“Time Kills Deals!” – The 40% Rule and the Speed Strategy That Closes More Car Deals | Chase Abbott, VP of Sales at Cox Automotive
Car Dealership Guy Podcast
“Time Kills Deals!” – The 40% Rule and the Speed Strategy That Closes More Car Deals | Chase Abbott, VP of Sales at Cox Automotive
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Because guess what, your competitors aren't doing it. And when it comes to innovation, you're either the steamroller or you're the road. One of the two. And dealers really need to understand that, you know, when it comes to AI, the early adopters are going to box everybody out of the paint because they can scale great things much faster. Today I'm joined by Chase Abbott, VP of Sales at Cox Automotive. At a time when dealers are navigating shifting market dynamics, rising customer expectations,
shifting pressure to adopt new technology, Chase brings clarity to where the real opportunities are. He breaks down how dealers can win in a landscape where 40% of in-store customer time is still just waiting. A big thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible, pay junction, AFSA. And of course, Cox Automotive. And now, let's get into the show.
I appreciate it. I've got to say, real quick, one of the biggest outreaches I've ever had after I did a podcast for a webinar is from this particular vertical. And so I appreciate you having me back.
Wow. That's a huge compliment. Appreciate that. I didn't tell you I was going to do that either. So, so you're saying it's not just, it's not just my mom listening to the podcast. No, no, I tremendous outreach, probably 30, 40 folks reach out to me after the last one.
All of them had pretty good spirits about their questions and answers, things like that. So.
Well, what I enjoyed about our previous podcast and why I'm excited about this as well is because so you were a dealer for many years before moving on to the vendor partner side, but you also have an immense pulse on the industry.
And I think that's actually a great place to start. I asked you right before we start recording. I said, Chase, like how many dealers are you, you know, are technically under your umbrella today? It's in the thousands and thousands and thousands.
And so let's just start there. Quick context there. I, you know, we have our dear chat groups, our peer groups, CDG circles. I'm sure you've seen this. And so we get to, there's a lot of conversation happening right now.
And a big conversation I'm seeing is around margins and volume. And it seems like the industry has gone through.
I mean, in the last two to three weeks, I'm talking like late November here or the early December, people are like a little shocked over what's happening with margins and volume.
So I am curious to know what pulse are you right now seeing in the industry? What's your general take on the health of the industry right now?
Yeah, I think, you know, you're right. Grosses are starting to tighten. I speak with dealers every day. And it feels like, you know, I think we're also coming off of a high post COVID where inventory was really low.
And it was about finding a car more than anything. So I think, you know, the conversations I'm having is about the return of margin compression, which, you know, before COVID every webinar I did for years had some element of margin compression in it.
And going through that process, you know, when margin compression is back and inventories back, you know, you got to double down on experience.
It's not necessarily just about having a car, you know, or a price that might work or not work for me. It's really about, you know, now the customer has the ball, right?
And they've got the power a little bit more when inventory is back and experience. You've got to double down on it. And, you know, some folks are doing that. Some folks are doing it with AI. Some folks are only hiring salespeople that sold cars before COVID.
I've seen quite a few of those listings the last couple of years because it was like taking orders versus grinding, you know, and beating the asphalt every day like when I was in it.
And so I think, you know, dealers need to focus on their experience. They're pricing and what they have out there to the market, you know, are you going no haggle or you going no hassle or you going full list.
How does that look and really merchandising get their go-to-market strategy online, dialed in to start the experience because just about everybody starts their experience there these days on the website.
Let's break it down one by one. First of all, where are you seeing when your conversations with dealers, what problems are you being presented with most frequently right now?
There's no shortage of challenges for a dealer. We know this. Well, what is, is there a recurring theme with, you know, like this is the most prominent challenge that is bubbling up to me nowadays in the market?
Yeah, I think they're probably the biggest one here in the most about affordability. You know, we can't forget like when everybody dropped four or five six pounders on all these people four or five years ago, like we set the course for negative equity in the next trade.
And so I think a lot of times, you know, with rebates where they are with interest rates starting to come down a little bit, I think that's going to get better.
But I think that, you know, the equity issue is a real issue in LTV trying to get them out of that car.
And a lot of times in my days in finance, in order to get somebody traded out of something they were buried in, you had to have a big rebate on the, on the, on the new car can even really put them together on a used car.
And so I think that that's, that's a big part of it is affordability. And, you know, are these customers going to be able to afford the payment even if I can get them done?
Or does the bank say it's too much per their, you know, debt income ratio.
And so, so there's a lot of that going on the tactical, how can I make this work? I need bigger rebates. I need different cars.
And I think, you know, look, that's something that we're kind of reaping what we sow now when it comes to, you know, those bombs we dropped a few years ago.
You know, it's like when a town of country used to pull on the lot when I was selling cars, everybody scattered because we knew that person was buried.
And it was like, don't even up that guy, you know, like you're going to waste three hours to find out he's, he's 11 grain flipped in that thing.
So, so there, there's some of that going on, for sure.
The other one I would say staffing is like I said, I mentioned earlier, they only want to hire people that sold pre-COVID.
Because I think that, you know, with the Gen Z workforce moving in and, you know, there's some rubs there between some of these new folks and having the cutting edge tools that they expect nowadays versus the dealers kind of laggard behind on those cutting edge things.
And sometimes there's some friction between news salespeople and old managers. That makes sense.
So, okay, so before I, before I build on that, yeah, another thing we discussed in our prior conversation about a year and three months ago was how you were getting lots of calls or just having conversations about dealers wanting to consolidate, right?
What, what we had called the SaaS fatigue and integrated tools.
Yeah.
Again, 15 months later now, where are we at on that spectrum? Have we forgotten about that and moved on to AI? Is that still an incredibly important just opportunity for dealers that they're focusing on, right?
Reducing the number of tools in store. What are you, what are you seeing there?
Yeah, so I'm biased because I work for Cox Auto. But I will say, you know, when I ran a store, there wasn't an ecosystem out there.
I didn't have the pleasure of looking at a demo on an ecosystem that you had to piecemail together your stuff. And you kind of, when you do that, you really put yourself, lead yourself open to the API.
And is there integration between these products? And if not, the salesperson or the managers are holding the bag, you know, it's like it looks good to you in each individual demo.
But what you really just did was install chaos because now as a desk manager, I've got to reenter the customer's address four times to do a deal, you know, or reenter this particular piece because we don't have an integration.
And so, you know, we know CSI plummets in the dealership after 90 minutes. I saw a study the other day, 40% of the customer's time when they're in store is idle.
I think it was on your cast on one of your shorts that I saw it. And so, you know, that 40% of the time leaves their brain open to a myriad of things.
Most of them negative, what are they doing? Are they, are they, you know, going to screw me on this deal? Why hasn't they been back? You didn't tell me where he was going.
And so, I think the customer engagement part of it and the data and the speed in which you move through a deal is really important.
If you, if you believe what I believe that time kills deals, then I think you've got to look at an ecosystem.
You've got to look at something where it's together. There's already bridges or not even really API bridges, but, you know, kind of a platform kind of play to where you're moving inside of the same piece of software, which is what we're working on at cops and kind of where I came from with Vince solutions.
You know, Vince solutions used to do that very same thing. CRM lead management inventory websites market pricing. I mean, everything but the DMS and that little ink 500 thing behind me is that we were the 33rd fastest growing software company in the United States that year.
And it wasn't because the depth of our tool. It was because of the conceptual nature of it in that it was a dealership in a box.
And dealers really fell in love with that. And since we've done the cops journey, you know, we've kind of taken in and it's still the course CRM, but we've added in the best brands, you know, in auto, which is X time, the auto dealer track.
And now we're working on, you know, kind of replatforming that whole piece into kind of more like one thing so that, you know, our tools as you go between them, look and feel the same.
There's no latency on the data push and it's right there and everything's done for you. That way you can focus on the experience with the customer.
And not necessarily, you know, not talking to them for 15 minutes because you had to go re-enter their info four times.
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But I do have a question on that. So when you, when you look across the spectrum of dealers you work with, I want to, and I want to compartmentalize this into two separate conversations.
One about to your unintegrated dealership, one about AI, which is, you know, a lot, there's a lot of talk around different tools there. First, is there anything, is there anything different or specific from the last 15 months since our last conversation where you've seen any specific dealers outperform with a suite of integrated tools.
Maybe, you know, it could, maybe some any new tool that entered the market or like a change in process, like, what is that inside that best practice when it comes to running an integrated store that you've identified that any dealer listening could take advantage of just trying to understand, like, from all the dealers you work with, who does it best and how do they do it?
Yeah, so we constantly look at our data sets, right? We have thousands of dealers. I mean, 95% of all dealerships in the country do some business with Cox. And so we're looking constantly. And so we find that the folks that make the most gross, that converted a higher rate, that, you know, see more leads are using that ecosystem type play. It's, it's very easily measurable. Now look, there's nuance into that.
What's an ecosystem, though? Like, is it, you know, just two tools, three tools, one point at, I always, there used to be this metric. There used to be metric about social networks that I, you may have seen this, but I love this stat where it's like, you know, on certain social networks, if you get a user that has over nine friends on their social graph, they are statistically going to remain an active user on your social platform for like a decade.
So I like, with a dealer, right, what is, is there like a statistically like a level at which the best dealers are using, you know, 3.5 tools, I say that's orgasically, but do you see that?
Yeah, I mean, for us, it's around five or six. So that's where we really peak at the summit of that mountain is when dealers are on, you know, the most of our tools, and we have about, you know, on the software side, about six, six brands. That used to be a lot more.
We've consolidated quite a bit to make that offering more simplistic, but the great news is we have so much data, not only customer data, but dealership data, because we do business with so many.
It's very easy for us to go pit, one bucket against another, and really feel like we have enough sample size, you know, to, to make that stick.
And we always find almost every single data pool that we do the more they have of our stuff means the less duplicate entry, the less brain damage on a busy Saturday when I'm turning four units.
And I think that's an ode to the time kills deals part. So for me, I leverage on the ecosystem, if I left Cox today and started a store, I would go that way.
I would not go boutique and make my salespeople re-enter it because if they have a crappy experience, so does the customer.
So now let's go to the second section, which is, what are you doing on the AI side? I have a lot of these conversations. And what are you specifically, right? Where are you seeing the best performance? What are you doing there?
For us, it's predictive insights. And so at Cox, you know, we have auto trader, we have Kelly Bluebook, we have dealer.com, which is the largest franchise website provider.
So if you boil that down, we have 82 million unique visitors per month, per month, uniques, first party coming to our sites, shopping, searching payments, searching colors, flipping cars,
LTV, trade in evaluations with Kelly, there is a treasure trove of data of how these customers have moved through their journey. And, you know, with 82 million uniques, we're in a really supreme differentiator advantage, if you will, because a lot of our industry competitors have no websites, let alone some of these big monster ones like auto trader.
And so what we're doing with that is boiling that down into something a dealer can use. That's the old so what, so what chase? You've got all this stuff. What are you going to do with it? And what we do is we boil it down into predictive insights. So if I've got 100 customers on a list, and I'm working through that list, these are my deals, these are my leads. This is my pipeline.
You know, if I knew, you know, these 13 of the hundred are nine times more likely to buy a car in the next 30 days, which, which ones am I going to start calling first? Right. And, and that is all derived from the data. And we're boiling. Let's say a customer goes to 4,000 URLs during a visit.
Maybe we own 3,000 of them. We take all those 3,000 clicks, and we distill it down into action, because we know dealers are going to go search through the web visit, look at every page.
You know, what they do here, what they do there. That doesn't scale. So we're using AI to scale it. And it will tell you predictive insights what's going on.
We also do a thing called sentiment analysis, which is really cool stuff. So when I was in the dealership, if I watched a customer, here's what never happens.
The salesperson never goes to the desk and go, hey, man, I really screwed that one up.
Just so you know, maybe I could use some more training. I never heard that. So what sentiment analysis does is it looks for words, particular words, contentious words and emails, texts.
And it alerts the manager that there's a fire burning. And allows the manager to step in and act when the salesperson, unless it's a real big one, is never going to just say and fall on the spear that they could have been a better salesperson that day.
And so that's another one that we're using to drive, you know, more engagement. Now a lot of this is around what I'm going to talk about is a lot about the customer.
A lot of our competitors point AI internally, which is great. How many lines on my arrows are my service writers doing. And how can I improve?
And let's look at the salesperson ups and write ups and you know test drives. Let's go through the road to the sale with AI. Great. I think you should do every bit of that. And we do as well at Cox.
But when I was running the store, it was really about getting more customers into the store, whether it was sales or service, get them into the store, get new customers into the store, conquest, get them over the curb and another car.
I think it behooves dealers and I would challenge all of them to look for an AI stack that's going to go after the customer base, not just have your salespeople maximize the lines on, you know, or your service writers maximize the lines on the RO.
There's two sides to that coin. And I think there's a lot of camouflage on AI because there's just so many flavors of videos. I mean, it's a lot of my conversations are ridiculous about all the different flavors and how they should think about how they should navigate it, you know.
How should they navigate it? Like talked to us about the different buckets of AI because most of the conversations I've had at least on this platform recently have either been voice or followed up with text AI.
Yeah, it's been the majority of the conversations. But there's obviously more buckets. You just mentioned an important one sentiment analysis, which you know can just a just continuous improvement in the dealership operation excellence.
So what are those different buckets and how should you always be thinking about them?
Yeah, so there's the one we just talked about. There's also predictive insights like I talked about, which there's a ton of that one out there. There's a few.
There's chat bots, which everybody kind of associates AI with real quickly after hours lead follow up having a bot, you know, you set the appointment when it to in the morning.
That's one. There's also gin AI or generative AI, which we have it in solutions, which is a little kind of built in AI piece as you go through an email and text back your customer or as you even write email templates.
It will it's built right into the tool and embedded and it can go through and see what we know about that customer and then generate a response for the salesperson to send that has proper grammar and proper spelling, which is typically an issue when salespeople start free handing messages in my experience.
So it will allow you to give a little bit more quality control, not only on the template stuff, which I think is important, but also on the relevancy back to the customer and the post template follow up like once they convert and we're out of the lead process now.
And I've got the ball and I'm running with it as a salesperson. I think a lot of times that can fall off a cliff because then you go into each individual salesperson's acumen.
And you're losing a bit of quality control at the macro view. And so what gin AI can do is say if all you have to do is a manager's mandate that they use that.
And then you're going to know every single time you're getting a properly spelled properly, you know, proper grammar type of email that's also relevant to the stuff that's going on.
Yeah, consistency.
It seems like most of the AI usage you're referring to here is within the CRM. Is that right?
Yeah, most of it, but we also use AI in a lot of the reporting and the behind the scenes work at Cox to serve up the data, which isn't always customer racing.
But yeah, we do it a lot because we just have so much data at our fingertips.
Okay, so then to that question, what is what are the biggest objections you're hearing from dealers when it comes to AI adoption?
And then I want to go through the merits, the merits of them because I think that are all shares inside for my conversations, but let's just start like the top objections that you're hearing from dealers right now.
Yeah, no offense, but when I spent my time in the business, I mean, I'm ever laying it on the line to get a new website in 2003 and getting left out of the office.
And so I think historically dealers have been lagers to change, you know, the guys still walking around the paper stock sheet and pricing cars that way and doing manual inspections and all those things.
So I would tell you that, you know, the biggest one is skepticism. They don't necessarily here and that boils down to this. You don't know what you don't know.
It's skepticism to you because you haven't inspected what you expect.
And so that's a core life value more than it is anything else, but you need to go look at that and run that down because guess what, your competitors are doing it.
And when it comes to innovation, you're either the steamroller or you're the road, one of the two.
And dealers really need to understand that, you know, when it comes to AI, the early adopters are going to box everybody out of the paint because they can scale great things much faster than you can.
And they can isolate bad things much quicker than you can.
And so you can isolate, are you referring to the dealer like sentiment analysis, like isolating a bad thing.
You're never going to no sales per earn a manager is going to go through every email and text, right.
So you do good things. It can stop bad things from happening. And I think that there's just a general fear of change, pain of change.
If I was to say anything about why dealers don't buy whatever software, it's typically that pain of change.
They just don't want to jack with it. You know, they've got a tool. Yeah, that's some stuff. You're five won't do some stuff either.
We're not ready for all that. I got new staff call me back. You know, and so it's the timing is important as well.
I hear often about there's a concern around implementing a certain AI that is replacing a certain function of the dealership.
And the risk that creates because I think people's concerns are the inconsistency with certain AI tools.
And so when I think about when I think about overcoming an objection like that and just providing a better dealership experience overall,
I say, what are the tools that are less risky for me to implement, right, where it's maybe additive.
And it's not when replacing. And if it's additive, then I know that at the worst case scenario, it's maybe adding just a little bit of value.
Like you said, maybe sentiment analysis is a good case for that. Right.
But in the worst case scenario, it's adding no value or actually in like the absolute worst case scenario just doesn't add any value.
From my specific use case and then I can work on that, but it hasn't hurt me hasn't added negative value, right.
And I can and I can easily like explain that where if I, if I introduce right now today full swing an AI that is speaking directly to the macustomer,
that is not fully baked yet or just isn't working well for my customer.
And now maybe a certain a BBC agent is not doing that.
That's a concern because now I made lose business, not just come out broken even, right.
Right. Right. Is that something you're facing and you know, is that the conversation you're having right just overcoming that type of objection.
And like how and like how are you solving that pain point for dealers?
Because it's a super valid concern when you're implementing a new tool. Obviously you can pilot it maybe like a small volume initially.
But how are you going through this.
Yeah, I think that was more rampant when we started years back, right.
When we got with AI you're getting some stuff that was just way off the mark and not accurate.
And you know, I think that that continue we continue to refine the oil.
AI continues to get trained on bigger and bigger LLMs and it gets more and more in depth.
And so I think that that's an important part. I would tell dealers that what I don't see a lot of them when I talk to them is they don't have a plan.
They just don't they're a they're a they're in the wind.
And you know, whatever dealer called them that day is kind of where they're at or whatever vendor called them that day.
Maybe pitching a particular path through AI. They might go run that down a little bit.
But I think I think what we have to do is understand as a dealer how paramount this topic is to my business.
And then really put the time in to go figure out, you know, what areas of AI do we want to play in.
What KPIs would we associate with that if we were going to go after it as success?
And what KPIs would we might associate with failure? Right.
And then go through the that you got to inspect what you expect.
You got to go through the demos. You've got a pressure test. You've got a mystery shop.
AI is evolving all the time. But I think if you go through and you look like it, what am I going to do chatbot? Am I going to do gin AI?
You know, the next one is agentic AI where it's, you know, we can really stay with that customer be an agent for the dealership kind of like a BDC person and do a much higher level conversion path.
So that's a big one that's coming down the path.
Or like predictive insights, you know, a lot of people are you know what that is?
Because there's not a lot of folks in automotive that have the data to do it.
You know, you could do it. But if you only have a thousand people in the customer in the record.
I mean, the odds that you haven't that on some my very small.
What's the clearest example you've seen of where AI drove a real measurable impact on profit?
Like beyond just cool tech, but a real measurable impact. What's the clearest example?
Yeah. Our biggest one is really for us is buying signals because we point the AI like I said earlier at the customer base and we look at everything they're doing everything they're clicking on.
And we have algorithms behind all those things as triggers to say when this customer is ready to buy.
And we've seen probably more fruit beard from that.
There's also another way we do it and then which is show me every customer that's in the database right now with an active buying signal that has no future follow up.
You want to peel a dealer's cat back showing that because it's like, what do you mean?
There's 400 people shopping on my website right now and I don't have follow up.
No, no, they're all orphans. There's no set follow up.
The other thing we see with buying signals is on repeats.
So if a customer's already bought for me and three years later, I know who they are.
They go back on the websites they start shopping again.
We can notify that sales person to intercept that customer who's already bought a car from them before they ever hit go or shotgun start the lead when you know 16 dealers start calling them.
And we can intercept that before it ever gets there because we can tip you off to the website visits and what they're shopping for.
The other one is deal pulse in our neutral deal central.
That's the one I talked a little bit about last time I was on, but we continue to refine that as well.
But you know, we asked the dealers, what do you want to know about all this data?
We got 82 million weeks. What do you want to know? Well, it's not guests.
And so they came back and we had a laugh about this when it was the four square.
You know, sale price, payment, APR trade.
And so what we've done is we in our four square and our desk and tool where the dealer is going to set there and work that deal.
It's going to show you everything that the customer submitted and they want you to see how much money down they have, how much payment they can do all this one number each box.
And then underneath those it was going to show you the range of what that customer search for throughout their entire website.
So if I can see, you know, they will have to have eight grain for their trade.
But they also valued it at 7500 when they were figuring payments in the digital retailing tool.
As a desk manager, I'd like to know that because I feel like eight grand numbers false.
Because you wouldn't put 7500 bucks in there if you were doing it yourself in your own private website.
I'm going to go take another run. Yeah, it's kind of like that old adage.
I used to say when to my salespeople, I'd say, why don't you tell your customer?
And they said, well, they were looking for a red one.
And I go, no, they were looking for salesperson.
And so you know, you really got to enable me to reverse engineer the deal and speak to your listening
without ever asking you what your listening is.
That's pretty powerful stuff.
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I like that. I mean, it's very true, right?
So with that said, for someone listening, let's say they've tried a bolt-on tool in the past, hasn't worked out,
or maybe they just haven't tried, which I think is slowly becoming the minority,
at least for our listeners who are on the more kind of progressive, innovative side.
I agree.
But regardless, when you think about someone listening, if they're like, hey, Chase,
what's a 90-day plan look like for me?
How do I implement it? What's the first thing I do?
What do you tell a dealer that asks you that? How do you provide clarity?
So it depends on what I'm going after.
If it's the customer side, all I'm looking for is the data set.
Who has the most data on these customers?
First party, timely data that I can get my hands on to synthesize.
That would be a big one.
The other one would be the functionality of that particular AI tool.
And how it bolts on, is there a certified API into my system?
Is it part of the same ecosystem of products, you know, like a Cox, or a CDK, or something like that?
You know, where it's going to integrate, and really kind of run down what the experience is going to look like, post-sale.
I think dealer's struggle with that.
They do the demo, we do a good job of the demo.
What we're supposed to, we sizzle, we sizzle, we sizzle, we sell the steak.
And then they get live, and they're like, oh, I didn't go deep enough on that.
And this doesn't do what I'm used to from my old provider.
And so I think it's boil it down.
You know, I think dealers need to lean in a little bit more on this software stack.
And I also think that they need to set up a cadence to review it.
You know, in a timely manner.
Because there's turnover, you know, if this guy leaves, the next guy comes in, he brings in, hold his whole software stack.
And trust me, I'm living on that.
You know, that works for me. He has a guy selling the software.
It's also like, it's sliding and flaky.
And I feel like you got to grow a deeper route because the software and SaaS today in the car business are more important than ever before.
And to continue, the stock price is going to continue to rise as these customers become more and more digital.
And I talked to this about dealers all the time.
You know, you're used to having control the customer, especially pre-COVID.
The only way you're going to get any sentiment of that control back is digitally.
They're not going to just show up with the up bus into your store again.
It's not going to happen.
So it's like, how can we know the tells?
How can we see when they tip their hand in the store?
All the things I used to set at the table with them when we were talking and I could figure out and I knew which way to zig, I knew which way to zag.
And all that's still happening.
It's just happening online.
And I don't think dealers have really thought about it that way.
They say, well, the business is shank. Well, yeah, it has.
But then you change with it.
And you get some of that control back that you're used to experiencing like knowing.
You know that this customer loves that car and maybe I can shoot for a little bit higher gross.
Or we do make a model predictability.
That's a big one we see results with as well.
So we'll say 89% likely to buy a Honda 56% likely to buy in a court.
Now, if you're a Nissan store and you know that about that customer, what was not on there?
The Maxima, right?
And so, ooh, maybe they're a real Honda loyal looks like it, but they went ahead and sent a lead in on Nissan.
Now, I got to use the chords.
Setting on the use lot, you know, you're old 20,000 miles on it.
Wouldn't it be whove me to send that?
Because I know that that number one choice for that customer is a Honda core.
And I have one, I have two.
And but today, they don't know.
They're just looking at the lead. Yeah, we don't have any Honda's.
But here's my niece signing. I don't want to make some.
Oh, bad deal.
Definitely, you definitely speak deal, my friend.
You can tell you spent a lot of time in the dealership.
Yeah.
I'm loving the stories. I'll give it to you there.
You don't know what you don't know, dude.
And you don't know that it's any better.
Because you have an inspected what you expect.
You're just going along to get along and kicking the can.
And there are things and companies cutting the edge every day.
And you've got to be on that, that pulse.
And we call deal pulse.
What it is is because deal pulse in the desking tool,
knowing what that customer is doing is the latest and greatest pulse on how I put that deal together.
What are you most excited for in our industry here over the next six to 12 months?
What signals are you seeing of like, you know, what's what change?
Are you expecting like what just what gets you excited?
One thing that gets me excited is I don't feel like the dealers are going anywhere.
And I like that.
You know, I feel like everybody's trying to the franchise laws and the EV stuff to go around.
But, you know, I saw that again.
I'm a quote, car dealership guy was on your reel.
I think it was 98% of people prefer to buy their car from a dealership.
I think what has to happen is the dealerships have got to get better.
They've got to realize that they don't own all the control they used to.
Where nobody knew the price on your car.
Nobody knew the invoice price on the new car.
Nobody knew what the trade was worth.
The internet changed everything, man.
It informed the customer to a tee.
And so we've got to evolve there.
There's no, there's no saying or rule that says we can't go make money.
It just might have to look a little bit different to maximize our results.
Right.
I mean, I heard one of the guys that you interviewed talking about no haggle versus no hassle.
And I thought that really stuck out to me because he said,
look, if I tell him this is the price of the car and they want $200 off.
If I'm in one price store, I'm going to tell him to, you know, pound, say it.
And I don't want to do that.
If it's 200 bucks, I'm no haggle, you know, or no hassle.
So I can go in and drop that car to under to see, give that customer what they need to see
because maybe we made $60,000 on them in the service department.
I will say that I do think when you talk about that level of transparency,
I do think that there's just a lot of dealers that have adopted that.
And so, you know, naturally we put focus on many that haven't.
But the reality is I just, I talk to dealers every day who have either been on the podcast
or interviewed for the newsletter.
And by people, there's definitely this like awakening amongst the dealer body
that, you know, we need to continue evolving.
So also, and I'll give some credit to the next generation as well.
I'm seeing lots of up and comers who have just completely, you know,
come in with an open mind and taking an approach to communication, you know,
structure pricing, you know, whether how are we pricing?
And what are we doing like hard guidelines, more like a car Mac?
So I think there's a lot of great stuff happening there.
Chase, if someone is listening and they want to chat with you,
they want to pick your brain, they want to just, you know,
ask you some questions, not just me asking you, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Just phone or email by all means.
I had a lot of people reach out and email try to run every single one of those down.
I had conversations with many of them.
So look, I'm always trying to inspect what I expect.
The more conversations I can have across the spectrum informs me, you know,
at the macro and how I need to think about maybe our next move at Cox Auto
or what we need to go build next.
And so selfishly, you know, I'd like for that to happen.
So all right.
And then in terms of email, well, we'll put it up into Shono's below.
And if you would like to share it live as well.
Yeah.
Just chase dot Abbott, like you see below chase like the bank Abbott,
like Costello at Cox Auto Inc dot com.
If you hit me up on there, if you call me, I'm probably in a team's meeting,
which is most of my day.
But I'll get back to you quickly.
And the cell is 913644963.
So I'm not, not hiding out there.
But one, one thing I wanted to tell you real quick before we wrap up here.
Yes, he is.
And this kind of speech to a lot of what we've been talking about.
And it's like, OK, let's get ourselves up to date on the macro.
And so we get a survey at Cox, where we surveyed 516 franchise dealerships in June of this year
to kind of where they stand on the industry on AI.
And here's where it came back.
Three out of five are just starting to explore and test AI tools.
Curious but early 25% are in wait and see mode.
Let everybody go do the work for me.
And then I'll be a late adopter.
I want to see proof kind of before committing.
But only 15% have true what they would call true integrated AI.
Using it in their workflows every single day to kind of drive decisions or customer emails and outreach.
So I mean, that gives you a nice little view of kind of where people are at.
The other key stat I wanted to mention was dealers who have fully adopted an optimized AI.
Are 50% more likely to report revenue growth efficiency gains and higher profitability.
So the risk isn't trying it.
It's the risk is not trying it.
And I think that that's you got go go and fail if you fail fail fast and go to the next one.
But the the topic of AI is going to consume you or you're going to consume it.
That's how I really look at it.
Wow, that was philosophical.
Well, you know, I tell my team 60% of leadership is theater.
You know, see, so I try to.
I tried it.
Yeah.
Please have it.
Cox auto chase.
Thanks so much for calling on man.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed that episode.
Please give the podcast a rating.
Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about.
Thanks for tuning in.
I'll see you guys next time.
Bye.
About this episode
Chase Abbott, VP of Sales at Cox Automotive, discusses the evolving landscape of car dealerships and the importance of speed in closing deals. He highlights the '40% Rule,' emphasizing that a significant portion of customer time in-store is wasted, which can be mitigated by adopting integrated technology and AI. Abbott shares insights on current industry challenges, including margin compression and staffing issues, while advocating for a focus on customer experience. He also explores the role of AI in predictive insights and customer engagement, urging dealers to embrace innovation to stay competitive.
Original notes
Today I’m joined by Chase Abbott, VP of Sales at Cox Automotive.
We break down how AI, data, and connected technology are reshaping dealership operations, customer experience, and competitive strategy.
Chase explains where dealers are falling behind, why ecosystem-level integration matters, and how to overcome resistance to new tools.
Reach out to Chase directly here:
[email protected]
913 624 4963
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Topics:
03:31 Biggest dealer challenge: affordability or staffing?
06:28 Why use integrated dealership tools?
12:38 How does AI provide predictive insights?
21:06 How to overcome AI adoption resistance?
23:13 Best strategy for implementing AI?
32:34 Future of AI in auto
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