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“Leaving the industry better than I found it”-Dave Foy
Each week, Dave sits with a panel of guests to discuss the topic of the week. From Coaching for Success to Sales vs. Service, Dave talks to the industry and professional leaders that can bring their insight and knowledge to the viewers.
Our W.E. A.R.E Feature airs on the third Thursday of the month and spotlights Women in Fixed Ops and how they are changing the industry and leading the charge to a better customer experience.
Charity Dunning: Hello, Melissa.
Melissa Marlatt: Hello
Charity Dunning: Hello, Russell.
Russell Hill: Peace and blessings. Hello, Sean.
Shaun Raines: Hello, Russell! How are you, sir? Nice to see you.
Russell Hill: Nice to see you, nice to be seen. Thank all of you for showing up for me today. Not.
Shaun Raines: Well, I'm here for you all day, bro.
Shaun Raines: Sure.
Shaun Raines: Always good to see your face.
Russell Hill: Yours too, sir.
Charity Dunning: Well, this is gonna be fun, so we'll just get started. Does that sound good, Sean?
Shaun Raines: I'm ready when you are, yes.
Charity Dunning: Super. Well, why don't you start, introduce yourself for those of you who… for those that don't know you yet, and tell us, what you specialize in, what you do.
Kaylee Felio: But don't sell us.
Shaun Raines: I'm.
Russell Hill: Stand up.
Shaun Raines: Comedian slash wannabe rock star that ended
Shaun Raines: car business, because I fell in love with a girl in about 1990, and never, ever left the car business, really.
Shaun Raines: Oh, gosh, what's the short version? I'm a internet car guy, I used to say, many years ago, because…
Shaun Raines: you know, that's kind of where people started to recognize, oh, here you are, I've started speaking as soon as I could, Digital Dealer 2.
Shaun Raines: NATA a couple times, Driving Sales Executive Summit, Driving Sales, all that stuff. Probably… some people met me when I was a very young man in this business, in, like, 99. I got hired by Reynolds & Reynolds, Microsoft CarPoint team in downtown Seattle.
Shaun Raines: Slingin' leads in the early days.
Shaun Raines: internet process, all that. But a couple other notable companies where people also then, probably would have
Shaun Raines: maybe met me or heard of me at that time, and that would have been either Reach Local… I ran Reach Local's automotive division for a little over 3 years before they were LocalIQ and the Gannett, if you follow them, and they're still around, just rebranded and much bigger ownership.
Shaun Raines: And then, last big corporate role was at Dealeron, as their VP of Marketing, and also a little biz dev with them.
Shaun Raines: And then out on my own, and I've done a couple of different things on my own. Dealer Superhero, which is more of a passion project. I can't really hire other people to do it, because it's really me playing Batman to the Gotham of…
Shaun Raines: dealers, Gotham being all the horrible vendors that just lie to them and they can't be trusted.
Shaun Raines: And so there are a few people that, I think can leverage up the fact that they've been in the industry, experience is a big differentiator, I say that all the time, so I wanted to leverage that, and I had a little bullpen of dealers that I helped for a while, and then most recently, the last few years, I've been building an agency called Hired Guns Agency.
Shaun Raines: which is 100% B2B marketing, forced into it, really, by a non-compete, when I couldn't touch or help dealers for a little over a year. And, I love what I'm doing now, because I get to see the side, mostly automotive clients, but not limited to
Shaun Raines: I get to see the side of marketing and go-to-market strategy and sales, for the companies that are trying to figure out how to become known and liked and trusted to their audience, and let's… we'll probably talk mostly about automotive, so to dealers, how do you make them know who you are and care about you?
Shaun Raines: And, that's what I do now. I love it. Only… I'm the only guy working at Hired Guns. Everybody else, it's a family affair. My wife works for Hired Guns, my daughter, I'm still trying to get my son to work for us. But,
Shaun Raines: yeah, everybody on our team, it's, it is very much powered by women, and I wouldn't have it any other way. We didn't start out that way, but that's the way it's transpired, and it's awesome. So, there's the…
Shaun Raines: Long, short, short, long.
Charity Dunning: Well, that sounds good. Well, I have a whole list of questions, so I'll get started. So I think you have a really unique perspective when it comes to marketing, so I wanted to ask you, what do you think has defined your approach to marketing over the years?
Shaun Raines: Hmm.
Shaun Raines: I think, like a lot of people, I will follow what's kind of happening from the trend perspective. I know some people hate the term best practices,
Shaun Raines: But there always are. Best practices typically are tied to the thing that people try, and then they find success with. And when you find…
Shaun Raines: that a massive group of people can do the same thing. Let's just say they use the same channel. Google AdWords drops on people in, what, October of 2000? Most people don't know what it is. They confuse pay-per-click with pay-per-clip.
Shaun Raines: And all these years later, it's a different story if you're just talking about that one thing. What should we do with Google Ads? So, my perspective has really, I think, mostly been defined by being in, like, standing in the stream when the dam breaks every single time.
Shaun Raines: And I call that blessing, some people call that luck, some people call that fortune. I just feel really blessed that my perspective has really been guided by what's happened in the moment. And I guess… I think because of that experience.
Shaun Raines: That, even to this day, shapes how I look at every new thing that comes into the industry, or into go-to-market strategy as a whole.
Shaun Raines: I'm kind of looking at it as, you know, has this been done in a different way before? Because that happens a lot. We think we're, you know, everything under the sun is, like, not new.
Shaun Raines: It's oftentimes a different version, or a different lens, or, you know, it's like filters, it's the same thing, but you can look at it through a whole bunch of different filters. So I kind of go through that process, and then I'm looking at things that truly are, disruptive. I hate the word, but it's true, some things absolutely fundamentally change an industry, sometimes they change multiple industries, and so I'm typically looking for things like that.
Shaun Raines: which always usually leads me back to, you know, from a marketing perspective, does anybody even know that you exist? Because marketers need to make sure that they understand the difference between marketing itself, branding itself, and advertising itself.
Shaun Raines: all three things, different functions, and so that's oftentimes how I'm thinking about things. Does this truly fit in the marketing category? Is this a four P's thing to be evaluating, or is it…
Shaun Raines: more of a, this is a new advertising type that exists, and we've seen lots of that, you know. We used to not have any consideration around streaming ads. Now we have to think about, well, how could we differentiate ourselves with streaming? And it's been that way for every platform.
Shaun Raines: that's kind of how I look at everything. There's a lot of research and analysis, and I've always been a… I like to be in the garden with my hands in the dirt, so I'm a practitioner of most of this stuff as well.
Charity Dunning: Yeah. Can you give us an example of…
Charity Dunning: Something, marketing-related that has been disruptive in automotive?
Shaun Raines: Yeah, well, certainly if you go… it depends on how far back you want to go. If you want to go back to the beginning of websites, and then we had no control over whether or not organic content had anything to do with where you would show up in various search engines.
Shaun Raines: Google then comes in, links become really important. So, people talk about search engine optimization a lot, and they have been, and they still talk about it today. Is it dead? Is AI killing it with overviews and AIO? And I joke about this all the time, we might as well make it an old McDonald episode, E-I-E-I-S-E-O.
Shaun Raines: all of the considerations there, but organic is still a huge, huge, place where you can be disruptive. Like, you can…
Shaun Raines: If you know what you're doing, but strategy and tactic changes. Paid, the same thing. You used to not be able to pay your way into the search engine. Maybe most people on this call remember when the Google search environment had a… they used to call it the right-hand rail. The entire right-hand side of your search results was all ads, not just the top 3 to 4 placements.
Shaun Raines: All of it was there.
Shaun Raines: And people lost their minds when Google said, we're gonna remove that completely. Well, it didn't really change a lot of the results for people, and so it made them think strategically different, but…
Shaun Raines: I use SEM and SEO as a good example, oftentimes, around a question like this. If you were looking for long-term, we need a flag in the ground that has value years from now, you better have a really smart SEO strategy team, if it's internal, or you select somebody that really knows what they're doing.
Shaun Raines: Because it will last forever, and most people don't think of it that way. They think about, what are we chasing from…
Shaun Raines: the micro, breakdowns of SEO. Local, for example.
Shaun Raines: Years and years ago, we never talked about local SEO. During my time at Dealeron, for sure, we talked heavily about it. We brought Greg Gifford in specifically, because he was, like, kind of the foremost expert around local SEO. But there are many other layers to it, and when you get it right.
Shaun Raines: It typically doesn't, manifest amazing results in 24 hours, but 24 months, or 10 years later, I work with a lot of people who have SEO results that they can brag about that are 14 years old, and they're still paying off significantly.
Shaun Raines: The other side of search, being paid.
Shaun Raines: also super disruptive, because for somebody who knows that they're gonna need 9 months, or a year, or 2 years of… because you're at a really red ocean competitive SEO category.
Shaun Raines: If you're looking at a year or more before you might start to trend in the right direction, well, guess what? You can buy your way into the same places on the same keywords, that's the beauty of paid search. But if you don't know, really, the, both sides of search, kind of.
Shaun Raines: with a lot of depth and breadth, you will, spend too much money, you will make the wrong decisions, so you kind of have to have a counterbalanced approach of both of those, especially today. But both of those have been massively disruptive. Without them.
Shaun Raines: you'll be beat by the companies that figure out how to use both of them. With them.
Shaun Raines: you need to be using the right vendors that will actually help you tune that and calibrate it for better results, and that is a whole other… we could do a whole episode on that alone, because there's a lot of providers in, especially on the paid side.
Shaun Raines: that, they all get you within the same, area. Like, nobody's just demonstrably so much better than the other.
Shaun Raines: And…
Shaun Raines: Yet, there are some companies that are like that. They're the barbarians of it, they're not chasing programs, they're not chasing, you know, clout with OEMs, they're chasing, we're gonna deliver the best results for customers, and when you compare us to some of these other, maybe big box or big brands, they annihilate them. That exists as well, but most dealers don't know where to look for that, so…
Charity Dunning: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it sounds very PVP, but, I'll deep dive on one thing that you said there.
Charity Dunning: Can you explain to us a little bit more why organic content is so much more powerful than paid content? Can you elaborate on that?
Shaun Raines: Yeah, it lives forever, and organic content doesn't care if 10 people click on it, or 10 million people click on it. It also becomes the content that you should use first and foremost.
Shaun Raines: To actually identify the signals, signals being the things that will lead you to what should have any dollars put behind it in the first place.
Shaun Raines: Now, when I say that, I'm mostly thinking from a B2B mindset. With dealers, there's so much spray and pray, and I would say if you're a dealer.
Shaun Raines: and you're using paid search, you're probably just wanting to advertise your inventory. If you're smart, you're also doing that for fixed stops. In fact, you might be even heavy fixed stops if you're really smart. I would love almost parity, to be honest with you, because there's so many other levers to bring in
Shaun Raines: Traffic to what most people come to a dealership website for in the first place, which is your inventory, new and or used.
Shaun Raines: And you've got a bazillion bobbers in the water with bait on them for that. Not enough for, the fixed stop side. But, yeah, I don't know. I think that's one of those areas where I would say, yeah, it's…
Charity Dunning: So for… for B2B, would you recommend people spend their time developing organic content, as opposed to buying pain.
Shaun Raines: Yeah, absolutely, I would, especially if you're a startup, even if you've been around, I mean, we have clients that have been around for 5, 10, 15 years, they've never done any advertising before, they've never made any content before.
Shaun Raines: And then they wonder, like, why don't people know who we are? Because we're really great people. Yes, you are really great people, but, you know, if you don't actually tell anybody, well, we've gone to conferences, like, yeah, and how valuable is that, right?
Charity Dunning: It's one of the most…
Shaun Raines: low-intent places to try to, like, get leads and become known is at a, you know, expo hall. But I would tell B2B companies that the beautiful thing about organic content is it really isn't as hard as it once was. You just need a good strategy. So take my strategy, which is…
Shaun Raines: Decide on what's the most effective way to get a long-form piece of video content.
Shaun Raines: that is…
Shaun Raines: Thoughtful in its, desire to pull out and extract all of the subject matter expertise that exists in your company.
Shaun Raines: If you're a company that struggles to even identify one single, I call them the internal influencers, the last thing you need to do in automotive, although there are a lot of people, more than ever, and there's probably 5 more that just entered this marketplace since we started this call.
Shaun Raines: That want to be your external influencer of your brand.
Shaun Raines: If you're willing to write the giant, huge check, $10,000, $50,000, $70,000, I won't say any of their names. I don't care if they're offended by it. There are very few people in the industry that are nice, likable, and have a reputation that says, I'm not… I have no personal animus towards people.
Shaun Raines: But I do have a responsibility in what I tell companies to try to make really smart decisions, and if you've got $50,000 to drop on one episode of somebody else's podcast that has a massive brand.
Shaun Raines: sure, that thing might get a thousand downloads, right? But come back to me when you've actually calculated how many deals you got out of that that broke even on the investment, and then ask yourself the question, what else could you do with $50,000? Because I know what my company could do if somebody came to me and said.
Shaun Raines: Sean, how much content could you make for us that's amazing and awesome, and our audience wants it?
Shaun Raines: for $50,000. People just don't ask questions like that. They get enamored with, I want to be part of something, a bigger community, it's a feel-good. And so, we transition into an area of our lives where people have very little self…
Shaun Raines: control and very little discipline, which is emotions. And as soon as you start to feel something, right, you're gonna go in that direction. So I tell all B2B companies, when you're gonna come up with an organic strategy, it needs to be an engine. It has to be some… or a flywheel, as I've called it before. So one action allows you to have really solid
Shaun Raines: opportunities to create more video content, more written content, and this takes so much pressure off of internal marketing teams, which are expensive, and they're harder and harder to find. I advocate to a lot of companies now, everything that's kind of specialty in marketing, you should be outsourcing it, because in
Shaun Raines: Cases like my business and many others, if you don't like what they're doing, like, give them a 30-day notice and say, hey, we're moving on.
Shaun Raines: You're not doing that as much with your FTEs, but take that organic content engine and allow that to be the lifeblood of all of these other things. If you're doing infographics, guess what? A big…
Shaun Raines: piece of content can inform what you're gonna talk about on an infographic. It can be your white paper. It can be your…
Shaun Raines: hopefully none of you guys are still loving to do the gated, you know, PDFs of, like, drop your email, like, I know that's still popular, but it's better just to give stuff away, and if your stuff's awesome, then the people who are like, now I want to be on this list, that's the person you want, by the way, not the one you coerced or manipulated onto your email marketing list that's gonna unsubscribe to you anyway. No, a six-sequence campaign isn't gonna
Shaun Raines: finally get their attention. That's annoying, people hate it, just nobody wants to admit it, so…
Shaun Raines: I don't know, that's a long answer, but I tell people, yeah, get the organic content engine going that makes it easy for you to tell your story to the market. That's what they want from you.
Charity Dunning: Yeah, well, I will stay on the top of content, but… so, when you're shaping your message and your content, how do you form quality ideas that support your strategy? Do you rely on thought leadership or authority marketing for your content positioning?
Shaun Raines: Maybe a little of all of those. I think this is a really important exercise for people when they're trying to figure out, like, what is our story? What's our narrative? I think all companies should have a primary narrative, like, this is why we matter to the industry or to the target audience.
Shaun Raines: When you're doing that, by the way, just as an add-on, I think a lot of companies are misguided in what they understand their total addressable market to be, or their TAM, not to… well, I'll try not to use, like, jargony things like SEO and EIO and all that kind of stuff, but your total addressable market in automotive, let's just say you're only focused on franchise dealers.
Shaun Raines: 18,000-ish, so says NATA, but if you're… well, I'll just give you an example. As a website provider, you're not… if you're, like, in the top 10, but you're website provider number 8 on the list of top 10,
Shaun Raines: you need to think about a lot of realities before you start making big, big decisions. One of which is, if you're number 8 on the list, you're probably not in any, maybe a couple of OEM programs, so if you're not in Ford Direct, 35-ish, 100 dealers, chop that off your TAM. You're not in GM, another, like, now you're getting close to 7,000 dealers that are out. You're not in Honda, you're not in Toyota. All of a sudden, 18,000 for a lot of
Shaun Raines: people turns into 7 or 8,000. And it's not just website providers, it's anybody that has
Shaun Raines: certain limitations driven by the market. That could just be that the Publix happen to centrally manage whatever it is you do, and you're not in that consideration set. You have to think about that, because it will have a lot to do with
Shaun Raines: you know, how you're gonna actually come up with narrative, and what you're gonna say or not say. But, all that said, once you're actually targeting the right people.
Shaun Raines: that's kind of a blessing, not a curse. When you have a really finite TAM, you're able to say, well, account-based marketing becomes a really attractive
Shaun Raines: approach then, and that includes your narrative, that includes probably two, three, almost, highlight statements that get right to the point that helps the dealer principal, the general manager, the decision makers at the dealership level or dealership group level understand not just your top-level narrative, like, that sounds really good, but then these kind of two to three things that you could say repetitively
Shaun Raines: That help,
Shaun Raines: your audience understand your… the solution that you offer to their pain point. It always has to be something that's around making it make sense, and for most people, it's, I have this pain, I have this
Shaun Raines: a problem, and I need this relief, I need this solution.
Shaun Raines: the sooner that becomes really clear to somebody, now they're gonna actually be paying attention to, well, how does this person deliver? Does it sound like they've been doing this for a long time? Does your experience now all of a sudden help you rise above all? Those are really, really important, so…
Shaun Raines: Before you start that process, make sure you know exactly who it is you're talking to, and what you're really trying to get, because if you're overshooting into a, we could be selling this to 100,000 people, it's like, no, it's more like 10,
Shaun Raines: You're gonna spend too much money and make a lot of dumb mistakes in coming up with narrative and those grabber statements.
Charity Dunning: Okay.
Charity Dunning: I want to dive into… so I've heard several dealer principals lately kind of trash the,
Charity Dunning: the authority, you know, expert space. So, and you know, a lot of businesses try to position themselves as experts in the field. So, is the expert space overcrowded, or do you think there's still room for authority voices?
Shaun Raines: I think there's always room for authority voices. I think this is just my personal opinion. I think the difference is, is there are a lot of people who are more addicted to the attention than they are of truly being an expert and demonstrating that they're an expert. Like, they have the hours behind it, they have the case studies, if you will, even if they're not truly market-developed case studies, but they get, like, hey, I've done this, we've accomplished this.
Shaun Raines: We're in that era. I mean, social media brought that to us all, whether we liked it or not, where, you know, you know, nobody used to call it personal branding. People knew… became aware of who I was in the industry long before Facebook existed.
Shaun Raines: So…
Shaun Raines: now that we're in that era, very much deep in that era, a lot of people want… it makes them feel good, like, I want the cloud, I want to be this person, everybody's clamoring for, you know, who's the, you know, foremost AI expert right now, which all of that to me is disgusting, it's kind of repulsive, because the truth is that AI is the thing. Like, I was excited when the internet hit, thinking, what's this gonna be?
Shaun Raines: And literally in the middle of it as it's unfolded, like many of the people on this call, I'm sure. But AI is that times a million. It's moving so fast, the day you think that you're an expert in something, just wait, because tomorrow you won't be. So I encourage people to be enthusiasts and look for people who are honest about
Shaun Raines: Kind of where they are in whatever they're trying to be an expert in.
Shaun Raines: when CDK has a massive breach, you know, and then within 24 hours, LinkedIn is just saturated with people who are all of a sudden cybersecurity experts, right? And I'm sure that as I say these words, people think, I remember when so-and-so did it, and so-and-so did that, and so-and-so did that. Again, I'm not trying to, like, you know, I'm not gonna name names of people, nobody wants to do it.
Shaun Raines: But yeah, we… you could say both, yes, there are way too many voices.
Shaun Raines: But I would categorize it this way, and it's hard to find them. There are way too many voices that are talking that should be silent, because they're not experts, right?
Shaun Raines: how you find that, or how you identify those people, is if you have experience greater than theirs, then you know. Like, so change the channel, turn them off, put them in the category of, oh, maybe charlatan, up, maybe, you know, Pied Piper leading everybody the wrong direction.
Shaun Raines: And then go on about your business, because if you, if you try to… it doesn't matter the industry, if you try to identify all those people that drive you crazy, and you're like, and you pay attention to what they're doing, it will only drive you crazy. They will never know that you give two literal you-know-whats about what they're doing. They're gonna just keep doing it.
Shaun Raines: Because that's the way they're made, and they don't get their punishment until much, much later. But somehow, someway.
Shaun Raines: Those people, at least I hope they get it. But, and with that said, yes, there's always room for new voices. There's always, always room. You just… discernment is lacking in a lot of people, but for those that are veterans in the industry, hopefully they use it along with their wisdom.
Shaun Raines: to identify the people who are new voices that do need to be included. So, it's yes to both.
Charity Dunning: Okay, well, this is the question that I've heard a lot from various vendors, and I'm gonna ask you and see what your answer is. What strategies have you found work best when marketing to dealers? Do you have a magic wand or a secret recipe?
Shaun Raines: I talked a little bit about it, so… and I say this in a lot of content that I make, and I'll just tell you what I do for my company, and how it's helped us reach people, and also for the companies that we're making content for, and how it's helping them reach dealers.
Shaun Raines: not… you can… there are sources that will prove this even for people who are buying cars. There's only a certain percentage, 2 or 3% of the population at any one given time is actually in the market to buy a car, right?
Shaun Raines: So, if it's 97% of the market that isn't buying today, but will be at some point in the future, they're gonna need a car and want to buy a car, and they'll be buying a car, what do you do to market to them to become the Ford dealer in your market, the Toyota dealer in your market that they're going to think of first? That's important, because that will make you make different types of content than what everybody else makes.
Shaun Raines: Is that gonna change overnight? No. Many of us are probably employed by the fact that dealers
Shaun Raines: They… they follow each other quite a bit.
Shaun Raines: When it comes to the B2B side, for all the companies that are trying to figure out, how do we reach dealers?
Shaun Raines: You have to be known to them.
Shaun Raines: So how do you end up being known to them? Well, you have to identify where the dealers that you go after, and if it's all of them, okay, great. Where do they spend most of their time? And you may not know that. A lot of people will say, well, LinkedIn's changed so much in the last few months, it's no longer, you know, algorithm isn't calibrated for reach anymore, it's for relevancy. Well, that's a good thing, actually. So just, if you were chasing, I want all the big numbers, great, but
Shaun Raines: I mean, relevancy is far more important. So, it's important for companies to think, where does my group of dealers spend most of their time?
Shaun Raines: This is a question that I wrestle with all the time, because it is partially LinkedIn, there are dealers in LinkedIn, there are dealers that spend some time in Facebook, there are dealers that spend some time in Instagram.
Shaun Raines: I'm sure there are some that spend some time in TikTok, which, you know, that's fine. I… that's not my environment, but there are people that go there.
Shaun Raines: They like to follow the viral trends, I get all of that. But it's rarely, really important to figure out where you're going to deploy content, and I tell people.
Shaun Raines: try to start with one channel at a time, if you're not already saturated in many of them, not knowing which one's working. I often tell people, start with LinkedIn first. It's much more tuned to B2B. And then, almost at the same time, I tell people if they're not already, trying to figure out YouTube, they should be those two environments. They're huge, they're massive.
Shaun Raines: nobody's really nailed B2B in…
Shaun Raines: Especially in automotive, in the YouTube environment, but it's huge. I mean, we deployed, for the first time, a new client, a bunch of their shorts last night, and they had one of them that's already over 1,000 views. Now.
Shaun Raines: with a total addressable market that's really small, a thousand views on a short for them is like… feels like a million. And so we are doing that very thing with this particular client. Heavy LinkedIn, heavy YouTube.
Shaun Raines: And then you are posting so much of that organic that I was telling you, that you look for the signals on things that might deserve a little bit of cash behind it.
Shaun Raines: So when you have one of those posts that just jumps off the page, like, wow, this one significantly outperformed everything else, that's where I'd put money. I'd now put money behind that in LinkedIn.
Shaun Raines: See how much more juice you can squeeze out of it. Same thing on the YouTube side, or within the Google Ad platform, is let your organic wins tell you where then you need, dollars.
Shaun Raines: And this is more important to your question. What kind of content you're making is really important to how you're going to actually connect with dealers. If you are just saying, we're the best, you know, we're the most awesome, like, all these nonsensical things that we call marketing for many, many years, for decades now.
Shaun Raines: I'll just go back to website providers. You could say this about, digital marketing providers. They all say they're the best.
Shaun Raines: But, there is no regular season followed by postseason followed by Super Bowl that is agnostic, that would tell us who really is the best. So, if you are listening to your salesperson from whatever company it is, or the CEO himself, or herself.
Shaun Raines: Telling you all these wonderful things about how awesome we are.
Shaun Raines: The real reason why they tell you that is because that's the uniform they wear. It's not because it was ever proven that they're actually the best.
Shaun Raines: Right? And don't even get me started in how some of this then falls out within some of the programs over the years.
Shaun Raines: Like, there's favoritism all over the place, there's preference all over the place, but there's not a whole lot of, oh, we can actually prove that we're number one in the category. So why is that important? Because what your audience really wants to hear from you, again, is how you solve their problems, how you take pain away from them, how you make their day easier. If all you do is say, we help you sell more cars.
Shaun Raines: We help you sell and service more cars. Okay. How tired is that? Like, over and over and over.
Shaun Raines: how about we actually can have a, you know, from a $20,000 to $50,000 a month impact in cost savings of cleaning up some stuff because we do this type of thing? How about we can bring efficiency that you could actually do all the same stuff with two less people, or deploy them elsewhere in the business.
Shaun Raines: And on and on. There are examples like that. That's what a dealer principal wants to hear.
Shaun Raines: That's what a general manager wants to hear, is, I'm not really good at this, and now there's a new tool that allows me to do something that used to take me 6 hours, so now I can do it in, like, 30 minutes or less.
Shaun Raines: They want to hear that, and they want to hear why you're passionate, your company is passionate about solving that problem, and then it's just say those same things over and over and over, because you have to be known, and you want to be liked, so if your personality is trash.
Shaun Raines: Sorry if the way you've conducted yourself and the industry that you so want to sell into has been reprehensible, and you don't even know that your own personal brand is burnt, because people are kind, and they don't tell you that, like, listen, you're damaged goods, and you have been for the last 7 years. There's that in our market, that's in every market.
Shaun Raines: So likability could be an issue, even if you're known. You may be known for all the wrong reasons. That's why you need to also be liked, and more importantly, trust.
Shaun Raines: Trust is hard to find in any vertical. It's certainly hard to find in automotive, because things that look noble and amazing and awesome become corrupted. And why do they become corrupted? Because people are greedy, and people, before they know it, have become compromised
Shaun Raines: And that's going on right now in our industry. So I tell people, make the content that, yes, helps you be known, but be likable, be friendly, be funny if you can, and I'm gonna give you an example of this, because for people that haven't heard me say it.
Shaun Raines: To use a personal story, this is exactly what Greg, Gifford, and I were doing at Dealeron and didn't know it. We were making the Wednesday workshop videos, none of which was sales-oriented at all. We were talking about things 8 years ago, like voice search. Hey, if you're gonna use voice search on your phone, where's my phone? Doesn't matter. If you're gonna use voice search, then, be careful, because if you're on an Apple device.
Shaun Raines: It's gonna pull those Yelp reviews, not your beautiful Google reviews. I hear people say that now, as if it's like, that's a brand new thing! I'm like, okay. Point being is we made content over and over and over about digital marketing and SEO,
Shaun Raines: and freely put it out on those YouTube videos. At that time, Dealeron, maybe they still do this, but they were using the Wistia video player, which is much better for lead collection, and you don't have, like, the next recommended video hitting if you're just using the YouTube player. There's different schools of thought on that, but…
Shaun Raines: Important to realize that
Shaun Raines: you need to have something like that in your business that's constantly generating content. That was dealer on Content Engine for a long time. They should… we should have… if we were smart, if I was smart and see, that's how dumb I actually am, if back then I would have realized this should be a podcast. The beard and the hair, as we used to call it.
Shaun Raines: That should have been a podcast back then. People loved that content. What did it do? It drove booth traffic.
Shaun Raines: It drove dealers to Dealeron that could not, because they were bound by OEM programs or whatever, that could not even use Dealeron. I just saw one of them at Digital Dealer last week that said, I have been following you and your content forever, and the minute I was able to finally go over to Dealeron, we did it.
Shaun Raines: But it was, like, 3 years after content consumption and all that, and I tell B2B marketers, just think about HubSpot. HubSpot, for the longest time, was the only place for all of us marketing nerds to go and get free information. Yeah, you surrender an email address, but now it's like, I can build a marketing plan that blows everybody's mind!
Shaun Raines: They were the only source for that. I consumed their content for years before I was ever at a company that wrote a check to actually pay them for their services.
Shaun Raines: You need to be doing the same thing like that for dealers, because they might be consuming your content for weeks, not just days, weeks, months, before
Shaun Raines: they're in that 95% category who's not buying today, but the minute that they have your… the problem that your solution matches to, they will think of you first. What are you doing for that huge piece of the market versus the bloodbath of the 5-3% that everyone fights over?
Charity Dunning: Right, right. Kaylee, I see you. Go ahead.
Kaylee Felio: So many questions.
Charity Dunning: Okay, but don't take too long, so on and I.
Kaylee Felio: Oh, well, I wanted to kind of be selfish, because I, like, I feel like I have too much content. I'm overwhelmed with the amount of content that we produce at Parts Edge, and
Kaylee Felio: I am such an organized person that it drives me crazy, because I feel like I'm not organized. So, I would like to get your perspective on what I'm doing, because I…
Kaylee Felio: I, I have so many questions, I don't even know where to start. I want to know where… what you think about podcasting as a company, and I'm trying to transition, because my most best performing content is when I'm interviewing the founder on
Kaylee Felio: parts, and what part, like, what it is to be a parts manager. Not about our solution, but just, like, what you're talking about, like, just helpful content that helps parts managers or dealers think about their parts department.
Kaylee Felio: So I'm trying to move our content into those types of forms of, like, I ask them a very specific question.
Kaylee Felio: And then I just put that out on social media, and it's… and then it goes on the podcast. It's not me…
Kaylee Felio: the parts grow, like, I'm trying to separate that, if that makes sense. I know there's a lot of questions, and we do webinars, too, so I'm just, like, there's so much content happening that I don't feel like… but it's working! It's working, like, we have a lot of leads, but it's…
Kaylee Felio: Okay, I'll shut up.
Shaun Raines: All marketing works. It doesn't always work the way we want it to, but it works. It does something. And you can get to a point where you are making so much if you're not, categorizing it and putting it in different, not…
Shaun Raines: completely separated silos, but categories, so you can tell what's performing differently. It doesn't surprise me to hear that when you're making content with a founder, that that content performs really well. Anybody that's listening to this who hasn't already heard somebody, or they kind of know this.
Shaun Raines: LinkedIn alone, if you just take LinkedIn,
Shaun Raines: Dave Foy's a good example of this. Russell's a good example of this. You're a good example of this.
Shaun Raines: when you take your personal LinkedIn seriously, you start actually posting content on a regular basis, you get rewarded by LinkedIn, like, oh, that's kind of great, right? You start to see the movement.
Shaun Raines: founders, and CEOs especially, they see that lift relatively quickly, like, oh my goodness, things start to jump off.
Shaun Raines: But then when they go from 1 post a week, from 1 post every 3 months, to 2 posts a week, 3 posts a week, 5 posts a week, we have clients that were, you know, once every 3 months, and now they're 5 or more times a week.
Shaun Raines: And what has happened to their personal LinkedIn profile?
Shaun Raines: tons of followers, all kinds of engagement, and LinkedIn is one of those places where dark social will be something that you want to look at, Kaylee, because it will probably be a really strong indicator of which content actually is performing better when you think about who is it reaching.
Shaun Raines: And in your case, you're… I think you're asking this question because you want to make sure that you have content, that you know which content is actually really resonating with the people that raise their hand and say, I want to know more about the business. Like, they could be a prospect that could be nurtured into, hey, new client.
Shaun Raines: Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things I would really be paying attention to, and the dark social is what do people say in the comments? Not just the, I liked it, I loved it, it's insightful, whatever. If they say something, if they share it with somebody, who are those people? Because oftentimes when you have content that pops off in a big manner.
Shaun Raines: Not that you want to discount your fans, that you participate in liking everybody's content, but when you start to see people that you don't even know, you've never heard of them before.
Shaun Raines: That's also an indicator, and that's where you want to start to pay attention.
Kaylee Felio: And I think another thing to notice, well, because I'm both marketing and sales, so when I get on calls where people are doing research on Parts Edge, and they're like, oh, I listened to a couple of your episodes of the podcast, or I saw this webinar.
Kaylee Felio: That also, I think, is helping with the trust, because they're like, oh, you guys know what you're talking about, you can help us. And, that's, to me, that's what's working. That's how I know it's working. It's not the comments or the engagement, it's getting on those calls, and people actually know who we are, because they see it online, maybe.
Shaun Raines: Yeah, it helps tremendously. I mean, I've watched your personal brand. You're a really good example of somebody who's like, I've got an idea, I'm gonna do this, let's go and do some personal brand building. Your personal brand building has lifted the corporate brand of Parts Edge.
Shaun Raines: like nothing else before it, right? It just has. When Russell and Charity started, you know, the podcast for What's the Fixed Ops? What the Fixed Ops, right? Those personal brands start to elevate the brand of Fixed Ops marketing.
Shaun Raines: That is a huge component for B2B companies, is you need to identify all of your, I call them the internal influencers.
Shaun Raines: Those are people like you, Kaylee, that will have more of an impact on elevating the corporate brand than almost anything else you can do, but not all of the internal influencers even want to be in front of a camera, let alone show up once a month, twice a month, how… whatever your cadence is for them.
Shaun Raines: To be prepared to make that content.
Shaun Raines: And so, that's a really important thing for people to realize, is leverage the personal brands inside of your business.
Shaun Raines: Here's another thing about those personal brands. There are companies that get afraid that somebody is, like, so red-hot in the company, they're more popular than the CEO. The whole C-suite combined is maybe just damaged goods. Like, these guys already have a terrible reputation. There's plenty of that in automotive, and you know who you are out there.
Shaun Raines: But you might have people that are working for you that still think you're decent and you're pretty okay. Okay, great. But you're afraid to elevate those people's personal brands because you think, oh, what could they run off with? And I'm telling you, if that's your thinking, you are an idiot. You should be doubling down on every single person at your company that could actually elevate you, to bring you to that higher level, and if you're afraid that that person
Shaun Raines: will leave, then you should go and look in the mirror right now and ask yourself how good of a manager you are, and how good are you taking care of these people? And yet, you know what? Oh yeah, they might be worth a whole heck of a lot more than you pay them.
Shaun Raines: When you are so, lopsided in your thinking that you're afraid of a person who literally is all in for the brand, they want to be at the shows, they want to record content, they want to do a podcast, they, like, love… you don't even have to get them excited, they already are.
Shaun Raines: Those people are really hard to find. Yes, they can be hard to keep, but if you're really smart, you will realize that the value of giving somebody 10 grand more a year, when you would go and spend $250,000 for 3 days at NATA, what kind of a buffoon are you?
Russell Hill: Right on!
Charity Dunning: not…
Shaun Raines: Those are not people that I can take seriously anymore when it comes to having conversations about go-to-market strategy. If you've got personal influencers part of your brand and they love it, gosh.
Shaun Raines: Do everything you can to make them love it more, because guess what? They're the person who you continue to elevate, and you and your company get to ride the awesomeness of that experience.
Shaun Raines: Until maybe they blossom into something else, but they also might be the next person that gives you insight and ideas to help your company expand into new areas, and… I mean, everybody that's amazing and talented that's on your team, it's on you to make sure you keep them. Like, because that's way cheaper in the effect they can have than all the other nonsensical things that you want to go spend money on.
Russell Hill: Yeah, that's a… that's an ego, pride, too much of, you know, selfish, self-seeking, self-centered, that is… that's the… that's actually counterproductive.
Shaun Raines: I 100% agree.
Charity Dunning: Well, while we're on the topic of podcasts, and I'm gonna have to speed up a little bit, because I at least have.
Kaylee Felio: Can we have a part two?
Charity Dunning: Yeah, I at least have 3 more I want to finish with you. Okay, so while we're on the topic of podcasts.
Charity Dunning: Have podcasts hit saturation since they're ubiquitous? Is there still room for fresh voices in automotive? Everybody has a podcast.
Kaylee Felio: And I have two.
Charity Dunning: Yeah, how many podcasts can each person have?
Shaun Raines: Yeah, I think it just depends on… again, it kind of comes back to when I… when I'm talking to companies about what they want to do with events, why are you wanting to go? And it may be really good reasons, and that needs to be thought through.
Shaun Raines: Kaylee mentioned this, actually, in her questions. Like, should companies be podcasting? Absolutely, I think the answer to that is yes, but why? To… I don't… and I… our clients… And how?
Kaylee Felio: How? Because there's… I feel like there's two versions, or there's multiple versions of.
Shaun Raines: Oh, there are.
Kaylee Felio: a guest, you have a guest, and you have a conversation, or you're the only one talking, and you're… you're talking about whatever you want to talk about. Yeah. And then there's other ones, right? But, yeah.
Shaun Raines: Yeah, there are definitely points of distinction, and so… and people have to think, when we bring people on, I mean, our company, the primary service that we offer is podcast production as a content engine.
Shaun Raines: And then all the things that we create for our clients.
Shaun Raines: That they can't do for themselves, but literally gives their marketing team… they only need really one person that knows how to actually deploy the content across all these places.
Shaun Raines: But they also don't have to think about, oh, we need to talk to the product team and find out, like, how do we really get to the meat of, like, what are we doing, and what's the next thing coming up on the development roadmap, and all this other stuff.
Shaun Raines: That's difficult, and you have to have really talented people that know how to do that. It's not just… I mean, we have a lot of, specialty roles in marketing now, completely don't want to divert from this question, but if all you know is, like, well, I'm just a Google Ads specialist, I don't even really do social ads, like, that's my thing. Okay, great. But to me, you're not going to be as valuable anymore, because I'm like, well, I know that too, plus I know SEO, plus I know social ads.
Shaun Raines: plus I know event marketing, plus I know plus plus plus. So being a generalist, a jack of all trades, they say master of none, but still better than master of none.
Shaun Raines: That's me, that's my area.
Russell Hill: No doubt.
Shaun Raines: really important.
Shaun Raines: to think about that from a marketing perspective. But when it comes to podcasts, yes, there is the, I'm a solo podcaster, I just turn on, I do short-form episodes. As long as you are actually preparing well, and you have a lot to say.
Shaun Raines: That can be effective to your audience. Who's your audience? In automotive, we have people that have really big podcasts that are media companies. They are media companies that… they build a big enough brand, and now that becomes
Shaun Raines: an asset. It becomes a sellable asset. Would you like to be on our podcast? It's not free. There are people that you can be on their podcast. Like, you're not charging me to be on this podcast today.
Shaun Raines: I wouldn't pay to be on anybody's podcast. That's me. There are companies that are so desperate that they are willing to write really big checks to be… and I… sorry if this offends anybody on the podcast, but…
Shaun Raines: you can do yourself with a podcast. Like, you don't need to even hire some other company to do it for you. You could do it yourself. You're not chasing number one in any category, because this is not podcasting to have
Shaun Raines: conversations like you would have on a Joe Rogan. This is conversation that's meant to be a marketing tool. So when you have a podcast, it gives you more digital property. On Apple, on Spotify, all the other places that you want an audio distribution, on YouTube. Now you cut it up into short-form pieces, now you drop it into LinkedIn and tell people, if you liked this little dumb comment from me, Sean Raines, talking, ranting about marketing, check in the number one comment, and then you can see the whole episode
Shaun Raines: With me just monologuing for an hour.
Shaun Raines: there are all these little tactics and strategies that work for it. I'm a huge advocate of companies using the podcast or a video series if they don't want a podcast for some odd reason.
Shaun Raines: to be the place where they can have all this content, but they have to have a strategy of how to prepare for that. And that actually takes time. To have a strategy session at least once a month, where you're like, what are we talking about? For the next 6 months, maybe. Spontaneously, you can still add things to the top of the list.
Shaun Raines: That's important, otherwise…
Shaun Raines: And I… at some point in time, people are gonna start wanting to push back on me for… because I won't name names, but the people in the industry that were like, hey, give me 5 grand and we'll slap your name on this kind of podcast.
Shaun Raines: you have to build so much value for that to truly be effective for somebody. Like, if… that just tells me that there are people who are not really paying it, they probably… people that do that are the same people that will write big fat checks for NATA, and they will not do any post-show math.
Shaun Raines: Right? None whatsoever. And if you have that kind of budget, you probably have way too much investment in a VC or private equity that is literally using a playbook that's 20 years old. So we'll just burn through tons of cash on go-to-market, and yeah, this is the most popular podcast out there, so let's jump on it.
Shaun Raines: and cross our fingers. Okay, well, you might as well cross your legs and your eyes and everything else at the same time, because it's not gonna do what hard work does, and that is extracting all of the great stuff out on your own podcast, your own brand, your own… do it yourself. You don't need…
Shaun Raines: I guess some people need somebody, because they like the hand-holding, and.
Kaylee Felio: I think you can do both. You can do both. I think if you're smart about it, I think… because, I mean, I've done it, I've gone on those media podcasts, because…
Kaylee Felio: You know, just trying to… spread it out, but I've always had my own, too.
Russell Hill: This is… this isn't fair. We need to have a second episode. This is not fair.
Kaylee Felio: They need a second.
Shaun Raines: But you gotta realize, a lot of these… when you… Charity mentioned saturation. There are already enough podcasts that occupy this one particular space that they're trying to do, that in that area, you're gonna…
Shaun Raines: you're not gonna miss the majority of the voices who are tuned into that anyway. So do you end up with, like, a lasagna layer of repeatable things that you don't necessarily need?
brent wees: another layer.
Shaun Raines: Probably so.
brent wees: I just go out there.
Shaun Raines: If you're gonna go do that instead of making it for yourself.
brent wees: Are you on thinking, or… Oh, you're on instant. Change the model.
brent wees: Oh, hey, here's Brent. I don't want to do anything.
brent wees: This is so long now.
Charity Dunning: Dave, unmute him.
Russell Hill: Brett? Hello, Brett. There we go.
Charity Dunning: Okay, so let me, I think I'll have time for one more question, and then we'll have to have you back, but I want people to be able to ask you additional questions before we run up in 9 minutes, so…
Charity Dunning: I do follow you on LinkedIn, I read your posts, and I… I love them. So, the one thing that you wrote on trade shows, you wrote, booth scans, 800. Actual qualified leads, 20. Deals closed?
Charity Dunning: Two. Like, the ROI on events is terrible. So, is there a time when you do justify attending or exhibiting trade shows? And, do you attend every one of them and fill out… fill out, like, your event bingo card, like NADA, Digital Dealer?
Charity Dunning: You know, or have you found a better way?
Kaylee Felio: How do you decide which ones to go to?
Shaun Raines: Found a better way.
Charity Dunning: Okay, let's… that's… that's what we want to hear.
Shaun Raines: Okay, first and foremost, if you're a dealer, which show should you go to? One, if you're a dealer, you need to actually
Shaun Raines: Be well-researched and studied enough to know what problems you're trying to solve at your dealership. Where are you trying to get better? Where are you held back that if you go to, you know.
Shaun Raines: There are so many. If you go to MRC, there may be people that Brian is putting on at MRC that you're like, I gotta go hear a deeper perspective, that you can't get… and oh, by the way, dealers, that you can't get anywhere else. Like, you're only gonna hear this person deliver this there, because
Shaun Raines: Let's be honest, Boys and girls, trade shows exist.
Shaun Raines: Because at one point in time, there were no websites. There was no internet.
Russell Hill: That's right.
Shaun Raines: to go and find out all about your company. I don't need to go shopping in a physical marketplace known as an expo hall, right, nowadays. I don't need that, because I can go to your website, and if you have a good website.
Shaun Raines: Not only do I read through your nonsensical boilerplate, you're awesome, you're great, but you probably also have a place where you are writing content, white papers, ebooks, maybe specific perspectives on a blog where your CEO truly participates, that you're not letting AI write all of that. Maybe you're dropping videos of where you're…
Shaun Raines: subject matter experts, your internal influencers have spoken at a 20 group or some other event. I could possibly know everything I need to know just by visiting your website. Why do I need to come to a trade show for that? So for dealers.
Shaun Raines: you need to be really smart in thinking about, what am I gonna learn at this event.
Shaun Raines: And is this the only place that I can get a deeper perspective on somebody who I might want to bring in as a service provider? Those are really important key indicators for dealers. For companies, this is usually what everyone wants to know.
Shaun Raines: For companies, if you… if nobody knows who you are, if you really need brand building to be part of your strategy for events, the first event you're gonna try to go to, then, is NADA. Why is that?
Shaun Raines: Because it draws more of your target audience, the people who you want, than all of the other smaller events combined, right?
Shaun Raines: Say what you want about the, you know, newcomers on the block, like a Sodu. Great! They have a brand that is very attractive, I get that whole message, it's awesome.
Shaun Raines: But they're not drawing the same numbers, right? They just aren't, and it will take them a long time, if ever. They never will. None of the others did. Digital dealer never got to that number. Driving sales never got to that number. It doesn't mean that they're not valuable. It means you have to ask yourself that question as a dealer, but as a vendor.
Shaun Raines: How many of our target dealers are gonna be there? If they tell you, most of them don't want to talk about the exact number of dealers that show up at the event, because when you start to do the trade show math, you're like, oh man, this is bad. But, NADA is the place where you're going to have the greatest number of dealers. It's also where it's the most noise. How are you gonna.
Russell Hill: Oh, yeah. No, listen, I know a ton of general managers. They're very strategic about what they do, and one of the… one of the big… several of them that I know, not all of them.
Shaun Raines: they will actually go to the outliers, the fringes, where new companies just started that no one knows about, and see what, hey, see out of the box what they got. They're raw, they're real, they're transparent, you know, and your thoughts on that, pretty good, or…
Shaun Raines: Yeah, no, I would concur with that. And, yeah, so I wouldn't have any disagreement there. I think that, everything that helps you differentiate through authenticity and being genuine like that, that, kind of melts the barriers to connection, right?
Shaun Raines: In retail, when we're selling cars, we're always trying to figure out how do we actually remove the sales tension that exists just about from every single person that finally gets to the dealership? Ugh, is this gonna be terrible, or is this gonna be great?
Shaun Raines: there's a similar component to that, to how you're trying to, you know, water the ground and soften the ground for people who might be prospects for your business. I do want to say this on trade shows. For companies that are thinking, I… there are 3 categories for me.
Shaun Raines: Brand building, you don't care about leads.
Shaun Raines: You're going there because you're gonna take your most charismatic people that have never met a stranger in their life, and every single person that walks by your booth, you're gonna be like, hey, what brings you to the show today? Even the people are gonna just blow you off, like, oh, nothing, okay, great. Like, just be amazing at conversational, get your people who have been the lead singer of the band, and they're at the show. That you don't get to go to the show, because, like, I've worked at the company for 8 years, I finally get to go to NATA. That isn't how we make those
Shaun Raines: decisions. We gotta be grown-ups about who goes, it's strategic, these are your warfighters on the front line, they know what they're doing at a trade show.
Shaun Raines: Second reason to go is, people know who you are. You've been brand building, maybe all year long, maybe two years long. It's like, man, you've got some buzz, you've got a few things wind at your back a little bit. Now, it's like, we're still building brand, but we know a few people are going to come by, and they're going to want to talk to us. So now, we do want to capitalize on, we gotta make the most of this. So, we should have an expectation that a certain number of deals would be able to be
Shaun Raines: done at the show, and the third category is expansion. There are lots of companies who've been at it for a long time, and then they add something new, which is majorly, majorly gonna affect their ARR, or even their MRR, depending on how long they contract with people, that's up to each individual business. But when you add something that's like, everyone's gonna want this new thing, but it's another 500 bucks a month, or $1,000 a month, or more, really big ticket items.
Shaun Raines: Expansion is another place where you're talking about your new thing, and you should absolutely hold yourself accountable to be at those places to expand with existing clients. Those are the three reasons why you should think about.
Charity Dunning: It shouldn't be…
Shaun Raines: Who's having a party that the Black Crows are playing for free?
Russell Hill: Yeah, well.
Charity Dunning: A lot of that. Who's renting the baseball stadium with the Ferris wheel in the, you know, in left.
Russell Hill: young…
Shaun Raines: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals playing in halftime.
Russell Hill: I mean, like…
Shaun Raines: That's not… as much as that's all the fun, and we're all honest about it, the dinners and the networking and all that, is there value to it? There's value to it. I literally throw a karaoke party in Vegas, every digital dealer just did last week. I met 3 or 4 people that are probably gonna end up being clients of ours just from that event. So is there value in the networking? Yes. But I had somebody in the post that you're referencing, Charity, that
Shaun Raines: had kind of pushed back a little bit. Oh, it's all the networking. And I went and I did a little bit of research, and I happen to know that particular company already has a 40 by 50 booth rented for NADA, and just the square footage of that booth alone
Shaun Raines: is $80,000. That's not the cost of the booth, the rental of the booth, the internet supports turned on, nothing.
Russell Hill: Power, nothing, yeah.
Shaun Raines: And I would just say, do you know how much my company could do for you for $80,000?
Shaun Raines: Like, I could power your content strategy for 2 years, probably, easily. So, yeah.
Charity Dunning: Yeah. Well, I… I don't know, we have one minute. Does anybody want to say anything to show.
Russell Hill: Yeah, I got… I don't know if… I must have missed it or something, my ADHD moment, but about expanding a podcast in other verticals, etc.
Russell Hill: You think that's okay.
Shaun Raines: Yeah, do you have a, like, a specific thought? When you say expand into other verticals, do you like automotive into adjacent, like RVs and power.
Russell Hill: No, no, what I meant was, you know, set up completely different. There's a lot of personal stuff in there, but it all ties back to your original podcast and your company and things of that nature, that it ties it all together.
Charity Dunning: A sister podcast.
Russell Hill: Yeah.
Kaylee Felio: Yeah, I'm curious, because I'm trying to figure that out.
Russell Hill: Yeah.
Shaun Raines: Yeah, I'm a… I'm a fan of that. I think that's one of those areas where I see marketing, and have for a long time, is there's a lot of area for experimentation. Some people don't like that, especially if they're writing the check. The CFOs don't like that. What? Experimenting, but if you really think about it, almost everything that we ever do for the first time in marketing is an experiment, and…
Russell Hill: Yeah.
Shaun Raines: And then we find out whether or not it moved things in the direction we wanted it to go.
Kaylee Felio: I have a question.
Shaun Raines: okay. You have to be okay with it.
Kaylee Felio: I do.
Shaun Raines: bit of that.
Kaylee Felio: I think you do. I think you have to experiment, but I think my fear is when you have guests on your show, that opens up that audience and that promotion. So if I'm only going to have a Parts Edge podcast where I'm… it's strictly education, thought leadership, talking.
Kaylee Felio: you know, interviewing the CEO, or not even just me interviewing, I just ask him a specific question, and he talks about it, and it's not even just me talking, it's just him.
Kaylee Felio: And then I get a few clients in on that conversation, too. Shit, what was my question? .
Russell Hill: Damn it, come on, Taley, what is this?
Kaylee Felio: I lost it! I lost it! Oh, does that dilute? Is… am I still going to get exposure, or do I get the exposure by having a Kaylee Filio podcast, and I interview guests, and I build those… those relationships, and then they're curious about what we do? Because that's kind of what I did with the Parts Girl podcast.
Kaylee Felio: I had the Parts Girl podcast, I interview people, then they get curious on what Parts Edge is, because Parts Edge is sponsoring this podcast. But then I wasn't having enough…
Kaylee Felio: thought leadership-type content for Parts Edge. It was all interviews of thought leaders in the industry, where.
Russell Hill: you know, I don't know what I'm trying to say. I don't think it even needs to be about… I don't even think it needs… about your company, it's just you. You're the face, you're the parts girl. It all ties back.
Kaylee Felio: I understand that, though, but when Chuck talks about parts, those videos get so much more views than mine.
Kaylee Felio: he is… he is the parts guy. Like, how many episodes were you?
Shaun Raines: What do you do in a month, Kaylee?
Kaylee Felio: How many episodes do I do a month?
Kaylee Felio: 4… I do, I release weekly, and then we have a webinar once a month.
Kaylee Felio: And… yeah, it's a lot.
Shaun Raines: Yeah,
Shaun Raines: something would tell me that I… I would say, one, you may be making stuff where it feels like you're just challenged to come up with, like, a new way to make it fresh, keep it fresh, so there could be a little too much of that, but… so four is a lot, I think, if you can.
Shaun Raines: Especially when you're a niche within the niche. The niche is the automotive industry. Your niche is parts. It's not even so.
Kaylee Felio: No one cares about it.
Shaun Raines: And, you're the first thing to come along in a long time where, you know.
Russell Hill: Absolutely.
Shaun Raines: there's visibility, there's conversation, there's… I mean…
Shaun Raines: You… when you came onto the scene, it was the first time where I actually went back to, like, man, my parts days, and now I'm talking about some fixed op stuff.
Russell Hill: Right? Yeah.
Shaun Raines: So I think you maybe already know the answer to this. What you were already doing, unless that trail leads to a place where, like, this just dead-ended, like, what happened? I think all the success points of, like, when you bring Chuck on.
Shaun Raines: you know that those are elements of the recipe for success. So how frequently, how prepped you make him, so he's bringing these differentiated points of view that.
Russell Hill: Mmm.
Shaun Raines: that really resonates with the audience, so that you don't oversaturate getting him on so that he's saying things that feel like, I've heard it before.
Shaun Raines: one, don't… most companies need to be told, don't ever think that you're ever gonna… if you can exhaust yourself talking about what you do and why it matters to dealers, you're… you're… I hate to tell you that the end of your situation is not gonna be pleasant. You should never tire of it.
Shaun Raines: But you do need to think strategically about how often and frequency and, right, some variation, because it will actually make,
Shaun Raines: the audience itself feel like, oh, there's always kind of something new. Always leave your audience wanting more. Always.
Russell Hill: I love it. I love it. I think personal…
Russell Hill: Stuff in there when you can get to it.
Russell Hill: Depending on… as long as it's not overdoing it, people, you know, may not always remember everything, but here's one thing that never changes, obviously, is how it made you feel. So if you have those moments, and they tie it back to that, and then your company, I mean, I think that is… I think that's really good. Do you agree or disagree?
Shaun Raines: Oh, I agree, for sure. What you're doing is around your brand, you're building affinity.
Russell Hill: Handized.
Shaun Raines: thing that you can do is making this kind of affinity around brand. You know, there are a lot of people that talk about brand, and like, I say things, I post things, they're like, you know, a new logo is not gonna save your company.
Russell Hill: Hell no.
Shaun Raines: about logos.
Charity Dunning: It is as much as…
Shaun Raines: we care about logos, nobody cares about logos. I was talking with Brent, I saw him, I don't know if Brent's still on here, but, last week, I got probably more time than I was, should have been, allowed to have with Brent and Bill Playford, some of my old pals in the industry. And we were talking about that very thing, because Scott Stratton famously, at the J.D. Powers, I think it was right in between, or merging in between, a driving sales event.
Shaun Raines: Told the Ritz-Carlton story. If you've never heard it, he just goes on about how there had to have been a logo camp, should the lion be facing left or right?
Russell Hill: Why is the tongue sticking out?
Shaun Raines: there was a font camp, a color camp, it's like, nobody cares about your logo. But he went on to tell the story of this little giraffe that was left behind by a family and their kid, and what did…
Russell Hill: Wow.
Shaun Raines: the… what… what did they do? The Ritz-Carlton literally staged that little giraffe all over, tucked in bed, out by the sunning itself as a swimming pool.
Charity Dunning: pool.
Shaun Raines: all these things, took all these pictures, sent it overnight with this super letter, made, you know, Georgie, or whatever the draft's name was, an official employee of the Ritz-Carlton, sent it all back.
Shaun Raines: Now, all of you, I've just shared the story yet again, like, 10 years later.
Russell Hill: Yeah?
Shaun Raines: That's the brand. It's not the lion with the tongue out. That's the brand. So when you're at my karaoke party, acting like an idiot, that's your brand. When people see me, right, and they are experiencing the Sean Raines wherever I am, when I was at DeLeron.
Shaun Raines: I think I did a good job of helping the dealer on light shine better because of who I am, right? Not who anyone else is, but all of your people are also part of, to your point, Russell… No doubt. They are also an extension of your brand, and you want as much affinity as you can, because then the halo effect is like, meh, like…
Shaun Raines: Likeable, trusted, known, like, everything you can do for those categories, they are gonna separate you from the people that don't even think about it.
Russell Hill: Wow.
Charity Dunning: I think the biggest thing I've learned today is that we need to get a giraffe.
Russell Hill: No!
Charity Dunning: That's the case.
Russell Hill: No, but I do have some ideas, Charity, that you and I will be talking about.
Charity Dunning: Well, Sean, it's been great. Thank you so much for coming.
Kaylee Felio: Do we have a Part 2 next week?
Russell Hill: Please, can we?
Charity Dunning: Well, that's up to Sean. I'm fine with it, but…
Kaylee Felio: Sean, you're hired by the way.
Shaun Raines: You guys could help… you guys could help me, because I've been toying with… I have a couple of new things. Brent Weiss is only the person that kind of knows about this, so I'm not gonna unveil that here.
Shaun Raines: But I have a couple of podcast ideas, but one of which isn't so much for podcasts, although I could use it for content for my podcast, but I have been thinking about starting, I don't know if I could do it weekly, but maybe twice a month.
Shaun Raines: to just run a live show like this, and just invite everybody that wants to come, and basically do 5 or 10 minutes on a couple things, like, hey everybody, I just want you to hear this, and then just… we just talk back and forth.
Russell Hill: I watched it.
Shaun Raines: I just don't know if people would show up for it, and, you know, all of us are wanting to manage our time wisely, but I was thinking about doing that. Do you guys think I should do that?
Kaylee Felio: I mean…
Russell Hill: I would show up.
Kaylee Felio: Topic? Yeah, this topic alone is such a hot topic, because I don't think we talk about it enough. Like, we talk about how we're experts in solving the dealer's problems, but we don't talk about how we are, you know, getting in front of dealerships and marketing, and it's just… and we just don't talk about it.
Charity Dunning: I didn't even get to ask you about generating leads. These are all, like, vendors looking for help. How do we get in front of.
Russell Hill: Oh, and trust me, Charity did her homework and research for preparing for whatever questions.
Charity Dunning: We just ran out.
Shaun Raines: I would like to do…
Kaylee Felio: Also…
Shaun Raines: I'll start two, and then maybe I'll start a live series as well, and then we can just talk about all the stuff whenever.
Kaylee Felio: They're live series.
Russell Hill: Dave, can we do that, or no?
Dave Foy: I'm in. You know I'm in.
Kaylee Felio: I don't know who's hosting next week? I don't even know.
Charity Dunning: Nobody. I guess it'll be me.
Kaylee Felio: Okay.
Charity Dunning: Since it's first… yeah.
Kaylee Felio: That's part two. Good. You can host.
Russell Hill: Alright.
Kaylee Felio: I'll come with some questions, because I.
Russell Hill: Thank you, Kaylee and Landon, Dave, Charity, Sean, man, thank you all for showing up for me today. I got a lot out of this.
Charity Dunning: Yeah, it was great. Thank you.
Kaylee Felio: I'm also still confused, too, so…
Shaun Raines: Well, it's my honor. I've been in this industry for a long time, so I really appreciate the invite, and it's been great spending time with you guys, and I look forward to doing another one.
Russell Hill: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, great show.
Charity Dunning: Yeah, we'll see you next week, Sean.
Russell Hill: Okay.
Kaylee Felio: See ya.
Charity Dunning: Bye.