It was 2004, and Troy Good and his team had just finished performing a paintless dent repair before an audience of nearly 100 Chrysler employees. He hoped they had done well. They had. The crowd erupted into a standing ovation.
That was the day Good, founder of Dent Zone, sealed his first service contract deal with an automaker. The paintless dent repair product his Texas company agreed to private-label for Chrysler was Auto Appearance Care.
"When we were introducing it to the F&I departments, they didn't understand exactly what paintless dent repair was, and so in the early years, [demonstrations were] what we had to do," Good told Automotive News. "We had our technicians do a lot of demonstrations. Nobody knew about it; nobody had any history."
Showing people was essential to getting them to understand that the process was a viable, noninvasive alternative to body shop repairs, which require more downtime, added Jeff Beaver, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Nobilis Group.