Richard Keith Latman - The Blog

Wow - Lots of You

Before I was going to sleep I looked at the traffic to this BLOG today: 22,019 unique computers! Amazing that this BLOG has caught fire around the globe and I am pleased to share my insights and ramblings. Notice no ads here, this is a personal BLOG and there's a lot more coming.

Stay Tuned...

eLeadCRM and Dealer.com Get Into The Game

Today was really a great day, 5 new accounts with tons of new leads and we got to smoke out a few more competitors talking crap about me personally. Those of you not in the sales game have no idea what a great compliment it is to have other firms trying to use my background against me: It means we are winning the technology and they can't beat us any other way. Over the past couple of days these companies like Dealer.com and eLeadCRM (they bake good cookies I hear which is probably why their CRM sucks) have both sent emails and sleazy reps like Rick Rogers out to talk smack and help dealers realize the real weakness of their product. The new tact by Dealer.com (exposed by an embedded IP address in an anonymous email when we added a tracking token and they replied to a message) is to send "good samaratian" emails to experts in the industry like this one:

From: bob johnson

Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 2:21 PM

Subject: [BULK] Beware of iMagicLabs and Keith Richard Latman

Anytime I post a response on DealerRefresh it gets deleted, that's why I'm contacting you directly. Mr. Kershner gets paid a lot of money by iCarMagic to promote their product. He doesn't seem too interested when people have other opinions than him. Especially when they are negative or truthful.

Keith Richard Latman, the owner of iMagicLabs, is currently on house arrest for being convicted of fraud where he stole SSN numbers and forged documents to get personal loans during his bankruptcy proceding which stems from a previous failed business where he was found guilty of credit card fraud and currently owns the State of Washington $1.5 million in fines and restitution. After house arrest he'll be on a strict probation for 5 years.

This was a part of a plea bargain.

iMagicLabs is really just a poor copy of Dealer.com's products. If you like iCarMagic, you'll love Dealer.com's stuff. Much better product, but Higher Gear is good stuff, too.

If you feel compelled to try iCar don't pay by credit card. Rick, ie Keith/Richard Latman still uses some of these tricks from his previous shady past. Many dealers complain of being double and tripled billed on their credit cards. Even if you pay by check make sure you keep meticulous records of what invoices you're paying. Latman creates a huge paper trail that can confuse the best bookkeepers. You really should ask for some dealers that are currently on their system and dealers that left as references to get a better opinion.

There are just as good products out there than iMagicLabs. All things being equal do you really want a convicted felon having access to your customer's Personal and Financial information? Think about the liability. By changing the name of the company and his name a few times he's able to keep people from Googling on him and finding out the truth. Be careful.

Sincerely,

Bob

It really just makes me laugh so hard I cannot tell you because it's just pure fiction. I plead guilty to one count of hiding my ex-wife’s wedding ring during a bankruptcy proceeding in the year 2000. Yes, I did it to protect that ring (which in 29 states is exempt from bankruptcy completely) and to be totally honest at the time I felt justified doing it. There has never been a criminal complaint filed against me for any other reason and I am only too happy to talk about what happened and why I did what I did with anyone.

There is an old adage in the advertising business that no publicity is bad publicity and our sales have skyrocketed since this slander campaign has started. I only hope that more of the desperate sales teams out there continue to make dealers wonder about who "Richard Keith Latman" is because they are giving me an audience with folks I'd never have met. Many of my closest friends in this business have come from people wanting to know more and then finding out who I really am. It's refreshing to see their faces light up when they see that iMagicLab is the real deal and the rest of these guys are fakers hiding behind anonymous email addresses and cloaked BLOG posts.

More soon,

Keith

P.S. Open note to Mark Bonfigli (big cheesy at Dealer.com), I mean Bob Johnson, you just lost another couple of industry folks and no amount of emails from Dan Jackson (VP of Something at Dealer.com) will help. Folks are tired of you all...

5Square.com Part II

Guess what? I had a very nice conversation with the big cheese over at 5square today and you know what he said? He told me that it was all false, the dealer was a liar and with his stellar ethics he would never say anything like that. Now, he continued, he may have overheard one of his directors or other officers saying something false and untrue but HE said nothing. Amazing how folks get scared and put their tails between their legs when directly confronted.

Note to Skip and the 5square crew: Anytime, anyplace, anywhere in front of any audience (including your venture capitalists) where you want to compare technology and see what a real CRM looks like just let me know. Oh wait, that won't work, you don't really have a product to show.....

5Square Trashing Me?

I just got off the phone where I heard that a little company called 5Square is trashing me personally in a feeble attempt to get sales. Look guys, when you build such a bad product, even after getting VC's to back your company with millions of dollars, and then you have to result to name calling it just shows what kind of folks you are. Here's a hint: How about trying to compete with me on say vision? How about actually competing on merit or the software itself? Oh, wait, your entire executive staff has never sold a car... Now I get it...

I really didn't make this up :) , take a look:

http://www.5square.com/aboutus04.html

What's even better is that they did a press release on creating an autoresponder (really I know some of you are doubters but I can't make stuff this good up):

http://www.5square.com/news_automated_follow-up_tool.html

Maybe you guys should do like the other wannabe's in the space and just copy me? Tell your Venture Capitalists it might make for a better liquidity event because you can spend less on R&D and more on money telling auto dealers false stories. Me? I'll just go help lots of folks sell cars...

Keith

P.S. Skip (the big cheese over there) I left you a voicemail today to discuss my thoughts, call anytime.

SEO Keyword: Overrated

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, gather around because we're going to create qualified customers before your very eyes!

“We're going to sell 100 units more a month, increase parts revenue, retain service customers and yes, we're going to do this without you lifting a finger. Write us a check and poof, like magic, your dealership will be transformed into a mean, lean selling machine.”

Give me a break.

Throughout my years in the car business there has always been something offered to dealers that was full of hype and promise but carried little substance or return on investment.

Here is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) falls into that category:

1. Impossible to measure

   SEO will bring people to your site, but most of them will be folks that you would have got anyway or who are a waste of your time. SEO companies claim all sales that originated from any search engine are success stories for the optimization process, which aims to make websites search-engine friendly. With 70-80% of all car buyers using the web at some point, it will appear that most of your sales are caused by their efforts.

2. Jargon means nothing

   I don't care how many hits I get on the keyword I bought at Google. I don't care about how many “click-throughs” my site paid for either. I only care about leads that turn into car deals. It's easy to get dazzled by all the lingo and hype that claims SEO is imperative to compete in the modern era. Truth is, our business is not the same as Amazon.com, so we shouldn't market like it does. Until we begin bubble wrapping cars and shipping them by UPS, this is just a waste of money.

   “Come on Mr. Car Dealer, it only takes two extra deals to pay for itself.” How may times will we hear this before we learn.

3. Loss on investment

   There are some issues with third-party leads, but for the most part we get what we pay for (local leads from sometimes real people). With SEO we get to work people that live 600 miles away, folks who are price-shopping us against 1,200 other dealers and a few shoppers who are convinced I should overnight a brochure to Brazil. How much is your staff's time worth? How many lost opportunities will we create by being inundated with worthless price quotes?

4. The buck stops, um, nowhere

   Part of the beauty of the SEO sale is that, no matter what happens, there is a ready scapegoat for any possible criticism of performance. All they have to do is get people to your website and, because the Internet is anonymous, there is no way to tell who's who. If you don't get leads, the website is flawed. If you don't close the leads, your process or staff is flawed. Anonymous traffic is not the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. It is a distracting misuse of resources.

5. Highest bidder wins

   I like Google but it's important to note that its system showcases the guys who pay the most. So for important keywords or placement, it is extremely rare that any single-point franchise would bid high enough to compete with manufacturers or big third-party lead providers.

6. Page-ranking hyperbole

   Most folks that promise to get you in the top 10 for any major search terms never deliver. Even if they do, what results will you get? A ton of leads from unqualified people not within your buying range, which will overwhelm your operation and result in lower sales.

Look at your internal process, refine your mission and attack the customers already in your pipeline and service drive. Leads are not the problem in 90% of the dealerships I visit. Lack of sales-staff training is the problem.

Multimedia Does Not Sell Cars

For the past few years I have heard a steady stream of industry "experts" telling dealers about their "one size fits all" online multimedia marketing solutions. Most of these companies bundle multimedia video presentations, email triggering systems and some kind of rudimentary software intended to shorten the selling process. These services invariably cost thousands per month, are fully automated and profess to drive real customers to the email box like thirst draws folks to water. As I’ve said before about a myriad of other topics: Car dealers just never learn.

There are a multitude of problems about these "marketing solutions" but lets start at the basics. To sell a car you must build a relationship with the customer and the customer must develop trust in both the salesman and the dealership. While no doubt I suspect that some lonely prospects will find a video montage of a car complete with computer narration compelling, it does little to whip the masses into a car buying frenzy. Further, by replacing the old fashioned human sales dialogue with instant video feeds and text-to-speech articulation, we will further de-personalize the transaction and leave potential buyers uninspired and uncommitted. How many cars have you sold to people who were just looking? The key word in the previous sentence was "sold" not "displayed" or "presented" and that is important to remember. Buying a vehicle is still a very big purchase for must people and we should never take for granted the amount of salesmanship required to earn a sale.

My next big problem lies in the fact that dealers may in fact be hurting themselves by relying on these tools to sell cars. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever outsell a talented salesperson and at best these "solutions" will be an automated cherry-pick system that will leave a lot on the table unclosed.

Regardless how many dealers are in the "sponsored" magazines talking about how many cars they sold with this stuff, if they had built a talented crew with good processes they would have sold even more. The mere fact that dealers are turning to automated solutions may belie the real issue: turnover rates and lack of real talent we can retain in our stores.

Even if we make the assumption that in at least some cases that these video emails are better than salesperson phone calls (and I don’t believe it) it is hard to imagine we’d be happy with how few of these are actually ever received. SPAM blockers, links that are deactivated at the server level and a myriad of other consumer protection devices that are put in play against these messages block well over half from ever being seen. Imagine only calling 50% of your new leads or following up on only half of the walk-in’s. Would you be happy? Could this possibly INCREASE your sales?

The old adage "a customer shops until they meet a salesperson" has never been truer than in the car business. There are literally hundreds of competitive models available and with quality becoming vastly more even there is often only one thing that makes the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity: a good salesperson. Take the five thousand a month and invest in your walkaround training, in management education and in making your dealership a place where people want to work. Reduce the revolving door at the sales desk, implement good simple solutions to manage your customer base and over time you will see sustainable long term growth in units, CSI and service retention.

The Dynamics of SPAM and Dealer Communications

There is not a day that goes by without a dealer calling me and asking about her emails and SPAM. It’s a valid concern considering that over 59% of all emails sent are unsolicited and there are harsh penalties, both community-driven and governmental, that sometimes are not reversible. Unlike humans, computers that flag your email as SPAM have ridiculously long memories and some people never get off the infamous blacklist that limits all communication from email addresses or even mail servers themselves. Let’s take a few moments and discuss the various causes and effects then we’ll finish up with some suggestions on how to keep the mail flowing.

What is SPAM?

In layman’s terms, SPAM is simply email that was not requested. Unlike telemarketing, email marketing seems to have a very liberal guidelines as to when or how often you should send email to prospects. Of course, everyone has their own opinion and the Government has passed legislation which attempts to formalize the rules (with typical Government inefficiency) but the real power in this game is the big email server owners. The AOL’s, Yahoo’s and Hotmail’s of the World create, enforce, manage and change the rules at will and often they move to their own beat without any coordination. Yahoo and Microsoft even went so far as to create their own anti-spam technology which all senders must adopt to send mail to their users. An immense amount of power is really now concentrated in a very small group of hands and you and I have really no choice but to dance to their tune.

Why do people care?

Without stating the obvious facts about cluttered email boxes, let’s just look at the economic costs of SPAM to these big email companies and little firms alike. SPAM can carry viruses, overwhelms system architecture and slow the entire Internet to a virtual crawl. Companies spend over $200 billion dollars a year on tech support, special equipment to detect these messages and repairing the damage to their customers and employees directly from SPAM. Nuclear facilities have been compromised from SPAM viruses, untold megabytes of user data has been lost and every day some retired people lose their life savings to scams conveyed via SPAM. In terms of money SPAM is a huge problem that makes junk mail or telemarketing look like walks in the electronic park.

As if the huge monetary cost was not enough reason to hate SPAM, remember that now it’s often what first introduces our kids to pornography, interrupts our family time by making the Blackberry vibrate for no reason and is the single largest reason that people mistrust the Internet as a whole. Imagine someone driving up and down your block screaming profanity out of a bullhorn 24 hours a day seven days a week and then you can imagine the effect of SPAM on our social fabric and morality. We doubt everything now and even the most innocent email is now subject to investigation by electronic sensors that although noble in purpose are often lacking in execution.

Testing, testing testing…

OK folks now imagine for a minute that you are an email server, I know this is hard. Now imagine some geek in San Francisco programs you to watch for SPAM. Do you think it would be natural for the software he creates to look for patterns? Patterns are very important as you understand the way these systems work and when you send test emails to your own account over and over you are in fact marking your own account as a SPAM sender. I know you mean well, but you are hurting your own deliverability rates by doing this stuff.

How do you make sure your email is delivered?

Well, let’s start with the obvious: Don’t SPAM your customers. Now I know, you don’t SPAM your customers, after all they requested some info back in 1993 and all you are doing is following up (for 14 years). Just remember that newsletters, specials, free hot dogs or the kids fingerprint picture day are all non-requested emails for the most part. Sure some of your customers have asked for this to be sent to them but the vast majority have not and it’s really just a fishing expedition. By sending these wantonly you are increasing the likelihood that your real emails will never reach the customers. Remember, email servers can block the “from” email address very easily and it’s nearly impossible to change once it’s happened.

Most ISP’s (Earthlink, Gmail etc) that receive mail from iMagicLab know us and they know that the vast majority of our users do not abuse the email system. Just because they know we’re legitimate doesn’t mean that they don’t watch us very carefully (we do after all have millions of email addresses in our system). More importantly they watch each and every message you send and dynamically compare them against an enormous list of rules (84,000 lines and counting) which help them decide whether to ban the entire email, deliver it to the bulk mail folder or let it proceed to the inbox as intended. Here are some helpful rules to email by:

·         Be careful with the words you use in your emails, words like “free”, “special” or “Viagra” are likely to send your email to cyber-nowhere faster than you can press send.

·         Never use more than one typeface or a color of text other than the default black color. How often do personal communications use red huge words that say “limited time only”?

·         REMOVE people from your mailings that ask to be removed. If you get a response from their server saying your message is blocked, or if you have even a hint that she doesn’t want mail from you anymore take them off your list. Every time you resend an email to someone who has told their mail server it’s SPAM you reduce your entire ability to send email to that SYSTEM completely.

·         Don’t use too many pictures in an email or links to more than one website. They measure the ratio of images to text along with the other rules to see if your email is likely to be SPAM.

·         Never ever buy, rent or borrow a mailing list from someone to use as a broadcast email source. These systems are not stupid, 5000 emails all with the same subject line or body text hits their servers they know exactly what you are doing.  Further they watch whether a customer has ever sent an email “to” you as part of the calculation. Repeated emails to folks that are ignoring you or marking your emails as SPAM will result in AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft blocking you completely.

·         My point above actually also applies to over-broadcasting email messages to your existing customer or prospect base. Remember it’s not enough to have good intentions to inform folks about the sale happening every Thursday on customized keychains. Make sure your customers have requested the information and specifically opted in to your marketing emails or you will be blocked.

The end result here is that, just like in phone calls, there is a limit to what you can do by email. It’s very easy for prospects to mark your mail as SPAM and far simpler than you can imagine to get your dealership blacklisted by the email G*d’s. Once you are blacklisted, or blocked, your real communications won’t get through, you will no longer have the ease that email provides in the transaction and your dealership will likely have to change domain names (i.e. smithmotors.com) to fix the problem. It’s just not worth the cost, stay focused and work your active pipeline with targeted specific email campaigns that both inform and respect users wishes. Make sure your team has templates and (gasp) processes in place to prevent abuse and above all remember that no matter how hard you try to evade the SPAM trap the only real way is to not SPAM at all.

OK, Now let’s go sell some cars by creating relationships and offering real value in all communications.

What is CCDM Anyway?

I've been involved with Customer Relationship Management since I was 7 years old and managed my very first lemonade stand. I quickly found out CRM's really not so hard to work, you just do what you say you are going to do and make sure you listen to their concerns. "Is it too sweet?", "Do I need to add more lemon juice?" were the questions I'd ask my customers and the answers would help me refine the product and sell more. Each step of my career I've used an informal CRM system to help me manage any project or business I might be involved with. The power of knowledge is nothing new, but I think CRM is mislabeled, it's really CCDM or Customer Communications Data Management.

CCDM is really needed throughout an organization and we use it at iMagicLab during all stages of the sales process. On the website (www.imagiclab.com) we set an impression that our product will make the sales cycle easier to manage. On our first demo we set the expectation that we don't negotiate on price and that we feel certain our product is the best there is. You can figure out the rest but the point is that managing the information that gets exchanged in simple communication is a huge competitive edge when it comes to understanding the needs of your prospects or handling the almost certain objections. Someday all calls will be transcribed automatically to create records of this crucial information exchange, but until then we rely on the "need" overcoming any burden that the technology creates. I say burden for a reason, because it really is a royal pain to input all this data and then use it effectively. Tens of thousands of users are typing notes into some type of tracking system as I write this but very few of them have any idea why. That's why CRM has failed most American companies: they provide wonderfully difficult technology to woefully under-trained staff and never articulate the clear benefits of its use. It's just mind boggling to me, but even iMagicLab customers sometimes just don't get it.

In my opinion it's managers so far that have failed companies by turning CRM systems into electronic babysitters and then using reports to chastise and demoralize folks. The message they deliver is wrong and it needs to change for sales organizations to realize their full potential. Could it be that the current group of managers do not understand the product they are mandating their employees to use? Do they really think it is big brother in a box? Whose fault is it and how do we correct it?

more to come....

The End is Near - Sorry Bill

You all know by now how I feel about software and how certain companies (namely Microsoft) have attempted to hijack your computer and make you do the things they want. As a friend of some powerful folks at MSFT I have had the distinct pleasure of testing the new Vista operating system over the past few months. I hate to say it, this is really a good piece of software and I'm pleased to say it's probably the last traditional OS we will see.

Quietly over these past few months a ton of new young companies have begun to place features of a desktop operating system online. Whether it be Google's new word processing and spreadsheets or my friend Mark Cuban's new filesanywhere.com, the power of the desktop is rapidly relocating on massive server banks. For just a moment stop and think what your operating system (i.e. Windows) does for you... ok, so most of you said "email" and/or word processing. Clearly these functions are now better online than in Microsofts famously bloated Office product. You have all your documents and mail wherever you are, can share files effortlessly and never have to worry about a backup or virus. You see, the real magic here (as in iMagicLab) is that the hard work is done by computer professionals and risk and complexity of running the machine is removed. Much like 50 years ago, the terminals are dumb and the IT department keeps the network up. What we need now more than ever is just a simple machine to get us online and let the millions of brains connect and innovate.

It was a good time to retire Mr. Gates, the cookie's about to crumble: Here's some Windows-killers to check out:

http://docs.google.com/?pli=1

http://www.goowy.com/

http://www.filesanywhere.com/

http://www.flixster.com/

http://keepvid.com/

Sorry for the delay

As some of you know, it's been a bit busy in my life of late. We changed the name of iCarMagic to iMagicLabs, launched 7 new products and business is just amazing. That's not intended to be an excuse for me not BLOG-ing lately, well, OK its an excuse, but it's true.

I have a ton of your emails to answer and a lot to write, stay tuned until next week and things should free up.

Keith