Everest Is Breaking Records for Website and Marketing Performance KPIs

Brian Pasch0:00Hi, this is Brian Pasch, and welcome to another exciting podcast interview. I got two superstars from Dealer eProcess, senior executives. We're going to talk about their Everest platform, how they're leveraging AI to create a bespoke customer experience when consumers are shopping, and more importantly, what about website design that increases the cost of that? Versus conversion removes friction, removes friction, removes friction, and gives dealers the opportunity for a fresh look that engages consumers. So, I've invited Gino Cipperoni. He is the Chief Revenue Officer. And Sam Vukas, he's the COO of Dealer eProcess. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Gino Cipperoni0:50Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Pasch0:52Hey, let's start with the word Everest. Obviously, we think of Mount Everest, and your new platform, which was, I guess, announced over a year ago now, has really been taking the dealer community by storm. I'm hearing more and more dealers talking about it. Gino, let me start with you. When you are talking to dealers about Everest, what are you referring to? And how does that play into your overall tech stack strategy?

Gino Cipperoni1:25Yeah, when we talk about Everest, Everest is an idea. We're referring to the idea that, in order to, quote, climb to the top of the mountain, the best solution, as far as we see, is a solution that provides you with all the tools natively that you would need to help you reach your peak, help you reach your goals. And so, when we talk about Everest, that encompasses our website platform, our advertising platform, which also includes Amazon advertising, and then our entire suite of tools from digital retailing to trade-in to soft pull credit applications, chat, and a host of others that help dealers, you know, generate more leads, manage their environment and their ecosystem in a real seamless way,

Gino Cipperoni2:04and provides all the data and reporting that they would need to help optimize campaigns, understand, you know, how to best get the most, you know, bang for their buck, as it were. So that's Everest in a nutshell.

Brian Pasch2:17Right. Sam, you know, one of the things that I hear is dealers want more leads, number one, from the 2025 Automotive Website Survey. They want higher customer support. And yet, it seems like every day, dealers are buying another tool to bolt on. They're not looking how the website appears to mobile shoppers. For dealers leaning in, you should know, 65 to 70, even 75% of your traffic is coming on a mobile device. And yet, man, those mobile devices look awful cluttered. Why aren't more dealers, Sam, interested in just having a, your complete, embedded, clean, retailing tools for trade, credit, digital retailing, chat? And it seems like they're chasing the next shiny object, which is actually hurting conversion, the thing they want more of.

Sam Vukas3:20I think it comes out of a lot of noise, you know, and everybody has a selling point, right? Every company has an advantage and everybody wants to push that advantage. But what's often overlooked is the disadvantage, like you said. So you could have a really great feature for a chat company or a trade tool. But again, at what disadvantage are you going to harm your overall website speed experience for the customer by plugging something in that doesn't natively fit there? I really think it comes down to a little bit of personal preference. Dealers have long forged relationships with some vendors in the space. Look, we do too.

Sam Vukas3:51That's fantastic. But really, the disadvantages are often overlooked. And I think that's how we get to where we are today.

Brian Pasch3:58Sam, you brought up a great point, those disadvantages. We know that when we look at the average dealer website, there's probably 8 to 15 GTM containers. These have been added from marketing agencies, tool vendors. No one seems to take these things down. And yet they slow down web performance. Who knows what data they're extracting or what audiences are they building? Sam, what do you have to say to dealers who, I want more leads, I want more leads, but can't stop themselves or don't even know how to audit all of the things they've bolted on their website?

Sam Vukas4:41Yeah, so it can be a long, drawn-out process to clean that up. Or it could be a short one. And I, for one, like the short one, meaning just rip them off the website and see what you break. Be willing to understand that you need to watch it, you need to talk to your other vendors, and just kill all the GTMs that are on there and then put on the ones that you know you need back. I've been personally involved in audits with dealers where we've asked them, hey, what is this GTM? They go, I have no idea. Like, why is it on our side?

Sam Vukas5:07Well, you told us to carry that over when you migrated to our platform three years ago. You said it had to be there. We don't know. You gave it to us. They don't know either. So we play whack-a-mole and we just remove it and see what breaks. That's the best way to do it.

Brian Pasch5:21You know, it's so funny you said that, Sam, because I was talking to Scott Weideman. He heads up marketing for the Keating Auto Group, and he's part of the CXO Network. And I put out a message this week asking members, hey, how do we tackle these 12, 10, 15 GTM containers? I actually had a customer who had 20 GTM containers, and I couldn't even believe it. And his response was, we tore them all off and we waited to see who called. And I love that. I'm working on a framework that in the website code where these GTM containers are inserted, right? We can't see what's in the container, but actually putting some commenting and documenting so we can understand who owns these containers to help with tech support, because they really are a rat's nest.

Sam Vukas6:14No, and I'm glad you're doing that, because we do something similar. So we actually have for a long time, we put the ticket number from when the request comes in, but sometimes it doesn't always give the context. We've actually taken it a step further, and we now tie GTMs to third-party installs, if they are, right? So if we get, hey, install this chat company, and with this GTM, we tie the two together. So now when we process that cancellation and we remove that chat from the website, it removes that GTM as well. So it's at least trying to help and save some of that. But, you know, there's still a lot of cleanup to be done.

Sam Vukas6:44There's still stuff from old ticketing systems that have, you know, been placed on the site five years ago, still exist. And again, we weren't thinking of those things five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago. So, you know, we still have some dealers out there that need some cleanup, but I like Scott's approach, because I'm with him. Just rip it off and see what breaks. And then moving forward, we have implementations with notes. We have implementations tied to third parties. We're trying to help the dealers just save their sites.

Brian Pasch7:06Well, that's why at the DMSC conference coming up in Scottsdale, Sam and Gino, you're both going to be involved in our two-hour discussion on website optimization and conversion rates. And one of the things I'm going to bring up is a framework to add commenting, maybe even GTM registration to help with this problem. And I think with folks like Shift Digital involved, J.D. Power involved at the conference, maybe we can get a framework. Gino, I want to switch to an important topic is website design. Dealers are saying, man, dealership websites are too cluttered. They need to be clean. Yet, when I talked to you, and you just showed me something yesterday that was amazing, what I would say, one of the cleanest website designs, beautiful.

Brian Pasch7:58What do you say to dealers who's like, hey, Dealer eProcess websites are too busy looking? And you and I know that a lot of times they start clean, but after they start bolting on, you know, six different tools, it looks like a big mess. What do you want to say to dealers who are looking for a website partner to deliver a fast, efficient, clean website design?

Gino Cipperoni8:25I think that what I would say first to the comment of Dealer eProcess having busy sites is that Dealer eProcess apparently attracts busy dealers because our out-of-the-box solution that you were just mentioning is extremely clean. It's extremely streamlined, and we put a lot of effort into making sure that it's as efficient of a browsing process as possible because the way that we look at it, it's all driven by data, right? We don't put a lot of emphasis into, you know, we don't want to put a lot of emphasis into making like really flashy overproduced homepages because only about 15% of the views are on the homepage anyways.

Gino Cipperoni9:00We want to, and so we want to try to get past that idea of, you know, 12 banners on a homepage, which makes it look busy, and then carry those 12 banners over to the SRP, which makes it look busy. And we really just want to get it dialed into what does that individual customer want to see? And a lot of that is where our AI comes into play because it can adjust the site based on what that customer's preferences are. But ultimately, to kind of go back to what we were talking about before, the idea with Everest is to have a site that is fully functioning, so you don't have to pull in six different third-party providers, although you could do it.

Gino Cipperoni9:32But the idea is that if you build everything natively and build it in a way that it looks like it's meant to be there, the busyness goes away. It kind of melts away into a system that's really intuitive and easy for a lot of customers to operate, and that's where we see the ultimately, you know, the highest rates of conversion. It's almost like, you know, we get so excited about something and just say, you know, throw this here, throw that there. I was told this would get me more leads, so put that on, and this tool is going to get me more leads, so let's put that on.

Gino Cipperoni10:00But I don't think anybody ever looks at what's the net increase in conversion. Did you get the amount of leads that you were promised, or did you just add something that took leads away from something else, and now you have an ugly site that converts at the same rate?

Brian Pasch10:10You know, one of the things that most dealers should know, I'm going to repeat it, the CRM is a liar. The CRM only shows typically the first source of a lead, and additional leads that match that same consumer may set an update flag or move that person higher in the active shopping queue, but doesn't really show source. And one of the things that these promises from vendors about their tools, I'm not sure if they're creating net new conversions or just diluting conversions from one place to another, and then we run into this problem of, are those vendors throwing in ASC events? Can we see those conversions in Google Analytics?

Brian Pasch10:54Can those conversions be used to optimize Google Ads? And in many cases, these tools, oh, we forgot to send events, or oh, no, we're not supporting the industry standard ASC events. And what dealers are doing is actually robbing their visibility, impacting the way in which Google can optimize advertising, which dealers spend a lot of money on, and it becomes messy. But when I look at DEP websites, Gino and Sam, I'm not sure who wants to take this, I see some of the highest conversion rates. I don't know if you can speak to conversion rates in some of the OEM programs you're in or in the dealer groups, but regardless of what anybody says, you guys have been focused on conversion optimization and seem to be leading in that direction.

Brian Pasch11:46Can you speak to the performance of Everest as a platform?

Gino Cipperoni11:50Yeah, I would say just what we see, I can't give too much away, but what we see when we get compared in the programs that we're in against the competitors that we compete with, which is usually the same cast of characters across the board in all the programs, we are top of the heap in terms of lead form conversion, clicks to calls, things of that nature. But things that really matter to dealers. And so that's where we kind of, you know, hang our hat on is a lot of times that that high end conversion, but that does come with understanding and kind of, you know, taking our recommendations as far as what we say and what we our data shows is the best setup for a site.

Gino Cipperoni12:31And I want to kind of throw out a challenge to anybody in your network, Brian, and I know a few dealers in your network have said recently that they thought our sites were busy, they're not going to look at Dealer eProcess because of that. Any of those folks out there watching this, I would love to have a 10 minute conversation with you to show you how we actually recommend our site to be set up, not how one of our dealers decided to kind of take it and run with it. And, you know, if after that 10 minutes, you still think we're busy, that's, you know, we got more work to do then.

Gino Cipperoni12:59But I would love to be able to have that conversation with anyone who still thinks that we're an overly cluttered website.

Brian Pasch13:06I love that, Gino. I love that challenge. Sam, from the 2025 Automotive Website Survey, dealers wanted more leads. That was the first thing they wanted. And they said that customer service was the most important factor in picking a website partner. You have your executive team and the people in executive roles have not changed. I've been working with you guys in the industry for 15 plus years. A stable management team, stable tech stack team, and a very long tenure for your customer support. How do you pull that off? Because it would seem to me, I mean, as the COO, you're looking at costs. And we've heard of massive cuts in customer support from other companies.

Brian Pasch14:01And we don't know if that was just cutting fat or just reducing service levels. How have you been able to really elevate the customer experience for the dealers who pick you as their platform provider?

Sam Vukas14:19Great question. It's a bit of a long one, so I'll try to keep it short. But we focus a lot on, and Dan will kill me for saying this, he's our CTO, over-engineering some of our solutions from a perspective of controls. So where we have many things built into the website platform, our digital marketing platform, digital retailing, etc., the amount of things that we watch that have to manually be done, we shrink that pretty regularly on a monthly basis. So when we find that there are certain requests or certain things that need to be done, we build controls that not only the dealers themselves can use, but that our own people can use.

Sam Vukas14:57So that really allows us to not have to just fill seats with bodies and have to just purchase human capital over and over and over again to do these redundant tasks. We build in a lot of automations, we build in a lot of systems that our teams literally press buttons and things get deployed. And we take a lot of time in doing that with our development cycles, just for that exact reason, so that we never have to overhire, then have to try to scale back and do all these things, which also allows us to just, again, have better control. And so what Gino was saying, having, you know, the ability to cater to those busy dealers, so when they want all of these things, we're not hacking in different answers for what they want to display on their SRPs or VDPs.

Sam Vukas15:35We've accounted for that ability to have those things there without having to just jam code and that's going to break over time. So it really comes down to the focus that the CTO and the entire dev team has on just making our account executives, our support staff, our onboarding specialists all just better by removing a lot of manual processes.

Brian Pasch15:54Love that, love that. One of the things that I see is your reporting dashboards, you know, you're bringing in dealership sales and service records from the digital marketing campaign. Sam, talk about that, that integration that quickly shows dealers what their ad spend generated through the website, right, through service bookings or vehicle purchases, right? You're tracking leads to the campaign, to the keywords, to the sale. To me, when I look at your dashboards, I can really see right away what's working, what's not working.

Sam Vukas16:33Yeah, so we've had what's called CARoi for quite some time, which is our DMS attribution so that, again, to your point, through campaigns, we can match what campaigns are working and actually selling cars as opposed to just saying, this is your click-through rate, this is how many leads you got from that. Okay, it's great, but are you actually selling cars from that? And what's the return on that investment? So what are you making front-end, back-end, what's your holdback, how much you have in pack? All of that gets fed in from the DMS to match those back to the leads. More recently, we've also pivoted that data to look at it from a different perspective, to look at it from an overall model perspective.

Sam Vukas17:06So we have our inventory insights dashboard, which gives you kind of a performance understanding of where this all kind of makes sense and talking to the dealers in their language, saying, hey, look, this is what you have on ground. This is what you have on order. This is what you've made so far in this model segment for the month, even if we didn't match it to the leads, right? We can still pull in just general sales information to know so that they can make deterministic choices, again, back to digital marketing, on what they need to do. If you're selling cars at a very fast clip, and a lot of those sales are coming from organic traffic, and then you look and see that you have a $7,000 budget just for that model, why?

Sam Vukas17:42So you can make a lot of these choices that are smart. So not only just looking at the matchback and saying what campaigns are working, but understanding where you need to add money or remove money because other channels could be working as well. So something we've been doing for a long time, and I think the inventory portion of it is even greater use for the dealers.

Gino Cipperoni18:01Yeah, so just to add to that real quick, Brian, I mean, it goes back to, again, the idea of having an all-in-one solution. All of that reporting that we just talked about gets better when everything is fully integrated because there are so many tools that we could put on the site that will perform. I'm not saying that they're not going to get you leads, but they're not going to tell us what leads we're getting. We're not going to tell us what keyword generated lead. We don't know if that led to a sale or not. And so when we look at this idea of having the right tools on the site to build a good environment, the way we look at it is that the whole has to be greater than the sum of its parts, meaning everything has to do more than just provide a lead.

Gino Cipperoni18:34It has to report the data. It has to funnel the data to the right places. It has to not slow the site down. And so that, again, goes back to that idea of that all-in-one holistic system being an amplified way of doing things.

Brian Pasch18:47Yeah, and that is a great lead-in, Gino, to your use of AI. We're learning more and more that AI needs large data sets to kind of make recommendations. And when a dealer's using Everest with digital retailing, with chat, with credit, with trade, all of those touchpoints, all of those interactions being rolled up into a customer record, then the AI can make recommendations to how website SRPs or VDPs are displayed or what content journey is displayed. And so I think more and more dealers are realizing, yeah, their website looks like Joseph's Technicolor Dreamcoat with everything bolted on. But if they wanted a clean, connected shopping experience with your digital ID passing through the website, through credit, through trade, through chat, all together, wow.

Brian Pasch19:43And then you have a rich data set for the AI to use to develop personalized experience. Can you, Gino, talk a little bit about what Sherpa AI is doing? And I like the play on Sherpa and Everest, so love that when that first came out. What is your goal in 2025 to provide practical benefits to dealers with Sherpa AI?

Gino Cipperoni20:08Yeah, our goal is to use AI in a way that is, number one, hands off. There's no, you know, added work on the dealer's part or the customer's part to actually get the full benefits of the AI. And number two, an AI that acts more like a guide, which also plays nicely into the Sherpa name, versus something that can kind of get in the way if it has a hiccup, if it starts to try to sell a car for a dollar, which we've seen before. Like, that's not the AI that really we want to try to institute just yet. So our AI, the way it's designed, is it works really well in the background.

Gino Cipperoni20:42And what it does is it kind of monitors the customer's journey through the site, identifies areas where it can make an impact on their experience in a positive way. It can rearrange filters on the search results page. It can key in on certain vehicles that the customer has shown interest in and highlight them when they return back to the site. It can even take their profile using a very simple no-login required process and transfer it to that customer's cell phone if they were originally on desktop, so they can continue that journey on multiple devices. It also has the ability to actually proactively bring out content to, like, look at window stickers, take this action, actions that it sees tend to lead to lead generation more.

Gino Cipperoni21:20All of that happening kind of proactively, but still running in the background. And so it's there more as a guide for the customer to just kind of walk them down this path, which can be very confusing a lot of times for car buyers, and it's there to help. And then on the dealer side of things, going back to the reporting that Sam was talking about, it's on our end starting to learn what that data really means and how to best interpret it in a way that, you know, you might need a data scientist to do it if you wanted to do it manually. This system can just run through its own models and its own brain and say, you should be putting money here, or these customers are doing X, Y, Z, so you should be focusing on this.

Gino Cipperoni21:56All of that is really helping to boost how we manage the site as well.

Brian Pasch22:02You know, I think in the future, Sam, maybe you can comment on this. Before the Automotive Standards Council, there was not a standard for tracking what consumers do on the website, which means even if the website company had their own event naming convention with all the tools bolted on and everyone either throwing events or not throwing events, it was really impossible to see the entire customer journey. So, today, with wide support for the ASC specification, the event naming library, I imagine, Sam, that if all the tools are connected, sending a standardized event library, and AI can look at that customer ID, when they came, how many times they came, what tools they use, what got them to convert,

Brian Pasch22:53which ad campaigns brought the most conversions, I'm assuming, with all the ad tech data that you have, and all the website engagement data, eventually, we should be seeing some recommendation engines, right, from the DEP team that's going to say, hey, these are the budget recommendations and shifts I suggest you make. Hey, this is maybe inventory purchasing decisions, maybe you should be making, I mean, with all the data you have, plus all the data from ASC, it seems to me that when dealers say, which marketing campaigns are working the best, and what should I change, they're going to start to have more data-driven suggestions. Am I following the future path correctly?

Sam Vukas23:43You are following correct. I mean, even down to the conversation of how to best optimize a website, right? Well, that's kind of a loaded question, because when you start looking at the data that Sherpa is already crunching, it's different per model. So when you start seeing certain signals where a shopper is going to be in the market for a Ford Bronco, and we start quantifying the fact that the people that are in market for a Ford Bronco and further down the funnel to put in a lead and then purchase and buy, they're going to take certain actions, they're going to look at a window sticker, they're going to look at a brochure, they're going to check certain specifications on, you know, engine or torque or whatever it might be, right?

Sam Vukas24:19You can start to construct certain CTAs or suggestions through Sherpa to get them down that path. And so that could look vastly different. So if you break it down to, let's use Kia as another example. If you find out that every single time that somebody looking at a Telluride clicks a window sticker and then they convert, I'm going to put a window sticker more prominently on the SRP maybe and definitely the VDP. But that might be different if I go to a Kia K5, right? I may not need to put that in front of this shopper that's looking to purchase a Kia K5. They may be more interested in payments and more budget conscious, right, than the Telluride shopper.

Sam Vukas24:54That changes based on their behavior and who we've identified them to be. So, again, baby steps first and foremost. We're quantifying that. Our teams are going through all those recommendations. Right now it will be a more manual process, but our goal in the future is that taking that information over a certain amount of time, the website can eventually put those things in front of shoppers. So if Gino is shopping for a Telluride, they identify that. All of a sudden a window sticker button appears on Tellurides on the vehicles and the dealer didn't have to make a change. DEP support didn't have to make a modification.

Sam Vukas25:26The site just instinctively knew to put that there in front of Gino. So you are correct, not only just talking about digital marketing, but websites as well, and even going down the road, digital retailing as well. That is really why we have put everything all together through Everest. Now, websites and digital retail are all one. It's all the same platform now, and our digital marketing feeds all that info.

Brian Pasch25:45You know, for the dealers listening in, I'd like to challenge you. Just lean in for a moment, and I believe you can pick up what I'm going to put down here. But we need, as an industry of leaders leading dealerships, we need to really lean in and take our websites a little more seriously. We need to know how they're loading and what's preventing them from loading faster. That's, we talked about today, a cleanup of the GTM containers. We need to really analyze the consumer shopping experience from a mobile device, because three-quarters of those shopping sessions are coming from mobile. Please do not do website design on your desktop.

Brian Pasch26:29So, we need to simplify the number of partners on the website to make sure we have every click, hover, swipe, and conversion being tracked, so that data can be used to optimize marketing campaigns, to send into AI, to power better personalization. The days of just counting leads, of course we want more leads, but you can't say you want more leads, and then just throw anything on the website. You can't say you want more leads if you're not paying attention to web speed. You can't say you want more leads if your digital marketing online isn't matching what's on the website. It's all coming down to do you have a data-driven platform, do you have a data-driven mindset, and that's why the Everest platform is so meaningful for dealers who are leaning into CDPs and identity resolution.

Brian Pasch27:27Gino, let me close out with one other question. We know that consumers already have a distrust for dealers. We know that. We've heard those surveys. But one of the things that's unique when dealers use your digital marketing team and the website together is every ad, whether it's in Google Search or Meta or Amazon in their video streaming platform or an email, everything is being driven off a single pricing engine, right? You have the inventory feed. You have the OEM incentives. Can we talk about the importance of that? Because normally when dealers have two or three different agencies, pricing and offers can be disconnected. And so when the consumer clicks to the website, they can't find that price.

Brian Pasch28:16They can't see that payment.

Gino Cipperoni28:18Yeah. Well, I mean, trust is a really important thing. And it goes the same for online and offline. And I was actually asked this question. I was at a last week, a digital summit for a luxury brand out here in Chicago. And one of the dealers asked, how do I cultivate trust with my customers online? And the number one answer is give them what they're looking for when they ask for it. And if you think about it, if I walk into your showroom and I see I saw an ad wherever I saw it that said, you're leasing me a car for $399 a month. I walk into the showroom and your salespeople don't know anything about that lease offer or it's actually, they tell me, no, it's $499 a month.

Gino Cipperoni28:59Or we don't even have that model in stock or whatever it is. That, to me, loses trust because I'm like, well, you told me, you sent me a mailer or whatever it was that said, I can come in and get this offer. It's the same thing that happens online. If you put an ad out there that says $399 a month and then when I click the ad, I go to the homepage that doesn't have that offer or I go to the SRP with the wrong inventory or I don't even see that offer anywhere, I'm lost as a consumer. And being lost as a consumer erodes trust pretty quickly.

Gino Cipperoni29:29So you have to be able to have all that synced up, which is what's nice about our, what we call our offer management system, where, like you said, that offer is coming from one single place. It's dynamically added to the ad content and the website and those systems are linked. So the ad, if it's being driven by an offer, is going to link to a page that has that offer, which creates, number one, a lot more trust online, but number two, a lot more relevancy in Google's eyes as well because of the connection between the content on the site and the ad.

Brian Pasch29:56Gino, I can't tell you how many times over the years, this is my 20th anniversary, dealers like, hey, I'm just using this local agency for Google ads or I'm using my niece's friend's company for social media. And I say, do they know anything about automotive? Do they know how to take in a pricing feed or a rebate incentive feed? It's like, no, no. And they just don't think about that trust. And I'm glad you brought that up. When you have a unified data-centric platform connected with digital marketing, connected with identity resolution, dealers can know when their customers are back shopping, develop shopping profiles, personalize a website, send perfectly timed marketing messages to them, and create a better retail experience.

Brian Pasch30:47That's why I want to encourage you, if you're coming to the Digital Marketing Strategies Conference in Scottsdale, April 27th, 28th, and 29th, get a demo with the DEP. Or if you're not going, just go to DealereProcess.com and book a demo and ask for a complete walkthrough of the Everest platform. Sam, I love talking to you because you don't mince words. You tell it like it is. You know, in the website world, success is a true partnership. You can build the tech. It doesn't mean that dealers are going to use it in the way you intend it. You can tell them to use integrated tools, but they may bolt on other things.

Brian Pasch31:52And then you might tell them to simplify their GTM containers, but they push that task off. Why is it so exciting right now? Because I'm seeing the momentum that your team has built with Everest. What's changing in dealers' mindsets that they're starting to really understand the platform's benefit to their business and the ability to sell more cars?

Sam Vukas32:16So I think a lot of the excitement comes down to, you know, we've been data hoarding everything for years, right? And we always talk about us using the data to affect changes, whether that's designs or bringing certain features or data to like the SRP or VDP or how it's laid out. And a lot of that has always been behind the curtain, right? And every dealer is different, right? You can take two Toyota stores and it's a totally different market, totally different type of buyer. But really, I think a lot of the excitement is around what Gino mentioned and using those large data sets with Sherpa and understanding those customers and being able to do that with the press of a button and not having to sit here and comb through data, not having to sit here and try to really just throw something at the wall, see if it sticks.

Sam Vukas32:57This is now the age where finally, finally, we can tell dealers in a meeting when we sit down with them what their online shoppers are actually doing, what they're interested in. What are the key events that are happening on certain models? You know, it was always a conversation of how well is my website performing and you look at things time on site, you look at SRP views, VDP views. But what does that truly tell you, right? Is the site configured correctly for the audience that you're driving there? Is it configured correctly down to the model? Is it configured correctly for the area that you're in?

Sam Vukas33:28And finally, we have that, right? And we're bringing that forth to dealers. And I think that's where all the excitement is really coming from.

Brian Pasch33:35Gino, I'm going to let you close with this one thought. I'm convinced that dealers are really elevating their education. I've been writing about CDPs for two years. I'm seeing a big movement of dealers wanting to clean their first-party data, maintain it, and activate it. They need a platform provider that can keep up with them. And I also understand the dealers' needs for flexibility. We talked about support. There are some dealers out there that, from my website survey, say, website companies and OEM programs just are okay. No one's exceeding my expectations. Only 30% of dealers said any of the website platform providers exceeded their expectations. I know, because I've done some surveys with your customers, they're ecstatic about the support.

Brian Pasch34:39What would you tell a dealer here who's saying, I don't really want to go through a website change? What would you tell them that would encourage them that on the other side of that change order is a different experience?

Gino Cipperoni34:52Yeah, I think that's an issue we run into a lot where one bad apple ruined it for the bunch. So a customer or a dealer will have a bad experience with one website provider, have a horrible website launch, not get great support, but then stick with that provider because I don't want to go through that again, right? And it can be a headache if it's not managed correctly. So I think our team does a great job of managing the launch. We can launch a site quickly and effectively, get it up and running in a really reasonable amount of time. And we've, again, going back to what Sam said, we build our own tools internally to help us manage what should happen for the dealership.

Gino Cipperoni35:35So we've built tools not only to help manage the site once it's live, but we've built software to help us manage the launch itself, which means telling us which pages we need to bring over for maximum SEO continuity, which means keeping us on the right timeline so that certain milestones are met when they need to be met. And we have a lot of dealers who rave about our launch process just as much as they rave about our support. And what I would ultimately say to the dealer that, you know, isn't having a great time with their website provider and just doesn't want to go through the process, like putting that last part aside, what would it really mean to you if you could get the website that you wanted?

Gino Cipperoni36:12What would that mean to your bottom line? What would that mean to your time investment on a day-to-day basis? If you're spending 20%, 30% of your time on your website where it should be spent, you know, dealing with your customers, that's a conversation that should be had because if you can get that time back, that's time that can be reinvested in growing the dealership.

Brian Pasch36:32Love it. You know, one thing I will be sharing at the DMSC conference is working with some larger dealer groups, and I'm looking at the impact that design changes have on overall conversion rates and the range within a same dealer group with the same website platform with the same brand. There can be a 200% difference in conversion rate, and I know some dealers might be listening to this podcast and say that's impossible, but here's what it's like. Your websites are probably converting at, I'm talking about the dealers here, 1% to 1.5%. In the same dealer group, if you're part of a larger dealer group, there are going to be stores that are converting at 2%, 3%, and 4%.

Brian Pasch37:19When you think about the 50,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 visitors that come to your website a month, little changes can make a big difference in total sales opportunities and your net profit. It's time to get serious about your website, your data platform, and the insights that can come through managing your first-party data and all of your shopper data. Gino, Sam, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for being a supporter of dealer education, coming down to Scottsdale to lean in on workshops and panels. Gino, one last thing, if somebody wanted to get a demo of Sherpa and the Everest platform, what's the best way for them to do it?

Gino Cipperoni38:05Yeah, they could either go to dealereprocess.com, fill out a lead. We also would love more leads, so that's always good to get those in. Or if somebody wants to talk to me directly, my email is just gino at dealereprocess.com, and I'd love to have a conversation with anyone who's interested.

Brian Pasch38:22Right. Well, thanks, guys, and for everyone who's leaning in and listening today, if this is the first time you listen to one of my podcasts, there are hundreds of interviews with industry leaders, disruptors, and entrepreneurs who are working to improve automotive retail. So just search for the Brian Pasch podcast on your favorite podcast channel. That includes YouTube or Libsyn or any of the ways that you listen to podcasts and listen in, especially if you're coming to DMSC. Listen to some of the leaders who are coming to really unveil the next generation of the tools that dealers need to sell cars in a digital age. Thanks for listening, and finish the month strong.

Brian Pasch39:04Have a good day.