Jeremy Evans built Marketing Delivery after years inside dealer groups, OEMs and contact centres. He shares how “reward the lead, not the lag” thinking, plus stock-alert automation tied to your CRM, turns missed enquiries into sold cars.
What we cover
- How a cross-department start at Bristol Street and Nissan shaped a no-nonsense view of dealer ops, from dot-matrix “walk-in” sheets to today’s AI-assisted follow-ups.
- Setting up Marketing Delivery in 2007 and sending automated emails by 2009, and why the business shifted from “agency” to product.
- “Reward the lead, not the lag”: get the data right, then let tech keep the conversation warm until intent spikes again.
- Stock alerts that scan group inventory and price drops, email customers, and ping sales when they click, with around 10% of recipients going on to buy.
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About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade Podcast, an association with Symco Training. This is the weekly podcast where we share best practice tips and ideas on how to sell more cards, improve your service department and generally put more profit into your dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett. As some of you probably already know me as Skipping. I will start with saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today I'm joined with Jeremy Evans from Marketing Delivery. And for those of people who don't know Jeremy, people hiding under a rock there, Jeremy, firstly welcome aboard to the podcast. Thanks, Simon. Thanks for having me. And can you tell us a little bit about how do you first get started in the automotive industry and then maybe digital marketing after that? But where was your career path up to launching marketing? Yeah, so I started in, before I started in automotive I was a in high street reader. So I worked for Boots of Chemist. I was a soil manager and I did a lot of come to the commonwealth in the marketing area with them. And wanted to specialise more in marketing. I've always been a petrol head with my cars. So I started looking around for a marketing role with an automotive kind of bias to it. And yeah, took a plunge in 2001, I think it was, which seems like a very long time ago now, into into a motor with a marketing job with with Bristol's route motors. Yeah, pre-ver two days. The original Bristol Street. The original Bristol Street. Yeah, so I was working in the Bromley kind of market area and Bromley, Orperton, Dalit as our as our dealerships and initially started in an after sales marketing. That was the role and it was a Ford sponsored role that kind of placed people in dealer groups. And my, my management director there at the time, Michael John Tro, who I credit with having learnt every basic skill in automotive that he could possibly want to learn. He put me through a very solid kind of training induction programme where I spent time. He wouldn't let me do any day job until I'd spent time in every department. So sales department, body shop, sales department, accounts, vehicle admin, you know, very thorough induction into the industry. It doesn't happen. I'm not saying any more that. I know. I got to say, I did the same thing. I started washing cars. It was 18 months of spending in every department. Yeah. What a background though. Does that still set you up in good steps a day knowing how everything works in the deal? Absolutely. Absolutely. We often joke that the things we've built at Markton's delivery, we've built things that we wish we had 20 years ago when we were in dealerships working in dealerships because we were there. We felt the pain. We operated carriage refs 7.0. I think it was at the time. We used to generate service reminders. So we have to tell some people that his key loop for the people who are not used. Yes. Yeah. Now that was key loop. Yeah. Now that was key loop. Well, CDK halfway through. Like you've changed their name. That's it. Yeah. It was basically the Doc Matrix version of key loop back in the day. And we generate, you know, follow up lists for the sales team, literally on Doc Matrix, let's print out so that we'd hand out to them and the service reminders. So we were lucky in that we could merge to Excel and merge out to words documents so we could stick in the posts to people and we had a contact centre. We were set up one of the first contact centres to make outbound calls for a sales and service. And I sat myself in the in the office of the new car sales manager for a while just to get a moment of view of what they were doing, how they were recording inquiries and you know, the old favourite of the printed inquiry sheet where the most successful marketing source allegedly was the first box that got ticked on the form. Yeah. Walking, walking, walking. Yeah. Well, when we printed the, reprinted the form, we shuffled the order around for the sources. So we went from the Bromley News Shop are being the most important source of new leads to being the Thompson local directory, which given we'd stopped advertising in the Thompson local directory about two years ago and made for interesting reading. So, yes, all the things that we've built with tech now in fast forward to 20 odd years, it's basically to try and streamline and get better data out of the processes that have been the efforts at 20 plus years, but with the tech along now to improve them and make them faster than they used to do. So you said you're always being a pet or pet and people who are listening to that. The most people listen to this going for a jog or driving the work behind you is a couple of photos of lovely, old Mustang there. There's a couple of 9-11s I can see there. So as a child, were you always a petrol head? Were you the person who got a look at all the car magazines? Well, as a family growing up in South Wales, my dad used to be a member of the local kind of motor club and we used to go to kind of rallies in weekends and he'd march at these rallies and, you know, I'd stand there as a little kind of eight year old boy, you know, with Midego jacket on as these rally cars went past. And then we used to go to the British Grand Prix when it used to be at Brands Hatch and then at Silverstone. So we always grown up as a family of kind of petrol heads really. And I do a bit of racing myself in various series in the UK. We've got, you know, we're my son, both race now. So we're going to be a petroler. It's going to be in our veins really. That sounds great. That sounds really good. Okay. So this is a really separates the true motor traders. Now, I'd normally ask you remember the first car that you sold, but I suppose your part is a little bit different then. But working in the different departments, I'm sure you sold a car. I'm sure you spoke to a customer in the service department and told them their clients need to be changed. Do you remember the first car you sold it all? It would have been probably a four-thiesta in Bristol Street days when I went, you know, somebody came in to look at a car and other salesmen would be busy doing other things or if there was the only one there or something. So, yeah, I remember a few times in the showroom in Bristol Street just looking around me and going, well, there's nobody to look after this person. So I'll do it and just talk to people. I guess I came about it because of, you know, not being a formerly trained salesman. I just came at it from the conversational point of view and talked to a customer about what they were looking for, what they wanted. And obviously, the four-thiesta or whatever it was was the best choice for them because that's when they were looking at them. And I recognized the signs. You know, you used to have a Saturday job at boot selling scenarios and TVs. So, you know, you learn to listen, don't you? As a good salesman, listen more than they talk. Whenever I walk into a dealership, I might just see somebody talking at a customer. I go, just stop, just wait, just listen and then go with something that's going to be relevant. If you can get the customer nodding their head, I always said, if you can get the customer nodding along with you, then you know you're on the right track with them. So why marketing delivery? What inspired you to start the company? How was it your mission of all the years to meet the challenges of that dealership? As you said there, we're building things that we wish we had 20, 30 years ago. Yeah. So I went from Bisto Street to Burtuert to another deal group as kind of dealer marketing manager there and kind of wanted to spend a bit of time on the OEM side of things. So I spent a couple of years working with Nissan as one of their regional marketing managers and I saw how a dealer marketing service worked and provided assets and kind of insights and opportunities for dealers of that franchise to get the message out there. But many of the dealerships that I saw and I worked with in that role were either small one or two side dealerships that didn't have any in-house marketing expertise at all. They may have somebody looking at the database if they were lucky, but nobody, no marketing manager has decided to help bring these campaigns together or they were multi-franchise and Nissan was only one part of what they did. So the original plan with marketing delivery was to be that kind of outsourced marketing department for those dealer groups that didn't have an in-house marketing resource. So I'm not going to bring if they were multi-franchise, I would work with their various franchises and making sure they ticked all the boxes for what the manufacturer needed them to do. But then also had some solid marketing info, typically used cars where the manufacturer wasn't particularly interested in that, but that's obviously where the dealer made all the money. So we would do a lot of box-ticking to keep the manufacturers happy with new cars and then go and do what we needed to do with use cars. But that quickly turned into how do we use tech better. So it was at the dawn of the era where you had people like Tesco emailing people based on clubcard purchases, you had Amazon was there and was emailing people. And dealers were saying, well, how come we're sticking things in the post? Well, why can't we do these big email campaigns like High Street retailers can do? We've got all this data sitting on these systems. And of course, every time I visited a client, I would be looking at their database health and giving them a big long list of things to go and improve and get better at. And the challenge was then, well, what are we going to do with it? Once we've got all this data better recorded, what are we going to do with it? So that's when I started looking around for the things that we could do with it and how to do more kind of more email marketing, electronic marketing using the data that we had, but typically, the system didn't have any functionality for that built in. So the very early version of the data hub that we now have was taking data for something like I think it was the eager demand as at the time was the main system of choice in dealerships. We're sure now, aged now, aren't we? Yeah, so we are. So that we take that data into a little file and make a pro database that's sat on a Mac mini server on my desk. So we'd have the data and we plug that into a third party off the shelf email marketing system to try and do some sales follow up work on inquiry, follow up work. And then we started plugging in some DMS data for after sales, so we could do the service reminder programs with it as well. And that was the first iteration. So I set the business up in 2007. And by 2009, we were sending automated emails in a very early stage, but using typically eager manners data and the sales side of it. And then a bit of DMS data where we could get hold of it in after sales for service reminders. Yeah, I did a bit of trawling around to a bit of research on marketing delivery and self. And there's a phrase that come up that I really love the idea. You said you've talked about rewarding the link, not the lag in running out. I imagine you talk about the sales team. They all maybe I've got that wrong. How do you encourage that initiative and think pro activity among your staff while ensuring that the business meets its targets? What do you mean reward the lead, not the lag? So the lead, the lead is king. And if the data is right around the lead, there's so much we can do with it. Now there are more leads than there are sales execs to process them. So we are looking to say, look, if you get the lead right, you work your hardest to convert that lead while it's in its infancy, well, customers keen. If for whatever reason you can't get that customer over the line, let us pick it up. So rather than there be a lag, you've left it alone and you just wait now for the customer to sort themselves out and maybe come back to them or you might remember the old customer that says, oh, I was looking for a car and there's one that's just come in. Let us do that. So get the lead right, get the data right and let us then follow it up. So for example, we keep all the stock, the inventory feeds coming into our data hub. So if somebody hasn't bought a car, we know what car they're looking for. We know what stock the dealer has. So if another model of that comes into stock or one of the existing ones drops in price, let the tech pick that up and send out the email to the customer. Is that because we as salespeople, we tend to be more hunters than the farmers? Is that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you look at the consolidation in all of the most of the last 10 years, there are now more groups than there are individual dealerships. So if I'm a sales exec in a dealership trying to keep an eye on group stock, whereas I may have only had 10 years ago, I might have only had one or two dealerships stock to keep an eye on. I'm out of 10 or 15 dealers to keep an eye on now. I'm not going to be able to keep up with the changing stock profile in 10, 15 dealerships for every one of my open leads, but the tech can. So the tech runs in the background and assesses open leads versus stock profile and decides, yeah, let's send some of these cars out to these customers and see what happens. And then the sales exec can pick the lead up again when it gets hot. So IE customers clicked on the button. Our system is kicked the lead back over to the sales exec. So it says, right, Mr Evans is looking at this BMW 3 Series now on your website. Here's his details. Here's the vehicle details, basically, the go fetch. So the sales exec can work the lead and we'll take care of the lag. So the tech will run in the background. I keep that customer ticking over and tooled some things, you know, peaks their interest. And then all we need is the execs to keep the data up to date and to deal with it when the customer does pop back up again and having clicked the button and we've told them about it. The sales team is going to jump on it and get back onto that customer. Jeremy, can I go back to your early career? You're at Boots there. And I'm going to talk a little bit about any mentors or influencers in business. The reason why I say that, lots of people listen to this will either be senior managers in a business. They've just stepped into their maybe their first management role and they're having to lead a team. Okay. I'll ask you first thing. Were there any mentors along the way or people who influenced you in your career or lessons you learned that helped shape your leadership start? Yeah. So when I was at Boots, I took every second and go in. So I did roles in store operations and accounting. I took roles in sales and marketing. I took kind of store management roles. So if there was a role going that needed somebody to cover it for an eternity or somebody moved on and they were filling it temporarily until somebody as a permanent appointment was made. So I took all of those opportunities. So again, that's what I would say. Much like my grounding in automotive came from doing that induction and all the different departments when in a business, if an opportunity comes up to take on another role for a three, four, five, six month period to broaden the horizons, I would say take it because I took every role going. I also did a lot of formal management training. So I guess a big national company like Boots, you know, invests in that kind of thing. But also when I was at Bristol Street, you know, we were on the Ford College program to go and do our training courses up there. So that kind of team building and recognizing the stages of the team, the whole kind of you know, storming, norming, performing kind of, you know, a bit of that. Yeah. So, but that's all true now because whenever you put, you know, I see it now with the situation of businesses at the moment. And I guess we'll mention that a bit later on, but you know, we have new people slotted in working with each other now and recognizing the signs of when things are a bit stormy, but not reacting to it, letting it play out, seeing what's happening and understanding when to step in, when things have got a bit beyond that or when to just let it go because you can see things coming together. You know, I learned that at probably age, I don't know, 22, 23, on a Boots Management Training course. And that's the site that stayed with me ever since. So again, if there are, you know, execs out there and sales managers out there that have opportunities to go on external leadership courses and management training courses, I would say take it because you need to step outside of your environment a little bit and have somebody kind of go through the theory of it. And then you can think, well, what does that, how does that apply to me? It's not that he's never worked in automotive, but people are people and teams of teams. And you know, if you can take some of those observations back and just look at your team and the new fresh pair of eyes with, with a bit of a new interpretation behind it, it's really valuable. It's so true when you say a fresh pair of eyes because I just want to have you ever had to change your management style? For example, I know I'm a control freak and I end up micro managing everything and actually letting our trainers who, by the way, I always employ people. I've got a lot more experience than I do. But it's still hard to let go sometimes. I've had to do that, really. I mean, I joke that I set up a marketing company. I've accidentally ended up running a tech company. And I don't have a tech background. I think for the business to grow, I had to let go of the tech side of things and let tech people do the tech for me. You know, I could tell them what I wanted it to do because I understood the deal of processes and deal systems and what the outcome should be. But the terms of how to get there, I had to just learn to let somebody else do that. And I couldn't control everything because that would just stop our growth. If we had to wait for me to understand how to do something, we, you know, our growth would have been under crawl. So I had to recognize that fact and recognize that actually I need developers. I need people who build software for a living. I need to tell them what I want and then let them go off and do it. And he pre-est the team, the client services team has got bigger as we've grown. Again, I've had to let the andee my client services director have been with me at 12, 15 years, whatever he's been there. But, you know, letting run things, we brought in Charlotte as an MD for the business three years ago to again take that kind of day to day operational control of the business to let me look at the horizon and see where we're going with it. So yeah, that's, as you say, go from when you start off on your own and you build up your initial team with one, two, three, four people, then you can be in into absolutely everything when you've got a team of 20 people on 500 who deal a rooftops, you're looking after a tech stack that you've never touched in your life. Yeah, you do have to learn to kind of pull back and scan and zoom in, I guess, on the areas that you can be most effective in. Well, maintaining the culture though, because I'm sure the culture starts from you and that's still there right from the beginning. And you're right, we will be talking about the future and what's happened with the business and I want to get to that. But again, you've got to maintain that culture within another organization. That's going to be difficult, hasn't it? Do you guys do team events? How often do you get together? How often do you, because you're all over the country, I take it. That's going to be a challenge in the modern world. Yeah, so I mean, tech can help us. So we use teams and zoom and those kind of things all the time too. So every day we have, we call them stand up meetings where the tech team are on screen, one of them and the cloud services team are on screen and another. And we just go through what are we doing today? What have we done yesterday? What have we got doing today? Is anybody going to get any challenges they need any help with? Because when people are remote, and some of our developers are overseas, so when people are remote, the only way you can check in with people and see the whites of their eyes is if you jump on a team's call and get everybody to run through what they're doing. And then you can listen out for the trends and say, well, hang on, I know that person's been talking about the same thing for three or four days now. Are they struggling? Do we need to help them? Or that person seems to be flying through there to do this? Have they got a better capacity and they could help? And you can just kind of see, we vary early on, said, if you're on a team's call, you can use your cameras on. You can't be the excuse of, I haven't done my makeup or my eyebrows. I want to see the whites of your eyes. I want to see if somebody looks confident and comfortable whether they look like they're struggling. So that's the day-to-day kind of activity. And then we pull the client services teams and the camp managers in every quarter to the physical offsite meeting somewhere where we get everybody to update their client groups and share ideas, suggestions, good practices, successes, struggles as well. And then the social side of it a few times a year, we've always had a summer barbecue, where we get families and friends together. We used to do that at my house, but then we became far too big for that. So we're going to take over one of the local pubs in Tumbra as well as the Christmas booth and things like that. So yeah, it's important to try and get people together. You're never going to get everybody together at every event, but it's important to have a few of them throughout the year that it can be to quiz night at the local pub or bowling or something. But it's important to have a few of those throughout the year just to give people an opportunity to get together. Yeah, as a team. Now, let's get a little bit more specific into market delivery if we can. So for people who haven't worked with you before or they don't know you're someone's from a different country. We have lots of people listen to this in Australia and Canada and America and so forth. So I was having a look at some of the case studies of what you've done. And there's one case study there where you've actually improved the dealer sales teams performance jump from, I think it was 9.8 sales per month to 14.9 sales per month. I think I don't quote none of those exact numbers, but it's a huge increase. Practically, how does marketing delivery help that on the sales side at first? Yeah. So that primarily comes to turn to one of two things really. I mean, it's not simplistic as this, but it's easiest way to. It's the most measurable way of kind of explaining it in that I alluded earlier to kind of keeping stock feeds, updating the opening queries and we call that stock alerts. So where when we know a customer's come in looking at it to look for a car and hasn't bought when we did kind of lost sale research in the kind of early years of marketing delivery, I asked people a question, why didn't you buy the car that you came in for? The top answers were it wasn't available anymore. So we started to have a look at that and realized that the most popular cars in stock have got maybe 10 or 12 people looking at them. Only one of them can buy it. So what do you do about the other 9 or 10 people that may be looking at the car? Traditionally, it goes, if something comes in, I'll give you a call, but the fact customer ever gets called. Exactly. And the other one was kind of price or affordability issues. So that could be part exchange valuation wasn't where I thought it was going to be. Couldn't get the finance I thought I would get or thought I'd be able to negotiate hard and couldn't. So there was an affordability issue. And the third reason was, as you just alluded to, you would hope that somebody would keep an eye on it and call you back. The salesmen never called them back. So we came up with the program of stock alerts, which kind of addresses those three issues and says, right, okay, if anything comes into stock, there's new anything that's currently in stock drops in price, we will contact the customer. So we check every open need every three days against the inventory feed. And we have a look at those two things, new vehicles in stock and changes in price. Now, ending on the data we get through from the lead management systems, we may not have a lot to go on other than the make and model. So you could find that you have a five or six cars going out to the customer, one of which could be 70 grand, one of which could be 20 grand, depending on how old that car is, what the spec is. So we kind of got some AI running in the background, which assesses what the customers click on. And if they click on a car that's at 50 grand, then the next time it looks for a car for that customer in three days time, I'll narrow that price band to bring back more relevant stock. And that's where the extra sales stock coming from. So around about 10% of people who receive one of those stock alerts, you know, go on to buy car. It's not always the exact car they click on, but it keeps them coming back to the dealer website, keeps them back in a conversation with the dealership, where, as you said, in a more traditional world, then we're reliant on a sales executive to keep on top of the stock across their group and look to match that manually against the open needs they got. There's too much stock across consolidated groups. And there's too many open needs for somebody to do that practically well enough. So you get the tech to do that, and then you get extra sales. Jeremy, are you we're in an AI world now? Okay. And the last AM live conference where they, I think everyone just had to put AI behind their name. That's what it should be. So I just a practical question there. Are you putting that information back into the salesperson CRM? So that salesperson contacts, or are you going directly to the consumer? Both. Yeah, both. So we'll go with both the consumer with his the stock. Have a look at it. Click here, come to our website and have a look. Okay. And then if they take a positive action from that, we'll fire that back to the salesperson to say this customer is looking at this car on your website now, so they can do something with it. And then in a background, you know, I call it algorithmic intelligence is more than what is the AI that we we kind of do day in day out that we've got all these algorithms running refining that customer's profile, then every time they interact with one of our emails. So whether that's, as I said, to tweak the price search for the next time we look for a car for that customer, or whether it's to recognize that the customer has an open an email, so we'll send them a text message instead. You know, this, this always things going on in the background are set reassessing the data, typically the data feeds from the lead management systems come in every day. So again, we can look at the status as if there's a status change, we can tweak the message that goes out to that customer next. So then we've got thousands of algorithms running in the background constantly reassessing the data that we see, be that the management data, inventory data, customer activity, your what button are they clicked on and how they open things and allow them to not open things. So those algorithms are constantly running to decide which is the next contact for that customer. That just leads me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett through LinkedIn. Thank you.
