Seminars

In today’s rapidly evolving technology market, our mission is to provide automobile dealers with the tools and guidance they need to negotiate for their dealership systems with confidence. We have helped over 7,000 dealerships in the U.S. and Canada to dramatically reduce tech expenses and get the right system for the best possible price and terms. That track record makes us the most trusted dealer technology advisor in North America. By walking our dealers, step-by-step, through the technology selection process, we help dealers focus on what they do best: sell and service vehicles.

Our comprehensive research process and best-practice consulting approach build the base for delivering profound and yet executable recommendations. Our experts appeared in over 500 seminars and webinars over the years and we are regularly featured at NADA and NCM 20 Groups, ADA’s, AICPA, DealersEdge, and others. We deliver compelling insights that will help dealers negotiate for technology with confidence and achieve substantial savings.

We’ve spent 25 years advising automobile dealers about dealership technology and we’ve learned this: nothing is more constant than change. Focusing on what work and avoiding what does not will help dealers save a lot of money and avoid hassle. In this seminar, we focus more on the technology side than the negotiation side. Our goal is to help dealers understand what has changed technologically, and how those changes affect them in their decision making.

When asked what IT solutions dealers cannot live without, most dealers say their phone system. They could go back to manual operations and run a dealership without a DMS, but they could never cut off customer communication. Being available via phone at all times is crucial for dealer success or failure. Unlike a DMS, Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) technology is not sold directly from the manufacturer. Dealers must find the best reseller before deciding which phone system is right for them. This seminar aims to help dealers understand the complex telephony and communications solutions market, preparing decision makers for selecting and negotiating the right IPT system with the right channel partner.

As dealers add more and more features to their dealership management suite by working with supplementary technology vendors, the consequences also get more complicated. Third-party vendors may offer more system capability and generate more sales, but these vendors also have an impact on dealership financials, data integration, and data security. On average, a dealership has between 15 to 20 parties extracting data elements from its DMS. But what do these third parties really do with dealership data? Do they share sensitive customer info with affiliates? Do they sell information to brokers? How much data is really needed to provide the service? The goal of this seminar is to help key personnel understand how to work with third-party vendors. We want to support dealers as they manage their supplementary technology partners more (cost-)efficiently and securely.

With decreasing margins in the variable business, most dealers are looking at Fixed Operations in general–and Service in particular–to boost profit. Deploying technology in the Service workflow promises the highest upside for dealers pursuing this strategy, but also offers endless options. What vendors and systems are available for service scheduling, service walk-around, or mobile technicians? What systems deliver and exceed dealer expectations? We researched these questions and this seminar presents our results along with insights about how to select the right tools and negotiate the best price and terms.