Tom Murray with WebBuy

Kelly Kleinman:
Kelly Kleinman dealershipnews.com/ we are the Digital Dealer Show at the lovely Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, the sinful city we've got with us from WebBuy Mr. Tom Murray. He is the CEO and Co-founder. Tom, what's the value proposition? What do you guys do over a Web Buy?

Tom Murray:
Nice to see you Kelly.. We we are dealers primarily that decided seven years ago that we wanted to create an Amazon solution, including a proceed to checkout, so to speak, functionality for the franchise dealer world. And we we began the journey and its been an interesting path for seven years. And the things that differentiate us Kelly. is that we a number one, our solution works that had an approved by most OEMs that we have now have hundreds of happy dealer customers. But there’s a couple of key differentiation points in our solution. We create a sandbox of sorts, right, for that demographic. I call it the Carvana effect, right? Carvana nd I think the number was 4700. They reach out in 2017 and 2018, sold 94,000 this year. They’re tracking, I believe, about a 170,000. So whatever you believe about their value proposition in terms of their business model, the one thing they’ve certainly done is to have validated. Right. The fact that this is in this demographic of of a buyer who’s conflict averse, who’s digitally savvy, and maybe most importantly, who wants to control the process. Right. It isn’t growing. It’s exploding. And if you’re a franchise dealer, whether whether you want to partner with my company or not, I would I would call special attention to you to really focus on the fact that this is this isn’t a fad. Right. This is coming. It’s not just coming. It’s here. And then you look at the vroom’s and the digital disruptors. Right. And if you’ve ever seen a Carvana TV commercial, for example, they’ll tell you car salesman is bad, a car dealer is bad. Don’t go there. And so we’re under attack. And I would encourage my friends in the in the franchise dealership to to recognize that right. To not stick our heads in the collective sand and go.. It’s a fad. It’ll pass. It’s not a fad and it’s not going to pass. You either need to reinvent that portion of your business because today it’s probably 25%. And I would say in the next 24 to 36 months, it may be as much as half of your customer base. So even if you’re not digitally, digitally retailing, at least give your consumer, your customer and the people in your marketplace a path to engage with you. Right. Because today, if you don’t have that opportunity, if they don’t have that opportunity, you’re never gonna meet them. And there’s so many other places that will meet their needs. CarMax. Right. Even Tesla gets referenced not because it’s a high volume car, but it’s the process. Right? It’s simple. It’s easy, and most importantly, it’s user controlled. So that was our mission statement from day one. Number two, we wanted to be able to make it dealer centric. Right. We my co-founder owns a big dealer group in Billings, Montana. My background, I spent half of my career in the retail space. The other half, I worked for the warranty group.

Tom Murray:
I was the president of Resource Automotive, the biggest division. It’s now Assurant. So we understand the car business. And we not only protect the dealers profit centers, but we grow them and we’ve actually created new profit centers. And then lastly, we give you as a dealer all of the impact drivers to control the business digitally, just like you would with a green sharpie marker in the force in the showroom we use in essence Kelly. just the way summarize it would be say we digitize the 10 steps to the sale. Right in every aspect of our solution, whether that’s sales tax to the penny, whether it is rebates and incentives, whether it’s payoff information. Our billboard is it real time auto decisioning machine that allows you to markup the loans, control it, and foster that rapid less than 60 seconds communication and the deals bought are customizable training tool, which is part of our solution. We built it from scratch. We made a dealer centric. You decide all of the impact drivers in terms of the deductions, the additions. Right. How you want to give you one quick example and the appraisal front. If if a customer is in a dealership and you say to me, hey, Tommy and both remotes for your trading, and I say, no, Mike, my son lost one of them. But we’re gonna have to deduct $400. Right, because we have to give the next customer.

Tom Murray:
I’m probably mad at you at that moment, the dealership, because you’re the message. I’ll spin the paradigm and change that dynamic, and I’m in my sweats at 10 o’clock at night on my computer and I’m clicking right. New tires click. Does it need brakes? Click? Yep. Both remotes now are missing one click and then the reconciliation comes up and it deducts the 400. I’m not mad at the car dealer. I’m mad at my son. Right. For losing the remote, possibly $400. But here’s the here’s the punchline. The people who had the self-guided experience are. 78% more likely to accept the wholesale offer, not a retail offer, because they’re in control. They’re the ones they’re appraising your own car.

Tom Murray:
So that’s just one impact driver in our solution. And then we literally take it all the way A to Z. We give them a sandbox to play with regular rates. Then it rates lease payments in real time with updated impact factors, rather return interest rate or money factor. And then we literally have an Amazon proceed to checkout functionality at the end where the customer puts the credit card in and literally buys the car. So we’ve spent a lot of time Kelly. 7 years building this solution and trying to make it dealer centric. Most of our investors are car dealers. We’ve gotten a lot of great ideas along the way and we’ve endeavoured to continually reinvent and update on a regular recurring basis in a position where a dealer says This is exactly what I do right in my showroom manually on a Saturday afternoon. If I’ve got 15 salespeople at one o’clock in the afternoon and there’s 22 ups, I’m going to lose that op on a Saturday because I don’t have a way to handle to ups. I want to augment what you do and what your salesperson to take. Three ups, not one. So if I say to you, hey, Jimmy, from pulling out, that’s what I’ve done. If nothing else had slowed you down and bought myself some time to finish with the first up right and get to you. But at the end of the day, they could literally take the phone and buy the car while they’re sitting in the customer. So there’s a lot of a lot of good impact drivers in our solution. But most importantly, I guess the advice I would give to dealers is again and I’ll kind of end where I began. This is not a fad. This is not a flash in the pan. And most importantly, it’s not going away. The franchise dealer model is under attack by digital disruptors.

Tom Murray:
And fortunately for you, we have a solution that would combat that Carvana effect and level the playing field for you and allow you to engage with those people that, you know, don’t like negotiation. They do everything on their phone. They forget about negotiating, they don’t even want to talk to another human being right then and say, hey, we’ve got a path to make you happy and to allow you to engage in a self-directed digital purchasing experience. You’re in control. So I look forward to visiting with you again. Thank you for the opportunity to visit with you today. And I hope you have a great finish to show folks.

Kelly Kleinman:
That’s whereby Tom Murray, CEO, the man, the myth, the legend. We’re going to do a podcast and then we’ll get a little more into it. In the meantime, have a great day.