This is the 8th 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.
Thanks to some of those third-party web agencies, we now received a steady trickle of leads. Realistically, I couldn’t have coped with many more. Each dealer required an initial presentation, and often, I would return again when the real decision-makers became available.
A yes to a three-month pilot meant my role as a salesperson might be over, but work as IT support and Project Manager had just begun. Technicalities needed to be discussed to ensure broadband would be available where required, often resulting in weeks of waiting while BT installed a new line before I could test anything. It also meant liaising with the dealer group’s IT person. I never met one who wasn’t chasing his tail and really didn’t need my requests on top of everything else that needed to be done yesterday.
Finally, when it was all set up, I organised a training day to introduce the sales team to the new kit, teaching them how to make a successful live video presentation. I quickly became wise to our chances of success. It all depended on the actions of two people.
The ones which failed always had a common theme. There was little to no buy-in from the Sales Manager. They begrudgingly allowed me to train each member of the sales team during the day but were never available to make a video themselves. The Dealer Principal who’d made the decision was either off-site or too busy. This played right into the hands of the Sales Manager, who would see the trial out with as minor an inconvenience as possible.
It’s easy for me to criticise and paint a poor picture, frustrating as it was, but they were only behaving the way many of us do when change appears to be forced upon us. Their sales targets were always demanding, and they had tried and tested methods to get results. Spending time on live presentations with unfamiliar, awkward equipment must have been uncomfortable and was often dismissed as a waste of time. Many managers would much rather double down on their sales teams making more phone calls and have the security of an agreed appointment with the customer to view the car on-site the following weekend. Why show the customer anything unless they were prepared to take the trouble to visit the dealer? It was a common theme.
I also wasn’t a trainer, too impatient, and didn’t have a structured training programme designed to ease everyone into this new way of selling. That would have to wait until we could afford to invest in a training team.
Live was also a scary word to use to describe this exciting opportunity. Many of the salespeople I met hated presenting to an invisible audience, even though they were still having a phone conversation via the headset. There was also a strong aversion to turning the camera around to say hello properly, even though the idea of a face to a name was hard to argue with when they were all taught to do meet and greets, part of the traditional sales process that they knew so well.
One of the mistakes we made when we had tens of dealers was to stop raiding TK Max for bags to carry the small netbook computer. Although the bags came in various makes and colours, they were often grey or black. We thought nothing of it when we decided to buy some bright red ones made with our logo emblazoned on the front. They looked great, but not to many of the salespeople I was trying to train. It was just another reason to avoid using it.
One Thursday afternoon, I saw a salesperson outside one of my many problem dealerships making a CitNOW presentation. I’d turned up as I often did to go over old ground, trying again to get some commitment to at least give it a go. I could barely believe what I was seeing.
I waited for him to finish, desperate to know what had possessed him to suddenly start wasting his time when he’d shown so little interest until now. It transpired that the sales team had a target of doing three CitNOWs a week. He was off tomorrow, so was doing his presentations before it was too late. There was money at stake if he didn’t. But why was he carrying the closed netbook in one hand and the camera in the other? Apparently, he wouldn’t be seen dead in his Boss suit with a red bag over his shoulder.
I was proving to be even less popular than usual, and I wanted to cry with joy and scream hallelujah. Finally, a Sales Manager with a backbone. I went in to congratulate him, only to get another ice-cold reception. He’d only introduced the new process because the Dealer Principal had finally demanded that he did something before the trial ended.
It might sound like a well-fought victory, but it wouldn’t turn out to be. These situations never ended well for the dealer or CitNOW. An incentive to encourage use can be good, especially in the beginning, but sticks and no carrots rarely worked. Later, we found salespeople who were recording videos under similar circumstances. We could see what they were doing from their dealer dashboards. The videos barely lasted a minute and were never sent to any customer. The good news was, they’d done their quota for the week, ticked a box, job done; it was all an entirely pointless waste of time.
Despite the struggle, we continued to increase revenue slowly. Leads started to come in from dealers who had heard about our video presentations on the grapevine and wanted to hear more. It was so encouraging because at least I knew there was some genuine interest, and I was delighted to spend time explaining how CitNOW could work for them.
The type of enquiry we received also started to change with dealer groups now interested as well as the more usual one-offs. Several of these groups became great, long-standing customers, which profoundly affected our future development for entirely different reasons.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.