Curtis Driver on Why Dealers Fire Vendors in the First 90 Days

In this episode of Word on the Street, we’re joined by Curtis Driver, Omnichannel Digital Sales Manager at Capital Auto Group, to unpack why dealers so often fire vendors within the first 90 days — and what both sides get wrong during onboarding.

Curtis shares a candid dealer-side perspective on why onboarding breaks down, how silence and unclear expectations kill momentum, and why utilization is the most important metric dealers should be watching early on. The conversation covers how marketing, BDC performance, and in-store execution must work together, why dashboards don’t matter if managers aren’t trained for accountability, and how communication methods like SMS and short-form video outperform email inside the dealership.

The episode also explores omnichannel digital sales, realistic uses of AI in sales and service, the role of CDPs and lifecycle marketing, and why AI should scale employees — not replace them. Curtis explains how dealers evaluate vendors in the first 14–90 days, what causes frustration during rollouts, and why proactive communication is the biggest differentiator between vendors who last and vendors who get canceled.

If you’re a dealer, vendor, or automotive marketer looking to build stronger partnerships, improve onboarding outcomes, and cut through AI hype with real-world insight, this episode delivers practical takeaways straight from the store level.

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Transcript

Every dealer has signed contracts with vendors and then just had the deal fall apart during the onboarding. Today's guest knows when that happens, why that happens, and more importantly, knows how to fix that from happening again. Curtis Driver, he's the omni-channel digital sales manager at Capital Automotive Group. He spent twenty years working inside the real dealerships, managing vendors, the tools, and especially looking over the BDC's performance. He's onboarded, he's failed, and he's really built a playbook around how to maximize the relationship with vendors, starting with the onboarding. If you want smoother launches and better results from the partners that you're already paying, this one's worth the time. This is Word on the Street. I'm Andrew Street. Please follow and subscribe if you have not already for more conversations like this. But ladies and gentlemen, enjoy this conversation with Curtis Driver.

Well, Curtis, I'm honored that you have been able to jump on. You've been someone that's certainly been near the top of my list after watching you present at a Vendor Twenty event. But could you just give me a quick breakdown of your role in the dealer group you work with? Yeah, so I'm the omnichannel digital sales manager for Capital Auto Group. We're based in North Carolina. I'm based in Raleigh. In my current role, I support, really focus on BDC performance with our individual rooftops and then supporting our teams in store with vendors, tools, onboarding, utilization, and really figuring out who we need to partner with and then making sure we're getting the most out of those partnerships. I hear a lot more marketing people in your role working closely with the BDC just as leads are getting flowing in and, and being distributed and being nurtured and being qualified. Has that always been kind of like a, an aspect of the marketing role for you? So I think it has, it's whenever we're talking, cause we have an agency that we work very closely with, um, long partnership, they do fantastic work and, Whenever you're talking about marketing, getting the opportunities to the store is one thing, but then what's actually happening with those opportunities when they make contacts, submit a lead, or just walk into the front door, that's where the rubber really meets the road. So if you're just judging based on close rates, but not looking at the actual actions that are taking place in the store and how your team is interacting with customers, then you can't truly I don't think you can truly judge how effective your marketing is because you could have the best marketer. You can have the best marketing team in the world giving you the thousand high quality leads a month. But if you drop the ball, then what have you really done? So I think when you're talking about marketing, the in-store and communication part of it with our BDCs and our teams is something that has to be part of the conversation. In my experience, it's like, I feel like there's an easy conversation, but it's a trained conversation that the agency and the account managers can have with a dealership. That's not a super long conversation, but it's just to get a good understanding of how that dealership's equipped. And if their needs are new car leads, qualifying them, how they're nurturing those leads. Is it automated? Is it a virtual BDC? Is it an in-house BDC? Is it a cradle to grave that, you know, a lot of, they can't take a ton of crap leads, but if we can qualify them more before we give them to them, or is it automated where we can just flood in leads and then get a grasp of that before starting the advertising and advertising. Yeah, one of the things that I really, really, really like about our group is we were a midsize group, but we let each store kind of have its own flair, its own personality. So we have different BDC setups, different sales team setups at almost every store. I mean, we've we've from the corporate support team level, we can kind of we can go in and give best practices. We can help analyze processes. But ultimately, the GMs have the freedom to kind of make their own calls and set their teams up the way they want. So that that does play into what each store's needs and wants are for for leads and for marketing. To your point, I've got we've got stores that will say, give me every lead and they want two thousand leads a month when they're selling one hundred fifty two hundred cars. And then we've got stores that really want to narrow it now and focus on higher quality, high converting sources. And if something's not performing, they don't have the manpower and bandwidth to handle it. So we'll move on from it. Yeah. And it's also like understanding, I think, the manufacturers too. It's like, are we selling... Rolls Royces or are we selling Mitsubishis? Each one has a different type of customer that's more and less willing to jump through hoops and be responsive to SMS and phone calls. We're domestic heavy. We've got a lot of Ford stores, a lot of GM stores, and even within markets. Different things work at different dealerships. We've got dealerships in markets where it's all about the phone and Almost every lead answers the phone when you call. Their inbound phone ups are disproportionately high. And then we've got markets where you cannot get a customer to answer the phone to save your life. And it's all about text messaging or all about email. So ultimately it's about what the OEMs, every OEM gives us good guidance, good guidelines on who their customer base is. But I think it's even more local than that. And you really have to kind of play around with getting a sense for what your local market wants i like the sound of that market where people answer their phone our buyers are answering phones is where i want to open up my dealership yeah Well, the way that that I've heard your name a number of times just because you've got a good reputation as a strong operator. But then I had a chance to watch you present at a vendor twenty group event where you seem to have written the book more than anybody I've ever listened to about onboarding vendors with the dealership in a harmonious way. And it sounds like you're coming from a precautionary tale of of things that haven't worked well in the past. Why does onboarding break so often with dealerships and vendors? I think onboarding breaks really when we start treating the contract signing like a finish line instead of the starting line. The excitement wears off, the vendor goes quiet, stores left wondering who's driving the bus. Dealerships run on momentum. If you've ever worked in a store, it's, you know, when I was at the sales tower, I want a showroom full of people because it's easier to close deals when you've got thirty other tables working deals and everybody feels like they're part of something. So when that momentum stalls with vendors, trust erodes very, very quickly. In my experience, most onboarding failures aren't technical failures. They're expectation failures. And that usually starts within the first few weeks. And so what does it feel like when you have the smooth onboarding? Um, good onboarding, a smooth, a smooth onboarding feels like it feels natural. It doesn't feel like you're having to force anything. It feels like when we're working with a new vendor and our teams at the store really feel like the vendor understands how they do business, how they operate, and can bring them a tool and teach them how to fit it into their operations without fundamentally changing what they're doing. and make their teams more efficient, that's when everybody walks away from onboarding feeling good and when we have long-term partnerships. I feel like I've constantly been on a quest to not have a dealership change anything operationally or staffing-wise or training sales teams that have a fair amount of turnover to needing to install mobile apps and go through a different process. really getting a sense up front for where are where is this dealership and make sure that we're integrating with their systems when possible and when not let's let's not do it like let's just do the things that work within their platforms within their crm yeah a hundred percent and i think it's a lot of vendors i work with i think i think everybody everybody lo is is super passionate about their company their tool their product but what they forget is they in the dealership world they're one of They're one of thirty dashboards, one of thirty logins are. As a sales manager in a dealership, if you've never had if you don't actually have ADD but want to know what it feels like to have ADD, go work in a sales hour for a day because it is a constant barrage of people needing something, tasks that have to get done, things that need to get looked at. And if you can't, as a vendor, if you can't find a way to slot into that that's natural and impactful, then your tool's just not. It's not going to work. If I expect somebody to log in and look at one thing for thirty seconds every single day without finding a better way to put that information in front of them, it's just not going to happen. Has there been a good way that you've experienced that, that vendors are able to get information in front of you without you needing to log onto their dashboard without it being necessarily like a scheduled monthly call, but you know, a short video or SMS. Yeah. So SMS text works great. A lot of guys, a lot of our teams, especially our managers in the dealership, they will respond to a text message four times faster than they'll respond to an email. They, they, a lot of us that aren't, In the dealership day-to-day, live in our emails. That's how we communicate. On a corporate level, that's how we communicate. But in the dealership world, you may look at, a sales manager may look at their email once or twice a day, tops. They have their phone on them constantly. Videos, short update videos are something that I've seen a few vendors start to use. Actually, I'll shout her out. My rep for code video was fantastic at doing this. And it's quick, it's three minutes. It's digestible, we can watch it, get a quick update, and then set up a call if we need to. We're all inundated with Zoom calls, team calls. It's not realistic to expect managers to get on them constantly. But the important thing for, I think, for any vendor out there, or even for me, when I'm trying to communicate something to our teams at the store, is you've got to figure out the person you're communicating with, I mean, it's the basics of communication, the person you're communicating with, how do they want to be communicated with? And then how do I, and then just tailor my messaging and my delivery method to what's actually going to sink in and be understood and read. So it's not, it's not one size fits all, even, even within a group like us, it's, it's every stores, every store, every manager is a little bit different. Because this is something I think as a marketing firm that we're constantly kind of tasked with, and that's communicating an effective message, not just clicks and line graphs, but here's what we're finding. Here's what we're seeing with similar stores. Here's some ideas that we could shift budget into, or if you have an extra couple thousand bucks this month, here's something we can push. I see you guys are number two in certified pre-owned. What if we allocate more budget? just to be able to have like more of a proactive message that maybe the dealer doesn't already know. And that is something that the vendor can impact from their desk. And it's like, okay, they don't want to have calls with our account manager because what we're doing, because business is good and they don't need to have conversations, just keep going. So it's like, okay, can we make a video? So I'm having everybody make these short videos that are, have enough meat on them where the dealer can say sounds good or absolutely not. Don't make this change. We're still focused on, you know, Elantras or whatever they're focused on. What, what's the, have you found a good cadence for what makes a good video? So I think the, the, Prevalence of short form video in the auto industry, whether it's communicating with customers or internal communications or communicating with vendors. I think it all stems from the rise of short form video on social. So I think about Instagram reels, TikTok, your two, three minutes tops. I may see the same person on Instagram reels or TikTok once every week or so. It's I mean, it's not an everyday thing and it's it's not a it's it may not be an every week thing. But ultimately, I think the reason those algorithms work is because they serve you up something that's engaging. So if you don't have anything important to say, maybe it's a quick weekly thirty second video. And then once you shoot a five minute video. But if you start sending me five, ten minute videos once a week and there's no meat to them, I'm going to stop watching them. So whatever your cadence is, more important than the cadence is that the videos contain something impactful and some kind of call to action or some kind of action item that you want feedback on. Let's like I'm super interested in the onboarding thing and I like how you guys focused on it because it's something that's not spoken about enough and focused on. But it's been like a huge crux for dealers that lose money during a rugged onboarding process. That's a heavy lift and poorly communicated. Where do you feel like dealers really start to lose patience during onboarding? So I think dealers the first well, the first place I lose patience is when there's silence. even if there's stuff going on in the background, if you're not communicating with me that you're working on these setups, you're working on these integrations, I assume that nothing's being done. The dealers assume that nothing's being done and the shiny wears off really quickly. And then the other place that I lose patience is there's a fine line between pushing for action items that you need and giving dealers reasonable timeframes to respond to emails and respond to requests. I think one thing that a lot of our vendors forget is most dealership employees, everybody works Saturdays, so everybody takes a day off during the week. So if you send an email on a Tuesday morning needing something from somebody, that person may well be off that Tuesday and not get back and they're inundated with stuff on Wednesday and it takes them a little bit to respond. So be push for what you need but also recognize the realities of people working in dealerships because as soon as you as soon as you as soon as you make somebody mad you're you're out with them in the dealer world it sounds like there's some really say that again really hard to recover from that once it's once that conversation starts going negative And especially because we ask that everybody gets CC'd on everything during onboarding for visibility and just for assistance where we can step in. But as soon as you call somebody in the dealership out or escalate unnecessarily, you've lost them and it's really difficult to get them to turn back around on whatever it is that you're putting in place. I feel like there's some simple stuff that vendors would be like a non-negotiable thing just to ask fast questions while they're, you know, before or after the contract sign of how do you like to communicate? What's the best method for me to be able to communicate with you? What day are you off? Are you, you know, start to be like, OK, let's not have that recurring meeting on Mondays if you're not at work on Mondays. Let me just be at least acknowledge this and have a footnote in my my CRM or whatever I'm using to to know you as a customer, as well as your dealership, as well as your, you know, your customers, your market. Is there something that you think vendors can do before the contract sign to ensure that there's like a smooth onboarding? So I think having conversations about, or being, being able to deliver a clear roadmap and communicate everything that needs to happen from contract signing to go live is really important just for transparency. And so that everybody sees everything that needs to be done. Kind of step by step onboarding is really frustrating for everybody. And I think leads to unnecessary delay on the vendor side, not just on the dealer side, because I may know internally that this action item, I've got to go through five extra steps to get it done that you may not know we internally have. So if you give me everything at once, we can kind of help manage that process. It may not be exactly the timeline and the order that you are accustomed to doing it, but we can kind of help piece everything together to, to make it a little bit smoother. And do you have a feeling for like, is it just case by case or just like with adding a vendor to the whole group going in tranches of a few stores at a time or is it just depend? Yeah. So if we're rolling something out to the whole group at once, you have to go in waves. It's, it is almost we're, we're, twenty five ish dealerships trying to roll sign. We try to roll something out to everyone and launch everybody at the same time. It's incredibly difficult to manage. So having some some some breakdown of different phases, different waves, whatever you want to call it, it just makes things more manageable. And and because everybody is a little bit different. I mean, we've you know, we've we've got Every store's on the same CRM, except for three, we've got every store on the same DMX, except for two there's, there's always exceptions across, across groups. Um, and a lot of that comes from, from acquisitions or for contracts or piloting different stuff. So going in waves lets us tell it, it lets us standardize it, but then also take, gives us space for those one-offs without it getting lost in the shuffle. Okay. Have you had any experiences with a clean first one month of launching with a new vendor that there's something that they're doing that's made it a lot smoother? Is it a checklist or documentation and a list of contacts that are a good point of contact within the vendor and within the dealership? So a little bit of all of that, but I think the biggest thing that leads to a smooth launch is really focusing on training managers how to quickly see utilization and training them on accountability within your tool. A lot of times we teach everybody at the store how to use a tool, but we don't do a great job of teaching managers. How do I see if I'm putting a new video tool in a store? Have we trained the managers to quickly see what the utilization rate is, what the open rate is at their store versus waiting thirty or sixty days post launch for the first performance call and then all of a sudden we realize nobody's using it or we're doing something wrong. So focusing on the manager aspects during onboarding always leads to a smoother actual launch and increased utilization rates. And it sounds like once launched, have like maybe that seven, ten day touch point. It doesn't even need to be a sit down Zoom with everybody. Just a video of something or something that just shows this video tool has been used by these six employees. And here's some of the response rate we're seeing on our end. Great early start. Here's the moving forward. Here's what we've seen, like our most successful dealerships able to do with this tool. Yeah, and handoffs to the customer success team. I mean, that's something that gets overlooked so, so often. And what I've seen happen is we'll be thirty, sixty days, ninety days, even longer sometimes into using something. Somebody from the store has an issue and instead of reaching out their customer success manager that they might not have interacted with or they were off and the CSM met with another manager, they start reaching out to the onboarding team. because that's the last person they talk to. That's who they know supports this product. Then the onboarding team either doesn't respond, they feel like they're, or they hand them off to somebody. Now our employee feels like they just got shoved aside, pushed off to somebody. But that's a huge gap that I see happen all the time. And that handoff and that CSM being kind of up in everybody's face kind of a lot during the first ninety days is really critical. So that way, when there is a problem, the right people get notified and can step in to fix it quickly. Such a dance. Yes. That we're continually, hopefully improving on. Yep. Yeah, it's our job. I mean, it's heavily weighted on the vendor, I think, but it's amazing to get like a perspective from a dealer who's seen it go poorly and seen it go well. And it's had twenty years of experience to develop some opinions and, you know, best practices. So you should write a book on this at some point. A vendor last week that called me and was frustrated and kind of blaming it on the store because six months after we launched something, they had an issue and we're Like I just mentioned, we're reaching out to the implementation team. And I'm like, well, you know, it's not our fault because we don't know about it. If nobody tells the right people, I'm like, look, man, if they don't know who to reach out to at the store, that's not our problem. That's on you. You got to take a little responsibility here. Yeah. And it's hard to hear. It's like, well, our tools just magic and it works. And now you're signed up. It should be, it should be humming. If it's your fault that you're not using it. I can just works and you don't have to actively stay in front. Then I hope you enjoy cancellation emails. Yeah. Then the salesperson is back involved. You got to own your product. So your role, you had mentioned it's Omnichannel Digital Sales. Is that right? Yep. That's the first time I've heard that title. Yeah, it's a fun one. Yeah. What does Omnichannel Digital Sales mean, I guess, to you? Omnichannel Digital Sales is think of go back five, ten years when everybody was rolling out, when DR tools were the big thing that everybody's rolling out, these omni-channel digital retailing tools that can go fully end-to-end, then during COVID it transitioned to, okay, let's elevate these digital retail tools to let customers buy cars completely online. Well, the problem is, and we saw this firsthand through some projects that we had internally, and we even see this when we look at how somebody like the Carvana is structured with their call centers. Ultimately, customers say they want to buy cars completely online, but what their actions show us is at some point, nearly all customers are going to hop off of that path and want help. So Omnichannel, for the way that I look at it and what we're focused on with our group is how can we be ever present in that whole customer journey And then how can we make sure that we are ready to pick the ball up when a customer does raise their hand and say, OK, now I need help wherever they are and then offer a seamless transition to working with somebody in the store, not making customer, not asking customers to redo anything that they've already done, recognizing their past actions and then just being wherever they're coming from. at whatever point being ready to receive them and then help move them along their their pipeline and their purchasing path you make it sound so easy i wish it was i just get it it's it's certainly a a a huge ask of a dealership to be to have visibility into where that customer is once they start the conversation with the store and there's a lot of like tools that are available, but they're not really as simple to tap into and pull meaningful information out of where this customer is and triage the seriousness of how hot that lead is. like with the cdps like you mentioned digital retailing tools i feel like that had a a burning hot front plate that's cooled off a little bit and we've got you know some the dust is settled where we see like maybe those are just like really qualified leads that filled out more information than other ones but with like a cdp where do you feel like those are are starting to settle into so I feel like this year was AI, AI, AI every conference I went to. Last year was all the year of the CDP. CDPs, I think, are incredibly valuable tools, but it's a lot to bite off to do it correctly. And a lot of our group, we've been slower. We've been slower to try to bite off and build something internally. just as we continue to evaluate, you know, what setup actually makes sense for us. Geographically, we're all spread out. So we've, I mean, we have a lot of conversations about group level versus individual store CDPs. And then we're kind of dabbling a little bit with a couple of vendor partners that I think of it as like a CDP light that are doing some ownership outreach, some lifecycle management for us. And we're seeing good returns. So we're kind of still in the dipping our toes in the water phase of CDPs just because it is a huge and expensive lift to set something up at the group level. And we still want to make sure before we take that on that we have the right tools in place and processes to activate that data and see ROI on it. that's you know i feel like it's you know one part is like what does this dealership really need we're short on pre-owned pickup trucks let's find an excuse to use our CDP or, or, you know, our database and go after everybody who's purchased an F one fifty from us over two years ago and let them know because of market conditions, we're aggressively buying pickup trucks. So now it's not just saying we buy cars or we want to buy your car back. It's like we're trying, we're buying your car specifically and people who've purchased who aren't doing routine services. Okay, what do we do? Should we email them, text them, call them? run social ads to them to try to see if we can, um, improve on our, our, you know, loyalty from, from sales to service, get a better fixed absorption rate and start to play with it with things that are meaningful for our bottom line. Cause it can be overwhelming cause it's so much and it can get expensive and it can become a huge distraction to try to really wrap your brain around it. Maybe it's just my brain cause I went to public schools and, Well, it's no, not just you. I mean, it's, and that's why we've, we've taken a little bit more fractured approach rather than just sending off one big CDP or one source of truth is we, we like to be, we like to be forward thinking, but also make sure that we stay flexible enough to partner with whoever is best in class of whatever it is they're doing. Sometimes that means that we, we partner with one vendor, uh, across sales, service, parts, body shops. Sometimes that means somebody that's doing service AI generated service maintenance interval outreach is better than the company that's doing sales AI. So rather than saying, hey, we know how to do all of this better than anybody, we choose to partner with experts in their individual fields and kind of let them run. Because people who are like an inch wide, mile deep with a super special specialty thing. Is that wild? Go ahead. I was just going to say, because it is wildly complex. Yeah. Okay, good. I don't think you're not making me feel alone on that. Um, With AI and like, you know, there's so many different ways to look at it from making creative and copywriting and responding quickly and speed to lead and regurgitating old leads and heating them up. Where are you finding it to be beneficial at this point? Or are you finding it beneficial at all? Yeah. So we use, we, are heavily partnered with a couple of different AI companies, both in sales and service, and are starting to move into some AI tools in the body shop. Ultimately, and we do let AI handle a lot of customer communications. Ultimately, the way that I see AI, and I think our group in general sees it, is we've got to look at AI as a tool to scale our employees, not replace our employees. So how do we make our employees whose time is incredibly valuable? How do we put them, if I've got a BDC agent, how do I use AI to do long-term follow-up, the repetitive tasks, and how do I maximize the amount of actual quality customer communications that that BDC agent is having on a daily basis? It's not an effective use of their time. to send an email to a thirty day old lead that has never responded, especially when almost everybody universally at some point just starts hit and send on templates and their tasks in the CRM. I don't need a lot of person to do that. And I can take that on. But then we on the flip side, we've got to train our agents. When you get when you see engage with an AI tool, how do you transition that and how do you transition that conversation with the customer? seamlessly to a live agent and a live person and to in the customer's view have it seem like it's you're you're talking to a cohesive team you're not just you didn't just get flipped from the chat bot to the person and now you got to actually start the conversation yeah and start from square one like hey we just talked about all this it's like it's i can't remember ever having a tool with as many vendors coming into the space as voice ai right now and almost everybody's starting in service and the first question that i asked on every demo was what is your escalation path what what what happens when the ai can't answer a question what is the escalation path to a live person and you would be shocked how many times that question just gets met with awkward silence um but when you're looking at ai you you have to look at it as as a part of your team not a fragmented standalone thing that's just going to do everything for you. Are you finding success with voice AI, SMS, chat? So we have not moved heavily into voice AI yet. We're having a lot of conversations about that internally right now with a couple of different vendors, a couple of different newcomers into the space, as well as some longstanding partners that we have that are moving into the voice space. Voice is complex. I'm perfectly comfortable with our AI tools, with text messaging and emailing customers, but voice is a whole other animal. And there's a part of me, as much as I love being forth, as much as I love AI and I use AI all day, every day in various ways, there's a part of me that's still in the back of my mind is old school thinking that I've got teams of BDC agents, both sales and service that spend all day long desperately trying to get customers on the phone. There's a part of me that's nervous about turning a lift. Somebody, if somebody is engaged enough to pick the phone up and call the dealership, there's a part of me that's nervous about turning that over and, and not having that go right to a live person. Yeah. And it's like, what type of customer too would be just appalled, you know, that, They're trying to buy a ninety thousand dollar vehicle and they're they're talking with your robots who are pretending to be humans. And ultimately, it's got to be able to answer the question. Part of the part of the challenge with voice over text or email is with text or email, there's a natural built in expected delay in response on the customer side. If I text somebody, I inherently understand it's going it's I inherently understand that it's going to take some time for them to text me back. It may be thirty seconds, it may be a couple of minutes, but that's a reasonable time frame for a customer to receive a response. And that gives us a little bit of breathing room if the AI can't answer a question to step in and continue the conversation. That doesn't exist with voice. So that's I think that's the biggest challenge that voice AI companies are going to have is it's there is no natural great to to turn something over and at the end of the day can i truly answer is this car that i want to come look at in thirty minutes is it on the lot is it available that's a tough one Who's doing a good job right now of this, of leveraging AI or is it a bunch of different vendors or have you found one? It's a bunch of different vendors. So it's, and it's funny because they all have very, they all have different approaches and different specialties. But just to name a few, we're heavily partnered with Impel, both on sales service and database marketing. Heavily partnered with BusyCar on the service side of things. They do fantastic work. We're also heavily partnered with Pneuma and, you know, Pneuma takes it takes a very different approach to ai they're they're what they're doing and they i guess technically are in the voice space because it all originates on on the phone but their approach and the problems they're trying to solve are different than most other voice ai companies um so everybody right now is kind of twenty twenty six is gonna be really interesting because right now everybody's kind of in their own little lanes but from from all the conversations we're having, I think, is where you're going to see a lot of people start trying to play in other people's sandboxes. We'll have to do an anniversary version of this conversation and see where things are shaking up. Even the voice AI, it sounds so good. The demos I'm listening to, the latency of them responding sounds so natural. Even the ones now that we're listening to, it's radically different than four months ago, what we were listening to. Yeah. It's an interesting time to be a part of this. You know, just to be alive, but to be finding good applications. Ultimately, the thing that I always come back to whenever we're looking at a new AI vendor is, do we have a problem or a deficiency in the store that this tool can solve? Or is this just a really cool tool that we've got to go try to find and invent a problem for the soul? And I think there's a it's it's really easy to get caught in that second trap and just because it's it's really we've got a cool solution, but we don't have the problem yet. Let's yeah, let's know. We've asked you probably has to actually exist. Uh, tell me this from an Omni channel. That means you look at a lot of channels. I imagine to really engage customers through the journey, you find specific channels that are getting more impactful or more important or they're emerging. So yes and no. Um, I think the, rather than individual, the way I see it as rather than individual channels becoming more or less important, I think the, I tend to think about the fact that customers are touching more channels than they ever have before, which makes it harder for us because I feel like you almost have to be a little bit of everywhere. I think the last Cox journey that I read about said customers on average take sixty two touch points before they finally convert. So rather than trying to focus on and I mean, that's not to say that we don't have things that we focus on more. We don't place ad dollars in various channels over others. But ultimately, you don't know exactly what it is that that customer is going to sink in and make them actually click the button and start engaging with you. So you kind of have to be a little bit of everywhere and have a little bit of presence just as much as you can. and then try to be in the right places at the right times with the right messaging that's relevant. I know that was very much a non-answer. No, no, it is an answer. It sounds like a pain to really make it, you know, it's like, um, yeah, I don't know. I was hoping you were just going to say like one word, tick tock, it's going to explode or something. That's like, I don't have a magic anything. I don't want magic anything. And then, I mean, we were talking earlier about customers and different, in different metrics and localities being different marketing is no different. I mean, it's we're spread across just North, largely just North Carolina. And even within North Carolina, I've got, we've, we've got campaigns and tools and third-party listing companies and things that work at one store that just bomb at others inexplicably. So it's, it's all, I think it's, it's getting as much as we think that everything's getting bigger and broader. I think it's, we sometimes forget just how hyper localized our business actually can be. Yeah. And then you start looking at attribution. You can go down a rabbit hole and really get into like the nitty gritty of like using clairvoyant things to look at that customer and how do they end up driving off of our lot in that vehicle. And then you see like, okay, they went to car gurus. Are we, we're not even on car gurus. Okay. But they, that was part of their journey, but they ended up coming back through here. Trying to, trying to look, looking at clairvoyant click trails is the most fascinating and maddening thing that you can possibly do when you're trying to figure out where to place that dollars. Right. It's like, this is, this person's been all over the place. Cool. Now what? What should we be doing differently? Or what should I be doing more of? I said earlier, Cox says it's sixty two touch points. Okay, well, this customer, it's three hundred and thirty four. So I mean, how how do you capture that? Yeah. Yeah. Got to give credit to every single vendor along the way who's helped make those touch points. And every single one can be like, OK, we got that sale. All right. Could we do some rapid fire questions? A lot of them are going to be about onboarding because, again, I think you stand alone as like the authority on onboarding for dealers. But the big one too, are you going to be speaking at NADA about this topic? Are you going to NADA? I'll be at NADA, yes. Any advice for dealers to get the most out of NADA while they're there? Have a plan. Have a plan, especially if it's your first time going. It is overwhelming. And have a plan of who you want to pre-schedule meetings with. what booths you'd like to stop by for demos and stay focused okay try to go in with an idea of what you're looking for like what what make a list of what what pain points do i have at the dealership and that will help inform what where you spend your time when you're on the show floor it seems much more precise than just walking around and then going to parties and then getting on a plane and going home. Like, what did I just learn? Yeah, it's, it's, it's a long week. It's not, it's, it's a hall for a lot of us on the East coast to get out there. It's hopefully, you know, hopefully there's not some, I don't expect there to be snow in Vegas this year. Like we had in new Orleans last year, but we also didn't expect snow in new Orleans last year. So it's by the time you get out there and you've spent the money to go, you've, you, Book your hotel room. You pay for your tickets. Just make sure you have a plan to get something out of the show. And it's not going to hang out. I need to plug this, but we've got the Vendor Dealer Mixer. We've got a twenty group of vendors. It's actually, I think, twenty-three vendors now. It's dealervendormixer.com. We're at Paris. Tons of fun, drinks, whatever. And it's a cool environment for us to be able to sit down, engage with a lot of dealers, hear what their headwinds are, what's interesting. I find I can do that on these conversations. But you should come if you haven't heard about it yet. I'll send you an invite. Yes, I'll send you an invite. I'll try to make it. OK, I'll make these more rapid now. OK. What is one word that describes bad onboarding? Confusion. Perfect. What is one metric dealers should watch for in the first fourteen days with a new vendor? Utilization. Dang, did you prepare for this? These are good. Maybe a little bit. One question every dealer should ask before they go live. It's the one thing that they don't ask, and it's what makes this fail. Yeah. Yeah. What have dealers that you've onboarded in the past do that didn't work? Yep. One reason vendors get fired in the first ninety days. Silence. Easy to do. One habit that separates top performing dealer partners. Proactive communication. I think proactive communication is key. Keep me keep me up to date. Let me know when you're let me know when you're in stores. Let me know who you met with. Let me know of any problems. be eyes and ears and, and just, there's no such thing as over communication. We may not respond, but communication. And what I like about all these things that you've answered is it's all human. It's all doing good business. It's not silver bullets and, and you know, just magic products that you, you, you sign up for and that's it. Yep. There is no such thing as set it or forget it. You've got to own your product. You've got to support the people in stores. That's the key to it. Well, Curtis Driver, I'm a big fan of what you're up to, what you bring to your dealership group, and now what you're starting to bring more and more to just the industry as a whole. I appreciate it. It was good talking to you. Thanks for the invite. Yeah. How can people connect with you or follow you? Is there any channels that you're active on? Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn or curtis.driver at capitalautogroup.com. It's the easiest way to get in front of me. Cool. Well, Curtis, I can't thank you enough, man. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Good to talk to you, Andrew.