This is the 7th 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 roughly a 5-minute read and is 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.
Until now, I’d always assumed that Honda would want to adopt CitNOW for its dealer network, starting in the UK before spreading to Europe. It was because Honda was my only manufacturer relationship and partly a stubborn streak of optimism. After all, the only real success I had to show for my efforts so far was approval from Adam** for use in one Honda dealership in Stoke. Whether it would be used was a significant obstacle which I hadn’t even begun to address.
These were also unprecedented times. The 2007-2008 banking crisis had affected everyone, and the world was well and truly in recession. I was starting to look beyond Honda, hoping to find other dealers who might find CitNOW a service they wanted to use.
It was no surprise when Ian*** announced that Honda no longer expected exclusivity on the service. We were free to do what we wanted. It made sense. Aside from the initial £20k investment with Holdcroft, no further financial commitment had occurred. We’d delivered a solution as promised, but our timing could not have been worse.
Our relationship with Honda continued though, as we maintained and updated their TV channel. We were heavily reliant on the income generated from the monthly maintenance, a vital source of revenue as we continued our transformation from agency provider to software developer. We knew it was only a matter of time before this project fell victim to the next round of cuts. They arrived soon enough.
Both projects had never been endorsed by the new Marketing Director, a job many expected Ian to get. It wasn’t to be. Cutting costs was a priority, and we were an obvious target - decision easily made.
Being cut adrift gave us one of two choices: sink or swim. We’d best be quick about it, too. I became focused on the fact that there were 5,500 franchised dealers in the UK, fewer today, who could all benefit from our tool. But what was the best use of my time? How do I get to those dealers who might at least be interested in exploring further?
I don’t mind cold-calling, but it’s a blunt instrument and not very effective. Outside of Honda, I knew no one in the car industry. There was no money for advertising, and we didn’t have a dealer database conveniently populated with decision makers and the best number to call them on. Somehow, I needed to get to know some car dealers and turn them into raving fans.
Part of the answer was third-party suppliers, especially website providers like G-Forces, Bluesky Interactive; there were others. They all had healthy client relationships and were already spending significant marketing budgets on their web presence, which made them a more likely fit. At worst, we were considered to be the entertainment, a quick 15-minute demo at the end of an account meeting. At best, they knew exactly which dealers would want to trial and gave their full support to help make it happen.
The Audi dealership in Dulwich Village was the first dealer I persuaded to take a 3-month CitNOW pilot. I hid my Corsa around the corner to avoid any awkward questions. The cost was £200 per month for a minimum of 90 days. If they loved it, the contract would be extended to a year.
I encountered exactly the same problem as I’d experienced at Holdcroft. The decision maker was the owner’s son. The sale had gone well enough with several meetings, including the Sales Manager’s presentation, who seemed particularly engaged. I knew it was going well when he started to recount if only stories.
If only we’d had this last week when John had a remote sale on the Azure Blue Cabriolet.
I visited several more times to train the sales team and then sporadically in the weeks that followed, trying to change what was happening. No one was using it, and the outcome would become all too familiar. They cancelled before the end of the three-month pilot; the Sales Manager out of excuses.
During these early months, there were also some successes to cheer about. Peter at Budgen Motors was probably the best first encounter I ever had. His title may have been Dealer Principal, but he was running three Peugeot/Citroen dealers in the Shrewsbury/Telford area and doing it well. He was an exciting blend of old-school discipline, cars don’t sell themselves, and a clear vision of how the internet would support his sales forecasts.
First impressions can also be deceiving. I was shown up some back stairs to their parts department and a small room where Peter had just finished a meeting. The wooden floorboards and the dusty smell took me back to my Duracell selling days, counting stock upstairs in a dark corner of Woolworths.
The presentation didn’t take long, and I thought it had gone okay. When I got to the point of explaining the three-month trial period, he cut me off,
We won’t be trialling CitNOW, there’s no need, sign me up for the year.
I was gobsmacked and, of course, delighted. He knew more than he’d been letting on about the importance of remote presentation. It didn’t take long to realise that he had a firm grip on his business, what he expected from his sales teams and where money was best spent. We might have been meeting in a dusty back office, but he spent thousands on his website, online advertising and now a remote presentation tool called CitNOW.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**Adam was the Dealer Principal at Honda Holdcroft, Stoke-on-Trent
***Ian was number two in Honda UK’s marketing department