The Buying Experience

The Buying Experience

ENTREPRENEURS by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Making the car-buying process easier for buyers and sellers sounds like an impossible dream. But a pair of marketing gurus is doing it anyway, creating a profitable business in the process.

Peter Martin was pretty sure he was onto something last March when the marketing executive began finalizing his long-pondered plans to start a business that could serve as both an online resource for female car buyers and a training ground for male care salesman trying to reach that audience.

Goal one was to generate traffic on the Web site, www.AskPatty.com, and eventually make it a clearinghouse for any woman about to buy a car, or play point in her family's car-buying effort. Goal two, and the firm's main revenue generator, was to sign up auto dealerships to the interactive training.

While both goals are works in progress, albeit with positive initial results, one aspect Martin didn't count on was serving as a marriage counselor: One car salesman who went through the training of how to approach, market and sell to women said the training was so good, it even helped him improve communication skills with his wife.

Martin, though, will stick to his day job of growing Lakewood Ranch-based AskPatty.com, as opposed to improving marriages. "Men typically are negotiators, but that's not the way women work," says Martin. "To women, its about the experience of buying."

Martin says AskPatty.com is already profitable and he's projecting between $1.5 and $3 million in 2007 revenues. The company also recently moved from a cramped suite it was sharing in the Eckerd College building in Lakewood Ranch to a 1,400-square-foot office in a nearby office park. It has nine employees, including Martin and Jody DeVere, the company president who essentially co-runs the business with Martin. DeVere works from an office in Southern California with three other employees.

AskPatty.com combines two businesses: The advice-driven Web site and the dealer training programs, which put together work on both ends of the car-purchasing spectrum. Or, as Martin is fond of saying, AskPatty.com serves as a third-base coach for both women and dealers.

Adds DeVere: "We are bringing the woman's voice to the automotive world with real authority."

Emotional training

A former car salesman himself, Martin says he saw the need for this business, both for buyers and sellers, as far back as 10 years ago, especially after his mother joined the club of thousands who have left a car showroom with a bad taste in their mouths. Martin also witnessed the flaws of the traditional car-selling model up close, when he sold cars at a dealership in his native Ohio while attending Ohio Wesleyan University in the mid 1980s.

By the late 1990s, Martin was running his own marketing businesses, Cactus Sky Communications, which focused on e-mails and Internet promotions. The 2000 dot-com bust forced Martin to put his AskPatty.com plans on hold, but after moving to Sarasota from Florida's east coast in 2004, he decided to try again.

DeVere and Martin met early last year through a mutual business contact, and the pair decided to go into business together, using their own money to fund the startup. DeVere has held executive sales positions for several companies in the automotive and marketing fields; she's also currently serving as president of the Woman's Automotive Association International, a group for women working in the auto industry.

About 90 dealers nationwide have gone through or are currently going through the training program and several of those are based on the Gulf Coast, including the St. Petersburg-based Crown dealerships, Germain Honda in Naples and Seminole-based Sun Coast Chrysler Jeep. The company has heard from nearly 700 interested dealers though, and plans to expand the training over the rest of the year.

The online training is run by Naples-based sales consulting firm Maddox Smye, which focuses on training men in how to sell to women in a variety of male-dominated industries.

The training isn't cheap, either financially or emotionally: The fees are $225 per dealer for a years' worth of training, in addition to a $1000 integration fee per store and a $795 monthly fee for the Internet services, which include a private-dealer Web site. Lessons include diversity training, how to build trust with women and empathy skills.

"We are asking dealers a lot," says DeVere. "We are asking them to change their behavior."

Still, DeVere says the training is not merely women bossing men around. And while she concedes there has been some element of back room snickering over the idea of training gruff car salesmen how to sell to women, the overall response has been great.

And why not? The auto industry, mired in prolonged a sales slump, has almost no choice to be innovative, says DeVere. "This is a math equation," she says. "This isn't a cutesy marketing program."

Ask experts

While the training program is where AskPatty.com's financial future lies, improving the Web site that has the potential to help thousands of women through the car-buying and car-owning process has always been the big-picture goal, DeVere and Martin say. The site is growing by 20,000 hits each month, DeVere says.

Later this year, DeVere says the company plans to introduce a 'My Car' page, where a user can virtually park her car on the Web site and store information about the vehicle. Then she'd be able to access a variety of information, such as when the oil needs to be changed, traffic patterns in a certain area and what the car's re-sale value is worth.

DeVere, Martin and the Web-based employees also work on improving the site's gold-standard feature: The consultant pages, which are made up of 30 volunteer auto-industry experts who answer car-related questions. The advisory panel includes NASCAR driver Deborah Renshaw; NASCAR's first licensed female mechanic and current national motivational speaker Danna Dayton; and Mary Aichlmayr, managing editor of Tire Review magazine.

Challenges on both business sides lie in getting the word out about what AskPatty.com can do for buyers and dealers, as well as controlling the early growth, so the focus isn't diluted. On the former, DeVere considers the challenge of spreading the AskPatty.com mission, both to dealers and buyers, her greatest opportunity: There are 22,000-plus car dealerships in the country, she says, and millions of women car-buyers, creating a "blue ocean" of business possibilities, with no direct competition.

"We came up with what I believe is a stout business model," DeVere says, "for both women consumers and dealers."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Business. AskPatty.com, Lakewood Ranch

Industry. Auto industry, Internet

Key. Guides male car-dealers in how they can reach women buyers through year-long training, while providing counsel to women intimidated by the car-buying process.

What's in a name?

There's no Patty behind AskPatty.com.

Company founder Peter Martin came up with the name Patty in the late 1990s, when he first thought about starting a business that could cater to women car-buyers. He says there was no one named Patty who played a significant role in his life, but he thought the name sounded fun and nice - perfect for a Web site devoted to women.