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"It's Like a Wingman": The Sales Intelligence Tool Closing the Gap Between Your Worst and Best Reps | Jay Ku, Founder of HeyGreenlight

"It's Like a Wingman": The Sales Intelligence Tool Closing the Gap Between Your Worst and Best Reps | Jay Ku, Founder of HeyGreenlight

The Dealer Playbook Mar 03, 2026 21 min
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About this episode

Jay Ku, founder of HeyGreenlight, shares how his sales intelligence tool transforms dealership lead management by providing rich consumer data and personalized sales strategies. The platform, called Wingman, acts like a sales coach, guiding reps on when and how to engage leads, leveling the playing field between new and veteran salespeople. Jay highlights real-world examples of how Wingman personalizes customer interactions, from recommending parking spots to matching music preferences, enhancing the buying experience. The conversation also touches on the role of AI in augmenting human sales skills rather than replacing them.

Topics: sales intelligence lead management dealership sales training personalized sales strategies BDC enablement customer experience AI in sales sales coaching data-driven selling salesperson performance
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All right, crew, we are back here at NADA at the Auto Media Marketplace booth together
with iHeart Media Automotive.
I've got the man himself, Jay Koo, the founder and CEO of Hey Greenlight.
I can't wait to get into this with you.
Thanks so much for joining me on the DPB.
No, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
This is this is a moment for me to be here with you, man.
This is great.
You're going to start singing.
This is the moment we don't want to copy.
You see how I stopped myself?
We don't want to copyright strike.
OK, also, if I start singing, you instantaneously have nobody listening to this.
And so some protests to the FCC or something.
Maybe I want to just dive right in because first and foremost,
we've we've taken some trips around the NADA sun.
There is a lot of stuff to consume and take in.
It's rare that you land on an innovative idea that is fresh,
that something I believe deeply, which is leveraging the tools and resources
already at one's disposal and putting them together in an innovative way.
And here we are, you have it.
First, I want you to just tell me about how you came up with the idea for
Hey Greenlight and the problem that you guys are solving.
Sure. No, thank you.
I appreciate that.
So basically in my years at Truecar, I've probably met with people
representing thousands, a thousand dealerships.
And I think obviously there's a number of challenges in every dealership for sure.
I think two of the most significant ones are a salesperson has no clue when a
lead comes in.
They have no clue who that person is other than name and a phone number
and email and obviously have been.
But otherwise, they don't know who that person is challenge number one.
And therefore, every outreach, all the initial touch points with that
customer is incredibly generic.
Challenge number two is that turnover rates at dealerships sales.
You can invest tens of thousands of dollars, burn thousands of dollars on
leads on salespeople only for them to not remember their training, not use
their training or be gone in a few months, right?
And that's incredibly wasteful and also harmful to the dealership brand,
right?
Because at the end of the day, that salesperson is the spokesperson for
that dealership to that customer.
So you have two key challenges.
And that was especially true with something like Truecar that had all these
affinity partners where you were supposed to say lead comes in from Sam's club.
You're supposed to reference that.
Guess how many salespeople actually referenced it?
Less than the fingers on my hand.
So the whole idea was this is how do we solve those two challenges?
So basically when we started, hey, green light, the focus was on those two things.
So number one, through our partnerships with folks like Equifax and a number
of other people, we get incredible amounts of data on almost every single US consumer.
And so as soon as that lead comes in, we effectively append to that lead 25 plus
data points, income, credit score, garage data.
And with all that information, we then calculate how soon is that person
going to buy a car?
Because the reality is you need to talk to people differently based on timeframe,
based off of age, based off of, you know, viability in terms of affordability,
rather, those types of things.
And so we give every dealer the power to know that information about their leads.
Now, on its own, right?
That's great.
But even with that information, can you trust your salesperson to use
that info in the right way?
So instead, so we built essentially a sales product called Wingman, which more
or less develops a personalized sales strategy for every lead that comes in
down to what to text, what to email, what to say on the phone with a teleprompter.
And when to call, when to text, when to email down to the time of day,
some people cannot check their phone during the day.
So that's not maybe not the best time.
And it does all of that.
And so basically makes your worst salesperson or your newest salesperson
as good as your best.
OK, so there's a couple of things I want to draw on.
The first one I think is a challenge that we've had in this industry for a while,
which is training, training is so predicated upon the trainer's ability
to articulate and motivate and inspire and the recipient's own desire
to even want to learn or grow.
The second thing you brought up that I think is just so innovative
in its simplicity even, which is leveling the playing field.
What do we always, what do we hear?
I mean, from my experience, it's there's one or two BDC reps that are good.
There's the one that's always the best of the crop.
But even how are we measuring that compared to white?
And then there are the rest of them at varying degrees of efficiency.
What I'm hearing you say, tell me if this is if this tracks,
what I'm hearing you say is, but that's not a that's a thing of the past.
Like now, everybody, your newest green pea in the BDC,
right, your most seasoned, that's a level consistent playing field.
That's right. So that's absolutely right.
And what we've built is not so notice how when I talked about what we did,
I don't think I mentioned the letters A and I at all.
And the reason is that there is an aspect to it in terms of the intelligence
and us using it to basically pull in a number of different best practices
around sales and that type of stuff and feed it to the to the sales person.
But the reality is that this is a tool that is part coaching,
part immediate information sourcing, right?
If someone says, what's the towing capacity?
The tennis of rather than looking it up.
But then also it's basically taking the tips and tricks
that make the best salespeople who they are in giving it to all of your salespeople.
Case in point, just anecdotal.
We had one of our dealers and one of the calls,
the customer was saying how they're really into sort of the exterior color
of the car and how it looked and everything.
And basically when the salesperson was prepping for the appointment,
he asked the wingman, which is where he asked wingman,
she's coming in today for this appointment at three o'clock.
What do I need to prep and get ready for the appointment?
Based on the conversation, everything that happened, wingman tells them,
say this, don't say this.
Remember, this is her credit ban.
This is her income. These are her concerns.
Oh, by the way, because she mentioned that the exterior color is so important to her
when she comes in at three o'clock, the sun is going to be at this point
at the dealership.
Make sure you park the car on, I think it was like the south side or whatever
because a way that the lights can hit that paint, it's going to really make it shine.
Wow. Who would think to do that?
It's like I've used this term before and it's it's like
like a cruise ship has a cruise director.
To be a guest experience coordinator, right?
What you're effectively telling me here is
yeah, it's BDC enablement, but it's like guest experience coordination
provided like, who?
Hey.
Who's thinking about where the sun's going to be positioned at that time of day
so that the car can sparkle, you know, right?
Like now, if we could get it to know that my wife loves Diet Coke,
Fountain Diet Coke and that was sitting in the car, that car.
We are driving home in that vehicle.
It's actually funny you say that because we've trained on question based selling
where you take an interest in the person, not a position.
Tell me more.
So we've trained it such that it asks, it helps the salesperson ask questions
about why is that customer interested in the car?
What is a pain point that they're having?
What are the features that really they stand out for them?
And so and then also asking about their family situation, all those types of things
because, for example, we had one where we saw where the customer was like, oh,
yeah, you know, I'm going to bring my kids.
We're going to stop by and have some lunch before we come in.
And then we automatically populated into the teleprompter.
Oh, great.
That's you know, we actually here's three restaurant recommendations nearby
that are great and this one's great for families.
You know what?
When I can send you a confirmation of the appointment, I'll send you a link
to the restaurant and the Google map so you can just walk your way there.
And it's literally right down the street from the dealership.
You know what I love about this is because those are the things that the
customer actually kind of cares about.
Like what the last couple of times I've purchased a vehicle, I mean, they're
getting they're getting faster, but they're still this like three hour thing
where, you know, that they have to, even if it's brand new and never been sat in,
they got to bring it to detail.
They got it.
So you're still sitting there.
And every single time I kid you not, I say to my wife, what if they just asked
me what I wanted to eat and had Uber eats come and like, but to pick up on those
cues and what I'm seeing the opportunity here is to get ahead of that in a much
more intentional way.
That's right.
So here's the thing.
So is it reasonable to expect all of your salespeople to ask those questions,
make a personal connection when they're managing maybe 70, 80 leads per month?
I mean, you would think so, but, but understandably, maybe not.
And so we even had some where people mentioned like, oh, the sound system is
really important.
And then the teleprompter tells us all those persons asked, well, oh,
we'll kind of music you like to do.
What's your favorite artist?
They mentioned it.
And guess what?
When that person is preparing for that appointment, they ask wingman, what do I
need to do?
And it says, oh, by the way, you should have this music queued up ready to play
in the sound system because that's his favorite artist or something.
Right.
We even had one.
We, some of our dealer clients that have a large Spanish speaking customer base.
And so wingman told the salesperson, Hey, when you take a video of the car,
which by the way provides a script and instructions for what to video after you
take the video, make sure you should send it over to them on WhatsApp, because
it tends to be that Spanish speaking customers use WhatsApp more than I
message or these other things.
So you're going to get more engagement in a higher likelihood.
They're going to actually watch the video if you send it over WhatsApp.
Right.
I'm, you know, something that I've been really conscious of is in a world of AI,
GPT in particular, yes, I'm calling you out, really does a good job at reaffirming
my bias on so many things.
And so I'm, I'm trying to be conscious of what I'm about to ask because I
don't want it to seem like I'm just wanting to reaffirm a bias here.
However, we did, you did briefly touch on AI, but the throughput here that I'm
hearing is scale the human.
And I, I feel like there's two camps.
There's camp A, which is, um, you know, like, I, I can never remember the guy's
name, but the, the CEO of sales force who, you know, eight months ago, saying,
well, Mark, we're going to replace 50% of our workforce with AI.
Then you have Google on the other side of it.
That's like, no, we're, we may not hire as aggressively, but we are going to
leverage AI to speed our people up into that sort of a thing.
My own CTO Dan was on yesterday and he's talking about the need for the human
to still develop the skill set.
And I'm hearing something to the same degree of you, which is that the
through line to this is tech enabled human delivered.
That's right.
Is, is kind of how I'm hearing it.
But, but you see, I'm, I'm even conscious to make sure I'm not reaffirming a bias
of just the, the, the people in camp B who are like, no, people, people, we're
doing, you know what I'm saying?
Right.
Yeah.
What's your view on that?
So look, I think there's, there's a, like with everything, there's a time and
a place for every tool.
Yeah.
And I think like with everything, when something's new, everybody believes
that tool, it'll be a fix all and we'll kind of permeate into everything.
I think, look, here's the reality.
Here's my take on it.
And for any dealer that's thinking about where and how they utilize AI is most
of the players out there today are creating a gen like AI from a standpoint
of data analysis and quickly pulling things and insights, a hundred percent
great.
And there's a lot of people do that.
I think from an agentic AI standpoints, there's a lot of people developing
some great technologies, but I think a lot of them, it's, I think it's going
to become a commodity where like SEO or these other things that at some point
soon every dealer will have some amount of AI to answer phone calls, answer
questions.
Great.
If you just have a very straight Q and a type, I need to know, does it do this?
Where do I put that?
How do you know AI can answer it fine?
Sure.
And that's a great use for it.
But the reality is, is and not to poo poo the innovation behind that.
Like that's necessary.
That will be required.
Dealers will have that, but in the AI can book appointments.
But the question is, is okay, but what else from there?
And, and, and ultimately, can it help you sell?
Can it help you empathize?
Can it help you connect?
And we feel like we're one of the few that's actually focusing on that first
because I do think a genetic AI that can answer questions and book appointments
like that will be commonplace and there's any number of folks that can do that.
And we have an AI that can do that too.
And that's just, but that's, that's table stakes, man.
That's table stakes, you know, just like every dealer needs to do SEO.
Every dealer will need to have some kind of AI agent that can answer questions
and book appointments fine.
But it being utilized for sales is, is where we have to get more creative.
Yeah, I just feel like, you know, as long as human beings are going to continue
to be born on this planet, we're, we're, we're going to need them.
And we're going to, we're going to need them.
I'm talking like an AI now.
I'm talking like Skynet them.
We're going to need people.
We're going to desire people.
The work may change.
And I see, I see what you're doing with, with wingman as
changing, contributing to change in a positive way, but in a way that still
allows the human to do what they're good at, which is to feel and to discern
and to empathize and to trust.
That's right.
That's right.
And, and like I said, if you're talking to, you know, a 23 year old getting
our first car, maybe not a great credit, you know, and just trying to figure that
out, like you want to talk to a person as long as look, the reality is buying
a house is harder these days.
So for some people buying a car will be your most expensive purchase.
Right.
Like you want to feel good about that.
You want to feel consulted.
You want to feel empathized.
You want to feel helped.
And, you know, as much as the common kind of cliche of like, oh, people don't
enjoy going to dealerships and dealing with salespeople is that there's it's
still not to the point where they're like, you know what, like, I don't want to
talk to a person when I do this, right?
It's still there.
And so, and so that's right for us.
It's this tool is wingman on, you know, variable on fixed on acquisitions.
It's just having a person be able to sense, uh, understand, but have us have
something there that can give them the guidance and the tools, what questions
asked, what information to give, but also to help connect, right?
And, you know, people need help connecting.
I mean, it's ironic that you would have AI or technology help you connect, but
it really can, I can't, it can't replace, but it can certainly assist.
I'm, I think about, I'll never forget the experience.
I had sitting at my grandparents kitchen table when my father pulled out a brief
case, opens it up and pulls out the first cell phone.
You know, the big, like, yeah, yeah.
And my, my grandfather, who was a radio operator in World War two, so I had to
carry this massive backpack and all this.
My dad said, watch this and called them and my, the ghost, it looked like the
ghost left my grandfather's body at that level of innovation.
Right.
Now I'm thinking about everything that you've just talked about.
If you were to look at your parents or my parents, our parents generation in
your mind's eye and say, look at what we're doing here.
What do you think?
Do you think we have the same reaction?
I'd be like, what, what do you mean it's giving me?
I would, I would say this.
I would say, I would say in one sense, yes, but I would also say the, an older
generation that, you know, and like us, like when you wanted to call your
friend at their house, guess what?
You were to call the house, your parent would answer.
Hi, Mr. Smith.
Can I say, you know, and you were, you were forced to interact to develop those
aspects that today, I mean, it's so funny.
There's a cliche on like Tik Tok or Instagram, but how, you know, how you
know what generation your barista is at the coffee shop.
Basically, I talked to you, right?
Millennials are effusively about customer service.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Like all this kind of Gen Z.
They're like, what do you want?
You know, like, oh, it's like right there.
Like, yeah, okay.
You want to do it?
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Get out of it.
You know, it's just like, it's just that, that, and you walk up to them and
they're on their phone, right?
It's just, and so I say, yes, a hundred percent, but also it's a return to sort
of like, I don't know, it's almost like a lost art or certainly it's a lost
art, but also that art of connection even is, it's just, is hard to teach.
And the hallmarks of a great salesperson, they can do all those things organically,
naturally.
Yeah.
So we just want to make every salesperson be able to do that consistently and
automatically, even if they can do it organically.
Yeah.
There's a, there's a cycle or a circle here that I'm going kind of back to the
beginning, which I think is we talked about training my own, this is my own
opinion.
Okay.
So it's like, I know there's, there's difficulties.
There's challenges in training.
Like I said, the trainer wishes the trainee would get it.
The trainee wishes the trainer would go home.
However, what, what you've built, what you're deploying, the consistency, the
Intel, I think this is an unlock for those who are willing to pay attention
that they will begin to, to your point in, they'll ingest the information and
the cadences and the charisma and the delivery that it will actually train them
if they're paying attention.
And that will help them become better at this art of connection.
That is a hundred percent the goal.
And it was never, I suppose it's never good to build a product that makes you
irrelevant at some point, but listen, our feeling is there's always going to be
new salespeople.
You can fire yourself or you can get fired by somebody else.
Exactly.
And so the reality is this, so that we actually score every call.
So here's the thing, we have, we tell the salesperson what to write.
So also we have to figure it's not just the teleprompter on the phone, but it's
also emails and text messages, right?
And so the idea is that, is that we score on how faithfully that salesperson is
following the guidance.
So when we incorporate training best practices and all that coaching into it,
are they actually following it?
Or are they deviating from it?
In some cases that might be okay.
But then a GSM or GM, whoever can say, Hey, you know, Steve, I notice you're,
you're really deviating from the script a lot.
Well, why is that?
Right?
Well, just remember, we've trained it and we've built it in such a way to really
help you get connection to the customer.
So we actually score how faithfully people have it.
So then the dealer principal or dealer manager knows that, oh, like this, yeah,
this is actually working and paying off and they're following what we want them to
follow the, I have an affinity for operational efficiency.
And so one of the reasons I think I'm excited about this is just that it is not
operational efficiency at the cost of removing people.
It's operational efficiency at the investment of making them stronger, better
and more consistent.
That's right.
Cause look, like I said, if you think about an ecosystem of, of technologies and
a dealership, especially when it comes to AI, it's like, you know, fine, have an AI
that can answer inbound calls and book appointments, have an AI that can ask
some base, ask and answer basic questions, that kind of stuff.
But you can do that.
But if the salesperson, when it comes to timing, it always usually does for that
human to human interaction, cannot connect their way out of a paperback.
Like it, who cares?
Right.
And so what we're also seeing on some dealerships that we work with is they say,
oh, you know, we've tested some AI solutions, but guess what happens?
Person comes to the dealership for their appointment.
Salesperson one, hasn't read the transcripts of the conversation to no
clue what they're looking for, whatever.
And guess what started all over again.
How frustrating is that versus our belief is if you keep the person at the
center, which is why our wingman, when it generates texts, generates emails, we
want it to be that the salesperson is sending it, editing it, tweaking it.
They can just read it and be like, Oh, great.
It's referencing that she has three kids.
It mentions the fact that she's worried about, you know, cargo space.
And it does all that automatically.
Cool.
Great.
I'm reinforcing that send through the CRM.
Wonderful.
So I'm still at the center of it because again, when that person comes in,
we've already been dating, we know what to do.
Like we know each other here.
That's so valuable, I think in so many ways.
And it's just something that we feel like is hard to do a lot of dealerships.
Well, listen, I think this is amazing.
I think everybody that's willing to pay attention should be paying attention to
this because I really love the throughput to human connection, increasing
and leveling up human capabilities.
As we wind down, Jay, how can those listening or watching, you can look
right into that camera there and tell everybody how they can connect with you.
Yeah, I'd say like come visit us at heygreenlight.com.
Check us out on LinkedIn.
And yeah, come learn more about it.
And we're excited to show you and show you what we can do.
Well, the man, thanks so much for joining me on the dealer playbook.
Yeah, no, thank you.
Appreciate it.
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