transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] The first flaw was, and Salesforce pushed this, it's meant for your sales team and sales team only.
Speaker 2:
[00:04] Why?
Speaker 1:
[00:05] You have in a dealership a service advisor who is a salesperson, an F&I manager who is probably your best salesperson, you have your sales team, you have your BDC, you have your marketing team, all talking to customers, including maybe even the cashier clerks and parts. If you're talking to a customer, why aren't you in the CRM?
Speaker 2:
[00:21] Today, I'm joined by Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric. The automotive industry is currently struggling with extreme tech bloat and a CRM category that hasn't fundamentally evolved in decades. Matt breaks down the shift from rigid task management to real-time customer engagement and explains why dealers must consolidate their fragmented tools into a single cohesive voice to protect their margins. A big thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible. Lotlinx, CDG Circles, and of course, DriveCentric. And now, let's get into the show. Matt Leone, on the CDG Podcast. Matt, welcome.
Speaker 1:
[01:01] Great to be here. Good to see you again.
Speaker 2:
[01:04] Finally having you on.
Speaker 1:
[01:05] I know. It's exciting, right?
Speaker 2:
[01:06] How's it been for you since I saw you at NADA? How's business?
Speaker 1:
[01:10] Yeah, it's been a world win. Everything post-NADA is just as busy as everything leading up to NADA. So it's been a world win in Q1, but all positives. So in spring's finally here, so hopefully get a little bit of breathing room here from Q1.
Speaker 2:
[01:27] I think of you as this CEO whisperer. You, and I say that in a positive manner, of course, you were at Automotive Mastermind, which has become a gigantic company, and you were CEO there. And a couple of years back, you took on the role of CEO at DriveCentric. To me, as a student of the business, something stood out about this, because not back then, but today, when, and I'm not saying this to gas you up, I'm telling you objective numbers, data. But when I notice a company that falls in the top 5% of mentions within CDG Circle in our communities, I start asking questions, saying, what's going on here? Why is this company being mentioned so much, and why is there such positive sentiment? Not everything's perfect, and we'll talk about the not perfect as well. But it seems like things are working, at least from the outside. I want to think about the last three years, or three to four years, when you decided to take on big CRM, let's call it, for all intents and purposes. What drove you to this space?
Speaker 1:
[02:35] Well, first of all, I love your platform, and I love the concept of Circles. So it's great to hear that we're mentioned a lot there. It means a lot to us. And it is definitely one of the things, knowing this industry really well, knowing the auto tech software industry really well. I studied it. I've been learning it. I've been involved with it for so long now. The CRM category itself goes back to the 80s, and it was digitized the Rolodex. That's all it was. How do I take what was on a Rolodex, for those that are in your audience that don't know what that is? It's like a business card on a little flip wheel, and you would have an email or a phone number or home address on physical business cards. Somebody said, let's digitize this. And that was the first CRM. And then around the late 80s, early 90s, Microsoft came out with something. Salesforce wasn't quite on the scene yet. SEP had something. These big companies, horizontal companies, not into specific industries. And they were like, let's put process and workflow and tasks behind this. So you could hold your expensive sales reps accountable to leads and lead management. It was very effective. And everybody needed a CRM. And then Long came like Salesforce and said, okay, well, we need to do more than that. Let's make it a communication platform. Let's start to do email and text through this platform and put a customer in the middle of it. And you can see this evolution. And then Reynolds started and CDK or ELEADS rather started. And you kind of see this evolution in vertical of auto tech. Round 80s into the 90s. And it's doing very similar things that were happening outside of auto. Let's automate certain things. And the three most important things was hold your sales team accountable to leads with workflow and tasks. We'll wrap a reporting layer around it so management can see what's happening, get visibility, and then allow it to be a communication platform for typically email or chat. And it got stuck there. It just stayed static. And that is one thing that history can tell you is, you know, why do companies stay static? Well, usually it's M&A or acquisitions or this is all it's meant to do. And then you get tech bolt-ons wrapped around it to prop up the product. And you see that in auto tech right now and you see an explosion of it. Like I need a video widget over here to do video and I need now a phone widget over here to do phone and I need a digital retailing widget over here to do this and I need a chat widget over here to do that. And all of a sudden you have 40 different vendors all getting the data and the CRM category stayed static. It didn't move, it didn't innovate, it didn't do anything. And then the cool thing with the auto tech industry is, you mentioned Mastermind, I could list off a dozen companies that do some amazing, disruptive, innovative things that have sprung up over the last 10 years and DriveCentric is one of them, a 15-year-old company. And I think they took the approach of, let's scrap this idea of workflow, let's work on engagement. And the idea of engagement is totally different than tasks and workflow. We're going to engage with customers and how are we going to engage with those customers? We're going to have a philosophical, different approach. And we're going to do it with a mobile-friendly application that users want to be in the DriveCentric platform. Simple, beautiful, clean design system, mobile-friendly, modern, and native. You don't need to bolt all these bolt-ons on. One of the things DriveCentric had was native video. And that was kind of new at the time. You could drop a lot of your tech stack. Then we put in Genius and you could start to drop a lot of some of these AI bolt-ons. And I think that's where kind of evolution got us is saying, okay, the evolution was a new disruptive area of CRMs to do something more. And I think that evolution is just at the starting point.
Speaker 2:
[06:17] You said a lot of things there. I want to touch on a couple. So first of all, I'll tell you a personal story here. My wife is pretty frugal. And a couple months ago, I noticed she started buying these gummy bears. They're like healthy gummy bears. I'm like, what are you buying? What is this? And it was this company called Groons apparently. Long story short, today they announced literally like an hour ago, they announced that they sold to Unilever for a billion dollars. A billion with a B. And I started wondering, again, I'm a student, I love marketing. And I said, I'm looking at the packaging. This was like an hour ago. And I'm looking at the packaging. And I'm trying to understand, what the heck did they do? Like, what was their positioning? What did they identify in the market that they triggered something in her brain to go and spend money on these freaking gummy bears and then do it multiple times? So I bring this up because I think about the status market. And our vision at Car Dealership Guy is we say, I believe in a world where in the next five, 10 years, every dealer has DMS, a CRM and CDG. We are their external eyes, ears, look at the world. And so, okay, so I set the table there, right? What do you believe a CRM needs to be, right? How do you unlock that success at the margins as a CRM? What do you think is the ideal state? Any dealer who's listening right now, who's benchmarking, what does that success unlock at the margins?
Speaker 1:
[07:47] I love that question. And you said something also I want to double down on, which is in every other industry, you have a general ledger, you have an accounting system, my tax, my compliance, my system of record from my financial reports. It's Oracle, it's Microsoft, it's SAP. In the auto tech industry, it's your DMS. That needs to be clean, pristine, and as accurate as a source record to connect your OEMs, to be able to push financial records, be able to manage your inventory. That's its job, and it needs to be separated from the job of managing your customers. In every other industry, you have two platforms. I don't know why in auto tech we've confused this world. I have a general ledger, it manages my financials. I have another system that's dedicated solely to managing my customer and my revenue outcomes. If we agree with that starting point, that there are two fundamentally important platforms, DMS and CRM. Before I decided to come to DriveCentric, I did a lot of soul searching because like is CRM dead? Is it a category that doesn't need to be there anymore? Not because of the DMS, but because you have all these bolt-ons, you have all these solutions, AI was starting to come on and you're like, is this fundamentally still a platform? And when I thought about it, there's two flaws that happen in the evolution of the CRM. The first flaw was in Salesforce push this, it's meant for your sales team and sales team only. Why? You have in a dealership a service advisor who is a salesperson, an F&I manager who is probably your best salesperson, you have your sales team, you have your BDC, every marketing team all talking to customers, including maybe even the cashier clerks and parts. If you're talking to a customer, why aren't you in the CRM? The CRM by its definition, the very name of it is a customer relationship management system. C for customer is at the heart of the term. So if you step back and you say, how can I evolve the CRM into a source system to manage my customer? What happened in Auto-Tech? Well, we went from a CRM just managing my sales tasks to then, well, I need a marketing platform for this, and I need a digital retailing for this, and I need a CDP to do all of this, and we have this tech bloat. Why can't the CRM do all those things? It is fundamentally the most important platform because I'll turn the question back, you know, and have your audience think about, what's the biggest asset a dealership has? It has to be the customer. It's the only asset a dealership has. They have inventory, that's assets, but it's not the value of having inventory. It's the value of having customers that want to buy that asset from you. So, if the customer is the most important thing in your dealership of value, then the emphasis needs to be on that platform has to be one that I want my users in, all of my users in, and it's the one that I want engaging with my customers. And I think that is one of the big evolution steps that has to happen with CRM. The second huge evolution is, if I agree in that, that it has to be my BDC, my service advisor, my sales team, all in this tool, then if you think about agentic AI and you think about where that's going, you need one voice talking to your customers. You can't have 40 different voices in different large language models with different bolt-ons, trying to talk to your customers and then trying to cram all that back into a CRM. It becomes very challenging. So there are two big next step evolutions I think have to happen. First, it was just modernizing it natively. The second is going to have to be, make it your tire. Anybody talks to a customer has to be a user. And then third is going to be, let's start consolidating all these bolt-ons to be able to have one voice to my customer, one manageable voice to my customer.
Speaker 2:
[11:34] This episode is brought to you by Lotlinx. What if you had a strategist that could actually look at your inventory, your pricing, your market and real shopper behavior, and then tell you exactly what to do next? That's LotGPT. It's the industry's first AI-powered inventory strategist built specifically for car dealers. It analyzes your VIN level data and surfaces which vehicles are at risk, where the opportunity is in your market, and what actions you should take. VIN by VIN. No digging through reports, no guesswork. And the best part, it's free for dealers. Just head to lotlinx.com/lotgpt and request access or click the link in the show notes below. Okay, that makes sense. But if you had to identify, what is the secret sauce today that is leading to your customer happiness? Why are dealers happy with your product? Can you identify, like can you isolate one thing? Or is it a function of the fact that you are building a product that works across every single department and then centralizes it to create one voice for the customer? What is, is there one thing here or is it multiple?
Speaker 1:
[12:43] I think the second thing you said is where we're striving really hard for. We announced it at NADA this year, right? A service engagement hub, an F&I engagement hub, a sales engagement hub, all on one platform with magenta AI agents to be able to talk to customers, whether it's through a reception or voice or BDC or video. But I don't think that's why people love DriveCentric yet, because that's the next evolution that we're putting out into the market and try to lead that evolution.
Speaker 2:
[13:09] But why do they love it?
Speaker 1:
[13:10] I think the reason is maybe three-pronged that I feel, and I'd love your audience to provide some feedback to us. But one is there was a very innovative thing our founders did, which was created these pods. Pods are assigned for the life of the account, to manage the account, support the account, but they're all virtual. Our pods do an amazing job providing real-time human being answers to a dealership on helping them. Right through the tool, I can chat with them directly in the tool and say, hey, I'm stuck here. What does this do? Or how does this or what is this new widget? I get instant support. And I think that was very...
Speaker 2:
[13:50] So you have a... This is a live human on DriveCentric side communicating with the dealer.
Speaker 1:
[13:54] Yeah, exactly. And true through the platform. So whether I'm on my mobile app or I'm on my desktop, you can get to a DriveCentric support person or account manager immediately through the platform. And we launch you, we set you up, we configure you, we train you, and we always do it virtually. And I think the industry never heard of, I'm going to install a CRM and I do it virtually. We've been doing that for 10 years. And that to me is amazing because you form a relationship, you understand the dealership, you understand the dealership settings, you understand the dealership's needs. We are going to be a virtual account, but we are going to be instantaneous support for you. So I think that's one bucket.
Speaker 2:
[14:28] Wait, so stick on that. I want to hear another two. That's two interesting things. Our number one is, in a way, it's a forcing function to make sure that you have an incredible remote customer experience set up with your company, right? You have no option. If you're doing installation remotely, you have to be stellar at communication. You can't patch that because that's your entire business. On the other hand, if I would have been pitched at a decade ago, I would have been very skeptical because, you know, one of the first rules I learned in business is like, you don't innovate HR, you don't innovate legal, right? It's just like, don't try to, you know, come up with these crazy mechanisms. It's like, there's certain things where like, let it be, like these are not the areas that are going to create outside success. To me, this kind of falls in one of them. It's like, this is, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, installation and, you know, onboarding. It feels like very dry, but I can see how you've taken that muscle and channeled it in a value add direction, which is, hey, dealer, you can get, you can communicate with me at any point at any time. I have someone right there that's extremely receptive to you. So, Touche, I like that. Very novel.
Speaker 1:
[15:40] I can't take credit for it. We had three founders, Dave, Phil and John, and you take a risk as an entrepreneur, and 10 years ago, you're like, I'm going to disrupt something. I'm going to do it different than the others. You don't know if it's going to work. But a virtual launch is still to me amazing that we do that, and we've been doing it forever. Last month, we launched a record number of dealerships. The fact you can onboard 180 dealerships in 30 days, different dealerships in 30 days, do it completely virtual and have the highest CSAT scores that I've ever seen. I love the launch. I love my pod. I love pod 8. I love pod 12. They're amazing. That, I think, by itself was revolutionary. I think we just continue that and make it better. We just launched extended hours. We can support. We're there for the dealer to be able to make sure that there's a touchpoint to help them wherever they're at in their journey.
Speaker 2:
[16:32] The second one. I wonder what dealers think about this. I'll write this in circles.
Speaker 1:
[16:37] We'll see what pod they like and they'll say give them a pod number because we reference them as pod numbers, pod 8 or something or pod 4. But I love reading those comments. I love my pod.
Speaker 2:
[16:47] All right. Let's see what people think about the virtual launch. All right. You're about to take us to the second, or let's say step two of the secret sauce to DriveCentric. What is it?
Speaker 1:
[16:59] I believe heavily that users aren't tethered to their desktop, especially if you're in sales. You're out on a showroom. You're out on a lot. You're out on delivery. And I can't think of a mobile device in the auto tech industry that's not consumer-based, dealer-based, that is widely is adopted and loved as DriveCentric's mobile. Every feature of DriveCentric is on our mobile device. We have 120,000 users, 60,000 active at any given time on our mobile device. And it grows by two or three thousand every month. And in Google or in the Apple Store, it's some of the highest rated app out there. It's just easy to use. And we're making it even easier. So we rolled out like a genius voice assist. You could talk to your phone like Siri and say, hey, who are the appointments I have on today? Or, you know, hey, I'm calling out sick. Can you move all my leads from one person to another? Mobile was such a revolutionary thing. I think people love using DriveCentric because it was where they wanted to be, which was on mobile. And a lot of the lagging companies didn't catch up on that or had a really bad experience or only partial experience on mobile. And so that was number two. I think we did a really good job with mobile.
Speaker 2:
[18:12] Is that novel or do you think it's just like operational excellence? Because the salesperson historically has never been tethered to their desk. Arguably, they are more tethered to their desk today than they were ever before.
Speaker 1:
[18:25] Sadly.
Speaker 2:
[18:27] Yeah, because you had more, you know, you had more ops and drive-riding.
Speaker 1:
[18:32] It was revolutionary. I think mobile was table stakes. However, you asked the question, why do people love DriveCentric and experience? DriveCentric, when they came off of whatever platform they came off of, did not have that same experience. And so we were just better than everybody else in that area. And it was a need in the market that people really were happy with, having that in one platform. The third and final one was, again, we got away from this concept of workflows and tasks. Yes, there are tasks that you can assign in DriveCentric. But we had a simple dashboard, and when you log on, you're looking at who's engaging with you, who's in my website right now, who do I have to have as my hot lead right now? What do I have to do today right now to engage with this customer and what customers are engaging with me? We looked at it and flipped it upside down. Every other CRM in every category and every other company looked at, here are the things you need to do and just tasks and workflows, and you just crank through it. But you could have had amazing engagement happening and just totally blind to it, because you were too busy doing your tasks. I think one thing that DriveCentric did that was revolutionary was just flip that upside down. Focus on where there's engagement and put everything you got toward that, because there's a customer active and engaging with you, and we're going to make that super simple for you to understand and use. Yes, if you need your traditional, like I get all my engagements done, what else do I have to do? Yeah, sure, we have tasks and workflow and stuff of that nature. But that was a really different approach this year. I mean, those three things, world-class support done differently, the ability that we were there mobile for you, and then different approach to how to manage your customers was, I think, the third element to put DriveCentric into a different category.
Speaker 2:
[20:19] How do you think about modern-day engagement? What are we looking at today? A dealer that wants to maximize their conversion and their sales, right? When you say we measure engagement, what drivers or what signals do you take into account and weight the highest when it comes to customer engagement?
Speaker 1:
[20:42] When there's a customer that's active on your website, that is actively engaging with you through text or email or video. One of the things that we put needily in our product was video. We see the highest response rate and adoption of consumers interacting with video. Video is not new, and it's not revolutionary. But if you can track that engagement really well and understand, did they view it and how well did they engage with it? Get that text going with that customer, and then you could track the effectiveness and responsiveness. Then in real time, you could look at a visitor ID to your dealership and map it back to that. Now you're connecting dots and you're saying, here's the triangulation of this customer. They were on your website, they viewed this video six times last night, and this is highly engaged. We'll put that at the top of your list and say, let's do something with this customer. Wrapped around all of that is our Genius product, which is our AI, which was natively built. And in Genius, it's there to catch anything. And the original approach of Genius was, the dealership salesperson is not there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But if there's engagement happening, Genius is just picking that up and doing something with it. And so that long-term sort of safety net where, hey, I know somebody that's engaging, is at least getting responded to immediately. Super important. And so I think for us it's, how fast are you re-engaging with the customer? And we track it in minutes and seconds. If somebody's interacting with you and you wait a day, you've lost that customer. But if you can track that down and show on a dashboard and show a filter and show your managers and show the entire team, hey, this customer has had a four-minute gap in engagement here and they're active with you, that's like somebody showing to the showroom and nobody paying attention to them. In the modern world we're living in, if you're not there talking to that customer, so we put a ton of emphasis on showing that visually, like where's customers engaging and how long is that gap been before they've had re-engagement from the dealership.
Speaker 2:
[22:51] Matt, how does all this actually reflect on the dealer's P&L? Or ask differently, I should say. One of the stats that I bring up on this podcast a lot is the fact that the average sales per salesperson per dealership hasn't budged much in decades, which is deeply concerning when you think about all the added investment in technology and tools that dealers have added to their dealerships. And so when you think about that, do you know what is the average number of cars, the average DriveCentric salesperson or a dealership salesperson who uses DriveCentric sales? Or how do you actually translate everything you just mentioned, those three things and the fourth, and then say, this is the net result of our success and why this is working? Because it's all about the money, baby.
Speaker 1:
[23:42] Something that dollars does.
Speaker 2:
[23:44] That's what it's all about at the end of the day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[23:46] We just developed something I'm really, really excited about.
Speaker 2:
[23:49] So let me answer the question. I should tell you're excited. I like it.
Speaker 1:
[23:53] Are about to roll out. One of my companies I was at a few years ago was called SuccessFactors. It was an HR, human capital management software company. SuccessFactors managed performance, talent, things of that nature. A little bit of a background on that area. When I got to DriveCentric, everybody asked a similar question. How's my sales team doing? Who's the number one on my leaderboard? How did I define that? Every dealership defines it slightly different. It's response rate, it's deliveries, it's everybody had a little different definition of this. And so we created a performance management agent. And what it essentially does is it looks at the quality of your videos, the quality of your texts, the quality of your emails, the quality of your response rates, the quality of the deliveries that you do, the gross profit that you did. It takes so many factors into it. And it generates essentially a performance review for the general manager or the sales manager to have at their fingertips for every single salesperson that's touching a customer. And it will use AI and kind of create, here's their strengths, here are their weaknesses, here's how they stack up against their peers, here's how we would coach them differently. And it's there to be able to kind of help the sales team understand, what is Joe doing differently that I'm not doing? And what we learned in this was, in your getting back to your question, just because I did 100 videos, doesn't mean I should get 5 stars. I could have only created 1 video but sold 30 cars. What is it that you did in that 1 video that was effective? What was those texts or messages? What was the sentiment of the customer that you did differently than the person next to you did differently? And so we're getting to that next layer of stop looking at quantity, the good quality of what you're doing, and stack rank that against your dealership and all the other people in there. So we have something called drive score, kind of a gamification. The next level of drive score is really beginning to the heart of your question is, hey, how do I raise the bar of everybody and give them that real time feedback constantly of, what do we see working right now? It's going to ebb and flow. It's going to be different six months from now or a year from now, but it's going to be a constant raise everybody opportunity which I'm excited about.
Speaker 2:
[26:05] Well, you know, dealership training is an area that has seen growing investment in recent years. It sounds like what you're talking about, this sounds to me like a massive training opportunity across dealerships. I mean, this is like what you said, this is way beyond a CRM when you're getting into performance improvement. And that really starts to overlap with training. And it seems like where is the best data to inform that training? It's where the salesperson or whoever is interacting with the most. So it seems to make sense that that's an area where with lots of room for improvement.
Speaker 1:
[26:42] Think about the way that things were done for 20 years within an auto dealership. You had a report. Usually if you ask your CRM create you a custom report, the manager would take that report and then circle highlight things and then have a review on Monday morning and say, here's what's not working right. And then had a whiteboard and said, we got to improve in these areas. Well, why can't we just drop reports? Like, why can't we get to this world where reports are just historical look backs? Tell me what's happening in real time. And allow me to have the system tell me recommendations that happens in our personal life, right? Why can't we have that in our work life? And so I don't know if it's an extension outside the realm of CRM as much as CRMs are always managing people. It was one of the core three tenets of what a CRM is supposed to do is manage my reports with my people. We're just elevating the game to change the evolution of what the CRM is supposed to do. Yes, there's reports. I mean, create lots of reports. But why can't the system kind of give me back real-time information about how my team's doing? Who's on the leaderboard and why are they in the leaderboard? What makes them more effective the next person over? It's just an evolution of what a report is in my mind.
Speaker 2:
[27:51] What should I expect over the next couple of years in terms of my Salesforce, right? You are building, Steve Jobs built the iPhone, right? We're all like this in front of our phones and our screens now. Like he created that form factor and it changed the world in our lives. And in this case, you could tell I like this question too. Well, I want to because I think based on what you're telling me is, am I expecting not to have salespeople in three years and the agents do all the work until the customer gets to the dealership or how automated are we really going to get? I'm trying not to just say AI because I want to focus on the outcome here, right? What's the outcome that you are striving for?
Speaker 1:
[28:35] When we designed our new agent dashboards and we designed how we think we get rid of workflows, the core of what you just said though is, no, I absolutely don't want to get rid of the human. I'm a personal consumer. I just bought a car from my son. I want to talk to a person. I want to be there. I want to pick it up and I think I'm not alone. I just don't want to go through the hassle. I don't go to 12 different dealerships. I'm going to be able to look what I need, go to the dealership, shake some hands, and make it a seamless experience. But there's still a human interaction that I want in my life. Just like in travel, I travel a lot. I don't want to deal with humans 90% of the way. But guess what? When there's a problem, I want a human there. And I want to talk to a human. There's a balance we'll find. However, the way we're designing the system, because you asked, what are we designing? How are we designing this? Not necessarily completely...
Speaker 2:
[29:28] It's 2005. What are you building for me for 2007? And I'm using, obviously, the iPhone analogy.
Speaker 1:
[29:34] But if you rethink agents and you say, step back and treat it like an employee, and everything in our design sessions is always treated like it's a person. You have to hire this person. That person has a job description. What did I hire you to do? So you have to hold them accountable. You have to coach them. You have to mentor them. You have to give them performance feedback. Sometimes fire them. But we don't think of technology as an employee. We think of technology as a tool. And AI was a co-pilot. It was an assistant for me. But now with agents, it's not an assistant anymore. It literally is an employee. And if that employee is there, hold them accountable. And so the employee that's there working on payroll needs to become more of a manager of agents. And I'm managing people. And those people, agents, I'm going to hold accountable. And I might give them feedback through coaching. Had it like how you handle that customer interaction, change. Hey, I want you to have a softer tone going forward, change. The way that we have to interact with technology now is thinking of it as a personal person assistant and say, you got to do what I want you to do my way. This is our values, our mission. This is our way we handle customers. And this gets back to that you can't have 30 different bolt-ons because you can't train 30 different agents in front machine learning language with large language models and say, I'm going to expect the same way to talk to a customer. So the way we think about this is employees are going to be there to greet the person, manage a person that comes in, give them wonderful customer support, answer their questions. But when the consumer's at home in front of their phone on the sofa shopping, they want to be able to talk to Joe at the dealership as if it's Joe and get any information they need and have a great wonderful interaction. And when they're ready to go pick up that car, they're going to meet Bill instead of Joe and be like, Joe is amazing. He was just a great person. And not know they were talking the entire time to a robot. And I see that all the time in DriveCentric, like they're talking as if they knew this human. And they, you know, it's like there wasn't a human.
Speaker 2:
[31:42] You mentioned something important there. You said you can't have all these bolt-ons. The big trend in the business has been, hey, we have all this software. Let's try to centralize, consolidate. Is DriveCentric not for the dealer that wants to use, you know, X conversational AI, you know, Y conversational voice? Or like, is that, are you not the platform for that type of dealer? Or how do you think about integrations in general? Because every dealer wants to simplify their workflow. And it's a big reason why we've seen a big shifting in our industry to just more centralized experiences.
Speaker 1:
[32:19] Selfishly, as a CEO of DriveCentric, I'd like everybody to use DriveCentric end-to-end as their customer engagement platform. But realistically, that's impossible. So let me answer how we're addressing the people that want to use whatever ABC company bolt-on that they want to use in a minute. But first, just on the DriveCentric side of things, we're not yet fully in service in F&I. By the end of the calendar year, we will be fully in both of those categories to do a handoff. Because I think there's a lot of leakage and a lot of bad customer experience going from sales to the desking tower to F&I office to the cashier. Why? Why can't that just be a seamless process and a seamless handoff? We don't have integrated system. I use Darwin over here and I use some desking system over there and I use this over here. It's just a fragmented system. I think we can solve that by saying, you're just flowing a customer record through and you're dealing with a handoff between one department to another, and in between you have leakage. That's why there's all these tools that have prung up on services sales or vehicle acquisition because between the service department and the sales department, there was leakage. You have all these bolt-ons because of the leakage. Make it one platform to manage this and close that leakage. I think DriveCentric is going to lead the race there. But because there's embedded other products, a voice agent over here, I have my telephony over here, I have my AI widget over here, we created the Partner Hub and our Partner Hub grows by dozens every single week. We get 30, 40 requests a day coming into the Partner Hub to integrate DriveCentric to ABC widget. I realized when I came in as CEO of DriveCentric, it has to be more open where we have the API connect. If you want to connect, we connect with people that we would consider in the industry, direct competitors, but you lose choice. Most of it is your data, and if you really want to use that system and it is duplicate of what we do, then that's okay. As long as the data flows back into one centralized customer card, so we can manage and ensure the customer data is all centralized in one place. You can use whatever tool you want. We find the most success with dealerships that try out all the different things and then say, eventually can I turn other things off? Awesome, yes. But we made a conscious decision that no, we can't be a conglomerate that fused the world like traditional Apple. You got to be in the Apple ecosystem and every single device and everything in your household has to be Apple. I don't believe in that world. And I also don't believe in the world that Apple...
Speaker 2:
[34:58] I don't want the green text bubbles. I'm just being honest. I'm just being honest. I'm in a blue chat.
Speaker 1:
[35:04] What was funny is like, you remember way back when Steve Jobs got on the screen with Bill Gates behind him, if you were like, what's this? Microsoft and Apple getting together? Yeah. Then recently, Apple just announced they're dropping their AI and they're going to Gemini, which is Google. And it's like, that is a good world. That's a world I support, which is, hey, if it's better, use it, integrate it. But right now, dealers, for whatever reason, are stuck into certain tools and processes and I won't win every battle. So great, we'll integrate it.
Speaker 2:
[35:40] Needless to say, they should have won the AI battle with just all their capital and their moats, but that's a story for another day. Dealers, early access to our private dealer chat groups is now open. Join top dealers at cdgcircles.com, that's cdgcircles.com or hit the link in the show notes. I'll see you inside. Let's make sure we pull up some objections to keep this fair for the audience. There's really just one thing I saw. And I'll reserve my own opinion on this until I let you speak. The only thing that came up in terms of objections with DriveCentric was price. Some people said you're too expensive. I'm sure you hear this in private conversations too. How do you respond to that if someone says DriveCentric is too expensive?
Speaker 1:
[36:24] I did a lot of research before I came on board. There were three main feedbacks I was getting. So probably number two and three was closed off, didn't integrate. Well, hopefully, we're getting that change in the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:
[36:35] Which is why I asked you about the integration, by the way.
Speaker 1:
[36:37] Then the third one was reporting weaknesses. Hopefully, we've closed a lot of those too because we rolled out Genius Reporting, which is a natural language way to do reporting. But more work to be done in both those categories, and I acknowledge that. I think we're going to have a tremendous leap forward in the way we think about reporting. I think we have a tremendous leap forward in the way that we think about how we handle integrations, because we're reintegrating to anybody that dealers are asking us to integrate with as fast as we can. There's realistic of how fast we can integrate with everybody. There's too many, the influx of them. But on price, an age-old problem is, I could give one answer which is you get what you pay for, value is value. But in this world of dealerships with margin pressure, and this world of dealerships with difficulties with justifying a line item that's the most expensive on their P&L. The way that I describe it to people though is, look, our core CRM, apples to apples to any other CRM out there, is probably cheaper and I put probably a fairly good wager on, besides maybe some that just sell into independence or just sell into specialty dealers. Franchise dealers, CRMs, the big four or five that are out there, our CRM pricing is no different. However, our CRM comes with 12 or 15 other features that are bolt-ons, a video bolt-on you got for over here, an AI bolt-on that you got for over here, live room over here, the ability to have a portal to exchange secure documents over here with this widget. When you consolidate all that tech stack, you're saving money and we have tons of testimonials out there of dealership saying, I truly step back and said, what could I consolidate my tech stack on? Not only am I getting better compliance, I'm getting more savings and a better customer experience. Yes, there's a perception in the market where expensive, but I think it's because the CRM is not apples to apples. It's the CRM plus ABCDEF and it's only going to continue. But I do want to ensure we're working on having three packages out there in the marketplace. We rolled out this year a concept of three packages. If you really, really for whatever reason want to skinny down your package and you want to turn off all of these great features and get down to just a very basic rudimentary CRM that does some basic tasks and management, great, we'll give you that package, sub $1,000. But we see 99 percent of our dealership say, and I actually really want this. When I did the analysis, this made sense for me to do. But we do offer now three packages just to help squash that concept that were expensive. Guess what? When I was with Mastermind, it was also really expensive and it was a perception, it was expensive. But I think there is value when you say, hey, this is my customer and managing the engagement of my customer has got to be the most important thing I do. Let's put the money there versus a back office system, an accounting system, something that doesn't talk to customers. We spend an absorbent amount over here and not as much over here. Sometimes I always question the logic of that.
Speaker 2:
[39:57] Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Matt, a couple more questions here for you. But as you were speaking, I'm trying to think, okay, you're doing well today, amazing. Do you think you're well-positioned to continue winning in these coming years? With all this change, with AI disrupting everything, of course, you're leaning in a big way into AI, right? There's obviously super well-capitalized competitors, as I'm sure you are as well. But why are you well-positioned to continue winning? How do you think about that?
Speaker 1:
[40:31] Tell my team all the time, there's three core pillars I believe in, and we rolled this out company-wide last year, but it's focused on the core. It's really important. We have to scale for growth, and we have to innovate for the future. Break down those three pillars, the core. That's our support, that's our infrastructure, that's the core product. We have to keep innovating for customers to show value. Value is in software world, constant features, and we rolled out 2,600 features in 2025. I think we might double that in 2026. You have to show value in the core. We rolled out weekend support that we didn't have fully coverage because now we have dealerships on different time zones. It's important. Scaling for growth is, how do I scale this to have enterprise views across a dealer group? How do I have the ability to do, where I could launch 200 dealerships in a month, 300 dealerships in a month? I have to scale the organization to stay ahead of where we're at, so I don't get a reputation of backlog, bad customer support. You have to keep scaling the business. Then, innovation is probably our most important one, which is we're in a dead race. I mean, the funnest time I think I've been in software for 25 years is the last 18 months, and it's not just DriveCentric. It is the speed of which new technology is coming is mind-boggling to me, but an exciting time. So the innovation race, the beauty of DriveCentric is we can move at lightning speed and we're a big company now, but yet we're not tethered by big company problems. Big company problems typically are red tape and typically bureaucracy that slows down innovation. In DriveCentric, we're like, hey, we're going to roll out an agent every 60 to 90 days. Hey, in DriveCentric, we're going to have different things with the pace of which these large language models are coming out. We test out all sorts of different ones and we say, voice wasn't there for us, our quality, a year ago. But there were a thousand voice agents that came out to market. Now, all of a sudden, it's pretty good quality. Okay, we have a voice agent now and embedded natively into DriveCentric. But there's still some gaps that have to close to make that customer experience so good. What's the handoff back to a human if you need to? Is that transcript truly in the customer card? In that piece of the innovation to be able to close those gaps, to be able to give out to our customers a quality product but at a pace that they can absorb and our sales and our commercial and our marketing team can absorb, is my number one challenge as CEO right now. We are way ahead on product than I think the industry can absorb. And getting the message out, getting them to understand, getting them to adopt these tools is a cool challenge to have right now.
Speaker 2:
[43:29] Do you see that shifting? Like do you see AI adoption accelerating amongst dealers or what's your pulse on that?
Speaker 1:
[43:36] It went slow at first. AI adoption was, hey, it's this little flashy widget that's cool. And then it was, hey, this is helping me write my emails. And hey, this is helping me follow up on things I forgot to do. And AI started to come more into our consumer life. And it was a little bit of a lagger in the professional life. And then all of a sudden people were like, hey, I like these cool little toys, these widgets, these bolt-ons, a voice agent for reception, a service scheduling over here, you know, a sales agent over here. And then I think it kind of started to come back down because people are like, this wasn't the experience I was hoping for. I didn't get the ROI here. It's missing stuff. It's not centralized. Too many different voices. And so I do think it's patod, if not slowed down a little bit. I think what's happening now at the pace of what's happening at these macro large language companies that are out there and the pace of which verticalized software companies can move this out in a integrated way. I do think it's going to pick back up really quickly here. And again, it's the fear of...
Speaker 2:
[44:44] That's my assessment as well, by the way, based on all the inbound we get and the questions and the interests and just the feedback, you could tell that not everyone, but the smart dealers don't want to fall behind. So they're spending a lot of time and doing a lot of homework and research.
Speaker 1:
[44:58] You don't have to be first to market in some of these little flashy items. But if you could look for a platform that kind of says, where are you going? What's all going to be included in this? What's your 12 month roadmap look like? And have conviction in that company that they can deliver that. I think we have a pretty good track record in DriveCentric of saying, here's where we're going to be going, and here's what we're going to go do. If I can paint a picture of where I think we can consolidate, you don't have to rush in to every little area and say I need a bolt on here, I need a bolt on there. If you can put it all into one platform, one voice, you have such a better customer experience. And so if you've been on DriveCentric seven, eight, nine years, it's probably worth going back to your pod and saying, hey, refresh me on what's new, because I might not even be using it. And that's one of the industry challenges, you get stuck into a routine, this is how I do things. But technology is there to constantly enhance how you do things. And the pace of this sort of new world is really exciting, but you as an end user of the platform have some responsibility to say, I got to know what's the latest and greatest thing in case I'm starting to fall behind because I'm stuck doing same thing I've been doing for two or three years in my system. And that system might have evolved a lot. And not always does that come with a cost, it might just be a core feature or an added benefit that was rolled out, we just weren't aware of.
Speaker 2:
[46:24] Well, Matt, you're doing some incredible work for the industry and for the customer experience, which we so badly need to continue improving that, and especially in today's day and age with all this pressure from different forms of mobility. So, kudos to you and to the team. And as we wrap up, leave our audience with one piece of advice or Matt Leone word of wisdom. What do you have for us?
Speaker 1:
[46:48] The word of wisdom, especially for people that think about the systems and technologies, is this really serving my customer? Is this making my customer experience better? And I think often we think, is that technology going to make my job easier? Is it going to eliminate a task or do something better for me? And I think our fundamental belief in DriveCentric is, if we can make the customer experience better, then it's a home run. And I just challenge the industry to start thinking about that differently, that your platform of choice got to be the one focused on your customer. And the technology powering that has to be one that's focused on that customer engagement. So one bit of advice I think I always share with people is change that mindset.
Speaker 2:
[47:28] Matt Leone, CEO at DriveCentric. Matt, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show. And check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.