And so the marketing that worked two, three years ago is not per se working the same way now. And so, and we’re also obviously getting much more sophisticated around that. But it’s mostly direct and we think we have a huge opportunity given also the way we capture consumers, the way the consumers behave on the site and our level of intelligence we have and data we have around us, we think we can do a better job marketing than we have done historically.
Naved Khan: Great. Thank you guys.
Operator: The next question comes from Chris Pierce of — with Needham & Co. Please go ahead.
Chris Pierce: Hey, good morning. Going back to the first question in franchise dealers, can you kind of talk about what you’re doing in those geographies where maybe the franchise dealer kind of [keep] (ph) higher churn? Like what are some things that you can do to kind of reintroduce the new product to those dealers? And is TrueCar+ sort of part of that playbook or is that sort of not related?
Jantoon Reigersman: No, TrueCar+ is not related. So TrueCar+ really is, think of it as like a really separate business line effectively for now. And in some ways, I feel a little bit schizophrenic and I think I’ve mentioned it to you in the past, which is like I feel schizophrenic is there are days where I feel like I’m a Series B venture product CEO as opposed to a public company CEO when it comes to TrueCar+ and then obviously we have the core business. So TrueCar+, I think will be applicable obviously to, especially initially to some of the larger dealer groups, probably initially. So when we’re talking about the franchise dealers, really think of it as, and this is the book we were mentioning, right? We’ve had — we obviously have a large amount of dealers on our platform.
We’ve been running a series of these dealers a little bit on autopilot. Some of these groups, especially the ones that are not necessarily in high growth markets effectively have probably been somewhat neglected. And so now that the market is coming back and inventory is coming back, et cetera, we effectively have to be more on top of them and really help them and help them in training and help them in insights and all these type of things. And I think we’ve done a — it was probably six months ago or so we’ve made a big shift internally where we really emphasize both the sales and service side. We’ve had a very strong service leader come in. We have a very strong service team now and they’re constantly thinking about, okay, how often do we touch our dealers?
What do we provide and what form do we provide? What is the service we provide, et cetera. So the whole notion of the way we are servicing our book has dramatically changed over the last six months. And that is obviously having really good fruit in the form of dealers being very excited about what we’re doing, but it also means that you’re realizing that there are some dealers we probably have not serviced as well as we could have, and obviously in some of those areas, we’re going to do a much better job.
Chris Pierce: Okay, perfect. And then we see OEMs turning on marketing through your income statement and through the increased incentive spending. And now we see you guys turning on marketing to kind of drive more units to dealers. Is there any sort of magic bullet or why a dealer has been slow to turn on marketing? I’m just kind of curious the disconnect given what we see in the industry and what we see as far as inventory is.
Jantoon Reigersman: The honest answer to that I think is just that OEMs are just very thoughtful, long-term thoughtful and obviously have achieved interesting P&Ls over the last couple of years where they’ve become very, very efficient because they didn’t really have to support. And it’s very hard to start — have to start supporting again, right back to what normalized was in a world where the last couple of years, a lot of these OEMs have been saying that this was the new normal. And so I think just like redeploying capital for them is just a little bit harder, and so there’s a little bit of a lagging effect. But we clearly are seeing it because once you walk into those doors with the appropriate data and obviously we have a lot of data across the different brands, you start seeing also just which OEMs are a little bit more responsive to the macro environment, which ones are more eager to really maintain a longevity of relationship with their customers.
Right? So if you are a three times same car buyer and you’re walking in for the fourth time, are you going to be sophisticated about that or do you not really care as an OEM? And so there are these balancing acts and each OEM has a very different identity and a very different view and a very different strategy around that. And so we have these as open dialogues and we try to accommodate each of those and then with data we provide arguments on why we think certain programs make sense depending on their characters and views. And then the other thing is also, we obviously try to make them match also potentially with some of our affinity partners as well if there are certain programs there. So, but these things take a little bit of time, but the main reason is just lagging of realizing what’s happening around, a slight unwillingness to over-deploy too soon and kind of wait and see mode.
And I agree with you that I would have expected that to come a little bit faster in general as a macro thing, although I think we are doing a really good job capturing share.
Chris Pierce: Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Martin Fong with BTIG. Please go ahead.
Martin Fong: Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I’d like to just start on the independent channel. So I think in the shareholder letter, you wrote that you were seeing signs of that channel bottoming, and yet in the earlier comments, Jantoon, I think you were saying that, still a little bit unpredictable with bankruptcies and consolidation. So maybe you just kind of square those two lines of thought. I mean, is there actual positive inflection in the independent dealer count that you’re seeing or just to expand on that a little bit, thanks.
Jantoon Reigersman: Yeah, it is — it’s just that the, I think the remark is more towards like the fluctuations. It’s never really a perfect line and it depends a little bit on the months. And it’s — so it’s just harder to predict given the sizing of the type of dealer. So, right, a — the dealer count, a dealer is a dealer, and even despite the sizing or effectively revenue or monetary value it brings to us. So the [common goal] (ph) is much more around the fluctuation and just the hard — that it’s hard to predict it even though more broadly it seems that the world is stabilizing around that doesn’t mean that like on a month-per-month basis it’s hard to predict. So it’s really more about volatility than it is about the overarching trend.
