Talk to each other: How dealers can smooth tech vendor bumps

Ten-plus technology vendors help executives and employees at Carter Myers Automotive run the dealership group and interact with customers. That may seem like a lot, but it's roughly half the number from five years ago, after CEO Liza Borches led efforts to streamline and nudge remaining partners to work more efficiently together.

These partners include separate dealership management system and customer relationship management platforms, plus technology companies focused on inventory management, digital retailing and more.

Carter Myers, of Charlottesville, Va., began its streamlining efforts around 2018, Borches said, when the company switched to single DMS and CRM systems. The effort accelerated about two years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Carter Myers combed through its other vendors to determine which relationships still made sense to scale across the company, which now includes more than 20 franchised regional new-car dealerships.

Borches also held a summit in Charlottesville, summoning Carter Myers' remaining technology vendors to explain their purpose, identify shortfalls in usage, and maximize efficiency and partnership interaction. The process has helped the company keep down the number of technology partners it uses.

"We've been able to hold it down because we've been doing a stronger evaluation prior to bringing anything new on board," Borches said.

Borches, in an interview with Automotive News Reporter Mark Hollmer, explained the vendor summit, what it accomplished and how her dealership group benefited from auditing the vendors it had. Edited excerpts are below.

Q: How did you decide to streamline your technology?

A: I looked at it in two different buckets, our DMS partner and our CRM partner. We've always wanted to have consistency there, and so that's one relationship. And then I look at the other vendor partners, who are the tech partners who help us communicate with our customers on a daily basis. They are the partners that tend to change more often. The time that we went with a new digital retailing tool, it was probably four years ago, there was a lightbulb that went off that this is an important initiative, that we want to have a consistent experience for any customer of Carter Myers Automotive.

You called a meeting of most of your technology vendors 18 months ago to try to create more efficiencies. Tell me about that.

It was a combination of marketing and tech vendors. The idea was, how do we put everybody in a room and have a discussion about which responsibilities lie with each partner? Where do we have overlap? And where do we have gaps? And then if we have gaps, which partner in the room to support us is filling that gap? And if we have overlap, who's the best one to own this so we're not duplicating efforts?

What were your takeaways?

We established as a company a list of nine questions that we ask any new vendor partner or [use] to evaluate an existing vendor partnership. Some of those questions were, what is this tool or partner solving, but they also make sure there's a reason that we have this partnership.

Did you ask your vendors to solve inefficiencies among themselves, or did you simply determine which ones would stay or leave?

It was really for us to learn and gather information. Everybody in the same room helped our vendor partners create relationships with each other so they could communicate about our account. After that meeting is when we worked with Kyle Mountsier of ASOTU and Auto Genius and he helped us establish these nine questions so we could go back and then evaluate the partnerships and especially any new partnership that we might like. We would ask them to go through these nine questions, really understand what the problem is to solve and champion, and what does success look like.

Why did you agree to hold this meeting?

We knew that we were not utilizing all of our partnerships with these vendors to the fullest extent. I felt we probably had redundancy in some of the tools we were using, or the marketing we were spending. Instead of us having singular relationships and communication with each of our vendor partners, I felt strongly that if they knew each other and could collaborate on what's best for CMA, not only would we have a better result, but they would also have a better result.

Did you end your relationship with any of your technology vendors after this process or add new ones?

We did not remove anybody, but there were some things that we found either weren't getting done or were getting duplicated that we were able to resolve within those conversations and assign responsibility to the vendor partners that I think helped us have a more successful partnership.

Were any of your tech vendors nervous before the meeting? Did they feel like they were going to lose their contracts?

There was definitely one in particular. I'm not going to name any names. But I feel like once they went through the process and realized we weren't trying to get rid of anybody, we were just trying to create collaboration and integration in a way that would allow us to have stronger partnerships with each of them, I think the defenses went down.

Is there irony here that you made progress with your marketing and technology vendors not just through technology, but sitting in a room talking to each other?

It is a little bit ironic. But I do believe that technology is only there to complement and support personal relationships. It doesn't take the place of relationships. We need to have personal relationships with our customers and with our associates and then wrap it with technology that can create efficiencies and scale, but it does not replace relationships.

Is that a sentiment that's common among dealerships? Or is that an exception?

I believe that in our industry we look for what is the silver bullet, and we look for a tech solution to fix the problem. And I believe that if any dealer was honest with you, they would tell you that no tech solution fixes the problem. A tech solution should allow our team to be more efficient and effective in communication and connection. But it does not replace people and I feel you would hear that from anyone in our industry who honestly assesses their tech partners.

Should other dealerships pursue the same process?

I'm not going to pretend we are an expert in this and we're doing everything right, but I think we've started down the right path. I believe all of us in this industry — we have so much more expense, and so many more technology and marketing partners today than we did 10 years ago. Where we all need to work is, if we have all these additional tools, we should be able to have higher productivity and efficiency in each of our people. And I'm not sure we're seeing that yet. All of us need to look and say, OK, how are we using all these tools to make sure each one of our associates can be even more powerful in the position they're in?