Canadian auto dealer walked the floor and talked with dozens of suppliers about their offerings and the general “buzz” in the industry this year.
“Having a cross-section of dealers from all over the world in one central location is really great for us. Building on our success in the United States is what our international expansion is all about. In Canada we have more than 2,500 dealers on the website now. Our goal is to invite dealers to try us. It’s free for dealers to have their listings on CarGurus.”
Diego Sanson, Vice President, International Business, Car Gurus
“We are excited about the retailing trends and giving dealers more data. Dealers are worried about where the money is going. There are so many tools and widgets out there. With the new analytics we have now, dealers can say: ‘yes, this is where I’m making money.’ We can help them spend it more wisely. We are working on a lot of behavioural items right now, and consumer facing items. We are going for that Amazon experience. We are always look for trends outside of our industry.”
Maria Espinoza, Director of Business Development & Major Accounts, Dealer e-Process
“The proactive dealers, realize that the current great sales aren’t going to continue. Our experience for our customers in the service lane is nowhere as near as good as the experience on the front side. Service is ten years behind and it’s the most profitable, high-gross centre in the entire dealership and we’ve kind of left it alone. That’s what Gravity is all about. It’s about bringing all of those departments together.”
Bill Wittenmyer, Partner, ELead1One
“The buzz is always fantastic at NADA.I am really excited about the OEMs that have been opening doors and reaching out to us and working with us to find the best solutions for their dealers. Those conversations have been fantastic. We have launched Precise Price, where customers can go online and build their own quotes. Those quotes come into the CRM fully built. It’s creating a whole new process and empowers the consumer and provides full transparency and speeds up the deal process — that’s the wave of the future.”
Christian Hamaoka, Director of Business Development, Canada, Dealersocket
“We have had a tremendous number of Canadian customers come by. What’s unique this year, is they are spending a large amount of time in our booth asking us questions about where we see the market going and how we can help solve some of their issues.”
Lynn McNeill, Senior Vice President, Senior Vice President, PBS Dealer Management Software
“Digital Air Strike always likes to deliver that total solution and take ownership of that consumer engagement cycle. We’ve found a new way to let dealership personnel text a request to a consumer to provide their feedback. That’s a new innovation that’s very exciting. Dealers love it. When consumers are happy they then have an option to leave a public review on mobile, which is huge.”
Alexi Venneri, Co-Founder & CEO, Digital Air Strike
“We have worked with CDK Global to create an end-to-end solutions for accounts payable. From the front end that captures the invoice, and extracts the key information and routes the invoices to the right person for approval. The solution is cloud-based. It integrates to CDK very smoothly. Our intelligent document recognition software is going to extract the key information on the invoice. This increases accounts payable productivity.”
Laurent Charpentier, Chief Operating Officer, Yooz
“Hireology is a talent technology company that helps dealerships be good at the people side of their business. We are here to help them learn how to do it the right way — either through process or technology — or both. The key to hiring success for a dealership is to treat it as a core and critical business process. Using defined steps, database driven, predictive, and based on previous success models, your turnover will go down. You will start with higher quality, higher aptitude employees and that will lead to higher performance and higher retention. Everyone knows there’s an issue. Average sales turnover in the industry is 72%. The female turnover rate in sales jobs is between 88-90%. The average dealership spends about US $400,000 dollars in EBIDTA each year on the high costs of turnover.”
Adam Robinson, CEO, Hireology
“We have been integrating the Cars.com product marketing, sales function all within the Dealer Rater team. It’s really about creating that connection between the consumer and the dealership, but also the connection to people in the dealership.”
Brendan Dougherty, Director, Product Marketing, Cars.com (DealerRater)
“We had a change we are really excited about. Cox Automotive Canada became part of the international group. That gives us a lot of exciting things to look at in terms of scalability. All of our products are integrated together. We call it the “Cox All In” solution. We can provide that to our clients. Whether you are a small dealer group with one to three stores or if you have 50 stores, we can customize a solution that works for our clients.”
Jack Sulymka, Director, Marketing & Communications, Cox Automotive Canada
“The show is good and business is great. We got to see a lot of Canadian dealers and OEMs. We are adding more mobility functions so that the information on your phone, tablet and desktop are the same and consistent. We create a graphical interface to make it easy for dealers to show the information to their customers. OEMs and dealers want to better understand their customers. What is he or she doing or not doing with me today?”
Maury Marks, President & CEO, Quorum DMS
