Automotive State of The Union

Q4 Strategy Sessions: RussFlipsWhips on Social Media That Sells

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Episode #1176: Day two of Q4 Strategy Week brings social media powerhouse Russell Richardson — aka Russ Flips Whips — to talk about how dealers can turn content into car deals. He shares real-world results, easy-to-start strategies, and why empowering your people might be your best Q4 move yet.


Show Notes:

  • Q4 is the best time to make an ask — if you’ve spent the year giving value through social media, now’s when it pays off.
  • One trained team created 4M+ impressions and over 60 car sales with one incentive-based video campaign.
  • Empowering every team member to post multiplies reach faster than paid ads ever could.
  • “Older” sales pros are thriving on TikTok — customers connect with people who look and sound like them.
  • If you’re just starting: post one video per workday on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. Consistency beats perfection.
  • Even if it doesn’t generate leads, it builds communication skills and confidence on the floor.
  • Concerned about brand control? Russ says it best: “Why wouldn’t you think of all the things that could go right?”

Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.

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Paul J Daly:

All right. Next up, you're in for a treat. Our q4 strategy sessions we're having for the first time ever on the show. But you know him. You love him, one of the most likable and smart people in the automotive industry, Russell Richardson, aka rust flips, aka new father, soon to be. You got you kind of like, got the world on the string right now, dude. Welcome to the show.

Russell Richardson:

Thanks for having me on. This is exciting. I'm pumped up. Nada knows gonna be intro music, dude, dude. Oh, we don't do

Paul J Daly:

anything. I have a little jukebox. I just, I'd hang it on my belt buckle, and just when I go anywhere intro music,

Unknown:

he walks in a room and Intro Music plays. I

Paul J Daly:

don't really that would be. That would be pretty funny, though. You should see it. You should hear when I come out of the bathroom, right? Big heavy metal music, victorious. You know, he

Kyle Mountsier:

walks slowly, even though there's not a slow mo camera on him. I throw

Paul J Daly:

my own way, throw my own confetti in the air as I walk through it and emerge. Russ, thanks for joining us today. You've definitely taken the marketing brand, personal branding, social media, world in automotive by storm. Over the last year, you've been across the world. You've been in Australia, you've been all over this country. You have your own training consulting company, bringing that to other dealers. Now just tell us, what are you focusing on in q4 as we round the year, what are you focusing on, from social strategy, what people should be talking about, what dealers should be doing, what steps they should be taking. Your show? Man, yeah,

Russell Richardson:

I think dealers should just sit around and wait for the OEM to market for them and hope people come in

Paul J Daly:

says, No strategist ever

Russell Richardson:

you four got to be the easiest time of year to talk about what your incentives are on social media. And this, this dials back to what we preach in our social media consulting, which is, you need to build a brand. You need to give value, and then, when you ask, you will receive. So if the dealers I've been working with over the last six months, eight months here, that have been building value, getting followers, entertaining people, now it's that time of year to ask, you got to ask. And you have some real reason to ask. You're going to have incentives programs, and you can talk about that on social media. I mean, every dealer, every franchise, every OEM, is going to have a different thing that's going on. For example, last month, halfway through the month, I believe, Ford came out with some crazy tier bump from tier five to tier zero. You could be a 580 and get 1.9 for 20 years. I forget what it was. And one of the dealers we consult was like, What should we do? I was like, I would have every sales person go out and make a video and explain it the best they can in their own words. And they did, and they generated hundreds of leads. And I think the numbers are still boiling out. They're still working on the actual attribution, but I think from that one campaign that they ran internally, they generated over 60 sales just talking about,

Paul J Daly:

that's unbelievable. Well, let's talk about this. So why were they in a position for that to work so well, though? Right? No, and I'm not, I'm not saying, but, but like you can tell people to go out and make a post, right? And they, they it's, it sounds to me that they had like, this little army already, that they were like, here are the marching orders for this morning. And everyone did it, and it worked.

Russell Richardson:

Yeah, so there was a we went out and trained them. And they're, uh, they're uh, they're pretty private groups. I won't, I won't name who it was fun out and train them. You could probably do the figure out through my social media who it is. If you want to, we go out and train them. They get the training. Everyone's bought in. This group's amazing. They didn't make anyone take the training that didn't want to do it, but they got legitimate buy in. And I think we ended up training like 180 people, and we they, they bought in. So they're making these videos, they're being entertaining. They're giving value, the car, buying advice, the whole nine yards, everything we preach. And then this opportunity arose, and I just happened to be in a meeting with them, doing a follow up session. I get cut off by their sales director, and he's like, Hey, Russ, if you were us, this just came out. Now, what would you do? I said I'd end this meeting and go make a video on it, which is true, because I did that once when Lincoln and Ford announced employee pricing. I literally left the meeting to go make a video on it. You can fact check me, first person in the world to announce that to social media ended up doing like, over 15 million views. Ended up generating hundreds of leads. Unfortunately, I quit a week later. So

Unknown:

you're like, I'm gonna show you how much it doesn't matter to me. Out with the bang. I create leads in my sleep. I don't even care. I spill more on the floor than I got.

Russell Richardson:

I did end up helping a local Ford store sell a lot of cars. Our Lincoln store did end up selling, I believe, like 15, because I I'm a good guy and quit on bad terms. So I kept dishing them the leads. And then I know a guy that owns a Ford store, but like when this news drops, you can bring it to the table so quick with the phone in your pocket. I love the OEMs, but they're gonna do like a, they're gonna have like, a 12 hour long meeting on how they should go about. Oh, and then it's gonna go through 12 hours of compliance. Then you can have a sales guy pull it as far as, like, Ford just did the craziest thing, let me tell you. And they understood how to make this work. You can, I can show you guys. I mean, I think they. Generated over 4 million impressions, slash views, just on Tiktok. I mean, they're on Instagram, Facebook, the whole nine yards, some of the sales guys, videos got a couple 1000 views. Many of them got over 800,000 views, which those views turned into inquiries. Those inquiries turned into credit apps, and those credit apps turned into sales. And they actually did a really good job.

Kyle Mountsier:

What's so key to me about this is like it's and we actually ran a campaign for our our media launch a few weeks ago that ended up getting, we can't even trace all the views, because I think we had over 80 pieces of UGC content across automotive floating in every every corner. And this is the thing that you get when you democratize or diversify your advertising strategy across your whole organization, if like a dealerships post that if you posted one time, would get a small amount of views in order to get anywhere close to that views would take some level of millions of dollars of ad dollars placed behind it to get it into the ecosystem. But 160 people democratizing information across many different social channels. Like the speed to like getting into people's feeds is so much quicker if you just release control at the at the root level, and give that to to your employees

Russell Richardson:

and a little secret, secret hack, I'll put you on the older guys and gals that are doing this are crushing it. They're not getting the mega views, but there are older people on social media, you can't tell me otherwise, and they might not relate with Russ flips whips, they might not relate with a younger guy, but then they see someone who looks like them and talks like them. Now they're instantly grabbed. And I have a gentleman who's like 55 years old that does social media honestly?

Paul J Daly:

Is he an older guy now? Are we there? Oh, that's Collabs. Hold on, hold on. The other day, I got a survey, and I was roped into 45 to 55 Wow. It was a moment I had him. Okay, I'm just, I'm just teasing. Okay, had this older guy, 55 agent. Like, when you ask a five year old, how old am I, they're like, 82

Russell Richardson:

right? Like, five year old car sales person doing tick tock and Instagram, yeah, you know, that's Oh for sure. On tick tock, especially older people on social media and they see Russ and I'm, all, you know, guys like me are all they have to watch or look so they might not be reaching out to guys like me, because I might talk too fast for them. I might just not be their pace of life. Then they see a 55 year old guy trying his best, putting out a video. Who's this on, you know? And they get, they generate leads, because there's older people on there that do consume we

Paul J Daly:

appreciate that, right? Yeah, yes, yep. Okay, so I'm a dealer. I don't have a lot of this going on right now. I think the people who hear this advice and hear your your kind of, your direction on this, that already have a little bit of an ecosystem going they know exactly what to do if I'm a dealer. I haven't started any of this. I've wanted to what are some low hanging fruit, things that I and ways that I can coach my team to actually start and do something. Yeah.

Russell Richardson:

I mean, we have a very simple, easy to follow process. The toughest part about it is being consistent with it. You want to be on all platforms. I don't loop in LinkedIn in the bucket for car sales people, although LinkedIn can be very great for executives, managers, owners, but you want to be posting on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Tiktok. It's hard to set them up, kind of but once they're set up, posting is so simple, and you want to be posting one video per working day. And you can't tell me, nobody has time for this. There's time, even if you're walking to your car at night, wrapping up your day, just talking some of our best students we work with just tell stories like, Man, I had a customer buy three cars today, and here's what happened. Boom, people find that interesting. I think getting people out of their comfort zone and posting on social media accomplishes a few things. One, brand awareness. You're putting your dealership on the map, and your sales person is now potentially having the opportunity to generate their own leads just by posting once per day. Secondly, we have found people aren't as good at talking as they think they are. You put somebody in front of a camera, they can't talk for a minute straight. I don't care what you say. How do you sound with the customer for two hours, you say um more than you think. You have these awkward pauses and mess ups more than you think, and your confidence of your sales team will go through the roof. That happened for me. Watch my first YouTube video. It's out there. I did a Lincoln aviator review. I said um 50 times in seven minutes. And I don't think I said um once today, other than saying the work um. So even the biggest outcome, if you don't generate leads, is just getting becoming a

Kyle Mountsier:

better practice, the practice of communication efficiency. Yeah, you're

Russell Richardson:

a car salesperson. Was the last time you recorded yourself doing a meet and greet, or walking around on a vehicle, or even presenting numbers, you can see how you sound, and then it exposes the flaws, and you can get better. So I would record anything at all and then post it. It's like so simple, but so hard for a lot of people to execute

Paul J Daly:

on last question, I'm a dealer. I'm afraid to put my brand in the hands of my people. Because I'm thinking of all the things that could go wrong. What are you saying to me? Why

Russell Richardson:

wouldn't you think of all the things that could go right?

Unknown:

There we go. I'm on

Paul J Daly:

listen. You know who he is? You know how to find him? Russell Richardson on LinkedIn. Everywhere else. It's Russ. Flips whips. He can train your people. He can convince you. He can give you great short answers, and he will definitely make you smile.

Unknown:

Russ, thanks for being with us today, gentlemen. Thank you. You

Contributor

Kyle Mountsier

Host
Contributor

Paul J Daly

Host