Ep. 646 - How to Keep Your Inventory Clean, with Brian Kramer
In this episode, my guest is Brian Kramer, EVP of Dealer Growth & Success at Cars Commerce. Brian has a unique perspective—he’s got eyes on thousands of dealerships, millions of VDPs, and the real numbers behind what’s working (and what’s not). We dive into some game-changing insights about how dealers can stop guessing and start measuring their online road to the sale, fix inventory inefficiencies, and finally connect the dots between marketing, CRM data, and actual sales.
Now, here’s the thing—we all think we have a process. But if we’re being honest, a lot of our workflows are not really that intact, somehow, leads are still slipping through the cracks. Half the time, customers are bouncing off broken experiences on our websites, and we’re left wondering why closing rates aren’t what they should be.
Meanwhile, the top-performing dealers? They’re not doing more—they’re doing less, but better. They’ve mastered the pain of discipline—refining their processes, eliminating inefficiencies, and ensuring that every lead, every trade-in, and every digital interaction actually leads somewhere. That’s the difference between guessing and making data-driven decisions that actually move the needle.
If you’re ready to tighten up your process, stop overspending, and get a clear roadmap for making your online showroom work as efficiently as your physical one, this episode is a must-listen. Brian shares some simple but powerful shifts that can save time, money, and frustration.
Episode Brought To You By FlexDealer
Need Better Quality Leads? FLX helps car dealers generate better quality leads through localized organic search and highly-targeted digital ads that convert. Not only that, they work tirelessly to ensure car dealers integrate marketing and operations for a robust and functional growth strategy.
Watch The Full Episode
Prefer to watch episodes? Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and turn on notifications to get full access to our content.
Episode Transcript
MC: 0:00
(Episode Sponsor) This episode is brought to you by FlexDealer.
Hey auto industry. In this episode, I'm joined by my pal, Brian Kramer. He's the Executive Vice President of Dealer Growth and Success at Cars Commerce. We're talking about how to measure your online road to the sale, how to stop guessing, finally, and introduce efficiency into your inventory process. Dpb alum, Brian Kramer, thanks so much for joining me on the Dealer Playbook.
Brian: 0:40
Great to see you, as always, Michael. I appreciate you having me on.
MC: 0:42
I was just saying look too well rested for someone who just got home from NADA. And then you admitted and I'm going to admit for you, that you go to bed at 630, right after supper. You're still in the generation that calls it supper. Right, you have a nightcap that you wear and I heard something about a nightcap. I have a little compress on my eyes. Oh well, it's always good to see you.
MC: 1:10
Obviously, I was fortunate enough to watch some of the sessions that you were doing at the Cars Commerce booth at NADA. At time of recording this that just passed, it was in New Orleans. There was lots of snow one day and then no snow the next, thank the heavens. You've always been a big advocate for inventory process and keeping inventory clean and certainly as you transitioned out of dealership into cars commerce, you've been quite an ambassador for this concept. I want to maybe get your vantage point, looking across the ecosystem, the high mountain that you're able to stand up on and look down upon the thousands and thousands of dealerships that are involved with cars commerce. What do you think the maybe some of the most common mistakes are that that dealers are making in maybe their trade process or their acquisition process, or like what do you think is just getting in their way from having a much cleaner inventory?
Brian: 2:03
So that's an excellent question and I'll give it a slightly nuanced answer, even what I was talking about at NADA, but it all comes together in the end. I'm looking recently and it ebbs and flows and sometimes the industry gets better and sometimes it's seasonality, but right now, at the moment we're approximately 50% of the inventory. Use our inventory on our site, which is representative of all the sites Wow, we have 28 million unique visitors a month and our inventory flows from 2.3 to 4 point something million, depending on how many listings we have private party and franchise and independent dealers but at the moment almost half of that inventory is over 60 days old. Now, sometimes it goes into the 30% range.
Brian: 2:48
When I was in a dealership, I would start my blood pressure would start skyrocketing at five to 10%, right and and and everybody else's would be. Would you know, feel that blood pressure rise as a result of mine? Right, cause I felt like you know all my mentors had ever taught me you had to instill fear and anxiety into people to make sure that you never felt like. I've had many mentors that said you experience either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Either way, prepared for pain and by not having the pain of discipline. And here's what pain of discipline looks like. Pain of discipline looks like I'm going to gather all.
Brian: 3:25
That's not what normally people would think about from an inventory management. They think about VDPs and VDPs is a percentage of SRPs. Market day, supply days to sell, average days in recon, all of those cost to market, price to market, all those things. But I'll put those aside for a minute. Now. What I've learned, to your point, sitting on a mountain of dealers, data you know, like like Mount Everest, and looking in a go to the, I always am trying to figure out. Whatever market I'm in, you know, I might be assigned to see this dealer and this dealer I'm like well, I'm curious to see this dealer and I see these great numbers. So I want to go visit them and I want to pick their brain and I want to. That is my idea of a good time. And here's what I find out is that they start at the beginning. They get the PII. They get first name, last name, mobile email address, and now this is something like when you and I met years ago, that Jared Kilway would handle for me.
Brian: 4:20
So it's kind of outside out of mind as an operator. But the power of all of that you can't retarget. You can't which I'm preaching to the choir but retarget, remarketing, the most efficient spend you have on all these people that abandon your site along the journey of the GA4 events, right, and it's a silent killer. If somebody you know retail you were in retail If you see somebody that's not getting TO'd turned over, or they came in and they wanted to get numbers but they never got their cars appraised, or they wanted to get payments and the finance manager never got involved, the management's losing their minds. But then on your website, 100 times more per day, people are bouncing off of a broken sequence or a broken experience to appraise their car, submit credit, and of those things. Or, worst case scenario, when I see the majority of the time the managers are like just get them in and by just getting them in you're not getting their PII. So now this whole marketing piece, after the fact, all this opportunity, dealers have to pay more than they should. They're spending way more than they need to. It's inefficient, it's not the best experience for the consumer and it's not the best experience for the dealership associates. So I guess, to answer your question, the pain of discipline is making sure that we're entering all that information there.
Brian: 5:35
If somebody wants a sight unseen appraisal, have a link on your website that you can send directly to the client. If they want to get pre-approved, have a link on the website. That's very easy. That also populates your credit, your route one or dealer track tool. That it also populates your appraisal tool, like Accutrade. You've got it embedded in a iframe or a native API to make it even easier.
Brian: 5:59
But then all that stuff goes into the CRM, where it's supposed to, to make it easier for your associates and everything's seamlessly so that when the customer arrives you don't have to start the process all over after they put in all of the and it's like a doctor's office. You know I was talking to somebody the other day they input all the stuff in there to say, 45 minutes. They get in and they give them a clipboard with 20 more pieces of paper. Well, we know that stuff and that goes somewhere else, but we need you to do this in order to get you in and it's almost like you feel like you. You know you're getting jacked around. Well, why I would have been, rather, why did I do that other part of it. There was no point.
MC: 6:33
So, which is a good fit for you, cause you've been a huge proponent of moving everything to digital right. You, you were paperless, right If I. If you moved to an entirely paperless process and it makes sense to me. I mean, you're removing friction from the customer's perspective, and something that's resonating with me I've written it down now three times which I think was an undertone of a lot of the conversations I had at NADA which is this concept of just being as efficient as you possibly can. That seems to be the focus this year. People came out of 2024 and they're like whoa we overspent, we were guessing a lot, and now they're moving with this new mindset and I think this is such a timely message.
MC: 7:20
So I kind of cut you off on your riff, but I had to get that in there because it just resonates so deeply with me.
Brian: 7:28
No, and that's the reason Alex better created the position of what I'm doing. Is dealer growth and retention, or success is to make sure dealers have bought a lot of software and a lot of technology and just a lot of stuff. Right, yeah, I'm working internally with our data teams just all of our teams, across the board, from a dealer's perspective, on how to make all of these things connect in a much easier way, a much more efficient way, but also so we can become a lot more consultative and say do you really need these five pieces of software? You know I'll do a shameless plug, but if you have Accutrade, you don't need a instant author tool. You don't need a service drive equity mining tool. You don't need a.
Brian: 8:20
You know an instant offer bleed generator tool doing that off. That's disjointed and separate from your website and it's not all seamless in one. You know consistent, unified workflow, and the list goes on and on with uh, you know crm site, unseen appraisal length and all the things that go along with it. It's just one tool in one ecosystem with one data flow, with all the data in one place, instead of having to grab this, export this Google sheet or this Excel sheet into a pivot table and all the things that nobody's willing to do because they just want to sell cars. So what I look at as my role is is to find out where those pain points are and enable that for dealers.
MC: 9:02
But I mean all those things make for fancy presentations at conferences. Brian, you just wiped out all of the conference presentations. What grinds my gears because you are preaching to the choir, but it grinds my gears because I wish it was shouted more from the rooftops is the missing. When we look at marketing efficiency, for example touching back on what you were talking about earlier and we go and audit a CRM, it's like no wonder they're not closing at the rate that they want to. There's so much missing context about how this customer even arrived in the CRM.
MC: 9:44
And then who knows what their internal process is CRM? And then who knows what their internal process is? They might get a note in the CRM that says customer wants to trade vehicle and buy a new one. Then if you happen to have some sort of call tracking or attribution tool, you realize there was a 15 minute phone call in which this customer was like really into it. Knows the general manager of the store. None of it made it into the CRM. And then they get the standard lead follow up seven, day, 11, day, whatever it is text, phone, email, whatever it is and it just doesn't work. And then the solution that I found well, this is not my solution. I'll preface it. This is what, in general, we've found. Is then the dealer's like well, I guess I better go back into my pocket, take more of my hard earned dollars to overcompensate for the operational inefficiency? And I look at it and I just go what?
Brian: 10:33
is happening Overpaying because it's not strategic, because at the last minute, fourth down hail Mary just hoping for the best, and when you're not staffed for it and it's not paced out. I'll ask you a question because you're an expert in this wheelhouse and I think that I came up in the age before there was CRMs, right, we had 3x5 index cars and a lot of the dealers that are out there don't really know the nuances of how a CRM works, specifically around attribution sourcing. So it used to be drive-by walk-in phone sourcing. So you know, it used to be drive by walk in phone or internet, yeah, and then everybody started to get a little bit more fancy. Well, did it come from carscom? Did it come from auto trader? Did it come from whoever right? Yeah, so I see a lot of instances and I realize now what happened in my store, because everything is and it's not it's only the automotive industry. It seems like. There's like because if somebody touched Facebook, google and Twitter and whoever else, most marketing companies in other verticals will count all of those as attribution or percentage of attribution. Automotive is the only place I know that only has one source of attribution.
Brian: 11:46
So if somebody gets on, let's say, one of our competitor sites and they don't get the information they're looking for. But they submit a lead form. That lead form, timestamped, that becomes lead source number one. Then they get onto our garage let's say carscom my garage where they input their vehicle. Now they can get notifications about what their car is worth. They can go back into this ecosystem, they spend more time there. Then they go into a carscom VDP where they're calculating payments and it's based on their credit, on a soft credit pool. They appraise their car with a guaranteed value. All this data is getting pulled into this enriched lead, yep. And then when that lead goes in along with the three or four other ones that they visit after the fact, the CRM says that lead goes in along with the three or four other ones that they visit after the fact, the CRM says that lead source number one is why they bought a car. I hate it. After all of those things, what's your perspective on that? I hate it.
MC: 12:50
I hate it because what it does is it's created a diluted understanding of what chance like this is why there are platforms out there charging as much as they do, because they take 100% of credit of the credit of what sold the vehicle. My thought process here I'm allowed one controversial statement a day and I'll use it on this. The car dealer sold the car. The fact that the car was there and it was what the customer wanted, and they had to work and pencil and put the deal together and present it and demo that's sold the car. The lead providers have a weighted touch point. You know attribution model of what encouraged the customer to show intention. It should be a weighted attribution model of what encouraged the customer to show intention.
Brian: 13:30
It should be a weighted attribution model, which I really haven't seen, even right down to like.
MC: 13:35
This is that's my overly flamboyant way of like giving credit back to the dealer personnel, because we're vendors are so ready to write like, take all the credit and say, oh, like the dealer didn't do anything and it's like, well, I would probably say they're 70% of the equation, plus they had all the holding costs of the vehicle to begin with. They deserve most of the credit. But then we have this but they are part of a weighted attribution of which the customer didn't just go. Oh, there, it was on the website. I guess that's what I want, no, they. Then there was an ad that followed them and a promotion and a third party listing, and you know, like they might've been on y'all's website or, and I don't know how every dealership but in mind 70% of them bought another vehicle other than that vehicle Once they arrived.
MC: 14:20
Correct. Then there's the YouTuber who did the vehicle walk around and showed them the gadgets and gizmos. And you know, I mean years ago, the last time I looked into it, google was saying there were 24, 25 different touch points that helped shape the path to purchase and understanding that buying journey. So few, I mean. Look, all the website providers want it to be the website. All of the third parties want it to be a third party. All of the eight marketing agencies want it to be the marketing agency. But it is an orchestra of you know where third party sites might be the timpani.
Brian: 14:56
And the song is automatic without it. You know they don't purchase. And I think, as we're talking about this online customer journey, yeah, there's so many instances I see where I mean. Even to this day, I haven't had a home phone since 1998. And I remember, you know, my father asked me have you lost your mind? What if the power goes out? What if their battery goes dead? I use my ham radio, right, and all these crazy. Or when I went cashless back in like 01, that was another crazy thing. But as I'm going back and I'm looking at all these things, they don't always have mobile numbers. Well, I've got their work number and their home number and obviously the IP address that's attached to that mobile device. Then you can do an audience build. Combine it with our first party data at carscom, with their first party data, to get even more enriched data to with. At the end of the day, you'd have a more efficient spend or they can spend less and accomplish the same results or more. So I think that's one thing that I really think the whole industry needs to be educated about.
Brian: 15:59
I didn't understand until I came to carscom, cars commerce, the power of combining dealers first party data with our-party audience data and putting those two, like the ingredients, together into the same recipe and the exponential amplification of that deal. I know you've said that stuff before and many people have and I hear bits and pieces of it, but now I've connected the dots. So my goal is to show dealers there how it affects them in a simplified way. Yeah, because I don't think that there's opportunity for everybody to simplify that messaging Right, to show that journey or whatever. But I think if dealers paid attention to the topic of this podcast, if they paid attention to their online showroom and everybody's always said that the virtual showroom versus the in-store showroom but if they measured the road to the sale and actually had all their GA4 events synced to see as it goes online showroom, then when they leave and they say I got to think about it and for whatever reason, they didn't buy, what better messaging than retargeting, remarketing based on the last event that they did?
Brian: 17:10
I experienced this the other day and somebody educated me on it. I didn't understand why. I said I'm looking at Nike. When I click on a Nike carousel ad on Facebook, the product comes up on that product, right. But why is it that I clicked on this Vilebraquin swim trunk ad and it drops me into this carousel and I can't find those swim trunks anymore and I'm like my attention span is like that I bounce and I'm like, and then I see it again, you know, like the next day. Oh, there it is, it's on sale. I click on it and it puts me into the main page of that website and I try looking for those swim trunks again. Can't find them, don't know what it is. And those broken things.
Brian: 17:46
I know it's happening in car dealerships and that they're using some people that aren't maybe cars commerce, that are then monetizing their data and selling it to be able to. You know all these opportunities, all these impressions, because I did this with 10 different dealers and I'm doing it with all of them. So now I sky all these impressions, because I did this with 10 different dealers and I'm doing it with all of them. So now I skyrocket the impressions but there's no results and you can't quantify it and all of these things. I want to pull the curtain back on this and expose it to the industry, cause I didn't, as an operator, didn't know about all this stuff. I think dealers will behave a lot differently if they know what you've known, will behave a lot differently if in it with you.
MC: 18:56
(Sponsor Ad Mid-roll) Hey, does your marketing agency suck? Listen before we hop back into this episode. I know you know me as the host of the Dealer Playbook, but did you also know that I'm the CEO of FlexDealer, an agency that's helping dealers capture better quality leads from local SEO and hyper-targeted ads that convert? So if you want to sell more cars and finally have a partner that's in it with you that doesn't suck, visit FlexDealer.com. Let's hop back into this episode.
So there's something interesting here. I have to add a bit to the back of this because I think it's so powerful what you're saying I I can't even believe I'm gonna. I have a pillow, brian, that was designed for side sleepers. My chiropractor says you gotta sleep on your back. I'm like I can't, I just I end up on my side. So, okay, I'm the same, yeah, okay.
MC: 19:16
So I see an ad for a pillow called the med climb pillow pillow not sponsored. It is a wedge. There's a body pillow attached to it. There's like a hole that you slide your arm through, but it takes all the pressure. What's my point? I see it from MedCline. I go to their website because I'm intrigued.
MC: 19:33
I'm in audience, I'm thinking you know, shoulder pains top of mind for me and then I magically see this ad. I start filling in the form, but then I'm hesitant and I go oh well, hold on a minute, let me think about this. This is a $250 pillow. I don't know. Guess what happens. Based on exactly what you're explaining, this idea of retargeting, based on the last GA4 event, I then start seeing a slew of influencers that MedCline hired to run ads for the pillow, of them using the pillow and talking about the pillow, and now this pillow is following me everywhere. But also, what I thought interesting is, it was influencers that I recognized that were not like a mr beast that you know, maybe everyone. They were like very niche um, you know youtubers and instagrammers and and whatnot that were following me around until finally one of them hit with the offer that was like and for like 50 additional dollars off you would be, and I'm like that Right, that's the CT.
MC: 20:41
I was waiting for now and I think about, like, how do we take what you're saying and this concept that exists elsewhere and put it into the dealership framework, where you don't even necessarily need to be an influencer but spit ball in here and this might be a bad idea? What if the dealer actually said we're going to maximize our ad spend and retarget people through an ad account for the sales person that worked here, that demoed the vehicle for you when you came in?
Brian: 21:08
Now that granularity. That's why I love talking to you so so. So in NADA we were just there, you know, uh had this, uh tick, this huge Tik TOK influencer named George Saliba. He jumped through. I heard you guys, he's an Accutrade power user Interesting thing, michael, on this gentleman. We signed him up and I'm looking at the performance and you obviously see outliers and I'm like independent dealer New Jersey, not a franchise, getting 500 inbound worldwide car leads a month. That's crazy. So I reach out to him and I saw him at a SotoCon last year. He was there and I started picking his brain and I said TikTok, you know I get it, but I mean it's not where I get most of my leads. Wow, okay. So he's walking me through it.
Brian: 22:04
Fast forward to the other night at one of these events at NADA and I was telling somebody. I said I think he's standing next to me and I go. I think he's generally 800 leads and he goes no, no, no. And he holds up his phone. He goes this is the last 30 days 3,000. Thousand. So three thousand off of organic content, no ad spend whatsoever. So I go, what's that worth per lead? And he said you know what I do? And and this. This happened just like this right, which I'll get back to this iip, our inventory intelligence platform. But he comes over, he goes I hear you guys have this new iip, I want to see it. Uh, we're in like there's, you know, there's a live team there that's filming my reaction out of the blue. He goes I want to see it. Can you show it to us right now? Sure, so we go over there, we show that.
Brian: 22:47
But right after that, he had just gotten a couple more cars and his team had acquired them remotely. And he sees Joe Neiman from Dealer Club, this new partnership we just did. And he said okay, joe, tell us about Dealer club. He goes well, it's the most frictionless, easy. Uh, you know D to D auction that there is and, by the way, it's not just the easiest, but we're going to pay you to list your cars and sell them instead of you paying us. And he goes okay, well, how does it work? He goes. I just set up my account yesterday. So, because I just bought an Acura from a customer remotely, hasn't touched this car yet. He's in New Orleans, it's off a lead in New Jersey. I don't know where the customer was.
Brian: 23:26
And Joe looks at his phone. He goes oh yes, just do this. Click this copy and paste, which here, in a couple of weeks, will be much easier. If you're on Accutrading and Cars Commerce platform, hit this, click this. He goes.
Brian: 23:38
Now it's listing. He goes. Now you can see this many people are watching and this many people are looking at it. Oh okay, he goes and now it's sold and this happened in like a minute and they're filming this, right. So, and I'm like even myself you know, you and I talked in the metaverse and yeah, I'm looking at it and I'm like what just happened and it was so advanced and transformational.
Brian: 24:02
And George goes. That's a good price. He goes. I was doing this on some other cars and Joe goes, yeah, so then I had to go do something else, but those two are sitting there.
Brian: 24:14
I don't know what he listed and how many cars, but when you can source that many cars with your own first party audience, like George and then he goes, I'll retail the ones I like, the ones that I think are going to age out on me, instead of me waiting 60 days, I'll just get rid of them from day one, because I'm so good at advertising that I don't need them all and I'm going to have tomorrow I'll have more than I know what to do with. I'm going to call the brakes and rewind for a second. So we go over and there's him being there with the camera crew, and all that stuff always draws a crowd, so there's people that start gravitating towards what's going on. We're looking at this inventory intelligence platform. We're showing the benefits. He goes how much is it? We go well, if you sign up right now, until the end of the year, there's no charge. We just want to get data, we want to scale this thing and we want to get a lot of people on board.
Brian: 24:57
And he goes you got to be kidding me.
Brian: 24:58
So he's comparing it to what independent dealers pay, which is like seven $800 for inferior software. And I think he said verbatim if you're not using this IIP, you're basically an idiot. And he hasn't posted this yet, but we've already signed up three of those dealers that were just in that small conversation of maybe five or six from his endorsement. So when you talk about the pillow, I'm picturing him validating what we're talking about in that same way, and I think that that's a very exciting future for automotive retail. Now to go from some are still doing newspaper ads and radio that you can't quantify. It's not like you put a QR code on the radio. I think we still have a ways to go, but I think that that's what the future looks like, and I don't. It maybe doesn't look like the metaverse, right, but I think that it's even more exciting what we're talking about today because it's real. I just watched it happen live and this business is changing by the minute and I'm going to steal your idea and hopefully you see it soon at Cars Comics.
MC: 26:10
You heard it here first, folks. You heard it here first man. I love this conversation. I love talking about this stuff because it's what matters. I mean, during the pandemic, we I think everybody I can't believe I said the P word. I need to have a jar for that. I put cash in when I break my own cardinal rules, but we saw how important inventory cleanliness was during that time period and I and and so then we have innovation like what you're talking about at cars commerce, and what you guys are doing with Dealer Club I think is phenomenal. Hey, as we wind down, how can those listening and watching connect with you?
Brian: 26:46
You can email me at BKramer@cars.com. Anytime you connect with me on LinkedIn, youtube handles just Brian Kramer, instagram, Facebook, tiktok Right, I did it by accident.
MC: 27:03
You're one of the lucky ones. You got your name. That's amazing man. Thank you so much for joining me on the Dealer Playbook Podcast. Always great talking to you, Michael.
(Outro) Hey, thanks for listening to the Dealer Playbook Podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please subscribe, share and hit that like button. You can also join us and the DPB community on social media. Check back next week for a new Dealer Playbook episode. Thanks so much for joining.
