How OEM Leaders Can Build Real Product Expertise at the Dealer Level

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

John Gough (00:02):

As marketers, sometimes the best information we have is what we can observe people doing on a website or who has filled out a form or how many email addresses we have. There are real limits to what we know about what's happening in the marketplace. Even when you're doing that well, the tools that most people use, HubSpot, MailChimp, whatever, to do MarTech, to do CRM and marketing automation, they are built towards this idea of lead score. It turns out that lead score, when most people see it for the first time, they think that lead score is the same thing as propensity to buy. That if you have a high lead score, you have done the right things and that people with a 90 out of a hundred are the ones who are just about to swipe their credit card, especially in these big purchases. There's a correlation between lead score and propensity to buy, but it's lower than you think it is.

(01:04):

And so there are a lot of marketers who are in these industries and they're looking at the tools, at the software that they bought, and they're being tricked because it's not actually telling them what they think it's telling them. Lead score typically improves as you know more about a customer. And so it's actually a measure of that. How much have I seen this identified individual do something in a property that I can observe? I know their name. I know their address. I know they clicked on the downloadable brochure. And those are some things that look like propensity to buy. But the difference is that when you actually look at propensity to buy, you look at a big cohort of people who have purchased and a big cohort of people who have not purchased, and you do the math to figure out what are the signals and what is the noise in these two different groups, some of the signals are surprising.

(01:59):

For example, there is a lag period, a quiet period across all of these outdoor recreation big toy purchases where people just go dark for a certain amount of time. And it varies a little bit depending on what they're buying. It's usually between like 30 to 45 days. But that period of time when people go dark on your OEM website is not actually them abandoning, which is what the CRM or the MarTech tool would typically tell you is that they're decaying quickly. Actually, they're at the dealership. They are talking to their spouse about, should I buy the 20-foot or the 22-foot? And they're getting their financing ready. If you treat that as the decay that the tool would tell you it is, you as an OEM salesperson or marketer are going to do a bunch of behavior that may not be the kind of saving behavior that the customer actually needs.

(02:56):

It might be annoying to the customer when that propensity to buy is actually increasing. One of the visuals that I like about LeadScore is on a scale of one to five, imagine a picture of a really pixelated blurry face versus a perfectly clear high res image of an individual. A one, the lowest possible is anonymous or I know almost nothing about them. A five is, I see who you are clearly. So lead score actually in our world is probably a better representation of like, do I understand what segment you're in? What kind of buyer you are likely to be? Not how ready to buy you.