¶ Intro / Opening
So today, Paul and I found this fancy little thing. It's, it's called
this is Auto Collabs.
The like, what are you gonna say right now? Every day,
the Cirillo boost we found it's on the RodeCaster. It's called Big Bottom,
Big Bottom.
Because we keep saying that Cirillo has the most amazing voice in all of, let's just call it podcasting. And he's like, No, I don't,
I definitely just had a button voice.
He just had a button.
Except when I went, when I went to the button, my button was turned off. And it's probably because I'm using
well, because you have you have a super Big Bottom,
chest resonance McGee over here.
salutely nothing to do with the fact that we get to hang out with my dear friend Ben Hadley today. And talk probably smarter than a lot of a lot of people want to on whenever you listen to podcasts. But what I love about Ben is, whenever he's communicating, he is like, I think of him as like a parable teller, like he's always trying to connect the dots, it's great way to put that between like this super techy thing and the way that we interact with the real world.
And I think that's why people love his approach to anything is because he's like, No, this is how this is how everyone sees the world watch. And this is how we can associate that to marketing or tech or business growth or anything like that, or auto sales or auto trade ins, and it's just relatable and people are able to kind of break that down and makes a lot of sense to me. So, yeah,
you know, Ben ass the parable teller nails it dude. Like he always has a contextual story that kind of allows you an on ramp into his far superior in my mind. Right? It's like he's like, okay, all right, let's help everybody on the highway. Right? Because if I don't, then I'm just gonna be talking to myself. That's a great way to put that apparently just
picturing like, because you both are right, like that is so genius of way to describe him because like, he's the kind of dude I feel like he's just constantly in deep thought, like, he never actually comes up for surface level thoughts. He's always like, swimming deep. Yeah, you know, and because he'll be like, I was unlatching my seat belt the other day. And it made me think about why clouds form and you're like, how did he get?
And then the next thing would be like, funny story. It's it's all fake. Long. Pause, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Everybody leans in a minute. Well, look, they're going to be playing that in this interview. We're sure we hope you enjoy our conversation with the onramp terrible telling Ben Hadley. Hey, Ben, it is awesome to be here with you today. It feels like very rarely do we actually get to have like a full conversation like so. Thanks for joining us and giving us a few minutes.
Yeah, no, I'm super pumped. I just noticed I was low there.
It's all good. Most people just go into
like the recruit when Paul's out of town for the
That is really fun. Isn't it a good standard man to other podcast. Yeah, I'm the Paul ever gets to actually have a conversation. get smarter, more better looking guys smarter the all the things
Cirillo and I are gonna make another we're just gonna
get them to stand and if we both can't be
there, if you guys need vacation days just to help you grow out a beard. You
don't even need to you know and today is maybe a little bit more we're gonna test test your kind of your fortitude and acumen because you know you just told me you only had three hours of sleep last night because you were up with a little one.
¶ Ben, Paul and Kyle talk about the challenge of raising little ones, as they all have children aged 2 and under.
Oh my god. We're just we just hit two years old. July, the end of July. And we have not had. I was telling Charity we have not had I thought terrible twos were like, you know the the classic like let your body go down in the grocery store
and just drop the weight
on that that's what I was in for. And what it turns out we're in for is just 12 o'clock. On the button.
Midnight wake wake up everybody. Now the other ones coming to the other. I can handle
it transition more in like the three the three was a lot harder. Sure, because for our kids, at least two didn't come with as many opinions as three came. And three comes with this thing called opinions where they like have a stake in the ground now, right.
Rita opinions brought.
Somehow this doesn't surprise me you have a few opinions or so I
have some opinions myself
after a mother though, right, of course, right?
Well, look, you have been somebody that has played a role in a lot of different things in automotive that people just don't know, you're probably one of the biggest men of mystery in automotive, where you've kind of had a lot of experiences, and influencing a lot of things that have happened that people use and people have implemented and, you know, things that have been adopted by the industry that, you know, which is, I think, part of the intrigue around you.
So it's exciting to kind of unpack a little bit about that. I guess I'll start off our kickoff question. What is the the thing that you were involved with? And I don't know the answer to this question that you think was has made the biggest impact on the automotive industry? Interested in what your perspective is?
That would be tough, I think. advisory work for either Credit IQ. Which, or, or CARS.com and Dealer Inspire, was probably one of the most impactful things. Really tough to say, though, because the work we did at Clairvoy and I think was impactful today. And we were just way ahead of our game when I was over there, so it'd be a tie between those two.
I love it. I love how you just mentioned like oh, it could be this No, no, that was awesome. This so that there was really no what really made a difference.
Well, here's the thing with with that Clarivoy right you're like you're you're you're able to talk to and collaborate with almost every vendor in the space because we all just want to know what marketing is working what's what isn't. Right, that's the question we're answering. And so you get all this exposure with everybody. Um, but then if you fast forward a few years there's definitely like a FinTech ification of automotive
happening right now. And you got to coin the CreditIQ cars.com thing, I think is like a solidification of that
of that trust solidification of intensification. Asian ation that that's your new T shirt solidification Aztec occation this size font that's gonna be like your jazz fusion pan solidification of intechification.
What did I do what I wanted for Kyle, recently, I'll come up with it. I have like a T shirt. And in my head, I was like, ah, um, we have to do it for you. One of
our one of our video producers came up with one this morning. And he wanted to say he wanted in storage a RAID array. And if a RAID array is a server storage method where yeah, you know what it is, I'm explaining it for the layman. Which means like 98% of the people listen to this podcast, it's just a way to store files and redundancy on a server and he said RAID array. I was like, that's another great band name, RAID array array.
Alright, so you got Clarivoy, which is, you know, marketing and understanding, like every channel that comes into a dealership and tying it back to, you know, at at the best level possible transactions or leads and understanding marketing spend. And then you've got this kind of integration to shopping behavior, and fintech with the Cars.com and Credit IQ, kind of in the same timeline for you.
And now, the, like, fast forwarding just a little bit past that is, comes a, a marketing community that that I'm grateful to be onboard with you and being a part of but, but explain where like, because at some point, every all great tech has a gap when it meets people,
right. And the people that are utilizing that tech is just as important, if not more important than the tech being able to be approached so what what have you seen is like the trend line that continues to come through, you know, this like early adoption of marketing analytics to you know, technology and shopping behavior meets FinTech to marketing community. What's the trendline there that you're seeing is like a movement for auto?
Yeah, I think I think your your, your about almost go there, which is like it's the end user. And so like,
¶ Equipping a tech product's end users, in other words, the people at the dealership who use it. It is like creating the Jarvis to the Iron Man suit for the salespeople to execute faster.
if you think about do you think about where auto started to where its automotive marketing software has started to where it is today. A lot of the design work was was really for the consumer, the purchaser of the vehicle. What you missed in that was thoughtful design that was for the marketer or the salesperson or the whoever in
the actual store. And so what I think what what what we attempted to do and are doing, or they are doing now at Clarivoy as an example, was you made software that made your marketers superhuman, versus the previous to that was making really captivating display ads that got the consumer. Fast forward that and now you start seeing stuff like Credit IQ, which is really meant for the internal sales ops people to
execute with. Right, and, and so now you're enabling you're creating the Jarvis to the Ironman suit for the salespeople
to execute faster. And so the the birth of the community Auto Genius was really just a way of saying like, Why aren't the voices of the end user being listened to, in the design of the product, because what happens is, if you design for the person, the salesperson, the marketing to whoever the downstream effect is, the consumer experience gets better, as opposed to leaping over those
people. And going right into the consumer, that's where you actually create more friction, is because the consumers now is like, Oh, my God, this is such an easy, awesome process, then walks into a dealership, and there's 17 dashboards, the salesperson has to walk through, right, so they don't line up.
And so I think, with the community, what we're really aiming to do is kind of take all the learnings of have that end user and then say, like, let's make their voice as loud as humanly possible, and give them as much impact to the design of product as possible.
There's like the crazy this really crazy tie in when we were, we were talking about these crazy names of these like rock fusion bands, where, you know, you have this music, and it's a bunch of people riffing, right nonstop, right? drum solos, bass solos, complex scales being played counterpoint and all this stuff. I call it musicians music, because the only way you're listening to that music is if you're a musician, and you understand the technicality of why it's
awesome. To most people. You're like, can you turn that down? Yep. It's almost like, that's what happened with the marketing tech. Right? It was musicians music, it was so complex, and it was so dialed in. But by the time it got to the end user, right, everyone's like, Why? Why are we listening to this? As opposed to people just want to understand, like, I like this song. Why? I don't know. I just like it.
You know, what, perfect example chat 70 something percent of chat. The chat services sold to dealerships are fully managed. Okay, so like, the 70, something, right, like 75, let's say 75% Of All Chat is basically managed by someone else. So So think about that, like a new product feature comes out. Hey, guys, like what are we going to do? I don't know, let's change this chat fields, add this chat feature. Awesome. Then someone goes in demos at to a store. And three out of four times. That
demo is like cool. We don't even care because we just want someone else to do it. And they outsource it. So the end user, like isn't even, right, like isn't even even though like it's considered it's not even really executed. Like every single day in that product. They're not even using that feature. And so it's like, let's go back to playing their music. You know, we're helping some BDC like, destroy, you know, not hoping the dealer,
can you talk about you? So you mentioned, you mentioned Auto Genius? Can you talk about the found like why Auto Genius started? And like I think a lot of people don't know what it is people probably have seen it on LinkedIn, they've probably seen it around the internet. If you're kind of paying attention to automotive marketing, you know, it'd be hard to not at least hear about it. But let's bring some clarification like, why did it start? How did this start? What
is it? Because I think that community specifically is super important to this transition in this move that you just explained to like, hey, let's like, consider the consumer and work it in with people who are actually practitioners of building things.
Yeah, yeah. So Auto Genius. was, I mean, there's a
¶ Ben Hadley helped found Auto Genius, along with Kyle Mountsier and Kevin Gervais. Ben and Kyle walk through that founding and why they chose "Market, product, fit" rather than "Product, market, fit."
couple of different layers to this originally. Yeah, I
know. I know. So. So. I'm asking Ben, that question, because Kyle, Kyle needs me to ask the question. So we could talk about because we need to talk about this too. I think it's good for everyone in the industry. Right? Right. Right, go back to Let's call it let's get started this thing called the Auto Genius that is really helpful for retail, automotive and a bunch of other things. But it needs to be talked about. It's okay, if we talk about it here. It's kind of fun.
It's like at one point, I forget who it was someone recently was like, oh, Daly's in Auto Genius, too. They thought you are our third founder. Why wouldn't
Why wouldn't they think I
was like, yeah, yeah, sure. You know, like, oh, man,
they're gonna say, I look like people. I'm like, Yeah, you know,
people get. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to the to like, the way beginning, right before like the crux of what we realized was about to happen, which was literally just, Ben and myself. Were getting frustrated by the fact that, like, I would do something cool at the dealership, Call Ben and be like, yo, yo, did this thing. He would call Jake Baron. And be like, Yo, Kyle, just did this. You ever tried it? Jake would be like, let me try it,
boom. And then he called Matt Lasher, and be like, Oh, I did this thing, right? And then all of a sudden, there's nine of us trying the same thing, because there's this interconnected web of marketers. And Ben goes, dude, I'm just tired of making like, eight One hour calls every single day. So should we just like get everyone in a track with track with me? He said, Should we get in everyone in a WhatsApp thread? No, no, I was like, for WhatsApp. I know,
typical Android user, right? No. So so that's kind of where we're like, alright, we got to get everyone in something to where we can communicate and in between WhatsApp, and I'll let Ben pick up the story here in a second in between, let's do WhatsApp. And let's start a Slack group. There was this like, probably 24 to 48 hour like window, where myself and Ben and Kevin, who's our co-founder, we're like, Wait a
second. We're about to throw a bunch of marketers that are at the top of their game, in automotive into a Slack channel that we were going to do free. And we very, very quickly said, No, we need to pay for 100% of the archives of this because something cool is about to happen. And then I'll let Ben pick up the story from Yeah,
yeah. I mean, there was a lot of serendipity there too. Like, I think Kevin was talking to you and me separately, which is crazy. Kevin.
I think we need to introduce Kevin. Yeah. Okay. Kevin Gervais? Yes. Who is Kevin? And what does he do
even more mysterious than me? He's our CTO. He, he's got a long background in telecom and banking, outside automotive, outside of automotive. But the hurdles and problems of telecom and banking are basically the same. So I think I was saying this, I'm like a used car all things used cars, which is like, if you think about it, the problem with auto in tech is that it was auto was such an early adopter to tech. That that's actually what what keeps it from evolving today. Same
with telecom. Same with banking. And so if you see how fast India is, is moving the telecom needle, right? It's because they don't have to have telephone wires. They just they started evolving, right? When 4g LTE came in, came into the market, we have an
infrastructure to protect because people's jobs and livelihoods and manufacture percent right, makes the world go round.
Yeah. And I think you know, for us, it's the same problem. It's the same servers, it's like a lot of the same kind of similar architecture. So Kevin seen the problem before but but he he has new to auto
Gotcha. So I just want to write so Kevin new to auto done it and other industries. It's a great pairing, the three of you got in a boat and said, Let's go in this direction, and then realize you needed a bigger boat.
Yeah. And on top of that, I mean, like, there's a I think we're also trying to kick around something which is relatively new, which is we're calling it market product fit. Which is the concept that like most people build a company and they go product market fit in that literal order. They build a product, they hope to god it fits into the market. And if it doesn't, they iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate, what we said was like, Well, we know who the end user is. It's these people.
Right? It's this community. So let's just let them tell us what needs to change in the world and then be the the arm to do
so smart. And you have the you have the intelligence and like the Nimble nature of what all the founders are doing, allows you to react and then you have like the, the most brilliant group of geniuses, right? So,
so they live up to the name anyway. Oh, it's I believe, I think like daily like five Lila Garcia came out with this crazy hack. stole one of my favorite posts on Facebook when Facebook was taking away remember
this? We covered it. Yes. Yeah.
That was still it still works, you know, killer? Absolutely. Anybody that's listening, if you think you're a genius, www.autogenius.com that
shameless plug, no problem well wow the more the more people Hey, you got the gate pretty well. So like yeah, it's not anybody can't join. Now we say NO WAY more are you good enough? This is great. That's a great recruiting ploy the Marines did it back in the day, right? They get their budget got cut and recruiting and armies, like we're going to spend on ads, Navy's, like we're spending on ads, Marines, like, we don't have any money. We don't know if you're good enough to join us
actually. The only ones that met their recruiting quota.
So, okay, so So out of this, obviously, there's a few things that and we're going to be doing some of the things that happen within this community, but also that have
now informed products. But, you know, the Pitch Tank community has really been built around which pitch tank is essentially dealers pitching vendors has been built around this auto genius community kind of searching out and seeking out, not just for themselves, but really for the industry at this point, like, what's good tech, what works, what doesn't work, what are good partners, and then this turn of like, hey, dealers, and this kind of market product fit idea is that, hey, dealers
have needs, and I think even Steve Greenfield is tapping into the this with his Dealer Fund is, hey, dealers have needs that are needing to now be expressed first, from the dealer side, to the tech world of like, if we don't solve this guys someone help us out, right? Yeah, we can't build it all. And a lot of you know, a lot of tech has been built by dealers moving out of the dealer world and building tech. But now it's like, Hey, we're doing really great over
here. But if we don't meet that, then all of a sudden, you know, to be grim, like we're gonna die. And so Hey, tech partners, you know, what, what, what do we need? And so, I guess, you know, from from an Auto Genius perspective, kind of answering this, what tech needs are is the Auto Genius community, like said, and then are now being
built. And then also, you know, what, what are you seeing that dealers are continually asking for even outside of that from industry partners right now that we might kind of see at at ASOTU CON?
Yeah. So I think what Ryan's we have this conversation early on with one of our clients, and I'm going to keep him anonymous, because he prefers that way. But he pointed
¶ The data in automotive is disconnected, and one of the things Ben is passionate about is finding a way to help everything talk to each other, so it can be connected.
out that, you know, he found it weird that you could, you could have someone sell, like selling CRM in our industry, right, like VinSolutions, elite, whatever, go into his store. And then he was like, you know, do you think they're logging that in VinSolutions elite, like a self made CRM? Or do you think they're logging that in Salesforce? 99% of the time, that guy is logging that, that salesperson from E lead or from VinSolutions logging that
activity in Salesforce. And so you look at that, and you go, Wait, why hasn't Salesforce just entered into auto? And I think that is like an it's an interesting thing, because auto's a $1.9 trillion industry, that any Shopify, HubSpot, all of these guys should be like, why? It's because the all the
data is so disconnected. It's so hard to enter that, that I think that's problem number one, that like, AG is approaching and solvinig, which is kind of connecting normalizing all of the data, and then allowing for outside tech companies to actually be a part of I think, when you think about collaboration, you can't just think about within our confined
walls. Like that is step one, for sure is getting all the kinds of vendor partners that we all work with, within the industry to join hands and like do some cool stuff. But you look at outside where everybody has open API documentation, everybody has an easy way to migrate data from back and back and forth. If you look outside of the industry, there is like not just collaboration, but the encouragement of collaboration through all those open API's and through that documentation, so I
think that's number two. And then I think the third one is is sort of breaking down automotive from sort of like one platform to rule them all into Microservices, so that you can adopt just as much as you need from everybody. And I think that I think that's going to be like the third big impact that we have is how
long do you realistically think it takes us to get there? And I don't mean completely there, right? How many? How long before you feel like there's meaningful adoption? And motion in that direction? Where we can say like, Hey, this is this is becoming the norm. I think, are we gonna become away? Five years away? Do you see?
Minimum? Minimum three, probably around five. feels right. The dots that I'm connecting are like, who's the who's the new CEO? Ford?
Jim Farley. Yeah. Jim Farley.
Right. His podcast for a while has been sponsored by Salesforce. Interesting, I don't know. Totally. Right. Like, like, why would you have your podcast sponsored by someone that like, can't even really truly be deep into this industry? Right, unless you have a want need, etc to be in this industry, then
a half wants some kind of special race track time. I don't know.
He just wants to drive. He just wants to be that. But like once a Brandon Mach E,
put it up with the tinfoil hat on with me for a second. Like, you know, I know for a fact. Shopify has tried to enter the market eight times and failed. So it's not like the automotive space you're seeing into the automotive space. So it's not like the outside of auto guys don't want to jump in. They're just having a really hard time doing it. They come in with a lot of capital. And that certainly helps expedite things. Yeah,
they probably are like, Hey, let's get into that space. It looks really attractive exploratory committee, they come back like it's much uglier than you thought. Like, pull up, man. Yeah, just kidding. Actually Dale Pollack tells an example talks about that in his book, like I see it, where he lists like the lack of data sharing, or the expense behind it as the one of the single largest, you know, stops of innovation in
automotive period. And he told a story about a company who was developing this really great product for service. And Dale was like, I had it, you know, I consulted on it. I thought it was great. It's gonna be great for everybody. And then they bailed on the project, when they found out how much it was going to cost to get the data they needed to do it. Yep. Yeah. So nuts. And so Okay, so you said three to five years? What's the tipping point? What has to
happen? Right? What is the point where, where, like, everyone's gonna get the message like, hey, if we, you know, you can't beat them, join them? Because right, right now, it's like the walls of defense are up, right? Let's protect what we've built. And at some point, everyone realizes are the smart ones realize, like you we can put ourselves out of business, or we can be put out of business. Right? What do you think? What is that thing?
I think that's going to be context wise. In software, you people get really excited when you have a unicorn. You'll hear them be like, Oh, my God, billion dollar company, they're a unicorn. In automotive, if you look at the top 150 accounts, right, the top 150 dealer groups, a lot of unicorns, there's probably like 150 of them. You know, and we somehow take that for granted. Somehow we're like, it's just no software one, though, that's a
bigger deal. So I think what you're going to see as a tipping point is as soon as the majority of those top 150 You see this already with like Driveway, of course you see with Carvana when when their tech stacks start looking very similar to the legacy vendors that are currently servicing them, right? When they're like, oh, yeah, we also use AWS servers in that way. We also use Salesforce in that way, we also use Salesforce marketing cloud and that way,
whatever. I think as you see those 150 start looking more and more like those, the existing tech partners that we have, that's the tipping point where all of a sudden it floods the market
is typical Ben with any conversation with you, I'm just like, intrigued by it. And then I look over him like, Oh, we're like 24 minutes. I told you, I was like, you gotta you gotta have the last question than the last word to wrap this up. I'm gonna sit back.
I'm just gonna have the last word. And I think that for me, and I'll kind of answer the question in route to a close is that is that the tipping point for me is just like the eyes up in recognition that it has to come for the companies that are still holding
data tightly, right? Like, the minute those companies look up and be like, Okay, fine, you know that that we're gonna throw it throw our hands up, and you now have access, and you now have quality API's and you and oh, it is the dealer's data. Fine. Here it is, the minute that happens, all these entrants are going to be like, we've been waiting for that. And I think that that's because I mean, literally sitting in a boardroom, with a company that's
creating a retailing tool. And they were like, no, what you don't understand is that the data side of it that we have to push all of our stuff into, has taken us seven months to train them on how to use their, their own API's, right? Right to be
able to get the data in. So like, that's like Salesforce, when they want to integrate with something, it takes them like a month and a half, because they just throw, you know, 400 grand, and developers at it real quick, and they just connect to the API, you don't go train another company on how to use their API's. And so the minute that unlock happens, I think that any tech company that's that's starting in automotive today, or like in the last year, or any new entrant is just going to be
ready to go. And so I, for me, that's, that's a tipping point that has to happen. And I think that we're going to see some of that recognition in some of the stuff that Ben's going to be a part of, at ASOTU COON, especially that dealers pitching vendors. And I think that there's going to be a lot of work out that happens in the brain space and functional space
from a product perspective. So like Ben and I were talking about this the other day, if you're an industry partner, and you bought your sales team, a ticket to ASOTU CON, you did the wrong thing, send your product team, because they're going to be better suited to serve the needs of the dealer of the dealer network. So and then thanks for coming in with a lot of ideas, way more ideas, way more ideas. Yeah. So Ben, thanks for coming on Auto Collabs. Thanks for hanging out with us.
And and and going through that, that history and kind of setting plotting the course for a lot of dealers in this network, and for a lot of industry partners as well, because I think, you know, even outside of Auto genius, your industry level recognition of what needs to happen is extremely valuable for this community and for the dealer network. So appreciate you coming on, man. Yeah, thanks for having me.
I feel like there were enough words thrown around in this interview to make up a whole new Beastie Boys.
I think if you just selected words from the transcript, and like dropped them rhythmically, I think we'd have an album and actually, I think Ben would probably like that. I bet he's
boys fan without a doubt. Well, or, or everybody would need a dictionary next to them. They're like, Yeah,
well, that's why he needs the parent. Now. I think I get it. That's why the parables makes sense, right? He hit us on. So when he drops the big word, we're like, oh, we assume he
knows what it means. Exactly. You know, I love the conversation. Because for me, it's a big pain point, especially coming from the dealer side of all of this tech that dealers are supposed to use and salespeople are supposed to use and, and it just kind of
gets overwhelming. And I and I'm glad that he's seeing this trend from consumer facing tech, back to user like, what's the end user feeling about this technology, whether it's a chat platform or a DR solution, that it's actually that it's actually being refocused on how users in dealerships, because that's what that's what actually is going to accelerate innovation or change or process change or consumer experiences, is the end user in the dealership actually able to use it better and serve the
customer. And so I think that it's actually it's actually focusing on the customer to focus on the way the employee or the internal dealership uses technology. And so I love that there's that refocus of attention for for new tech coming into the auto space.
Well, look, that's a lot to chew on. So we hope that you enjoyed our time with Ben, we hope you'd connect with him on LinkedIn, because he's always dropping posts that get you thinking and just very, very thought provoking posts, great conversation that has happened around them. So we hope you connect with Ben on LinkedIn. But on behalf of Michael Cirillo, Kyle Mountsier and myself, thank you for listening to Auto Collabs. We'll see you next time.
Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive, retail media and pop culture. You can get it now at asotu.com That's ASOTU.com. If you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.