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TVI MarketPro3 and Scott Kelford

How I Got My Fixed Ops Marketing Start

I actually started in the fixed operations world back in 1990 through 2015. It’s about 25 years. All of it was with pretty much with the Hendrick Automotive Group. My background in getting into marketing was how much I appreciated what MarketPro3 did for my Toyota store back in the day.

Drake Dorty and Bill Allen actually were a couple of people that came in and did maintenance with me, so I got to know the family with MarketPro3 way before I signed up to be employed with MarketPro3. They approached me back in 2016, asked me if I’d like to leave the dealership world and represent them throughout the United States, pitching the product, and I jumped on.

My Mission for My Clients

That would be a couple of things. I think first and foremost is obviously building Relationships with dealerships across the country utilizing transparency with the reports that we provide grow their repair accounts We’ve always been kind of named the unpaid employee and when you have fixed ops backgrounds like some of us do, we have the ability to go in and assist them with some things that are outside of what we do in terms of marketing. Maybe how to maximize gross profit on our repair order, that type of scenario.

My Greatest Challenge in Serving My Clients

I think that would be if we go out and we’re kicking tires, trying to find new accounts, I think getting in front of the right people. There’s always gatekeepers in the dealership. I had gatekeepers when I was running fix to keep people at arms length so that I wouldn’t be disturbed. And sometimes it’s very difficult to get an appointment. You just want to get an appointment. I think that’s one of the hardest things is getting in front of them.

Most Rewarding Part of My Job

Oh, that’s bringing an account on board. And I think the launch itself, the installation process and training consultants on how to treat these guests different because they haven’t been into the store in a long time and never. They’ve got to change the way that their mindset is. When they see one of these customers come in with MarketPro3 marketing pieces, they have to slow down, give that customer a lot of love, show them the amenities to build the subsequent visits. So I think that’s probably my favorite part of what I do.

Common Challenge Across All My Dealer Clients

Right now, I think it’s really unrelated to marketing in general. I think it’s post COVID, it’s keeping employees and when you can’t keep a good employee, it’s finding one that is status quo and has the ability to step in a new job with minimal training. And I think even in leadership positions, I’m seeing more turnover in the leadership role, service managers, fixed ops directors, general managers.

We’re just seeing a lot of uprooting and it’s not necessarily a performance situation is there just people robbing Peter to pay Paul and steeling other folks, and it’s just hard to replace people in any part of the dealership world, and I’m sure that’s across the board in the world in any occupation but that’s probably it’s people.

How I Personally Support My Clients in Solving These Problems

They ask me a lot of times if they’ve known me already with my background, you know, what could I do to assist them? And believe it or not, we can use marketing. We can use their database to reach out and post jobs with QR codes, things like that. There’s, you know, you’ve got five, 10,000 customers and an average DMS 10 model year newer, if we hit that, that situation, but think about the outreach of how many people they know that may be looking for a job.

We’ve done that a lot, and we’ve had some traction with it. So just finding the right people, asking the right questions. They’ve asked me my opinion on that stuff. But in terms of what MarketPro3 in general can do is let’s spread the news and get it out there if they need help.

TVI MarketPro3 Tools That Help Solve These Problems

We can reach out to the customer and the customer has family members and people that live up the street that knows, you know, we had a situation where a guy saw a posting and knew that his neighbor up the road was a technician and we ended up bringing that guy in. I don’t know if they got hired or not. Really don’t follow up with that part of it, but, you know, a lead’s a lead.

NADA Show 2024

It’s my first. So, uh, just probably just absorbing everything, learning from everybody, having everybody’s fingerprints on me and, and what we can do to maximize our opportunities. I know there’s a ton of people that are going to be coming across our neck of the woods with our booth. And I’m just looking forward to the experience. I’ve never been a part of that.

You know, you think somebody that’s been in the automotive world for 30 years that I’ve been there a lot, I just really never had any interest in going. I’d rather been back at the store doing things that I need to do there. But that’s probably what I’m looking forward the most is hanging out with our teammates, uh, being in that type of environment and just learning from that situation of somebody walking up and saying, Hey, what do you do? So that’s going to be pretty cool.

Get stores. I mean, I think the investment that the Allen families provided us with going there and setting it up as a substantial, I’m sure. And we just need to really get out there and work hard to get as many leads and get as much recurrent income and dealers coming on board and get that annual spend from those guys and that in turn reaches out to other stores and then hopefully it will just roll downhill from there and we can just get a lot of traction out of this. I’m excited. I’m sure that’s going to happen. Getting the appointment set up and some of the podcasts that we’re going to be doing, that’s going to be exciting.

TVI MarketPro3 and Scott Kelford

If they know me, they know my background. I think an advantage for me was I had TVI MarketPro3 as my marketing partner who did a phenomenal job when I was at Chevrolet and then when I went and ran the Toyota store. So I can speak to that intelligently to know that it works and it works well enough that I gave up what I did with a lucrative career with the automotive group that’s well renowned.

I can help them maximize our opportunities whether it be with what’s a smart marketing approach to take which segment of guests that we go after but I’ve gone in and done repair order analysis with the service managers and you know looking to see why the repair or parts and labor tickets are down. Why are we having a retention issue? Why are we having a subsequent visit issue? There’s a lot of underlying factors when it comes to that. It’s not pointing at the marketing people your marketing’s not working. There’s a lot of reasons for that, and I think I’ve got a lot of people’s fingerprints on me over the years that’s given me the ability to answer those questions intelligently.

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