Interview with Mike Martinez

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So you've been in this position at izmocars for about six months now?

Mike Martinez

izmocars

Chief Marketing Officer

Martinez_Mike_izmocars_100w As Chief Marketing Officer Mike Martinez is responsible for all marketing functions at izmocars, as well as business development and product management ownership for izmoIndY, the company's new Web 3.0 operating platform. Prior to izmocars, Martinez was executive vice president of products and strategy at OneCommand, responsible for OneCommand's corporate and product strategy, technology, and product development. Prior to his time at OneCommand, Martinez was president and CEO of Four Creeks, a company he co-founded, which was acquired by OneCommand in 2006. Email: mike.martinez@izmocars.com
Yes, my new position is responsible for all marketing aspect of izmocars and really helping the market understand who izmo is and the breadth of solutions and technologies that we provide. We are a technology enabled marketing powerhouse that provides a wealth of solutions including; search engine optimized websites, incredible accessories, virtualization/visualization technologies that helps dealers sell more accessories, the best CRM and F&I products that I've ever seen service scheduling capabilities, and customer-in-equity marketing data mining. I'll tell you what: We don't have a problem building products.

So tell us about how izmocars builds products?

The big story that we want to help everybody understand is the release of this incredible new operating platform called IndY. IndY is not really a product so much as it is an enabling technology that helps all of our applications to work together. Soon we'll allow third party applications to develop on our platform, to take advantage of all of the benefits that the platform offers like security and centralized reporting and be able to connect in with other izmo applications. At izmo, we believe that the dealer's website and the dealer's applications are their own, should be open, and we don't believe in putting up false barriers to integrating third party applications.

The cool thing about Indy is that it is so efficient and the izmo business model of global reach and global use of resources is so efficient that our first application on IndY, izmo Web, which is a fully featured website using the super rich content that we develop at our own studios. We are delivering those websites for as low as $225 a month. That is a huge savings for the average dealer.

What some of the F&I solutions that izmocars offers?

Our F&I solution is integrated with our CRM product that provides dealers a complete replacement for all other F&I applications that they may be using either with their DMS or other third parties that gives them single point of control of all of the information in a highly secured and process-oriented environment, saving them money and time and making it so much easier to be able to desk a car, fill out the finance, fill out the forms, run the credit bureaus and get the customer into and out of the store as fast and as profitably as possible.

Tell us about the accessories product ... it seems pretty revolutionary. Are dealers buying it?

I'm so excited that you asked that question. Our AOA (Add On Auto) product, our accessories application, is creating amazing results for the nearly 80 dealers that are using this product. In fact, the average AOA dealer is selling accessories to 1 out of every 2 car buyers, and selling an average of $400 to $600 in accessories to those buyers. Those accessories dollars bring great gross margins.

How AOA does this is to put a picture of the vehicle that the customer purchased, on the screen and then the customer can simply point and click and check out how that car looks with the bigger rims or the nose cover or what have you. AOA presents price to the consumer based on cash or on payment, making it easy for consumers to add the accessories to the purchase. AOA then pushes the purchase to F&I and automatically creates an order form in the service department so all of the departments are working together. What we've seen is pretty amazing.

Service has become far more important than ever before. What do you do to help dealers get more service appointments?

iService is a new product created by the incredible product engine of izmocars. iService is both a customer-facing, fully featured service scheduling application for the consumer, connected to the service management application for shop-loading and management technician time on the back end, tied directly into your website from izmocars. It is all riding on top of our Indy platform. It is very exciting.

One of the incredibly exciting parts about izmo is the fact that we are a true, 21st century global company. We provide reach into the great technology centers around the world that no other company in our space is able to do. We have over 400 employees working in the United States, India, Europe, and in Asia. That allows us to be able to tap the very best technology minds available and do that at a very competitive rate and pass those costs on to our customers. Quite frankly, what other company is going to be able to develop an application platform as powerful as Indy and be able to deliver websites at $225 a month and make profit for us and make profit for our dealers? This global component of izmo is an incredibly important part of who we are.