Entries from August 2009 ↓

840 Million Reasons to Celebrate – Zappos Business – Entrepreneur.com

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I’m writing this post to insure that there’s complete transparency regarding my involvement with 50 Below. I’m pretty sure that some of you, either with some encouragement from one of 50 Below’s competitors, or on your own, are going to wonder what the nature of this relationship is.

I don’t want there to be any confusion or misunderstanding about why I’m doing this. I want you Dear Reader to be 100% clear about what the deal is. And because of that, I hope you will respect my position and my conclusion. If at any point in the future anything changes I will be equally clear.

No, This little missive is not brief. It’s not a bunch of key concepts organized in bullet points. You’re going to probably want to carve out a chunk of time to read it, but damnit, it’s my site and it’s one of the few places I can do whatever the hell I want! It’s a blog and I like to rant! And I’m writing a lot of it on an airplane flying back home from Duluth so I’ve got time to burn.

Also, I don’t have an editor anywhere around here so I’m sure there’s a lot of really bad writing in here as well. Also (see?! two sentences in a row that start with also!), because this is my point of view and not officially a statement from 50 Below, I’m going to be pretty direct so there’s not a lot of ambiguity.

On with the show…

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve placed an advertisement on my blog here for 50 Below. In addition, you need to know that I have entered into a co-marketing partnership with 50 Below to help promote, and more importantly, develop, their range of solutions for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

If you’re a long-time reader of my random thoughts and rants in Dealernews or here on this site (Congratulations! You’re among a very small, and elite group of people!), you should be saying to yourself, “Self: but I thought Todd has said repeatedly in his columns and in his Indy presentations that all of those turn-key, 3rd party website providers were to be avoided if at all possible.” (Actually, to be honest, I’ve said they were all crap) And yes, when those things were written or spoken it was, in my rather well-informed opinion, true.

I fully stand behind the fact that when I expressed those views that if a dealership was committed to really taking on things like e-commerce or using their web presence as a cornerstone of their marketing strategy that the only honest advise I could give was to take it on and build something unique, bespoke, custom… Expensive.

That was before I began a project for A&S Powersports, the dealership that I am, at the time of this writing, responsible for the development and operation of their websites.

I’m pleased to say that now, for like 98% of you, when you ask me what you need to do to get online and really take it on, instead of of a 16 page proposal that had a ton of bullet points and would require you to spend a lot of money, my advise boils down to the following three points:

1. Sign up with 50 Below (load it up… get EZ-Shop, Shop by fitment, and when they launch some of the cool-as-hell stuff that I’ve seen this week, whatever it costs, you’ll need that too…)
2. Have someone that is at least full-time to really take it on that has the competence and ability to make the most of it. You don’t have a service department without a Service Manager do you? How about a sales department with no Sales Manager? Parts department with no Parts Manager? Nope. Nope. And…… Nope. So why would you have a line of your business that has more potential for revenue than all three combined (and right now, without exaggeration, that potential exists) without at least one person dedicated to it full time?
   Would you buy a new box of tools from the Snap-On guy, roll a bike in front of it and then get pissed because when you came back at the end of the month the bike still doesn’t run?
3. Hire me as an obscenely high-priced consultant to really show you how to make enough money so that you can sleep on a bed of $100 bills with three or four MotoGP Umbrella Girls.

(Step #3 is optional, but highly recommended)

Anyway on with the main story…

Over the years, A&S had one primary website, www.ascycles.com. This site was doing double duty as a successful dealership-based e-commerce operation, and our “dealership” website. So whenever we needed to communicate something like an event, or a vehicle financing special, it had to go onto a site that was generating significant e-commerce revenue from PG&A sales to BMW riders all over the country. This meant “giving up” things like screen real estate, navigation areas etc. for locally oriented purposes at the expense of direct revenue generation via e-commerce (promotion space, merchandising, etc.).

At the beginning of this year A&S took on Ducati and created a new line of business, A&S Ducati. This was going to require some shuffling around and thinking about what I was going to do in terms of site organization.

I made the decision that:

• the site www.ascycles.com should remain focused on BMW Motorcycle e-commerce
• there should be a new dedicated Ducati e-commerce site (www.ducati-motorcycle-parts.com (I can’t believe that in 2009 that this prime, SEO worthy domain was available!)
• I should create two new sites for local dealership activities (vehicle information, lead generation, local community activities, etc.).

I had some key goals or constraints for these two new dealer sites:

1) They had to be easily maintainable directly by A&S sales and marketing staff. I had zero desire, interest, or time to do things like put up new graphics or change content on these sites. So there needed to be some kind of easy-to-use content management system.

I could custom develop a site around a content management system (CMS) platform like WordPress or maybe suck it up and go with one of those 3rd party, turn-key sites that focus on the powersports industry. At this point in the process, you need to read that last part with a sneer of disdain bordering on disgust. Remember, I still didn’t like any of them.

2) I wanted a system that automagically had things like vehicle specs and OEM promotions just show up on the site. Well, that obviously ruled out building a custom site on a CMS and pretty much forced me to at least consider one of the three players in this space.

So I wrote up an extensive evaluation questionnaire similar to the one Arlo did for Dealernews. No, you can’t see my questionnaire because I did it as part of my day job for A&S, but Arlo’s is a pretty good representation of what I was asking.

I was going to grill the hell out of these guys and if they couldn’t handle it then maybe I’d have to go the custom route.

So I wrote up the questions, emailed them to each of the vendors, had them fill them out and then scheduled the follow up interviews.

Now I want to be very clear here. I was asking questions to a detail and a level that I’m 100% sure that none of you ask. How do I know that? Because all three told me that. They all said that I was asking stuff that they had never had any dealer ask them.

Because of my years, and years, and years in the software sales industry before I came to the powersports market, I know how to get through the smokescreens, the fake demos, the hand-waving, etc. I was a sales engineer during the dot-com days. I know how to rig a demo. Therefore I know how to spot a rigged game.

And remember, I was looking to spend real money for the dealership where I worked on not one, but two sites. I don’t take my job lightly. I’m obsessive to the point of being a pain in the ass. But I’m pretty good at what I do so I consider it a fair trade.

Also keep in mind that I was sort of throwing my weight in as somewhat of an expert in the motorcycle and powersports industry when I was asking these questions. As in, “You know who I am right? You know, if I end up picking you that means that I’m going against my past stand against a turn-key site and that might be potentially valuable for your company… Right?”

I’m kind of like the male version of Paris Hilton when it comes to the internet in this industry except I don’t carry around an ugly rat-dog and I make a lot, lot, lot less money.

And I’m not as hot.
Or as skinny.

OK… Maybe I’m more like Oprah.

But male.
And white.
And thinner…
And much, much, much poorer.

Anyway… I was being very clear that:

1. I don’t want to use any of you
2. If you impress me, I’m going to be very vocal about it
3. I’m 90% sure that you’re not going to impress me
4. It’s worth your effort to try to impress me

So onto the results:

Company A:

To sum up Company A in powersports terms, they are the equivalent of an inexpensive Chinese motorcycle. It’s cheap, and yea, it technically qualifies as as a motorcycle, but I would never buy one or ride on one or let a friend buy one. And it’s sure as heck not going to win you any races.

• They pretty much refused to offer much of anything in the way of a written response to my RFQ questionnaire so it fell to a phone call.
• On the initial phone call I went though the answers with a salesperson that I’m pretty sure had just turned on a computer for the very first time a day or two before we talked. They were totally clueless about everything. They finally admitted they were new (why would they have a brand new sales person talk to someone like me?! What were they thinking?!) and they were going to get their boss involved. That was probably a mistake.
• “The Boss” was one of the most unpleasant people I have ever had to deal in a sales/customer interaction in recent memory. And they were pretty clueless as well. On several occasions their initial response to a question was something along the lines of “Why do you need to know that?” Because maybe I’d like to know as much as I can about the platform I’m going to invest a big chunk of money in and depend on as a significant part of my business’s future success. How’s that for a reason? Good grief… Sales training anyone?
• So in addition to the general unpleasant feeling about the call, the solution was so horrible that I pretty much stopped writing down answers on my notes and tried to get off the phone as quickly as possible.
• Well, they do have pretty good micro-fiche solutions. I think they should go back to focusing on that, hand off all their customers to 50 Below and just move on. But that’s just me.

Company A’s verdict… Immediate and total FAIL!

Company B:

In powersports terms, Company B is a 1996 Virago. It might have been an adequate bike for the time, but it’s 2009 for Pete’s sake! A new coat of paint and new tires are not enough to let it compete in the modern marketplace!

• Dated platform. They have not made, nor do they seem to be interested in making any significant or necessary advancements or improvements to their products in several years.
• Pretty much without exception, every one of the sites I’ve ever seen that is based on their platform is ugly. Not just ugly based on 2009 standards, but most of these sites would have been ugly back in 1998 when people still thought that the <blink> tag was cool. I know, because when I judged the top websites for the 2009 Indy show, I had to suffer through reviewing like 90 of them. The good news is I could identify them before the header graphic had even loaded so I didn’t have to suffer long before I moved on to the next one.
  While I can’t fault you dealers for not being graphic designers, or knowing anything about how to design a website that enhances your brand image, you’d think that the largest supplier of websites to the powersports industry would have a frickin clue and hire someone that had more artistic and design background than painting portraits of Elvis on black velvet at the country fair.
• Horrible, horrible shopping experience. Face it… Customers do… not… shop… by… distributor… catalog…! A customer for a motorcycle jacket does not care or know who Tucker Rocky is! Sure, they know Parts Unlimited because their banners are all over the race track, but I’d say less than 1% of your customers has a clue what Parts Unlimited actually does. And they sure as hell don’t want to search through those catalogs for something like a jacket, sprocket, tire, or helmet.
• You’re locked into a long term contract. You are required to sign a one year contract with an non-optional auto-renew clause. No way! I’m not getting locked into anything as important as my website’s platform. Things change in our industry and on the web too quickly to run the risk of missing a significant opportunity to do the right thing for my business because I’m tied to an agreement that is not in my best interest. Seriously, what do they think they are…? A cell phone company?
• Very poor customer service. When I used them on a limited basis for a dealership I was trying to help out (to the point that I wrote several strongly worded e-mails about the issue to their parent company’s upper management) I basically got an “oh… so sorry…” response. I (and by extension Company B’s customer) never did get answers to my questions.
• Very expensive. When all the bells and whistles are turned on to get it to come close to what 50 Below offers when all their bells and whistles are turned on they were almost $10,000 more expensive than 50 Below over a year for both sites. And that’s with, in my opinion, an inferior product and much worse service.
  You’d think that if anyone could get a discount it would be me so they’d have a pretty good reference account… Nope… It’s not until now, in a down market with an obviously inferior product are they offering any discounts to try to shore up customers that are finally realizing that they’ve been overpaying for years. If you happen to have been a customer of Company B, and they offer you a discount going forward, make sure that you ask if you can get that discount back-dated for all those years they were over charging you.
• Here’s a real shocker… The person that I talked to on the phone, a guy that I’ve met at a few Indy shows and you would think would obviously know that there’s a fair chance that I’ll talk to people about our conversation, didn’t hesitate to take advantage of opportunities to totally rip apart the parent company that had just spent an obscene amount of money to acquire them. So here’s an executive at the company ripping apart his parent company to a potential, and somewhat influential, customer. What does that say about the internal dynamics of the entire operation and its internal corporate health?
• Backing up the above indications of bad blood between the acquired and the acquirer was that when I was at Indy and talked to several guys from another division of the acquiring company about their thoughts of the soon to be corporate sibling, they ripped them apart. Not just a little either. These are not rumors about hostility within the overall organization. This is my first-hand account with both sides of this company being openly hostile to the other guys.
• So obviously there’s something really messed up at that company and it’s just one more giant indication that I’d never want to recommend them to anyone, let alone choose them myself.
• I even offered the following to them: “If you are interested in detailed reasons why Company B was not chosen, and think that my input/reasons would help your development in the future, let me know.” Nothing… OK, fine. Maybe in spite of my position in the industry, my years of experience, my demonstrated success in e-commerce in the motorcycle industry they figured I was full of crap and had nothing to learn from. Might have been worth a discussion or two though, no?

Now again keep in mind that both of these vendors knew who I was. That by signing me and the dealership where I worked it would be at least a tacit, and at best an overt, endorsement of their company and their products.

And in both of these cases they acted as if they could care less. I was stunned. I expected a little more effort.

So, I’d say that if they were willing to treat me like that (and let’s not forget, I’m really, really important around here! ), before I’d even signed up with them, you gotta wonder what would happen if I was a customer and ran into “issues.”

So once again. Total… Fail…

50 Below:

With 50 Below, you’re getting a race ready factory bike. You even get factory support in the form of their Marketing Account Executives that will work with you, as part of the standard package to help you get your site working the way it’s supposed to work. They want to help you win. Let them!

So then I move on to 50 Below… Keep in mind that I went into this whole process positive that 50 Below was going to be the absolute worst. So much so that I had considered not even including them.

Why?

1) The solution they first offered a few years ago was so God-awful horrible. That whole page turning, flash-based, parts catalog based shopping experience was just miserable. The templates were eye-searingly bad. Etc. etc.

2) They had had some pretty significant financial and/or legal issues in their recent past that I thought indicated that they were at worst shady and at best irresponsible. Everyone I talked to about 50 Below, even today, universally says something along the lines of:

• “Are they still in business?”
• “Didn’t they all get hauled off to Gitmo?”
• “Don’t they try to keep your domain name if you leave their service?”
• (It should be pointed out that a lot of this FUD was being propagated and encouraged to propagate by good ol’ Company B above… Oh… Look… One more reason to not pick Company B… They like to play dirty.). For the record, none of the above was true or at least true to the extent that it was portrayed. If you want to know what really happened, talk to 50 Below. They will explain it to you.

Or better yet, check this out…

I didn’t know this at first, and I bet most of you might not know this, but 50 Below is also involved in other industries other than powersports. For instance, they are the only approved provider for franchised UPS stores. They are also the sole, authorized website providers for various financial and insurance firm’s independent advisers like UBS and Smith Barney.

I’m willing to bet that all those companies probably did a fair amount of due diligence when they decided to pick 50 Below. WAYYYY more than I did and I’m willing to bet WAYYYY more than you’re going to do. You think they would have picked 50 Below if the rumors were even close to being true? Yea. I don’t think so either.

And does being involved in those other industries mean that 50 Below is not “focused” or “dedicated” to the powersports markets? Hell no… It means that they are diversified across multiple industries so that when crap like what’s hitting our industry now happens, it doesn’t cripple them. Now if all you’re involved in is the powersports industries and things start getting bad, what do you lean on? Oh… Right…Nothing.

So onto the results of my investigation…

About 5 minutes into the presentation on their product offering I was really, really impressed with

1. the improvements they had made in the last few years and
2. how astonishingly far beyond the other two competitors they were.

Their website designs are composed of modern best-practices. All that crappy table based layout stuff that they had used in the past, and that the other two companies still used was gone with clean and efficient CSS based design. Nice!

Their shopping experience, what they are calling EZ-Shop, finally addressed the horrible practice of catalog based shopping. Customers can shop by category, brand, and even fitment to the model of vehicle that they own. This is seriously an order of magnitude better than the other two solutions. If you care about e-commerce at all as a part of your overall business strategy, this feature alone is reason to pick 50 Below. The fact that they are kicking ass on so many other features as well just makes this such a no brainer solution.

Is 50 Below perfect? Nope. Is it better than the rest? Absolutely.

Are there things I’d like to see changed or improved? Yes. And you know what? They are really interested in making those changes. In fact they already have plans, prototypes, or almost released features to address a lot of the things I’d like to see. They seem to actually be very committed to making their product better and better and providing more value and better service. What more can you ask for from a partner?

If 50 Below would have had an offering like they have now when I began the work on the sites I manage, I would have used it. Or to put it another way, if I was going to go to work for a new dealership today with the goal of creating another world-class internet presence I would use 50 Below as the platform upon which I would begin my work. No brainer.

Where do you want your techs to buy their tools? Snap On? MAC? Or some dude selling crap from China out of a van at the flea market? Same deal.

Does this mean that just because you use 50 Below you’ll automagically end up with a website that shows up #1 in all Google results and generates millions of dollars in e-commerce revenue? Not a chance. Just because you buy a Ducati 1098R can you jump on it and win an WSBK title? Nope. But if you have an amazing rider and a talented team working on it, you’ll have better than a fighting chance.

I get from 50 Below a real sense of forward momentum, valuable progress, continuous improvement. Moving forward at an amazing speed. In the time I’ve spent working with 50 Below I’ve seen a team of dedicated individuals that are hell-bent on creating the ultimate platform for the motorcycle and powersports industries.

In conclusion (finally…), I just spent the better part of a week in Duluth meeting with the folks from 50 Below. Seeing what they’ve got going on, seeing what’s coming, etc. I wanted to make sure that if I was going to get behind promoting something that I could do it in good faith.

After doing that I’m even more convinced that I made the right decision for A&S to use them for my projects and that I can recommend them as the default, no-brainer, “what are you waiting for?”, go-to solution for the motorcycle and powersports industry when it comes to turn-key internet presences.

Why do I want you to all move to 50 Below? Because I want to be able to actually help this industry start using the web so you’ll be successful. I’m sick of seeing dealers wallow around with no website, or crap websites, and not be able to tell you in simple terms how to do the stuff you need to be doing.

Now I can. Call 50 Below. Tell them you just read this and you’re ready to start taking responsibility for getting your dealership into the 21st century.

Here’s some more details about how and why I’m working with 50 Below:

• I contacted them to see if there was anything I could do to help them get more dealers to use their platform. Why? Because I could not understand why anyone except in the most unusual of circumstances would not choose 50 Below. I have a very limited tolerance for irrational behaviour. If after reading this, and after really digging into the three options out there you don’t choose 50 Below, well, I’d love to hear why. Seriously… If you don’t pick 50 Below, tell me why. If it’s a valid point, I will ask them to address the issue. If it’s a legitimate issue, I’ll update this post with that info.
• They are paying me a small consulting retainer to do things like write tutorials for their newsletters and other educational materials in the future. This fee also includes an advertising component for the banner on my site. Trust me, it’s not a lot of money and if I didn’t feel that I was doing the right thing to recommend them to you, the amount of money they are paying me would never be enough to get me to do it.
• I absolutely, positively, do not make any more or less money if you sign up or don’t sign up with them.
• And to be very, very clear, just because I write for Dealernews there is not even the slightest connection between my personal opinions and conclusions and anyone at Dealernews. I will not involve myself in any activity at Dealernews that involves the review or discussion of the competing platforms while I’m working with 50 Below.

Tags:dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, marketing, motorcycle, Motorcycle Advertising, powersports, reviews, selling-online

This is another one of those months where you’re no doubt going to walk away after reading my humble little column and cry, “My God! This man’s a genius! Why have we never thought of this before?!” OK… Maybe not… But it’s still a pretty good idea.

This month I want to pass on a suggestion about how you can make sure that you have the best e-commerce and customer service operation out there: Go shopping!

I’m sure that somewhere in your list of goals and desires for your e-commerce operation that you want your customers’ experience with your shop to be as good as it possibly can be. Not just better than anyone else, but good in an absolute, C.S. Lewis-ish, sense as well. After all, just because everyone else is horrible is no reason for you to be horrible too, right?

So how are we going to do this? We’re going to pick five to seven other e-commerce sites and take them for a test ride. I suggest that you choose two to three of the big e-tailers and catalog sites (i.e. Motorcycle Superstore, Knee Draggers, Bike Bandit, or Dennis Kirk) and then choose three or four dealer-run sites that also sell to the same markets that you do.

Your goal is to probe and test their systems. Their online systems, as well as their human, customer service systems. You need to create a standard testing process or protocol for how you’re going to do the test, and then apply that same protocol to each shopping experience. You’ll then grade or judge each retailer to not only see how well they are doing, but to come up with ideas for how you can be doing things better. Find something that’s horrible? Make sure your systems are set up to avoid it! Find something that’s amazing? Make sure your systems are set up to include it!

After all, if you don’t do this, how in the world will you ever know how good you have to be to be great? Trust me, your customers most likely shop with companies other than you, and they know who’s naughty and who’s nice. If you don’t have the same sense for where you stack up, based on first-hand experience, I’m willing to be that you’re not doing things as good as you think you are.

So what kind of things do we need to test? I’m going to offer up a few suggestions for things that you can do to see how satisfying, helpful, flexible, easy, etc. the experiences with each retailer is. Remember, one of your goals is to break their systems. You’re trying, through somewhat reasonable, real-world inspired actions, to become a nightmare customer. You want to be reasonable about it, but (based on years and years of first hand experience) I can guarantee that regardless of how wacky, far-out, or unreasonable you are during this test, that there are real customers out there that are worse than anything you can think up. If you’re new to this, you’ll have to trust me on this. If you’ve been around a while, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

First, pick two to three products that everyone carries so you can shop for the same stuff with each retailer. I suggest that one of the items you pick is a product that you know is hard to get, is frequently out of stock, has a long lead-time from the supplier, etc.

Now on to a few suggested tests (remember, these are just suggestions to get the ideas flowing… Come up with your own, relevant tests):

• Go to each retailer and place your initial order. Use their site search to see how hard it is to find each product. can you find them by drilling into their categories? Are all of the attributes like color

• Give them the wrong address: Give them, say…, your personal address with you order online, then call up a few hours later and have them switch the address to your shop’s address. Wait and see where the products end up.

• Order a hard part that requires installation and once it arrives, call them and see how helpful they are at helping you install that part on your bike.

• Order something like a pair of riding boots or riding gloves (or underwear… Seriously… It’s happened… Yes. Gross.), wear them and use them to the point where it’s obvious that they’ve been used, and then try to return them. Does the retailer give you a hard time or do they accept the return gracefully?

• On those out of stock orders, call them up at least once a day to check status. Make note of how patient they are with your badgering. Also, make note if you get conflicting or otherwise funky promise dates. If every time you call up you get a different answer, or every time you call up you get told “two weeks”, regardless of how many weeks have passed, that usually indicates they are not really looking into it or telling you the truth.

• After you place your order online, call them to change something with the order. The size… The color… Add an item… Take an item off… Then call back later that day and make another change. Then wait to see if you get what you’re expecting to receive. If you don’t get what your expecting after making the changes, call them up and find out what happened. Ask if they have a record of your calls to make those changes. If they do, they are using a good CRM system. If not, then they’re flying blind.

Tags:Column, dealerships, E-Commerce, ecommerce, internet, motorcycle, powersports, Powersports Industry, selling-online