Q4 Strategy Sessions: Ryan Rohrman on How To Stop Wasting 30% of Your Marketing

Episode #1179: We close out Q4 Strategy Week with Ryan Rohrman, CEO of the Rohrman Auto Group. He breaks down how cleaner data, connected systems, and smarter marketing decisions can save you money, sharpen your efficiency, and help you finish the year with momentum.

Show Notes:

• The goal is frictionless customer access — tech that talks and data that actually works.
• Rohrman Auto Group discovered 40% of their data was “dirty” just six months post-cleanup — now they scrub it monthly.
• Dirty data = wasted spend. Even a 30% error rate means 30% of your marketing dollars miss the mark.
• Ryan’s team built a single “source of truth” (Snowflake) to unify CDP, DMS, and CRM data.
• Exploring tech outside automotive has proven faster, cheaper, and more adaptable than legacy systems.
• “It’s not about spending less — it’s about spending smarter. Efficiency is king.” — Ryan Rohrman

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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Transcript

Paul J Daly: 0:01

All right, another q4 strategy session today. We're talking all things tech with the tech guru, CEO of the Roman Auto Group. You know him. You love him. Ryan. Roman has joined us today. Here we go. I'm gonna just see myself out, because Kyle and Ryan just get so nerdy that I always say I'm the lowest common denominator on the call today, Ryan, thank you for

Ryan Rohrman: 0:25

joining us, man, thanks for having me. That's quite the intro.

Paul J Daly: 0:29

I know. Hey, if you ever, if you ever need to feel good about yourself, you just dial

Kyle Mountsier: 0:33

me up. Just dial us up. We'll throw some hip hop music behind it. Feel great. Give

Paul J Daly: 0:37

me the whole thing. No, but we're heading into q4 we're in q4 actually, I keep saying we're heading into every one of these, but we're in q4 which brings a whole array of dynamics. We have holidays, we have time off, we have charitable things, we have all the shifting. And by the way, we have to wrap up a year. You and the group have spent so much time focusing on how to get tech aligned, how to deploy it throughout the store, how to integrate it with the customer experience. So we were going to ask you, what you do and what your perspective is, heading into q4 or being in q4 heading toward the end of the year, what mindsets Have you delivered and what are some of the best practices that you would encourage other dealers with

Ryan Rohrman: 1:15

well, so you know, if anyone who's paid attention to what we've been doing, like what I've been talking about a ton Is this the whole concept of frictionless customer access to our inventory. So what I mean by that is, you know, is your tech stack talking, and are you getting the most from it? And then, you know, the high level CDP, like owning your data. You know, what does that look like, over and over and over again, even inside of our journey so far, you know, we just partnered with a company who is literally cleaning our data monthly because we found out when we were doing it at first, we don't do it twice a year, but then we found out, man, our employee input, whether it's being done on purpose or sloppiness or whatever, leave it up. Now. It's really bad, you know. And so, you know, after like six months, we would, we would fix our, we'd fix our, you know, 2.3 million profiles, right? And be like, great. Our marketing is going to work. It's gonna go to the right people at the right time, at the right place. Six months past, we look back at Adam like, whoa, 40% of our dad is dirty already. Wow, that's a real number. And so then it was like, how's this happening? And so that's when we partnered with a company that now is doing that for us monthly. And so I think that's huge. You know, like, not only is it important to have this perspective to finish well sell as many cars as possible, but we also have the side of like, we need to be efficient as well. And I think, you know, efficiency inside of our marketing. Just think of how much money dealers waste when you know, even if 30% of your data is dirty, that means 30%

Kyle Mountsier: 3:15

of your spend is, I think what he's telling me is like, you know, we we want to get to, we always want to try and get to a point where we have a set of them, forget it. Thing, right? A silver bullet that just runs in the background and no, and you don't even pay attention to right? And what you're learning and what you're experiencing and now exposing to others is like, no. It's relentless pursuit of efficiency, relentless pursuit of great data, relentless pursuit of tech that connects well, and that's that's evolving faster than ever, right?

Ryan Rohrman: 3:47

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, to some extent it has to, right? And, you know, there's so many different Borches You have to cross with this. You know, we've talked about having that golden file, you know, where it's like, this is the, it's like the Glengarry. Glengarry Ross, I got the new leads. This is the gold, you know. And so, you know, we established a snowflake instance, which we that's our source of truth. And so we do all our activation from there. But at the same time, you still have this thing called a DMS, and dirty data still going into it. And so, you know, it's constantly trying to figure out, like in a perfect world, these things are all connected, and they're all talking. And it's that has been another challenge is just getting these big partners, you know, big CRMs, big DMS is that, the interesting thing is, you know, I've talked a little bit about going outside of automotive for tech, and that's been really eye opening to me, and in multiple ways. Number one, it's very inexpensive compared

Paul J Daly: 4:56

to what this is a common thread we're hearing a lot.

Ryan Rohrman: 4:59

You. It's, I mean, when I when I hear the pricing was like, per store, and they're like, No, we all get it store. It's

Paul J Daly: 5:07

just, they're like, you can do that. Hold on a minute.

Ryan Rohrman: 5:11

Oh, and I'm looking at the people in the room, and it's like,

Unknown: 5:16

nobody tell them. Just tell them to send over. Nobody tell him, no one tell him, so.

Ryan Rohrman: 5:24

And they're all very easy to deal with. They're like, Yeah, I mean, we'll set up anything you want, any way you want to set it up. We can do but then you come up against to these big tech monopolies inside of automotive, and they're like, We can't do it like that, you know? Or, yeah, we can't write that back. And it's like, well, I can go in and manually write it back one file at a time, so why can't you write it back in one file dump, if it's the same way? And so we figured some stuff out. It's too early to tell yet, but I think we have finally figured it out where now our DMS is a match our snowflake instance. So give us another 30 days. It's happening right now, but so by the end of the year, yeah.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:14

So, okay, so And there, there are more and more. There's a growing group of dealers, dealer groups that are trending in this direction. So when I think about now q4 let's say you've done the work over that last year, two, three as an organization, and you're sitting here going, I need to make decisions to have business proficiency and execution here at the end of the year. How are you taking what you've set up now, and what really timely decisions are you making on top of that? Data, your marketing efforts, your your your efforts in the showroom to leverage the tech that you've done a diligent job with?

Ryan Rohrman: 6:54

Yeah, so I think the biggest way to do that, or the best way I can answer that question, is we spent a lot of time in September talking about that question, because we saw September slow down. We saw September slow down. Not just, I mean, we still had a good month, but we saw our internet, our GA, four data, we saw it really slow. And it's like, okay. And there's two things you can do with that. You can just be like, Well, we'll see what happens as we go into q4 or we've built this mechanism where we know we need to feed it. And there's times we don't need to feed it as much because market changes, market changes it. Demand is, is funneling it into it. And there's other times where it's like, we need to go and stimulate some folks to be clicking and stuff like that. And so it's really figuring out, like, what that is. So, like, I've had a lot of conversations even over the last, like, three weeks, you know, going back to I mean, my big thing is I don't want third party leads. That doesn't mean I don't want third party relationships. I don't want their leads. So they have great data. You know who I'm talking about. I mean, the traders, the CarGurus, cars.com they have great data, great data. I don't really care for the leads. The leads are. We all get the same leads. Historically, you can see the national closing rate is like so low. It's not a better cleaner lead, which leads to a better cleaner experience for our customers, which is what we're trying to establish that as you know what makes us who we are? And so a lot of the partnership is, well, I don't want your leads, but how can I get your data and I can activate your data? And the three that I just mentioned, they're all open to it, and they all have different ways that they want to deal with that. So some of it is purely ingesting data, which we haven't done that quite yet because the scale and scope, it's in the 10s of millions, and it's just we're not, I'm not ready for that yet, correct? Frank, but referral traffic is a big buzzword right now, I think, for us. And it's like, you know, how can I these companies have done so well to get so many unique users to their platforms. How can I get the referral to my website from them? And so to answer your question, we don't want to see a dip in unique traffic to our websites, because that is the machine and mechanism we've built. And so to overcome that, we've partnered with a couple more referral programs, not lead generating programs, but referral programs that our thought is it's going to drive unique visitors to our site that we're not getting right now. And just remember, the whole basis of a CDP is when that happens. Maybe they, they just from them coming onto my site, they now are into an activation channel that is above and beyond that referral channel. And now I can they're, they're, you know, they're, whether it's an abandoned shopping cart or, you know, they click down, you know, through service or sales. So that's what we're doing. We're we've expanded our our scope and expanded our desire to partner with some referral like products. And it's too early to tell we it takes a little bit time to that's not as fast as like, Yeah, send us leads, right? You have to start connecting accounts and social media platforms, stuff like that. So, yeah, and that's so we, we came to our agreements, really, towards the end of September. So that's all going it's all live and going live as we speak. So I think that is going to be a really big. I feel

Kyle Mountsier: 11:01

like we need a January episode of this thing.

Paul J Daly: 11:03

Yeah, like looking back, right? Well, tell us this, Ryan, as we close out today, if you're talking to a group of we'll say 5000 dealers, and they're trying to decide, I want to make some changes. I hear what Ryan says. He's on step 11, right? And I'm on step two, what are the what are the basic steps you're saying, Hey, here's some low hanging fruit. Here's what you would encourage those 5000 dealers to do before the year's over.

Ryan Rohrman: 11:30

I mean, step one, I did this backwards. So we're actually shooting we're working on something internally to help dealers with this. I think step one, you have to make sure that the people you're marketing to, they a own, the car they beat still live there. And, you know, just so you don't you stop wasting money. You don't need to change anything else. You don't need to change who you're marketing with. You don't need to change your websites. You don't need to change your tech stacks, but, man, you got to make sure your dad is clean, yeah? Because if it's not clean, even if you do everything else I'm doing, you still have this problem where 40% of every activation is going to someone who doesn't own the

Paul J Daly: 12:10

car right live there, and all those dollars go right to the bottom,

Ryan Rohrman: 12:15

and that's just a pure waste of money. And, you know, $1 pickup, this is cool. You know, if you generate $500 of profit, how much goes the net right? When you save $500 of expense, how much goes the net right? Well, all of it in the expense line, and very small percentages of it in the gross line. So I think that's why efficiency is king. It's not spending less, it's just spending smarter, because you own the data, and you know, when you say, I'm marketing this message to these people, 100% of the people, whether they're reading or not, that's another thing. But at least the people you want to get the message they are, in fact, receiving it.

Unknown: 13:03

Well, look, I don't know if

Paul J Daly: 13:04

we could end it any better than that. Ryan, thank you, as always, for being so open handed and helping everybody take a step little by little. Thanks for leading the way. We are going to check in with you in January to see how everything went.

Unknown: 13:16

All right, sounds good. Companion. You.