Vendor Insights Podcasts

Mike Gilson believes that five years from now, the car business will look back and laugh at the software dealers run on today. Groups with 50 to 100 stores often juggle dozens of different store management and customer management systems, stacked up through decades of acquisitions, and replacing any one of them, he says, is like open heart surgery. Meanwhile, 64% of car buyers now use AI tools to compare models and payments, yet most dealerships can't even be found by those tools, and he argues...

71% of the brands a car shopper will ever consider are already in their head before they type a single search, and Jason Goldberg says that's exactly why dealers putting 90% or more of their ad budget into search and social are showing up too late. He walks through how dealers in one automaker's regions pooled their ad dollars into streaming TV and audio to buy the customer instead of the network, and argues that as AI shopping agents start requesting quotes on their own, dealers who don't buil...

Alex Perdikis walks through how his AI texted service customers about selling or trading their car and drew a 60% response rate at his Ford store, with cars bought the same day, and argues that the customers you've already sold are the best source of used car inventory you will ever find. Alex Perdikis is the Owner/CEO of Koons Motors Inc, which runs Ford, Lincoln and Mazda stores in the Washington, DC area, and the founder of inRide, an AI company closing in on 100 dealerships after about six ...

Aaron Baldwin estimates that coordination between dealers, automakers, and vendors is maybe 10% effective today, and argues that a bad car buying experience doesn't start in the showroom, it starts with the very first ad a shopper sees. Aaron Baldwin is the President of Mobility Global Sales Solutions, the division that brings Automotive Mastermind, MarketScan, and Polk under one roof. He started out selling cars and working deals at Asbury Automotive Group in the mid-2000s, was the foundi...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Rick Vrablik, General Manager at Nielsen Automotive Group, and Babak Mofrad, President at AutoVision to discuss how an 11-store group that shares every used car across every rooftop sourced, appraised, and priced its way to a 400-unit record month just five months after switching appraisal tools. Rick admits he fought the shared-inventory model at first, then explains why it forces managers to put the right money on every t...

Eric Rea and Dennis Steele's first pitch to a car dealership ended with the general manager writing a check for the entire year on the spot, and they say that moment is what convinced them dealerships, not the tire shops they started with, would build their company. They walk through how a 700-location collision repair network let Podium's voice agent take over 61% of its after-hours phone calls, and how that agent is now on pace to help book $1 billion in repairs this year with a customer sati...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Shawn Dennis, Marketing Director of the Ron Marhoffer Auto Group, and Patrick Janes, AVP of Inventory Solutions at vAuto to discuss why more than 90 percent of vehicle listings fail to sell themselves, and what it actually takes to merchandise a car the right way in 2026. Shawn breaks down why proper merchandising, accurate options, a clean Carfax, real angles, video and walk arounds, takes three to four hours per car and func...

Cuyler Owens is the CEO of Widewail, a customer reputation and review intelligence company that works with thousands of dealership rooftops across the country. He built software companies before coming into automotive, and now works alongside a market advisory board of dealer principals to turn millions of customer reviews into staff coaching, training, and revenue decisions. Topics: 00:20 Incentives Ruin Survey Data. 02:30 Reviews Are A Free Focus Group. 06:50 AEO Values Recency And Volume...

Jonathan Kienle's team once sent a salesperson to chase down a customer's canceled check, and he crashed the loaner car doing it, and Kienle says that single moment is exactly why he stopped trusting cash, checks, and credit cards to handle his dealership's biggest transactions. He walks through how switching the default down payment method saved his group $168,000 in fees so far this year, with $300,000 in sight by year's end, and argues that most dealers are needlessly eating card fees and ...

Zach Billings is the CEO of Wikimotive, a search marketing agency he has led for over two decades, building it into a bootstrapped, U.S.-based team of 50 professional writers serving dealers across the country. Free of outside investors, Wikimotive recently ran an all-staff exercise to rewrite its mission statement around a single measure, dealer outcomes rather than its own bottom line, and it has pruned services, including a legacy organic Facebook management product, once they stopped prod...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Travis Siebert, SVP at DealerPay, and Kris Towle, Chief Accounting Officer at Niello Company to discuss why one of the auto industry's oldest processes, collecting cash and checks from parts and service customers, still costs dealerships money, time, and trust. They speak candidly about the safety risk of sending drivers out with cash, why most dealerships never question an outdated process until something goes wrong, and w...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are John Keohane, VP of Operations and Partner at Temecula Valley Buick GMC, and Liam Golightly, SVP of Customer Success at Podium to discuss how AI operator agents are giving dealership leaders a way to run their entire operation without being in every conversation themselves. John built his own AI agent, which he nicknamed Emily, to scrape telematics data, run weekly revival campaigns on stale leads, and even coach his sales tea...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Eric Cohen, CEO of Merchant Advocate, and Cole Frankman, Owner/Operator of Frankman Motors, to discuss why credit card processing fees keep climbing year after year and how dealers can uncover the hidden increases buried in their merchant statements. Eric reveals that 80 percent of dealerships he reviews are being overcharged by 20 to 25 percent, and explains why the fee never really stops rising: the sales rep who set up t...

Matt Muilenburg is the Chief Product Officer at Impel, a company building the AI platform used by thousands of dealerships to run sales, service, and fixed operations. He has spent thirty years working in dealer technology, starting at the Cobalt Group in the early internet era. He has focused on the impact of artificial intelligence on dealership operations over the last several years. Topics: 09:55 The Trade-In Lead Killing Profits. 18:40 Smallest Dealers Face Biggest Existential R...

Today I'm joined by Matt Leone, CEO at DriveCentric. Matt breaks down why one dealer group ditched a $100,000 Salesforce contract they were barely using, why building your own software rarely pays off the way it promises, and why the next fight in the industry is over who actually owns the customer relationship. Topics: 06:00 The Referee Analogy For Software. 11:50 Consolidation Isn't Happening. 18:30 You're Replacing 7 Vendors. 24:50 Why They Sell You A Car Post-Purchase. 3...

Today I'm joined by Scott Traylor, Vice President at Mia Labs. Scott breaks down how voice AI is pulling $8,000 to $30,000 a month in after-hours revenue at stores where customers used to just hit a voicemail, why service advisors are letting calls go unanswered on purpose, and how Mia became the first voice AI company approved by General Motors for their co-op program. If you think AI is still a future conversation, Scott makes the case that you're already in the same moment as when someo...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Mike Martucci, General Manager at Jim Ellis Kia, and Kevin Esmezyan, Chief Product Officer at Matador AI to discuss how conversational AI is turning a three-person sales team handling 700 leads a month into a machine that doubles close rates and books service appointments at nearly 90% — while most dealers are still missing after-hours calls and watching customers drive to the competition. Mike walked into a store with a li...

AJ McGowan, VP of Research and Development at Reynolds & Reynolds. He breaks down why fragmented software platforms are quietly limiting what AI can see and do, uses a service drive scenario to show how a fully connected system could surface a high-value trade opportunity in real time, and explains why Reynolds is investing in its own hardware infrastructure to make that scale. Topics: 03:25 Why Auto AI Is Different. 06:45 Real AI Vs. Gimmicks. 08:45 Why Reynolds Is Buying Hardwar...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Frederick Grimm, Co-Founder and COO of AppraisalPro, and Danny Galat, General Sales Manager at Lithia Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Bend, to discuss how dealers are using real-time diagnostic scanning to stop taking hidden mechanical losses on trade-ins and turn a wholesale department that was bleeding money into one that's actually profitable. Danny walks through the $8,000 Ford Raptor miss that kept him up at night and drove...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Karen Chagnon, VP Sales at Guidepoint Systems, and Ferris Hamdan, General Manager at Wesley Chapel Honda, to discuss why most dealers are operating blind — unaware of which vehicles on their lot have a dead battery, a check engine light, or low fuel, and equally unaware of what's happening inside the vehicles they already sold, data their manufacturer sees but doesn't share with them. Ferris walks through how Wesley Chap...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Ben Atkinson, VP of Auto Lending at Upstart, and Evan Driscoll, General Sales Manager at Audi Jacksonville to discuss why the credit score has become the most overrated number in auto lending and how a full-spectrum dealership running everything from $2,000 used cars to $400,000 Rolls-Royces gets first-time buyers approved at competitive rates with no money down. Evan breaks down how a slow approval costs his store at least $...

In this episode of the Industry Spotlight, joining host Sam D'Arc are Art Dessein, Vice President of Sales at Impel, and Rebekah Scheussler, Business Development Director at Walters Auto Group to discuss why luxury dealers are quietly losing service customers to independent shops and how AI is rebuilding the personalized experience at scale across both sales and service. This conversation surfaces the silent retention leak inside fixed operations: a nine-minute average service hold time, an 80%...

Today, I'm joined by Brian Abrams, VP of Data and AI at CDK Global, to discuss the critical shift from viewing AI as a "tool" to an operational strategy that prevents massive profit leakage. Brian explains why nearly 60% of dealer data is currently "dirty," how consumer AI agents are already calling stores to negotiate deals, and why a unified customer profile is now the only way to protect your margins. This episode is brought to you by: 1. Podium - The AI platform trusted by one in three dea...

Today I'm joined by Jim Roche, CEO of Warrcloud. This conversation breaks down the massive $32 billion surge in warranty work, why customer pay is decelerating, and how dealers can use technology to fix "leaky" receivables and technician dissatisfaction. Jim reveals the tactical steps needed to modernize the service lane before the "death spiral" of rising prices drives your customers away. This episode is brought to you by: 1. Podium - the AI platform trusted by one in three dealerships. Po...