Marketing Team Realignment

Aligning the pieces to create a more cohesive, consistent, creative and successful Marketing team.

Seven months ago when Mark Westerman took over as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), he had a specific vision and two simple goals for his team: improve our company’s market share and lower the cost per vehicle sold. For Marketing to contribute to the success of these goals, Mark had to realign the department and adjust the team’s approach.

“The idea is to make us all smarter, so that we drive more and better leads to the dealerships,” Mark said. “It’s equally important that we create a brand that clearly differentiates us from the competition.”

He moved in this direction by creating a more structured and cohesive approach to the way the team functioned. By working together to drive ideas, the team could produce more consistent work with a stronger brand presence. Creating this new structure included combining sales/service and parts marketing, which were previously separate, hiring new key pieces to the puzzle, and realigning coordinators and graphic designers to focus on specific divisions.

To assist with better creative work, a Creative Director has been hired to oversee our team of designers. Our new Creative Director, Terra Hopson starts on April 25, and will lead and manage our creative team to create thoughtful and idea driven work. Terra, who comes to MileOne with a wealth of ad agency experience as a Creative Director, will ensure our design team continues to work together to push the boundaries and think outside the box.

As of April 18, a Senior Director of Marketing + Business Intelligence has been added to the team, as well. As Sr. Director, Houshyar Karimabadi will analyze our existing communications to prospects and customers, build out an architecture to drive leads and perform constant testing on our public-facing communications to determine what types of communications, what day of the week and what time of day produces the highest response. Through analytics and testing, he will work to improve our prospect and customer communications in the traditional and digital areas, and provide quantitative results and recommendations for best practices.

Mark also saw the need to develop a stronger employee communications plan, so a Corporate Communications Manager role was created. Our new Corporate Communications Manager, Danielle Schafhauser will work closely with Marketing and HR partners to improve employee communications throughout the organization, including HRConnection and the employee newsletter, and provide consistent messaging for company-wide initiatives and programs. She will also lead our partnership with the American Cancer Society.

While we’ve added boots on the ground at corporate, Mark also wanted strategic marketing partners more closely aligned with specific divisions to drive the marketing efforts for those respective areas. These folks, now known as Regional Marketing Managers (RMM), are assigned to a specific division and spend approximately half of their time in the field focusing on the needs of their market, sharing best practices and uncovering opportunities for Marketing to assist in that region. The relationships our RMMs build in the dealerships and their respective markets are monumental to our success.

Jean Mahon: Marketing Director, Hall
Jenna Steiner: RMM, Silver Spring
Todd Ross: RMM, MotorWorld
Danielle Szarka: RMM, Heritage (Starts April 25)

The reorganization of the Marketing team will be fully operational by the end of April. Marketing has always been a strong piece of the MileOne business model, but with the recent team realignment and personnel additions – they’re a true game-changer.