Online tools push car dealerships forward, help customers

Brian Kramer spent 28 years in auto retail, 19 of them as a dealership general manager with Germain Motor Co. and AutoNation Inc.

Last month, he entered the dealership software side of the business, leaving his role as general manager of Germain Toyota of Naples in Florida to join Cars.com as executive vice president and general manager of Accu-Trade, which the Chicago-based company acquired this year.

Kramer had used Accu-Trade at his dealership before the pandemic began in 2020, but he integrated it with the store's digital retailing tool during the pandemic and found that it helped source used vehicles and can improve consumers' digital purchase experience. The tool helped Germain Toyota of Naples double the number of appraisals and increase used-vehicle acquisitions by about 30 percent from 2019 through December 2021, he said.

Kramer, a 2012 Automotive News 40 Under 40 honoree, is a proponent of technology to keep dealerships competitive and to offer customers a better car-buying experience. He has supported efforts to allow electronic signatures en route to a paperless transaction. And this year, Germain Toyota of Naples experimented with selling a vehicle in the metaverse, a digital world enabled by technology such as virtual and augmented reality.

Kramer, 45, spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle about Accu-Trade, digital transactions and the metaverse. Below are edited excerpts.

On using Accu-Trade at the dealership:

It opened up doors, especially when COVID hit. We didn't have enough management staff. We didn't have enough head count. So we had to figure out, how are we going to appraise vehicles with limited staff? So the answer was to use Accu-Trade to enable salespeople.

We were already using it for some time, but we were using it on the back side through our CRM. It wasn't really, I would say, customer-facing. We had no other choice if we wanted to appraise that many cars because we weren't willing to sacrifice on speed.

We had a slogan, a halo — simple, fast and easy — and we weren't willing to compromise on any of those.

It allowed us to really scale. It was almost like an hourglass, where all these people that wanted to sell their car were up here, and then our process was like the belt that was cinched in the middle. And then the bottom is the supply and all the consumers that want those vehicles.

That's one of our goals here at Accu-Trade, Cars.com, is to open that up to allow a lot more flow through, to align the supply with the demand a lot more efficiently.

On providing accurate trade valuation tools online:

Whatever the process is, I think the most important thing is that it's consistent along the way. That's what the major online used-car retailers do. And I think it's also extremely important not to give them a range, but to give them an exact value they can transact at.

We found that although it was a little frightening, they don't really shop you when you just offer them that information. It's when you give ballpark ranges, or from here to here, and you create the seed of doubt that they either don't come in [or] they shop you against another online retailer. And they might still buy the vehicle from you as a franchised dealer, but you don't always see those trades.

On what he hopes to accomplish at Accu-Trade:

We hope to integrate with all the major digital retail tools because I think that we can help all of them. Integrate into the mobile websites, the desktop websites — but also integrate it into the process.

The chat templates, the text template, the email template so that it's not just a widget on the website, it's a holistic part of the process.

On transacting in the metaverse:

The transaction in the metaverse is just another extension. It's almost like a call-to-action button on your website; it was just in the metaverse. Now candidly, that transaction was with one of our dealership associates. That way we could control it a little bit more. And there wasn't [an] ad that we put into the metaverse that somebody clicked on, and then they transacted with one of our own associates.

It was more of a dry run to see if the technology worked, which it did. It was a little slow, just like Internet transactions were at the beginning. It was very clunky, disjointed. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done there, but at least we provided proof of concept.