Marshal Finch with sMedia transcript powered by Sonix—the best automated transcription service in 2020. Easily convert your video to text with Sonix.
Marshal Finch with sMedia was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your video to text. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular video file formats.
Kelly Kleinman:
Hello from Southern California. This is the dealershipnews.com/ podcast where we bring you the new and old school insight into the business of selling cars and service. So you have the foresight to grow your dealership and stay ahead of the competition. I'm Kelly. Kleinman. And here is our show. Hello, everybody. Kelly.. Kleinman. dealershipnews.com/. This is our podcast. On my right…
Kelly Kleinman:
We have Marshall Finch. He’s the big boss man. It sMedia. Canada’s leading DigiTech solutions provider, One of Canada’s fab five hundred fastest growing companies who, by the way, also has 800 rooftops in the United States. And the number is steadily growing. How you doing, Marshall?
Marshal Finch:
I’m doing fantastic. I’m a little jet lag today and then flying over the world, expanding our worldwide team.
Marshal Finch:
We just closed a funding round and we be adding 80, 80 new team members. So we got lots of lots of new stuff going on here.
Kelly Kleinman:
Tell the folks where you were.
Marshal Finch:
Where I was, I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh. So it took forty seven. It was a forty seven hours to fly home and it ended up taking 50.
Marshal Finch:
But it was the experience of a lifetime and just seeing how traffic and transportation happens in a city like that, Dhaka, Bangladesh is the most densely populated city in the world. And they do not have mass public transportation and nobody follows the rules and the lines on them. And there’s no street lights.
Kelly Kleinman:
Well, let’s get into a little bit about what sMedia does real quickly here. Is it all about artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms taking the guessing game out of a dealer’s advertising and marketing budget?
Marshal Finch:
Yeah. So at sMedia, what were we really focused on? Is it? It’s kind of like Moneyball right with with Oakland. Right.
Marshal Finch:
They they they they they took a new paradigm on how to build a baseball team to be successful. Right. Everybody wanted a homerun. Right. And in automotive, everybody thinks a homerun is a lead right.
Marshal Finch:
But what you want what you actually want to do is you want to get people on your Web site shopping your cars and then coming into your dealership to purchase.
Marshal Finch:
Right. Because nobody wants to talk to car salesmen. All right. So we’re trying to get consumers to do something they don’t want to do.
Marshal Finch:
We want to try it. Everybody else is trying to get consumers to fill out a lead on a dealership, but say which they don’t want to do and the car salesman staff don’t want to follow up with them because they don’t have any success.
Marshal Finch:
All right, so we’re going to get two groups of people to do something that both don’t want to do an unsuccessful when they do it, so it doesn’t make sense to do that. So we have to look at a different way to evaluate online advertising so that we can actually show dealerships what online campaigns are generating in-store sales.
Marshal Finch:
So how I explain it is if I’m show you five different cars based off your tone, inflection, body language, everything.
Marshal Finch:
I know which of those five cars that I showed you that you’re actually interested in and whether or not you’re going to buy that car, based off of all of my years of experience. So what we did is we took all of the sales data, all of the engagement data and clicks hovers, everything from all of our dealerships website. And we built an A.I. to find the correlations between those online by language and in store sales and find out what’s actually driving those sales. And a lot of the times when we do those correlations, there’s actually a negative correlation between leads and the sales of the dealership. So the more leads a dealership would get, the less sales they will get, because most dealerships, when they follow up with the lead, they go, hey, yeah, we got the car, come down and check it out. Right. And they provide no more value to the consumer. The consumer just gets frustrated and then they don’t want to do business with them. Right. So a lot of the times we’re seeing that generate more and leads can actually hurt a dealership based on how a lot of them are interacting with their customers.
Kelly Kleinman:
So the long and short of it is. Yes. You know, by the way, there's a Corbin's Sencuck, Senchuck right next to where we get your head on that right there. OK. Let me ask you a question. I just leading up to this, really, could AI have predicted that sMedia is dealershipnews.com/ Canadian DigiTech Automotive vendor of the Year?
Marshal Finch:
No, because we don’t have the data.
Kelly Kleinman:
Well, here's the data you've just been elected. Congratulations. You are dealershipnews.com/ Canadian DigiTech Automotive Vendor of the Year?
Marshal Finch:
Thank you.
Marshal Finch:
You know what, it’s been like a really big year for sMedia. Yeah, we were. We’re the 30th fastest growing company in Canada.
Kelly Kleinman:
30th.
Marshal Finch:
Yeah.
Kelly Kleinman:
Top 500, but you’re number 30th outstanding. Yeah.
Marshal Finch:
We’re 30 on that number. We’re up for Business of the Year in Canada.
Marshal Finch:
We’re up for Tech Business of the Year.
Marshal Finch:
And I’m up for Entrepreneur of the Year in Canada for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Toronto.
Kelly Kleinman:
Well, congratulations and happy holidays, guys. Where can you be reached? What’s the best way to contact us? sMedia other than smedia.ca
Marshal Finch:
Just smedia.ca or through our Facebook, or you can reach out to Marshal@smedia@ca, that’s mine.
Marshal Finch:
That’s my that’s my personal email. And my personal telephone number is 3 0 6 7 3 7 5 5 1 2.
Marshal Finch:
I actually sleep with my headphones in. So if any customer, any dealer that ever has a problem. Anytime day they can call me, wake me up and I will be there for them.
Kelly Kleinman:
Go get some sleep. Congratulations, Guy Corbin. How you doing? Oh, very good. It’s true. Marshall doesn’t get very much sleep, but he’s very thin.
Kelly Kleinman:
I can see that. Well, guys, listen, have a great holiday season. We’re going to see you in Los Angeles soon. Marshall, we’ll go ahead, coordinate that. Meanwhile, again, happy holidays to you guys and happy New Year. Congratulations on a great 2019 and get him at that.
Quickly and accurately convert video to text with Sonix.
Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your be/3fMqTYFnJCQ files to text.
Thousands of documentary filmmakers and journalists use Sonix to convert be/3fMqTYFnJCQ file to srt or vtt to make their media content more accessible to the viewing public.
Sonix is the best online video transcription software in 2020—it’s fast, easy, and affordable.
If you are looking for a great way to convert your be/3fMqTYFnJCQ to text, try Sonix today.
Kelly Kleinman of Dealership News interviews Marshal Finch to understand how his company has been nominated the business of the year, the tech business of the year by the Canada Chamber of Commerce. We surprise this Entrepreneur of the Year nominee with Dealership News' own award: The 2019 Canadian Digi-Tech Automotive Vendor of the Year! Just goes to show that we know how to pick 'em here at dealershipnews.com/
Sponsored by Gas.net — powering dealership growth through intelligent data.
Alt text: “Gas.net connects franchise dealers with integrated analytics and marketing tools.”