We ranked the 150 largest US dealer groups by Google rating. Garber came first at 4.9 across 70+ stores. Robert Norcross on why they ignore the industry average.
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We are launching What's Working in Auto, a podcast from the team at Widewail. The premise is straightforward. I find standout dealers in the Widewail Index and interview them to uncover the secret sauce behind their industry-leading customer reviews. Our launch episode is with Robert Norcross, Marketing Director at Garber Automotive Group. Listen here. For this week's REV, I'm taking you inside my conversation with Robert.
Somebody at Garber Automotive put a retention number on a screen and said the sentence that ends the conversation in most dealer meetings.
"This is better than the industry average."
At Garber, it started one.
"That was said as a way to say we're actually kind of beating this up, saying we need to do better," Robert Norcross told me. "Because to us it's like, how is it possible that that many people could come through the door and not come back to do business with us?"
That's worth a paragraph of your morning for one reason. When we ranked the 150 largest dealer groups in the country by group-level Google rating, Garber came out first with a 4.9. Across 70+ locations. A 4.9.
Garber, like many top-performing groups, throws out the industry average. Its targets are set much higher.
You'd expect the top of that list to be running something exotic. Garber isn't.
Eight years ago, Garber's marketing team built an internal app. A salesperson takes a delivery photo, and the app posts it to social with the caption written for them and sends the customer a direct review link in the same motion. Two problems, one request.
"The customer experience to post a review is a nightmare," Norcross said. "Where do I go? Do I Google your dealership? We just need to give them a straight link."
Because the request runs through their own software, every action is countable by person: photos taken, requests sent. But visibility wasn't the mechanism. "You gotta put it in front of them," he said. So the team ships a store-versus-store ranking every week, a wrap-up every month, and presents the standings to the stores in person. "Dealerships love rankings," he said.
Garber didn't stop competing on a number. They changed which number, and against whom. A store sitting fourteenth of twenty-five for review requests has a specific, personal, this-week problem. A store sitting "above the industry average" has nothing to do on Monday.
Norcross's objection is operational, not philosophical. "Say retention is 70% industry-wide, and we're at 73, or we need to get to 73. Does the number help you be better? Probably not, because you need new processes and new things if you're going to change the environment."
He does the same thing to marketing math. The industry sells about 10% of its internet leads. Norcross reads it from the other end: 90% of the people you paid to reach didn't buy, and nobody is asking what happened to them. Rates let you round people off. Counts don't.
Norcross thinks the real problems are hidden in the three- and four-star reviews, the ones that say it was fine, but highlight a real problem. "That person, they are complaining," he said. "We have something to solve there."
Other areas include review volume, response rate and negativity percentage. Read the Voice of the Customer Report.
The full conversation with Robert Norcross is on What's Working in Auto: How Garber became the highest-rated dealer group in America. Ratings and benchmarks from the Widewail Index, our database of 20M+ customer reviews across US auto retail.
See you next week - Jake
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