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TVI MarketPro3 and Nick Shaffer

How I Got My Fixed Ops Marketing Start

Like a lot of our sales team, I started in automotive retail, got into automotive retail in 2005, worked exclusively on the service side, did so for 11 years, managed service departments really, really enjoyed that line of work. When I left retail to come work for TVI, I was a fixed operations director over an 11-store auto group.

My Mission for My Clients

My mission is to build something really special. I want to build a team, a process, and a product suite that becomes the Swiss Army knife for any fixed-ops manager. We want to become kind of the de facto solution any dealership turns to, regardless of their unique business growth goals and challenges.

My Greatest Challenge in Serving My Clients

The most challenging part is probably helping a dealership management team navigate their misaligned priorities. Let me explain what I mean. Everything that we do is custom-tailored to the store, the market, the unique challenges there, and the goals that the store wants to achieve. And the challenge comes in because if you meet with the dealer and ask the dealer what do you want to accomplish. What are your challenges? What are you hoping to achieve?

You’re probably going to get a different set of answers than when you ask the same questions to the general manager and then to the fixed ops director and then the service manager and the parts manager. So because everybody wants different things, aligning goals beyond just lip service, like really authentically aligning goals, can become a little bit of a challenge that we need to navigate before we can develop a strategy for a client.

Most Rewarding Part of My Job

You know, I’m a very goal-oriented person, and nothing is more rewarding to me than setting an ambitious goal with a team and achieving it. Um, and we get to attempt this with every client. Um, once we have those goals aligned, which I mentioned a moment ago, can be a little bit of a challenge, and everyone’s in agreement about what we’re aiming to accomplish and how we’re going to go about measuring it.

The fun part comes next because, at that point, our very skilled team develops a custom-tailored solution, which is designed to pursue that client’s goals. And the most rewarding part is looking up six to 12 months later and celebrating, turning those goals into achievements and then setting new goals with our clients.

Common Challenge Across All My Dealer Clients

It’s probably, I’d have to say it’s probably a lack of resources. Um, it’s very common for a client to have a reason why, and it’s usually a legitimate reason why they couldn’t capitalize on all of the opportunities that we’re working to bring them. And usually, what that sounds like is, you know, Nick, we didn’t have enough. Blank fill in the blank. It might be that we didn’t have enough advisors. We had a part shortage. We have a technician shortage.

It was a short month, so we didn’t have enough fixed days. Or maybe they need more training, maybe they have broken processes or cultures in place. And helping a client create success in spite of their operational hurdles is often our greatest challenge.

How I Personally Support My Clients in Solving These Problems

I try to help them stay focused. Often, our clients, when they experience those challenges, especially if they weren’t anticipated,become so focused on managing the challenge that they lose sight of the goal. And…

Goals don’t change; plans change, right? So if we have a new challenge standing in our way and we just start working on that challenge, we might be working just to work and losing sight of the goal and not making progress towards the goal. So I try to help them stay focused on both the challenge and the objective simultaneously, and if needed, apply some focus to rebuilding the original plan so that we can manage the challenge and still pursue the goal.

TVI MarketPro3 Tools That Help Solve These Problems

A few thoughts come to mind. So, our reporting dashboards are excellent, and they can help identify opportunities to drive better results or a more efficient use of our clients’ resources. So those are a great set of tools to help work towards the goal and manage challenges, but also our team.

is one of our greatest assets. Our field reps have a very rare pedigree of marketing and fixed operations experience, so many of our clients leverage our field reps both as their marketing specialist, as well as someone that they can lean on for operational advice.

NADA Show 2024

You know, I’d have to say I’m most looking forward to seeing everybody. Um, I’m looking forward to the camaraderie. Our office is based out of Houston, Texas, and we have many teammates who work out of that office and get to experience our company’s great culture on a daily basis. Our sales team doesn’t get to experience that very often because we all work remotely.

And the concept of teamwork can become a little bit of a challenge to establish when our field reps work remotely and are responsible for separate regions. So NADA is an ideal scenario to get everybody together, enjoy each other’s company, and work towards a successful conference.

It goes without saying that it’d be wonderful to sell some business while we’re there. However, just as much as that, I hope to build some more name recognition for TVI Market Pro 3. A lot of dealers simply haven’t heard of us, and more often than not, that’s because one of our unique business strategies is to give our current clients an exclusivity policy, which, in a nutshell, means that as long as we’re working for a certain store, helping them do acquisition marketing,

We are not going to service the stores that they compete within the marketplace. So because of this, a lot of dealers just haven’t heard of TVI Market Pro 3, and I’m hoping that we can build some more name recognition for ourselves at NADA Show24.

TVI MarketPro3 and Nick Shaffer

Everything we do for our dealer partners is custom, and our clients’ goals are not one size fits all; therefore, their marketing solution shouldn’t be cookie cutter, and those solutions should be strategic and custom fit to align with our clients’ goals, and we can provide that also.

TVI is a data acquisition and purification company before we are a marketing company. So because of our data hygiene disciplines and our exclusivity policy, we’re able to provide our clients with a unique and competitive advantage in the marketplace, which always translates to higher response rates and return on investment.

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