How TARTLE Can Help the Automotive Industry Grow Quickly

Alexander McCaig (00:07):

Okay, how do we get to work? Cars, right? Cabs? Cars. Pretty much anything since the early 1900, thank you, Henry Ford is done with cars.

Jason Rigby (00:19):

Well, especially now after COVID everybody wants to have their safe space, so car buying is crazy.

Alexander McCaig (00:24):

No, car buying is nuts. So why Jason, why the hell are we talking about cars on Tartle?

Jason Rigby (00:30):

Well, I want to talk to people that are in the automotive industry.

Alexander McCaig (00:33):

First of all, you're an expert in the automotive industry.

Jason Rigby (00:35):

Yes, [crosstalk 00:00:36].

Alexander McCaig (00:35):

Playbook for Snapchat on how they should advertise automotive stuff.

Jason Rigby (00:40):

Yes. So whenever you look at the automotive industry, and I want to talk to those people specifically in that industry, and I'm going to present a couple use cases with you and problems that the automotive industry is facing.

Alexander McCaig (00:53):

Got it.

Jason Rigby (00:54):

So one, and first all we have taking a dealership model, which is very, very old and transforming it to a digital model. And then understanding, they are understanding one thing most dealerships, and everybody will agree on this in automotive, it's leads are important. How we handle them is not being done exactly right because we're left with salesman that's been there for a month or whatever. But leads are extremely important, so let's start there. Because every, you go ask any owner principal of any dealership, you ask any sales manager, general manager, they are going to say, "We need more leads and we need good quality leads."

Alexander McCaig (01:34):

Oh, so you want quality.

Jason Rigby (01:35):

Because they can get quantity.

Alexander McCaig (01:36):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (01:37):

You can go to all these different companies and buy lead sources and they're expensive.

Alexander McCaig (01:40):

Yeah, but what's the problem with that? I got to start and just hit this right now. Okay, we got to fucking squash this. When everybody in the industry is going to the same big three people handing out leads, what does that mean? You were all squeezing each other. You're all trying to bite off the same flesh and there's nothing left, but you got the bone there.

Jason Rigby (02:03):

Well, it turns into squid games.

Alexander McCaig (02:05):

It turns into a squid game, right?

Jason Rigby (02:06):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (02:06):

So you have to understand, you need to go and meet people differently.

Jason Rigby (02:12):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (02:12):

You need to find where the blind spots were. You got to find those individuals that otherwise didn't have their data captured, that aren't on those leads lists that are being shared with everybody else. And you're paying through the nose for something that somebody already else has. That's not an asset, that's a commodity. You're buying a commodity. What you need to do is transition your lead into asset buying.

Jason Rigby (02:33):

Yes, and leads, the most important thing with the lead is if you're just buying leads for lead sakes and you're just getting a bunch of people that have microsites, because that's how they do it, they have hundreds of ... they'll have like ...

Alexander McCaig (02:45):

You're on an Autotrader?

Jason Rigby (02:47):

Yeah, yeah. And then Autotrader will have, maybe not them specifically but we'll use them example, they will have a thousand microsites that are out there that are like a sports car one, and then it shows your inventory. And then it tries to collect a lead from all these different microsites are like, special rebates, rebates you only get if you buy a Jeep. And then that's a micro page, and then people fill ... it's just landing page after landing page. But here's the problem.

Alexander McCaig (03:09):

Tell me.

Jason Rigby (03:10):

Here's the big problem with it all, you're getting information that's passive aggressive information. You're trying to interrupt somebody in something that they're doing, and then you're trying to see if their intent is strong enough to fill out a form. But what do you do after that? And how strong is that intent? Do they really want to buy a car?

Alexander McCaig (03:31):

That's a great question. Why are they on the micro site? I don't know. Who knows what link brought them there. Go on Wikipedia and you ever done the link game?

Jason Rigby (03:38):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (03:38):

Click on it. It just brings you page to page to page to page to page. How do you really know what the person wants? All you're doing is you're preloading the entire thing with a form because somebody clicked on an ad. Oh, maybe there's like a half a second of interest. What's the established relationship? What is it? Do you know anything about this person? Really where they're coming from? No. You're just delivering a targeted ad through some online system and the person happened to click on the banner. Okay, great. Okay, but does that actually drive the person to a conversation with the person who's going to sell them the car?

Jason Rigby (04:15):

No.

Alexander McCaig (04:16):

No. Does the person really know what's going on with that information? No. Do they have any benefit from the start for filling that out? Zero. What's their incentive? If there's no quality incentive, you're not going to get quality information, so you are working off of collected leads online that are frankly garbage. And if you don't want those, then you're buying it from some of their group who knows where they got the information from, but they've also shared it with a thousand other parties. How do we invert that model? It doesn't work. You got to find a way to establish relationships with those people you want driving your car. Why should they be a part of your brand? Well, you got to establish a relationship with them. You have to incentivize them. Medallia, which most of the OEMs use to do their analysis on customer experience, they do it after the fact. And then Medallia's like, "We got AI. We can tell you, we can predict what's going to happen." Who cares about predictions? Who cares about after the fact?

Alexander McCaig (05:12):

The key thing is you need to drive revenue. You need a person to walk onto your lot and buy that car, sign the paperwork and leave, and then come back as many times into service department so they can bill you. And then you send it back to the larger OEM. That's your cycle. But I got to tell you, just understanding what happened after the fact, people are already exhausted from the car buying experience. It takes a long time. They're spending a lot of money. Why would you then ask them to give you more information after the fact and give them no benefit for it. That system doesn't work, it's broke.

Jason Rigby (05:43):

And that's where Tartle comes in because what they're not understanding is when you incentivize something to do something, every sales floor that is out there, the salesperson is what? Incentivized to do that.

Alexander McCaig (05:57):

Correct,

Jason Rigby (05:58):

Because it's funny, a general manager can go out there and put a spiff out for the weekend and say, "You get an extra hundred dollars for every car you sell." Well he knows if he pays a thousand dollars, there's 10 extra cars that got sold.

Alexander McCaig (06:09):

Correct.

Jason Rigby (06:10):

Or more, depending on what's going on.

Alexander McCaig (06:13):

Because these guys are incentivized. They're like, "We got to sell."

Jason Rigby (06:16):

And you need to do that with your customer. And that's where Tartle comes in.

Alexander McCaig (06:18):

Right.

Jason Rigby (06:19):

We're not asking you to pay any more. The $17 you're paying for a lead now or whatever, fine.

Alexander McCaig (06:24):

But don't pay it to some third party company.

Jason Rigby (06:26):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (06:27):

Pay it to the person that's going to spend that money back on your car.

Jason Rigby (06:30):

Yes. Yes.

Alexander McCaig (06:31):

That makes way more sense.

Jason Rigby (06:32):

So I mean, and if you want to, you can take all of your leads and all of that information, have it automatically go into Tartle through your CRM. We can even do the survey as Medallia in your DMS afterwards, after the sales, that's really easy, too. And we can work with your service department to create. We can ask them, "How was your experience?" All that stuff.

Alexander McCaig (06:51):

Correct.

Jason Rigby (06:52):

We can do after the sale stuff, that's cool. But I'm focused on before the sale, because this is like the ...

Alexander McCaig (06:57):

... hardest part.

Jason Rigby (06:57):

Linchpin. The most important thing that you can understand how Tartle is so unique and so different from any other company and any other, if you want to stick with just leads butt we do so much more than leads, is we can take your data, and I'm thinking, I know a dealership right now who has 120,000 email addresses.

Alexander McCaig (07:20):

Why can't that dealership go to 120,000 emails and say, "Hey, we want to pay you for more information. Go to this data packet on Tartle, fill it out, and we'll pay you for that info. Whether or not you do anything with us after the fact, we are trying to understand you. We're trying to understand you in this area. We're trying to understand you and how you feel about your car, your car experience."

Jason Rigby (07:43):

And I'm not going to call out any companies, but there is a company out there that is doing leads and giving leads. And then they say, "We need to be hooked to your system. We're going to take all of your data. And then we're going to give you this lead for free. And then if they buy a car, and in the meantime we're taking all data," and we could do a whole, I won't do a whole show of what they're doing with the data, but you could guess, but you guys can contact us if you would like to know.

Alexander McCaig (08:09):

Hey, Jim, we've got this dealership's data. You should check this out.

Jason Rigby (08:15):

Because data is gold.

Alexander McCaig (08:16):

Yep.

Jason Rigby (08:16):

So if anybody is, if you're paying for somebody to take your data ...

Alexander McCaig (08:21):

Something is horribly backwards.

Jason Rigby (08:23):

Yes, exactly. They should be paying you tens of thousands of dollars for your data, because it's worth that much to dealerships out there. But here's the thing, here's the crazy part, this company is ... so once you sell the car, then they have proof in their system because they can go in your CRM and look at if it was sold or not and your DMS. And then they charged like $395, something like that. So you're paying $400 for a sale of a car, and they gave you that person. You're like, "Yeah, I'll pay $400." But the problem is they're making dealerships compete against each other. They're making them drive the price below invoice.

Alexander McCaig (09:04):

Correct.

Jason Rigby (09:05):

So you're already kind of losing money and then you're going to lose $400 more, for what?

Alexander McCaig (09:09):

For what? So here's what we want to offer, this is our offer. Remove yourself from this sick, deprived market that you're working in, and move into a new one. Move into one where you have an established relationship, where you determine the price. It's not being squeezed. And the lead that you get is fully qualified and it becomes an asset, and you pre-established the relationship a person, not after the fact when you've done all the work and hopefully incentivized them to buy a car and they come in and then you ask them to do a survey. What's the likelihood of that?

Alexander McCaig (09:43):

Disney, Disney world has the hardest time getting surveys from people. And usually the other ones that fill out the ones that are off. So how you capture the people ahead of time to really know? And they'll be cool with you contacting them because you've already paid them. They're like this, "Okay. I'm cool. I get it." They were already incentivized to establish that relationship with you. There's an exchange. There's something real going on. Not, "Why is this person calling me or sending me something? I don't know who you are. Where'd you get my info."

Jason Rigby (10:10):

Yeah, and this is some old school system that we have set up, because automotive industry is one industry we deal with. We're a tech company that deal with a ton of industries.

Alexander McCaig (10:17):

Ton of industries.

Jason Rigby (10:17):

So this isn't some BDC, business development center we have set up out of country and we're just spamming people. None of that is happening. This is going directly to the person that you want to speak to.

Alexander McCaig (10:29):

Correct.

Jason Rigby (10:30):

And then we can take the leads that you have now and we could show you that. In fact, we have an offer for people, the first data packets, what's the ...?

Alexander McCaig (10:38):

Your first 5,000 data packets, we'll pay for it. So if you want to bake that into your leads up to your first 5,000, we'll do it. We'll prove to you. We'll show you. I'll hand you something and you're going to be like, "Are you shitting me? This information is available?" Yeah, it is. Isn't it important, let's think about, just let's get a little wacky with this. All right? Say I want to acquire date on some of the people here in Albuquerque. Maybe I want to know who's six foot five. They may not fit in a Mazda 3.

Jason Rigby (11:05):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (11:06):

Why am I delivering an ad to a giant? Right? I can't give a clown car to a giant. In all seriousness, I should be delivering them an ad for our largest vehicle. That's probably what's going to make the most sense. Don't I want to know how much disposable income this person has? Would I want to know what they're currently driving, what the value of that is ahead of time? What their favorite colors are? What they're looking for? If they have a preference towards leather? How they want to be treated when they come to the dealership? Do they want to buy a car? Do they want to refinance? You would know all of this.

Jason Rigby (11:40):

You're going to know all of that information. And the cool part about it too is maybe you want to have them not just be incentivized, but maybe you want to have them, let's use Subaru.

Alexander McCaig (11:50):

Go for it.

Jason Rigby (11:51):

That Subaru is the best example of this.

Alexander McCaig (11:52):

Yep.

Jason Rigby (11:53):

Let's say you want to have them donate to a cause that Subaru supports.

Alexander McCaig (11:56):

Oh, how cool.

Jason Rigby (11:56):

So if they fill out this information or share this information with you or send a picture or a download, we have so many different types of options. We take all kinds of data.

Alexander McCaig (12:04):

All types.

Jason Rigby (12:04):

So however creative we want to be with the process, then they can turn around and be notified that if they do that, then it can be given to this organization that's not for profit.

Alexander McCaig (12:15):

How cool is that? If Subaru wants to do it for some dog nonprofit, do it.

Jason Rigby (12:22):

Yeah. Or I think the big one is like Sierra Club.

Alexander McCaig (12:25):

And anything like that. So those individuals, when you're getting their information, you know that market. They would be more than happy to donate the earnings they got from sharing their information towards a not for profit. Because that's the whole point, it has to benefit everybody. And the models you have been using are archaic, out of date and they only benefit one party, the person's selling you leads, which they've also sold to a thousand other people. You've bought a commodity, not an asset. You're dealing with corn, we're dealing with gold. So do you want to own the gold or do you want to own the corn? Because the gold is the thing that actually gets someone to come in and buy the car.

Jason Rigby (12:59):

Yeah, and it's on the blockchain, which means that ...

Alexander McCaig (13:03):

There's proof that you own it.

Jason Rigby (13:05):

Yes, that you own it. Yes, exactly.

Alexander McCaig (13:06):

That you know that that lead which you bought, came from that person with full consent.

Jason Rigby (13:11):

And it's ethical.

Alexander McCaig (13:12):

It's very ethical.

Jason Rigby (13:13):

Which in the car business, that can be a situation. We all know the situation.

Alexander McCaig (13:18):

We know the perspective that people have of the car business and internally.

Jason Rigby (13:23):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (13:24):

You don't have to lie to yourself. We know what's going on.

Jason Rigby (13:26):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (13:28):

You need to step up your game.

Jason Rigby (13:30):

Well, it's just risk prevention for the owner. And this is who I specifically want. We can talk to dealerships of course, auto dealer groups that are large auto dealer groups. Great, we'd love to be able to have a conversation. We'll fly there, have a conversation with you. OEMs, we'd love to talk to. But if you're a small dealership or a dealership that's out there and you would like to get your first up to ...

Alexander McCaig (13:58):

5,000 data packets.

Jason Rigby (13:59):

5,000 data packets and team up with us, we'd love to use you as a case.

Alexander McCaig (14:05):

I love that. I really think that we can help the automotive industry.

Jason Rigby (14:08):

Yes, a hundred percent.

Alexander McCaig (14:09):

And I will hammer this over and over and over and over, the money you pay is going towards that end user. This is not to make Tartle rich.

Jason Rigby (14:18):

No. We have a free marketplace.

Alexander McCaig (14:20):

I'm so adamant about this because people are like, "Oh, these guys are just trying to make ..." Well listen, everybody's got to make money to survive. But you have to understand the value which you're willing to pay for that information goes towards that person. Tartle will not take that money away from that end user.

Jason Rigby (14:35):

No.

Alexander McCaig (14:36):

Ever. It all goes to them. We have to be clear about that. We brought on our chief revenue officer. This is how I explained it to him, "You are not the chief revenue officer for Tartle. You are the chief revenue officer for the people on Tartle." Totally changes perspective. Totally changes the game.

Jason Rigby (14:56):

A hundred percent.

Alexander McCaig (14:57):

Is this clear?

Jason Rigby (14:58):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (14:59):

So what I would like to do is I would like to speak to all those businesses out there. If you want to start generating ethical leads which are assets and not work in this commodities world where you're already on the tightest margins and you're dealing with things that are very risky and you're completely unsure what's going to happen. If one thing goes wrong and you're on that margin, you can kiss your profits goodbye for the year. One bad lawsuit, one thing that happens with that data, it's over. It's game over. That dealership's going to hurt. You're going to have to lay off some people. Let's prevent those things from occurring. Let's get ahead of it. Let's be offensive against these things. And I can see that happening with these major automotive groups, with the OEMs, and with the smaller dealers. And we're willing to help you do it.

Speaker 6 (15:51):

Thank you for listening to Tartlecast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path. What's your data worth?