On today’s edition of CBT Live, Tomi Mikula, Founder of Delivrd, joins us to discuss what he hears when he calls dealerships on behalf of car buyers. A former salesperson and F&I manager with over six years in retail, Mikula started Delivrd four years ago after deciding he couldn’t fix the car buying experience from inside the dealership.
Mikula also answered multiple questions from CBT News viewers, including how shipping works on out-of-state deals, why he asks dealers for out-the-door numbers by text instead of email, and what advice he has for BDC agents.
One question Mikula often gets asked is whether he is a broker. Mikula says he’s not a broker, but a customer buying advocate. Brokers typically partner with a set of dealerships and advertise specific inventory and deals from them, he explained, while Delivrd works with buyers and shops each deal individually. He says they get paid whether or not the client buys a car, and clients sign everything directly with the dealership. Mikula said clients can expect their deal to start within 24 to 48 hours of hiring Delivrd and a car in the driveway within five to seven business days.
Mikula said only about 10% to 20% of his calls turn into what he’d call a good experience, even though roughly half of the people he reaches are nice on the phone, and he pointed to the BDC as one of the biggest holdups because callers often hand over their information and then never get the promised callback. He estimates that about 40% of dealers aren’t FTC compliant in one way or another, with 70% to 80% non-compliance in some markets and closer to 95% compliance in others, and he said that includes some of the biggest dealer groups in the country.
For dealers, Mikula said any step that adds resistance to the sale is a mistake. Salespeople should be able to give numbers over the phone and negotiate their own deals, which means training them to hold gross instead of sending every call back to a manager, and every call should be greeted with energy and excitement because the first impression matters so much. He also sees a one-price model as the future of the industry and he sees Delivrd as part of that push.
