If there’s one thing a car buyer wants, it’s to feel that they’re in control of the transaction,” says Mike Wethington, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Outsell LLC. “A good way for them to achieve that is by shopping on line and looking just where they want to look.”
Outsell claims to be the industry’s fastest-growing Internet auto sales and marketing firm. Since mid-2004, Wethington says, the company has expanded from 20 dealer-clients to more than 400, and its revenues have grown more than 30 percent annually.
Outsell differs from Bloomington-based CarSoup, the better-known online car retail site, in a couple of ways. Outsell is paid directly by dealerships—unlike CarSoup, it doesn’t facilitate transactions between private buyers and sellers. And Outsell deals only with new-vehicle transactions. (CarSoup also handles used-car sales.) Dealers pay $2,500 a month for its services—which can include interactive marketing campaigns, live chat capabilities, and prospect follow-up—plus a processing fee of $375 for each car sold. Local clients include Maplewood Toyota and Main Motors in Anoka. Outsell also is adding partnerships with dealers outside Minnesota.
Outsell was founded in 2004 when Wethington and a partner, Bart Greenwood, purchased the assets of Minneapolis-based Solv Technologies. Wethington had worked for Minneapolis-based network-services firm Synet Service (acquired in 2000), where he helped build customer-service centers for companies including CitiBank, Allstate, and Pfizer. At the time of its purchase, Solv provided just live-chat capabilities to about 30 auto dealers.
“Outsell had just the attributes we were looking for,” Wethington says. “Automotive is the largest vertical retail segment in the world, and we could see that change was happening at the consumer level—they were moving their transactions on line, while dealers and manufacturers were going through consolidation. The industry didn’t have the scale or the capital to build a good online customer experience. We brought not only the capital, but also the know-how.”
Outsell communicates with about 16,000 consumers each day via live chat, search-engine marketing, or e-mail. The goal is to steer a car shopper—who in most cases has clicked on a chat icon at a dealer’s Web page—to a showroom visit.
“We’ll process more than 250,000 leads this year,” says Wethington. “The auto market is so big, and we’re positioned as the only company that provides this total solution.”
