How we built a business out of recession - chapter 10 - to the bat phone
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 10th chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is a 5-minute read, it’s an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
Have you ever walked into a car showroom during the working week? I’ve walked into hundreds. They all have one thing in common, they’re empty. The occasional noise to interrupt pins dropping is the staff who work there. It becomes much less mausoleum-like when aftersales receptions are also located in the same environment. The truth is most of us reserve the physical act of buying a car for the weekend.
It was no different for Jason and his sales team at Jaguar Warrington. There would typically be three salespeople dotted around the showroom desks and Jason in his office. Much of the weekly activity was progress chasing sales and getting ready for the weekend with potential customers booked for test drives.
Jason was committed to making CitNOW work for his business and encouraged his team by getting stuck in himself. It was rare for a Sales Manager to pick up the kit, and I was grateful for his support. The phone wasn’t ringing off the hook in his dealership, nor would it ever be; Jags are not a volume purchase. There were maybe two or three daily enquiries, so he wanted everyone to make the most of every opportunity presented.
The first six months weren’t the best. Any manager must take time and effort to encourage adoption, which Jason did, until priorities shifted and weeks went by with the presentation numbers dropping off. Worse was the fact that sales weren’t suffering as a result. How could I justify that this was a valuable process worthy of all their time, effort and money when it didn’t appear to be bumping up the numbers?
I imagined the words from Jason’s boss ringing in my ears: Thanks son, we’ve given it a good go, doesn’t make a blind bit of difference; the sales team aren’t in love with it, so we’re not wasting any more time and money. Fair enough?**
The counter to this was evidence that presentations did lead to sales, and everyone in the team was more than capable of making them happen. But performance always seemed to drift when the reminders stopped being made at the weekly sales meetings.
I spent a lot of time with Jason discussing this issue and why his salespeople continued to be off-and-on users rather than always trying to show the car when they had the chance. We concluded that it was simply too much hassle. I didn’t have an answer to it and assumed that, eventually, Jason would go the same way as many others and not renew.
It was a depressing thought, even though I was grateful he’d invited me into his business more than others had. I was at least now aware of the stresses and strains of selling cars, which was a great benefit as the business continued to grow.
We still didn’t have that many dealers after two years of hard graft. I used to refer to it as the revolving door of 40 (dealers). There was a steady trickle both ways as pilots started for three months and then failed due to inactivity. As fast as I added them, they fell off the other end. Some made it through the pilot phase, and I could breathe momentarily as contracts renewed for the next 12 months.
For evening homework, I typically looked at dealer dashboards, where I could see the activity levels for each account, down to individual salesperson. It was easy to see where my next problem would come from, but occasionally, there was a welcome surprise.
One such surprise was Rybrook Jaguar Warrington’s numbers; they were no longer yo-yoing as they used to. They’d become remarkably stable, with a consistent number of video presentations every week. What had changed? I asked Jason, and he started to talk about the bat phone and how he had finally cracked it. I had to see this for myself.
Leads generated for Jason’s dealership were handled centrally by Rybrook’s marketing team. He had little control over what they did or how much they spent, but he was responsible for reporting the number of leads generated and what happened to them.
The first step in an inbound telephone enquiry, after the usual questions was to confirm that the customer wanted to see the vehicle. A yes meant the salesperson had to ring the customer back, so they could use the dedicated phone line with a headset attached. There was also the practicality of finding and positioning the car so that a safe presentation could be made with plenty of Rybrook and Jaguar branding in the background.
Jason changed all this by putting the direct number with the headset (the bat phone) in any advertisements and asking potential customers to ring if they wanted to see the car immediately. As I saw for myself, the whole team jumped into action when that phone rang. Jason would usually be the cameraman; one salesperson would deal with the customer on the phone, and another would rush the car into place as soon as they knew which one was of interest.
It was a genius move and impressive to watch. With a bit of teamwork, his Jaguar dealership now had a significant advantage over the rest of the country. Jason had decided to invite the customer into his showroom, whenever they liked.
The public never had a problem with watching a live video stream. I always thought they’d be amazed and perhaps overwhelmed when their PC screen sparked into life, and they could look at their potential purchase from the comfort of their home or office. Not a bit of it. The issue has always been at the other end, persuading salespeople that it was worth making the effort.
It was amazing to watch. It was also the first time a dealer had found a better way to make the tech work for their business. It also wasn’t the last. L&L, a Mercedes-Benz dealer in Hertford, had an astute car buyer, John, who gave me another brilliant alternative use for our live video tech.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**It wasn’t far from the truth. Eventually, they cancelled the Volvo licence for Warrington, who was opposite Jason. Phil (Volvo Chester) decided to keep his, another great operator who harnessed the power of what was on offer.