This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Steven Hileman [00:00:00]:
Making the product strategy and the channel strategy and the marketing strategy all finally work the same and not fighting against our growth initiatives. The alignment on those is what’s really sort of unlocked the growth the last year.

Kyler Mason [00:00:19]:
Whether you’re going to market through dealers, distributors, or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2B2X.

John Gough [00:00:28]:
But the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I’m John Gough.

Kyler Mason [00:00:32]:
And I’m Kyler Mason. And this is Why You Win, presented by Element Three.

John Gough [00:00:38]:
Our guest today is Steven Hileman, who leads partnerships and strategy at Road Pass Digital and has spent most of his career in the RV space. That has given him a really interesting background in this B2B2X environment. And he carries that understanding and background into his role today, where he’s leading road paths and placing some interesting bets in a marketing and sales context. We had a great conversation with Stephen. We hope you really enjoy it.

Kyler Mason [00:01:05]:
So, Stephen, we were interested in having you on because we are talking to leaders in the world of B2B2X. When we say B2B2X, we mean manufacturers that are selling through distribution or dealer channels that are trying to reach the end customer. And you have a lot of experience in different stops at companies that operate in this world, like Rev Group, Airstream, now road paths. So it’d be great if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to start.

John Gough [00:01:35]:
Journey’s been an interesting one. I didn’t set out to be in the RV or outdoor space. I didn’t set out to even be in marketing. Went to school for supply chain and operations management, and it only took me six months in the realm, real world to realize that that was not the lane for me, but ended up in marketing as a test and loved it. I think where I got started was with a large RV manufacturer, right? What was Fleetwood Enterprises. Now, Rev Group was the largest RV manufacturer in North America. They had thousands of dealers and was sort of a crash course in the early stages of my career into figuring out how to do marketing inside a dealer network, where you’re trying to market your product, but the dealer’s the one actually handling the transaction and selling it. It’s the sort of age old challenge.

John Gough [00:02:24]:
Years later, moved on to Airstream, which is very different. Brand almost sells sort of outside of the RV space. I think if the airstream folks heard me even call their vehicles an rv, they’d probably come after me. But working with that brand was really unique because we built a lot of programs for dealers to help build that dealer relationships. And I even got to dab a little bit on the product side while at Airstream and now at Road Pass in marketing and sales. It’s been really interesting to be in a direct to consumer tech business, playing to that same RV and outdoor audience. But what’s interesting now is the pivot we have, we’ve had to make in the last couple of years just to build new channels for our products and working with dealers and different types of b, two b, two C partners on that front. So.

Kyler Mason [00:03:16]:
So you actually started out in supply chain and.

John Gough [00:03:19]:
Yeah.

Kyler Mason [00:03:19]:
So what’d you do? For the first six months, I was.

John Gough [00:03:22]:
In third party logistics. So boil it down. I took a stab at being a truck broker. What? I was literally buying and selling loads off of semi trucks. So it was my first look at sales. I had done some telemarketing, some crazy telemarketing in college just to pay the bills. I hadn’t done a lot of sales and jumping into what was pitched to me as third party logistics. And what was actually just selling was not my jam.

John Gough [00:03:50]:
At least I don’t think I was ready for it. And then my first real gig, six months later, was running logistics and operations for a very large marketing team. So I was able to flex what I’d learned in college a little bit. But it was mostly applying that to a large marketing organization inside of Fortune 500 who were making some mistakes at the time relative to their event strategy and participating in conferences and losing large, valuable crates of supplies.

Kyler Mason [00:04:24]:
So from that experience, when did the jump to actually working in marketing happen? Because you were, like, peripheral there, right?

John Gough [00:04:32]:
Yeah. So working on that marketing team, it was almost through osmosis that I just kind of started to get involved in other marketing projects. But that was 2006 ish, 2008, 2009 rolled around, and the recession sort of decimated everything. And I got an opportunity to help restart new Fleetwood, based in Indiana, not in California. And that’s the first time I really took a broader marketing management role. And it was an opportunity to help build a new marketing team, build an entirely new marketing muscle at a new company, because that restructure was what they would call an assets only transaction.

Kyler Mason [00:05:18]:
Is that like where Fleetwood moved under? The transaction was to rev Group.

John Gough [00:05:23]:
Yeah. So the old Fleetwood enterprises actually went through bankruptcy and sold off different parts of the business in 2008 and 2009. So some private investors came in and bought the assets for the Fleetwood group. Eventually that turned into rev group, and they’ve grown and multiplied multiple times since. Since I was there, but that was an interesting time. If you didn’t experience it, you know, unemployment was wild and you kind of took any job that was offered to you. In 2009, we didn’t have the most desire to move from southern California back to.

Kyler Mason [00:05:55]:
Was it Decatur, Indiana?

John Gough [00:05:56]:
Back to Decatur, Indiana. But I had family in the area. I’d grown up actually in the area. It wasn’t too far from home. I’d literally flown across the country and moved to California. That’s your post college dilemma, right? Get away from the midwest and move to one of the coasts and experience life. I tried and then got pulled right back. The forces pulled me back to the midwest.

Steven Hileman [00:06:21]:
Yeah, 2009 made me a web developer, so I know what you mean.

Kyler Mason [00:06:25]:
So I kind of want to follow the journey. So you were at Rev Group really helping to start the marketing from nothing. Are there any critical moments at Rev Group that you are reflecting on or have reflected on that helped build your skillset or resume to get you to your next stop at airstream and then obviously then to Road Pass?

John Gough [00:06:44]:
Yeah. I think part of the reflection on the time at Rev group was really understanding the relationship between sales and marketing, particularly in that dealer channel. At that point in time, the dealer held a lot of power in the relationship, and in some cases today they even still do. But it was easier to build a product than to sell it in 2010, 2011, especially in the RV industry, because of all of the discretionary nature of the purchase. No one needs an RV or a boat or a motorcycle or those things. So it was a series of projects, getting more involved in product development, getting more involved in the sales cycle, supporting sales, going to on dealer visits myself to understand what our salespeople were saying and doing in real life when they went and talked to a dealer versus what they were telling the head of marketing when they came back. There are nuanced differences between those, and I think it was important. At the end of the day, the biggest thing I learned was sort of the nuanced relationships between the dealer, the sales personnel and the marketing team, and that there’s going to be tension at every one of those intersections.

John Gough [00:08:03]:
It’s how you massage that tension to try to make it work, which is ultimately going to help you find the success. And those relationships are steeped with personal politics, business politics. The people I’ve seen have really good success in selling to dealers tend to have a really nuanced understanding of the political situation, the business situation, and all of the things that can affect that relationship.

Steven Hileman [00:08:31]:
There’s something that stands out to you, as you look back at those visits or times being with the salesperson and the dealer, things that surprised you, conversations that you’re like, man, I had no idea that that’s how that was going to go down.

John Gough [00:08:47]:
One of the more interesting moments, I think, was we had launched a new product, and I was helping the sales team deliver the product. We were driving the new RV model straight to the dealership. We were hand delivering the first one. We had hyped it up a lot, done a lot of marketing work. Only had a couple hundred miles to drive. I’m delivering one. I’m by myself. The sales rep was meeting me, meeting me at the dealership.

John Gough [00:09:13]:
It’s a high end motorized vehicle driving along, and I get maybe 30 miles from the dealership and everything’s going just fine. I’ve driven a lot of rvs my life. I was not worried about that part. I was more worried about pulling up at the dealership and the process. Right. I’d never driven an RV into a dealership before.

Kyler Mason [00:09:31]:
Do I wave like?

John Gough [00:09:32]:
Yeah, wave like, who do I ask for when I get there? Like, I’m supposed to be meeting our sales rep there, and about 30 miles out, this huge noise happens. And I look over and you know the sound effect in the movies when the space shuttle has a depressurization, like a catastrophic one. That’s the noise that happened as I’m driving. Something small had, like, hit the passenger side window, and while we’re driving on the highway, probably a rock hit the edge of it just right, and it, poof, shattered and out it went. Just like, sucked all the debris and the curtain that was hanging beside it sucked it all out the passenger side window. And I’m panicking because my brain was immediately not going to like, crap. There’s something wrong with the vehicle. It was crap.

John Gough [00:10:26]:
I have to deliver this to the dealer in, like, 20 minutes.

Kyler Mason [00:10:30]:
Not about your safety.

John Gough [00:10:32]:
I was not worried at all about my safety. I was worried entirely about the delivery and the relationship. And this was, I was in charge of marketing. We hyped up this new product, and the one that I was delivering now is missing a window and the curtain that got sucked out like a plane door. Ultimately, we ended up like sales and myself working together to shift the delivery to the next morning. And I stayed the night at, like, a Hampton inn, and there was a Walmart next door, and then it’s supposed to storm, and half a million dollar RV doesn’t have a window. Someone could easily break into it and steal the good stuff out of the inside or it’s going to rain inside. So it’s like 11:00 at night, and I’m walking over to the Walmart next door and buying a utility knife, duct tape, black plastic, and zip ties.

John Gough [00:11:20]:
At a Walmart at 11:00 at night.

Steven Hileman [00:11:23]:
That’S not sketchy looking at all, not at all. Very normal set of stuff.

John Gough [00:11:26]:
So these are the reasons why this memory is probably the most vivid. But what ended up happening the next morning was they sent a technician overnight with a window. They replaced the window and it was good as new so that I could do like a 09:00 a.m. delivery. And it became apparent to me that things happen in the delivery process. Things happen with quality that are sort of out of control of sales and marketing. And I think when you’re in particular, like sitting in the marketing office, you’re insulated. You’re entirely insulated.

John Gough [00:12:02]:
Everything’s hunky dory. Like, everything’s perfect. It’s got all of the PR spin you’ve dreamt up, and that’s not real life. And the sales team in the field deals with the real life, not the PR spin. And it was the first time where I think I was much more aware of how not sympathetic I was to that team and the type of issues they have to deal with to maintain the relationship on the ground with the dealer. It was a story fraught with lots of crazy little happenings, but one that was also a really important milestone in understanding how the relationship works.

Kyler Mason [00:12:44]:
So you’ve led a lot of marketing teams like marketing orgs, sales and marketing orgs. Have you taken that experience that you remember so vividly and transferred that to like, hey, I need you guys to experience the world of sales and the dealer in a way thats been like a part of training, or have you leveraged that in any way?

John Gough [00:13:06]:
I think its changed the way that I frame a sales team with the marketing team. It was one of the moments when I realized that it is easy for a team of marketers to hold the sales guys up as bad guys, right. They’re a really easy scapegoat because they might have told the dealer something that wasn’t true. To salvage a relationship, they might have promised a dealer something that now the marketing team has to deliver on an unreasonable timeline or basis. So part of it is just framing it with your team that they do a different kind of work. They’re working with us. It’s about the relationship, and you have to work with them hand in hand. It will never be easy, although I will say the easiest part is when you’re leading both the sales and the marketing team, and you can do joint staff meetings and you can do a lot more together when you’ve got a common leader and the is not so big and unwieldy that it’s hard to keep everybody together in some of those group settings and collaborative settings.

John Gough [00:14:06]:
So my favorite version of that is right now, where I have five marketers and two salespeople. But it’s a little easier to manage that today. Yeah.

Steven Hileman [00:14:15]:
And short of that, having a sales leader and a marketing leader who are in lockstep, understand the value each provides are really clear with your expectations, with each other.

John Gough [00:14:26]:
Yeah. And I think that’s a two way street. Right. A sales leader who, who has some marketing background is far more valuable in these b, two b, two c or type of dealer channel experiences. Being on both sides of the street is just really, really valuable.

Kyler Mason [00:14:43]:
So we worked together at Airstream. I feel like I don’t know all of the history before you, but I do remember you pioneered some things at airstream that brought the sales.org very close to marketing. They were even programs you started to explore that had never been done before. So I imagine that’s probably where you started to look early on when you first got to airstream to show maybe just I understand your world and we can make this work a lot better together.

John Gough [00:15:13]:
Yeah. I think that was the opportunity I saw at Airstream. It was a bit of a different role. It wasn’t a leadership role for me. I left a leadership role to go, to go work on some projects at airstream that I knew I’d be passionate about. And they had some things that, to me, felt easy to solve. It’s eternally optimistic. But projects like a dealer portal that was driven from the marketing team, a dealer portal that had traditionally been driven from an IT perspective.

John Gough [00:15:42]:
It was about delivering an IT solution and not delivering an actual sales and marketing solution. I don’t think it was always popular to have a marketing team driving that technology, but I think we accomplished more because of it. We were able to pull in different types of marketing programs, from seemingly simple things like point of sale merchandising to more complex things like lead generation and lead assignment and asset management tools. There were things that today we probably take for granted because this was ten years ago, but hopefully not ten years ago. I’m aging both of us. A lot of the programs we built at Airstream were about enabling the dealer relationship, getting the dealer as close to marketing as they were to sales because the brand was so critically important. Airstream is entirely about the brand and getting the dealers to sometimes comply with brand standards, but more often convincing them that it wasn’t about the compliance, it was that the brand messaging worked. Just you had to get on board and it’s going to be mutually beneficial.

Steven Hileman [00:16:54]:
What was the alternative? What were they doing that you had to convince them to stop doing and move towards brand?

John Gough [00:17:00]:
I think at that point in time there were still dealers in airstreams network that were selling rvs and not airstreams. Not exclusive, not just non exclusive, but who you sell a travel trailer to and how you sell it to them was very different for airstream at that point in time. A large, very large chunk of their audience was people who had never even considered an RV before and an airstream wasn’t. They still weren’t considering an airstream, an rv, right, because it wasn’t this big ugly white box with weird graphics on the side. It was an iconic silver bullet that they remember from the space race in the seventies. It was helping to convince the dealers that were willing that that’s how you could sell it. And that took branded programs, it took the right incentives, it took committing to changing the collaboration between sales and marketing to say like if you want to have access to cooperative marketing funds to help promote these, you know, to help promote airstream, basically free marketing money for the dealer. We’re going to change the way we do incentives for the salespeople so that they have to finish inputting all the customer’s information in the dealer portal so that they complete all these necessary steps that helps the machine grow.

John Gough [00:18:19]:
Those are things that you don’t want to do. You don’t want to get between a salesperson and their money, but sometimes you have to because it’s better for everybody. That’s a hornet’s nest of sales politics.

Kyler Mason [00:18:30]:
What’s the recipe for success there and the way that these salespeople earn their livelihood? Because kind of like bringing this back to the B2B2X. Your first customer as airstream is your dealer. You need them to be placing orders. You’re going to change kind of like the relationship is structured because you’re giving them maybe more rules than they’re used to. The salespeople are playing by a new game, but you’re also trying to drive demand with the consumer. So like how does that all work?

John Gough [00:18:58]:
It all comes down to behavioral economics to me, right? We put the right incentives in the right place to create the right behavior. Sometimes that means change, uncomfortable change. But look at it this way. If you want dealers to cooperatively market your brand, regardless of what brand it is, if you want them to do that marketing, you want to do it in a way that benefits your brand as much as it benefits the sales at their dealership. You’ve got to put the incentives in the right locations. Means, yes, you’re going to incentivize the dealership salesperson to a certain degree, but payout of that can be contingent on them completing a training course every year can be contingent upon them ensuring that any type of warranty registration documentation is submitted successfully. It is okay to put those steps in the process so that they’re going to get the benefit of it because that customer then is going to be fully connected to the manufacturer and they’re going to get lifecycle communications. They’re going to get different types of experiences from the manufacturer that are going to set them up to buy their next vehicle.

John Gough [00:20:12]:
Some of it’s about teaching those end salespeople, those people that are actually having the transactional relationship with the customer, about how they benefit from the program and not just when they get paid out for their spiff.

Kyler Mason [00:20:25]:
So what would you say to someone listening that’s like, well, yeah, that’s all true, but it’s airstream like. You have so much leverage. If you were plopped into another that was a little less mature, wasn’t such an iconic brand, what do you do?

John Gough [00:20:42]:
You’ve got to start somewhere. I think you have to remember, too, that airstream wasn’t always that iconic. They’ve had a couple of really talented leaders the last few years. They’re very marketing and brand savvy, and it’s taken them a long time to get to where they’re at today. And it’s taken a lot of talent by different people, not just me or you or anybody else, that helped on those projects. Like, it’s been a decade of hard work. You’ve got to start somewhere. When I started Airstream, there were one or two exclusive dealers.

John Gough [00:21:15]:
Now I’m guessing there’s 25 or 30, but we were talking about putting those incentives in place and those rules around incentives before the exclusive dealer model even existed, right? You have to start somewhere. And yes, you’re going to have leverage in different spots. When you’ve got a really constrained availability for a product and the dealers are fighting to get access to your product, you’ve got better leverage. But that doesn’t mean that if you have a product that’s readily available, you can’t move your leverage somewhere else. Right now it’s your cooperative marketing dollars that are contingent upon these other types of incentives. It’s use what’s in your toolbox and everyone’s leverage is going to be slightly different depending upon what their product is and what its availability is. That makes sense.

Kyler Mason [00:22:08]:
Totally.

John Gough [00:22:09]:
Yeah.

Steven Hileman [00:22:10]:
Is there a group or a time that you can think of where you had maybe mixed lot environment and they were moving towards this dedicated airstream only dealer model or any other dedicated model where you can sort of track the trajectory of skeptic to believer?

John Gough [00:22:30]:
That’s a good question. Honestly, I think I was probably a pretty big skeptic for a long time. A lot of the things we were changing were just big bets. Right. So is a lot of marketing projects in general, but I tend to be pretty glass half full, but always sort of edging in the background. Like externally, youll always see me with the PR spin rooting for the success of a program. Internally, ive already built four possible emergency exit plans and there may have been skeptics. I may have been secretly skeptical about some of those things, but I dont think at any point in time we stopped applying pressure for the success of those programs.

John Gough [00:23:17]:
I think there were programs that we let fall by the wayside just because they didn’t do as well as we had hoped. You got to stand up and do the messaging work, do the PR work, and believe in what you’re building.

Steven Hileman [00:23:29]:
And to your point about behavioral economics, there’s this survivorship bias that happens and we look back and we say, man, Steven’s crushed it. He’s great at everything. And of course that’s true. You are great at everything. And also there were bets that you made that didn’t pay off. And the ability to let those things fall by the wayside is part of the strength that you build. Not needing to double and triple down on the bets that go south is part of crafting good strategy.

John Gough [00:23:57]:
Yeah, and I think that raises a great point around knowing the audience, knowing the research, knowing the data. Like if you haven’t done the research first, your likelihood of failure on one of those tests, one of those spaghetti against the wall kind of marketing projects, we’ve all had them, we’ve all done them. They seem like good ideas and they’re easy to stand up. So let’s just try it before we do the research. The research is always, always going to help pre validate and help you understand exactly where maybe those incentives or responses should end up.

Steven Hileman [00:24:31]:
Yeah. Is there a favorite tactic research tactic.

John Gough [00:24:36]:
I know it’s controversial, but I’m a real skeptic with straight surveys. I use the Henry Ford quote a lot. Yeah, they’re always going to tell you they want a faster horse. But I still like to do those type of anecdotal surveys because it’s a lot of reading. Although now there’s some great AI tools to summarize that for you, which make it super easy to help sort through a bunch of anecdotal survey responses. When I read those, I see more like, I see the tone, I see the sentence structure, I see more, I see messaging, I see PR. And whatever emotion that came out in some of those responses sometimes is telling. So that said, in the world I live in now, I’ve come to find a lot of value in big data.

John Gough [00:25:27]:
When you have the ability to have hundreds of thousands of transactions, it can really easily point to problems and opportunities. But from a research perspective, I’ve moved around. It just kind of depends on the problem you’re trying to solve and if it’s a behavioral one, or if it’s one that is easily identified with some type of transaction data.

Kyler Mason [00:25:50]:
Tell us a little bit about Roadpass.

John Gough [00:25:52]:
Roadpass started back in 2018 in part as a spinoff of some ideas from Airstream, but Airstream’s parent company is still an investor. Roadpass today is essentially a collection of apps used for road tripping in the outdoors and rving. And one of the interesting things we’re tackling right now is not just AI, but also we grew through acquisition over four or five years and realized that the customer doesn’t want to use four or five apps to do their vacation or their road trip or the camping adventure. Our growth strategy conflicted with our customer strategy, so we spent the last nine months or so essentially consolidating all of our apps into one super app. We had a very successful road trip planning app called Road Trippers we bought as part of the 2018 transaction to start road Pass. And now road trippers has all these camping and rving features in it as well. You can use it for your car, your motorcycle, or your rv. It’s kind of like our own super app, which is fun, but it’s also where the worlds meet, because our growth strategy is finally the same as our customer strategy.

John Gough [00:27:06]:
And so it’s an exciting time. But road Pass is entirely digital, which is wild. I spent the first 15 years of my career in physical products and vehicles, selling high dollar vehicles to now, the most expensive thing we sell is a $59.99 annual membership at a much higher volume, obviously. But the mission back in 2018 when it started, was to really helped defragment and make the camping and road trip experience easier. And our investors at the time were incentivized to do that because they knew if you had a better experience rving, you’d probably buy another one or you’d rent another one, or you’d go on another road trip or book another campground. So it was all about improving that experience for the end user. And I think we’re there finally. So that’s an exciting piece.

John Gough [00:27:55]:
I think I way underestimated the technical capability jump from building a digital product at Airstream that controlled a smart trailer to having an entire digital platform, and from having a couple of contract software developers at Airstream to having 70% of the company today being software developers and product folks, it’s a pretty big shift. Learned a ton. As you might imagine, it’s been a pretty fun ride.

Kyler Mason [00:28:27]:
So you’re selling to largely the same customer you’ve gotten to know. And you mentioned the growth strategy. This conversation, this podcast is about like, Why You Win. Tell us about the journey that you’ve gone on and the different assumptions you’ve had, the things you’ve invested in at Road Pass to, to help you along the growth strategy. And like what are the things you’ve learned? How have you pivoted that kind of stuff?

John Gough [00:28:49]:
I mean, Road Pass was primarily built as a direct to consumer company. Our marketing team today is a direct consumer marketing team. We don’t typically and haven’t typically played in the B2B space. What we’ve learned and discovered really just in the last year or so, is that some of our customers had a better opportunity to connect with us as part of a different transaction, as part of a different experience. We were finding is RV and car rental platforms that were adding road trippers to their recommendation lists for how to have a better RV trip or a better road trip. And we were getting a fair amount of interest from consumers in those sort of unsolicited partnership opportunities. And we developed this vision that what if we were just part of the RV rental transaction? What if when you checked out of the checkout cartoon for renting your RV that you could just add road trippers like the full premium experience, all the bells and whistles, or it just came along for the ride. It was part of an experience package that some rental company wanted you to have that got some traction really fast.

John Gough [00:30:02]:
And we actually developed a wholesale channel program to be able to help not just RV rental platforms, but then eventually RV dealers and now even auto dealers in adding a product to their f and I suite to their add ons at the dealership so that they can offer road trippers as either part of some other loyalty program that they have for their customers. For me, it’s been interesting, but also kind of hitting back to my roots in the dealer world because we’re now offering this B2B2C solution. So now with the B2B2C solution, it’s really opening up our eyes to where the other channel opportunities are to put this road Trippers.

Kyler Mason [00:30:46]:
App what hasn’t worked?

John Gough [00:30:48]:
Well, I talked about trying to offer multiple apps. We actually had tried to offer multiple apps as a bundle where you can get this one membership and it includes access to all of these apps. And the value prop for that was good, right? It’s like a four for one deal. It’s a very classic marketing tactic and the whole company followed that strategy. That worked for a while and it worked for a specific consumer, but at the end of the day, the customer experience just wasn’t there. Like, how many apps do you have on your phone? How many apps do you have on your phone that you still use?

Kyler Mason [00:31:24]:
As few as possible.

John Gough [00:31:25]:
Exactly. That has evolved over the last few years too. There’s an awesome entire regulatory and subscription compliance world that is a major pressure point for us as well. At the end of the day, the single app super app strategy, one experience that was flexible enough to serve multiple customers, but personalized to whatever vehicle they were using, was really the sort of winning pivot. Getting out of that sort of four for one bundle scheme was kind of the big change that raised the ceiling for us again.

Kyler Mason [00:32:02]:
So as far as distribution goes as it relates to your growth, are you seeing a faster growth rate with sort of like the partnership channel you have, or still direct to consumer?

John Gough [00:32:15]:
We’re actually seeing a pretty fast growth rate on both sides. We chalk the direct to consumer side up to some new feature changes and consolidation of features between all those apps. So now, like the app is just more appealing to a broader range of potential users. But also, we recently launched something we call Road Trippers Autopilot, which is an AI road trip planner. So what used to take you hours to sit down and plan on a road trip you can do in 40 seconds? Wow.

Kyler Mason [00:32:44]:
I’ve done that before and it is tedious.

John Gough [00:32:47]:
It is no longer tedious. It can be. You still get the option, it’ll pre build it for you and make all these suggestions, but you’re starting with a template that’s personalized to you and now you can go in and actually check. Maybe I don’t want to stop at that many ice cream shops.

Steven Hileman [00:33:02]:
It’s a crazy choice.

John Gough [00:33:04]:
A crazy choice. And I was doing a demo of it live, which is always nerve wracking. Then I had done it multiple times for multiple partners, and it kept recommending all these ice cream shops for me, and I was like, how does it know my only vice?

Steven Hileman [00:33:19]:
The model is too well trained.

John Gough [00:33:21]:
Yes, and that’s the interesting thing, because it’s both a buzzword and a dirty word these days. Trying to market something with AI in it is a slippery slope right now. But it’s garbage in, garbage out, right? Like chat. GPT is only going to tell you as much as it can quickly scrape off the Internet. And the Internet is full of plenty of garbage. So we built our own internal algorithms to actually create a recommendation engine that utilizes close to 40 million trips that have been planned on road trippers over the last few years. So 40 million trips worth of data, personalized vehicle profiles and stuff that you set up in the app. It’s pretty slick.

John Gough [00:34:07]:
I’ve been incredibly impressed. We got a super talented product team that has been really helpful. We talked a little bit about doing the research to understand what your gaps are, what your opportunities are. It’s great now to have so much data to literally see like, well, these people, on average, they’re stopping after they have to select who they’re bringing with them on the trip. It turns out behaviorally, some people plan road trips and don’t know who they want to bring with them yet. You can find little nuances like that, or find that people want to see the trip or see the options, or maybe they don’t even know where to start. So they get to the start page and they can’t even put in like a destination yet. It’s like the I’m feeling lucky button from Google.

John Gough [00:34:55]:
Like we just give them an idea. We built thousands of trip guides to help spark people’s interest, but that trip inspiration piece is still very real for people who don’t know where to get started. It’s changed our marketing funnel a lot because it is no longer as difficult to get people to move all the way through that funnel. They don’t have to spend 2 hours building a trip before they’re willing to actually buy the membership and pay for the app. You’re expediting that hours long process, that hours long funnel to seconds. So in some ways, that’s the free.

Kyler Mason [00:35:31]:
Part of the experience before they get behind the paywall.

John Gough [00:35:34]:
Exactly.

Kyler Mason [00:35:34]:
Very cool. So talking about the different growth strategies you have going on, it sounds like you have product led growth and that you have a free option. You’ve consolidated a lot of functionality into a single app. And how do you message to the different pain points that the product can solve for when you’ve consolidated so much?

John Gough [00:35:57]:
That is a huge challenge. Right? We talk about segmentation a lot because the challenge is that meet someone who’s a retired couple traveling in a large RV with their two poodles. That segment is very different than the college student going on a spring break road trip. Yet both are our customers and users. And so segmentation has become more important than ever to understand. Like we don’t need to talk to the college student about all of these camping and RV features. I want to stop at dive bars and cheap places to get fuel and snacks and really weird, quirky roadside stops that they can take some epic Snapchats with. Thats very different than your boomer couple in an RV who are looking for very different things in their road trip experience.

Kyler Mason [00:36:50]:
Are you finding that through any one of these different distribution channels that youre reaching one segment better than another? Like the partnerships you talked about? How is that working out?

John Gough [00:37:00]:
Yeah, I mean, at the core theres still a sort of center line around most of our customers and a lot of them are rvers, but auto customers still make up the vast majority of our customers greater than 70%, though rvers tend to use the product more engage, they’re more invested in the experience. They bought a really expensive vehicle, so they’ve committed dollar 50 or dollar 60 app to make sure they get their bang for their buck is, you know, is an easy investment and one that they make year over year in our sort of dealer channel environment, those are mostly RV dealers today, but that’s because they see this opportunity and if the customer doesn’t have a great experience, they’ve got a big hill to climb, especially with a new RV or the number of new people coming into rving post pandemic. Like there’s been a huge wave of people engaged in the outdoors. If those customers don’t learn how to use the RV quickly, they don’t learn the features and the lifestyle on how to book a campground and the things to avoid. They’re not going to buy another one. Again, it’s discretionary. It’s not like the car you need for your commute. Like they’ll sell it and they won’t buy another one.

Kyler Mason [00:38:14]:
How are they selling it? How are dealers selling your product?

John Gough [00:38:18]:
There’s a couple of different ways. Every dealer is a little bit different. We have dealers who are bundling it with roadside assistance programs. So you go to a dealership, you buy a new rv, and you’re like, yeah, I should probably have roadside or some sort of technical support hotline because I’m a newbie. I’ve never done this before. They’re going to sell you a package that’s $100, and because you’re buying it at the dealership, they’re going to roll it into your total cost of the vehicle. So if you finance, it’s all sort of lumped in. It’s the easy way, it’s the convenient way to do it.

John Gough [00:38:49]:
So they just bundle a licensed version of roadtrippers in with that package. Some dealers say the experience is worth everything and they have their own loyalty program. In that case, they’re paying for a license for road trippers for all their loyalty club members, at least for the first year, sometimes more. And then you have other dealers who are literally just adding it as an add on to the experience. Sometimes they might throw it in. Sometimes they’re actually going to make some margin on it and make some money on us licensing it to them at a lower rate. It’s a business opportunity. It’s a margin opportunity.

John Gough [00:39:24]:
It’s a bet on a better customer experience so that they come back and buy another vehicle or come back and utilize their parts and service department. So it’s working so far, which is good.

Kyler Mason [00:39:36]:
How did you arrive at we need to go direct to dealer because that wasn’t where you started.

John Gough [00:39:41]:
It certainly wasn’t. The RV rental was kind of the earlier opportunity in terms of an alternate channel. But it actually just started out of this idea that we needed a wholesale channel and we needed a wholesale channel that was more of a licensed arrangement and less of a reseller of individual like promo codes, for example. We had some technical constraints around what we could do without a big change in our platform. We had this vision because it spent all this time at Airstream and rev group, and we had learned that there was this behind the scenes process where a dealer would provide roadside assistance to the customer. And all the roadside assistance companies used this file transfer process behind the scenes, a secure file transfer process, to send that customer’s information over to the roadside assistance company or to the bank or to whoever. And I said, that’s really easy process. We could do that.

John Gough [00:40:40]:
It’s a simple protocol. What if we just built the system to match that so that the dealer doesnt have to do anything. They just send us the same file. They sent their roadside assistance company exactly the same file. And that worked. We lowered the barrier of entry. Some of the RV manufacturers do that and others dont. But the dealer saw it as well.

John Gough [00:41:04]:
Now the barrier to entry is low because I dont need a bunch of developers or technical support to actually enable this. I can add a little margin to the table with every deal, and it’s a better customer experience. We made it a no brainer. And with all of that bundling activity, those dealers also now see it as one app to rule them all. They don’t have to recommend our four individual feature competitors, or know the difference, or know the difference or care, because they don’t. A car salesman or an RV salesman at the end of the day, like, they’ve very sort of narrow understanding of what they’re there to do. They have one mission, and the good ones are great at it, but they’re not always rvers themselves. So it gives them a tool to say, oh, you need to find a campground, just use road trippers.

John Gough [00:41:54]:
Oh, you need an RV safe navigation system so you don’t shear your air conditioners off the top of the travel trailer. Great, use road trippers. All of those stress and anxiety inducing features that they’ve had to historically point to multiple resources for, we’ve crammed in one app. So it’s this synergy of making the product strategy and the channel strategy and the marketing strategy all finally work the same and not fighting against our growth initiatives. The alignment on those is what’s really sort of unlocked the growth last year.

Steven Hileman [00:42:35]:
What I’m thinking about as you’re describing this, these new channels that you’re activating and your relationship with the dealer is in your past life, you have been on the manufacturing side and you have been the supplier to the dealer. And you are introducing incentives, as you were describing, to get a certain kind of performance out of them. But ultimately, the goal is to add incremental value to them. And now that you are a supplier to that same group, the goal is really the same thing. You are trying to activate the sales moment for them in a way that’s going to provide value to them and to you. Wherever you are. You’re distant from the sale, from the customer moment. Your whole mission is really, how do I create value in that transaction the most that I can for both the dealer and for us on the outside of it?

John Gough [00:43:24]:
That’s exactly it. It’s also free marketing, roadtrippers is now in the dealership at the point of sale.

Kyler Mason [00:43:32]:
I mean, your cost of customer acquisition.

John Gough [00:43:33]:
Is what its always higher than youd like it to be, right? In that situation. Yeah. The customers acquisition cost is negative.

Kyler Mason [00:43:42]:
Whats the time youre spending to land a dealer?

John Gough [00:43:44]:
Its the time for my sales team to go work those deals and build those relationships and manage those accounts. But we build some point of sale materials to help the dealers. And its a way, especially when youre talking about people who are purchasing their first RV in that space. They probably haven’t done the research yet to figure out which apps they need to use.

Kyler Mason [00:44:04]:
Why would they have thought of that?

John Gough [00:44:06]:
Yeah, it’s pretty far down the list when you’re trying to figure out what you can afford and which floor plan.

Kyler Mason [00:44:11]:
And like, it’s like when you go home with your first baby, it’s like, where’s the manual to this? Now you just jump into an rv.

John Gough [00:44:18]:
They make some manuals for those, but they never tell the full story.

Kyler Mason [00:44:22]:
Right.

John Gough [00:44:23]:
It’s a very good analogy. I think at the end of the day, the alignment is shared. Right. The benefit is the same for the dealer as it is for us. They get a happier customer, less stress and anxiety that’s shared externally from the customer towards the dealer. We can take some of that off of their plate because it’s our specialty. That’s what we do. We take some of that stress and anxiety out of the trip planning process.

John Gough [00:44:44]:
So there’s plenty of research in multiple industries that link those anxiety moments to whether or not a customer is willing to repurchase, whether or not they’ll come back for another RV rental if they didn’t have some of those epic memories, right? Like, do you take another RV road trip if it was boring? Is your definition of not boring like stopping and taking the Snapchat with Doctor Pepper’s gravestone? Maybe could also be the one I personally like, which is the future birthplace of James T. Kirk or the largest ball of twine competing with the largest ball of yarn. You want those experiences to be memorable. And sometimes it’s the weird and quirky, we call them extraordinary places that do that, but that’s a memory you share and you talk about with your friends and with your family. Those are the things those, the memories that make you want to take another trip.

Kyler Mason [00:45:38]:
You’ve really made a lot of progress on product. You’ve made a ton of progress on just like product market fit channel strategies working out. You’ve got partnerships with RV rental companies, dealerships. You’re going direct to consumer. So you’ve got a lot of things in motion, like what’s next? What’s next to accelerate growth to keep winning?

John Gough [00:45:56]:
Yeah, that’s a great question. What’s next is probably expansion of the type of services and products that we offer within roadtrippers itself talked about all this consolidation and how much value it added and how much better the value prop became for the customer. But there are more and more things and we’re learning them quickly. With autopilot, for example, that customers are doing or asking to do on their road trips, we’ve more recently started to tiptoe into bookings. So accommodations, campgrounds, events, those things that you’re adding to your trip, well, if they require a ticket or a reservation, keeps the customer there in one place out of multiple apps or multiple websites. So there’s a lot of growth to be had in that space. There’s still a lot of fragmentation in that space. So it will take some time.

John Gough [00:46:49]:
There’s plenty of campgrounds who don’t have Internet. Yeah, pretty much. If you like a reservation, you still have to pick up the phone and give them a call to make a reservation. That’s just not a thing that most of us millennials are comfortable doing. So we’ll get there, but it’s going to take a few years.

Kyler Mason [00:47:05]:
So you’re going after increasing lifetime value of a customer and looking for add ons more to add to the suite of solutions.

John Gough [00:47:14]:
Yeah, LTVs an important metric that we watch on a regular basis, but it’s one that we tackled first with this all in one super app strategy. In doing that, we also switched from we have one membership available at $35 a year to we actually now have a good, better best model. So we have a 35, a 50 and a $60 membership depending upon how much of it you need to use and what your road trip style is. That’s helped LTV a lot. Our RV features are in that top tier, our new autopilot tools in that top tier. So get the best bang for your buck up there by a long shot. But it’s also helped our LTV a lot.

Kyler Mason [00:47:59]:
Are your dealers selling the highest package.

John Gough [00:48:01]:
Usually in the RV side? Yes. Part of that’s just based on the margin opportunity, right? Like it’s a few more dollars available to them to make with them customer. And part of that is that most for dealers, RV dealers, and they want somebody to have that experience. That said, now that autopilot is in that top tier premium package, that autopilot experience is so good it’s so clean and fast that we’re seeing a lot of auto customers move straight there, too. That was part of the strategy, was give our auto customers a reason to want to give us more money. And Autopilot was so far, certainly turning out to be one of those reasons.

Kyler Mason [00:48:43]:
Yeah, that’s awesome. It sounds like you’ve hit a kind of a gold mine with the RV dealer and potentially a negative cost of customer acquisition. You’ve got two sales guys on your team. Are they focused on the RV dealer customer right now?

John Gough [00:48:59]:
Right now, the two salespeople that we have, one’s actually responsible for this embedded program. Embedded is selling licensed road trippers memberships through dealers or other companies. The other salesperson is actually structured to sell our advertising and sponsorship products. So we’ve got an entire sort of static line of business around our sponsorships. We do a ton of advertising with the 16 million annual web visitors that we get. Like, advertising is a real line of business for us. So our free users who don’t pay for subscriptions, see ads. And so it’s a combination of monetizing the platform to the fullest, something that we’ve done for a long time.

Kyler Mason [00:49:41]:
Okay, so with the team member focused on the dealer channel, why not double, triple, quadruple down on that and just try to land as many partnerships as fast as possible?

John Gough [00:49:53]:
There are not as many potential partners. There is what you may think, and the caveat today with the channel program, with the embedded program, is that it requires a certain volume to really be worth setting up for us. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t work with, strategically work with a really small dealer, the smaller dealers, by nature of the low price, it’s not as easy to incentivize them. And we’ve strategically gone after a few particular groups, large dealer groups. There’s been a lot of consolidation in dealer groups, both in auto and rv. Like snagging just one or two of those relationships, they become anchors to your strategy. And those deals also, they tend to be longer term. We’re in a lot of ways looking for the right partners there, and not necessarily all the partners.

John Gough [00:50:46]:
Like any business, we’re not going to turn away much unless it is strategically disadvantaged in some way. But we’ve got a really great salesperson for the embedded program came from the bookings world, from the campground bookings space, and we feel like we have the right manpower. We’re also using a sort of for hire AI lead gen service. On the sales side. It’s been an interesting journey. You’ve all seen the like, cold emails that you get, but it’s mostly AI, mostly email. There’s a real person picking up the phone and doing some cold calling for us too. But that’s given us a lot of bandwidth on the sales side without having to actually have the weight and structure of a really big sales team.

Kyler Mason [00:51:28]:
Who is it targeting?

John Gough [00:51:30]:
We’ve got a few different targets. We use it for advertising outreach to find advertising clients, but we also use it to find auto dealers. There’s a lot of intermediaries in the like, roadside and insurance space that also are willing to bundle road trippers in with their services. So we’ve got a few different segments that we’re targeting with that service. But it’s been slick. I’ve been impressed with it. It’s generated some pretty good leads for us. So that’s cool.

Kyler Mason [00:52:00]:
You’re gonna have to tell me what that is.

John Gough [00:52:03]:
I will.

Kyler Mason [00:52:05]:
Maybe secret sauce for this.

John Gough [00:52:06]:
It might be a little secret sauce. I’ll take that one offline. But we’re still in startup mode, so limited resources. We’re not going to go hire a massive team, but we’re still really good at being scrappy with the resources we have available. And that’s part of why I like Road Pass and still very entrepreneurial. Get to try some new things, even on the sales front.

Kyler Mason [00:52:30]:
And some things are hitting and you.

John Gough [00:52:32]:
Double down on things that are hitting.

Steven Hileman [00:52:34]:
Imprudent questions, Steven, but generative AI, it’s coming for a lot of us in a lot of different ways. And I have seen people use other AI tools to hint at the kind of thing that autopilot is doing. You know, tell me where I should go. Tell me what I should do. Help me plan a thing. What’s the moat? How are you protecting the value that Road Pass has currently from what may start encroaching on your territory?

John Gough [00:53:06]:
Yeah, we’ve asked that question a bunch of times internally. It’s a pretty critical one. At the end of the day, those 38 million plus trips that we have planned that are securely inside of our databases and not available to be skimmed and searched by other engines because they’re not public, that’s remote. We have better data specific to road trips, that’s specific to vehicle type, that’s specific to different types of traveler profiles. Part of the reason why our road trimmers autopilot is also patent pending. We’ve got some great folks working on it. Just getting started still. But AI is.

John Gough [00:53:50]:
I think I mentioned garbage in, garbage out is the adage, go tell Chat GPT to build you a road trip with the same inputs we’re going to ask you for. And you’re going to get the Grand Canyon or Disney World because they have the most affiliate links.

Steven Hileman [00:54:08]:
It’s all SEO.

John Gough [00:54:09]:
It’s all about point of reference and about the source of the information.

Kyler Mason [00:54:14]:
You’re sitting on a gold mine of data. Yes, a lot of people probably want that from you.

John Gough [00:54:18]:
No comment.

Kyler Mason [00:54:21]:
I knew you were gonna say that.

Steven Hileman [00:54:24]:
Why you win is presented by element free, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go to market strategy strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales, channel support, and brand development.

Kyler Mason [00:54:40]:
If you’d like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from Element Three, visit elementthree.com. that’s elementthree.com.