While walking the floor at NADA this year, I had the opportunity to explore the latest wave of data visualization products.  When used effectively, your data can show you your owners, prospects, used, new, demographics, trends, even what to say to whom when. After more than 35 years in the automotive industry between OEM, Retail, Vendor, and New and Used management roles, I am left with a few questions:

  1. What do you plan to do with this data today?
  2. Are you willing to make a decision against your gut because the data says to?
  3. How does using this data change how you market today?
  4. How do you plan to measure the impact of using the data on resulting sales or service and gross?

Data-driven marketers answer these types of questions first before they go looking for reporting and visualization tools. They have organizational discipline that values the data and is willing to use it to guide marketing. They select tools that are integrated with their marketing engines because they plan to use them to drive marketing decisions and creative. They have analytic engines in place that can measure the before and after performance so they can attribute impact to the changes they make with some statistical validity. 

If you are looking at a tool and can’t do these things, you are likely wasting your money. Here are my four simple questions to ask when selecting a data visualization and/or reporting system for marketing.

  1. Most importantly, does your organizational leadership value the recommendations that the data makes?  Will they follow the recommendations (at least to test) even if they contradict years of “experience” and closely held beliefs?  If they don’t or plan to nick you with a thousand cuts about validity, you will be frustrated beyond belief and never able to implement the changes the data suggests.  My advice is to select a new organization. 
  2. What is the source of the underlying data for your tool?  Does the vendor use your DMS or CRM and if so, do they clean it up?  Does the market data come from Experian or Polk or another legitimate source that can show you why it is valid and explain its source?  There are many tools out there that use “proprietary” data sources that have “unlocked the secret to [insert pipe dream here].”  In my experience, most of this is BS.  Experian and/or Polk and similar have spent years validating their data and complying with detailed rules and regulations.  If they can’t get you what you want or what the “proprietary” people can, chances are there is a reason for it or it is what my old boss used to call “shishcamunga.”  There are no short cuts to good data.
  3. Do you have organizational acceptance that the reports will “NEVER” match your DMS or your financial statement? This means volume and gross.  There are typically different timeframes and ways of measuring things that do not sync with financial reporting.  It doesn’t matter.  These tools are directional and measure changes in performance.  Whether it is $1251/ unit or $1323/unit doesn’t make a bit of difference if they are both up $100 this month.  Trying to get this stuff to match your internal reports takes you down a rabbit hole that is like Alice in Wonderland from which you will never recover.  Use the tools to show changes or improvements or differences.  If you can’t get your organization there, my advice is the same as in #1.
  4. Is your tool integrated with your Marketing Engine?  Is it easy to take the decision or recommendation out of the tool and immediately impact your marketing tomorrow?  If you have to take a report and give it to your agency and wait for them to “interpret” it and then tell you what to do, you are wasting your time.  Too much gets lost in translation and the agency almost always adds/deletes to the recommendation.  If your tool makes you sign in and run a bunch of reports and then try and figure out what to do from there, they’ve missed a step.  Tools should be linked to the “go” button.  They should tell you what they say in simple terms and then show you how to take advantage of the recommendations and do something easily and quickly.  The idea that dealerships should have Data Scientists that take complex data and make statistical decisions from it, set up valid multi-variate tests, link to marketing and so on, is just silly. 

I hope you noticed that half of the recommendations deal with the tool while the other half, the most important half, deal with your organizational readiness to use the recommendations. While I am confident that any dealership can benefit from the analytics and reporting tools available within the 3 Birds platform, I also know that the biggest mistakes I made in my long career were more about organizational readiness than the use of any tool.  

You need a hunger for data…an intellectual curiosity about customers and marketing…a willingness to try…and a tolerance to fail once or twice.  Once you have climbed this hill, then pick a tool that is easy to use, backed with good solid data and link to how you market.

Once your company gives you permission to make data-driven changes, don’t get trapped with a complicated product that looks cool but is impossible to use. Don’t get trapped waiting for someone to interpret what the reports mean and deliver you their thoughts weeks later. Once your door opens, make sure you drive through it and make sure you can show what you did and how it turned out.  Doors don’t stay open for long and sometimes when you let them close, you can’t pry them back open again.