most of the time i succeed and there is a win win siuation. One of the ways i do this is to ask a customer who is presenting me a price off an internet source is to ask them if if these sources sell cars or buy cars they always say No i then ask how do you think they make their money? Most say advertising/clicks exc i then ask do you think the internet site with the lowet used car price or the highest used car price gets the most traffic? They usually dont answer,they make a concession noise and we move forward with a more accurate trade price. I appreciate the feedback,for now i am happy with the production Zag has provided it is allowing me more opportunities to make comissions not just mini's!
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Comment by James Carroll on November 29, 2011 at 3:27pm
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@Jerry by the way love the video.
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@ James Does posting to Facebook seem wise or make us look like the big bad wolf as you mentioned earlier?
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Comment by CJ Romig on November 29, 2011 at 3:23pm
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@KEITH !!! My bad!!
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Comment by Mark Elliott on November 29, 2011 at 3:21pm
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Posted Jim...This could be favorite website of all time!!
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on November 29, 2011 at 3:19pm -
@ CJ, I'm Keith not Kevin. ;)
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@Stan you are right...the harder we work the luckier we get sometimes..
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on November 29, 2011 at 3:18pm
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@ All: I'd be careful to note Jerry's idea of not having SEO because he wants to keep this discussion more-or-less in the industry--and so I'm not sure it belongs on everybody's Facebook page. He might take it down vs. those concerns; up to him, of course. I'd say it needs to be seen by all the folks who might use or do use TC/Z.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on November 29, 2011 at 3:16pm
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@ Mike Betts: Does this direction make you reconsider? http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/truecar-inc-announces-clear... so no more hold on the trade? Or does the TrueCar CEO's publically-stated idea of the salesfloor manned by hourly employees and really no dealer excite you? Things to think about.
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@Kevin when that happens then I will have to look at the equation when we do our ROI meetings at the begining of the month..I am not married to any program and the targets are always moving. None of us on this post run the dealerships the same way...I just want to keep my sales funnel filled at all times and the opportunities are still pretty damn great in the auto business. At the end of the day I report to an owner that wants to make sure that my customers are happy and how much profit did we make. (sometimes not in that order)
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