Category: DMS

Why Using an Efficient DMS is so Important

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In a world of modern metrics, efficiency is everything. Finding advantages where they were previously lacking and implementing those advantages before they become the norm is standard in pro sports, business, and most definitely auto sales. So, how can your dealership implement its own version of Moneyball? The best place to start is with your DMS.

 

Efficiency of Integration

Just as sports teams scout other organizations and bring in talent to farm within their own systems, a modern DMS is more efficient when it works to include other resources outside your dealership. When a new, innovative software solution pops up, you want your DMS to be able to integrate with it and take advantage of all it has to offer at no additional cost to you. A DMS platform with open architecture gives you the freedom to choose what’s best for your business and allows you to maintain efficiencies in an ever-changing industry.

Efficiency of Data

The days of outworking your competition through grit and sheer determination are gone. Now, it’s all about working smarter, not harder. Instead of logging long hours, cozying up to the warmth of the computer screen at the dealership, your DMS should give you access to your information anytime, anywhere, from any device. Rather than waiting for information to come to you through the intermittent data dumps, your DMS should update in real-time, on-demand, and on your terms.

Efficiency of Employees

When was the last time you made a hiring decision knowing that your DMS was difficult to operate? If you’re worried about bringing on new talent, fearing they won’t be able to operate within the specific, restrictive confines of your current technology, the problem isn’t with them, it’s with your DMS. Don’t put outdated technology above the skills and potential of your employees. Give them the ability to grow within their roles, and flourish in a system built around their individual strengths, without having to worry about the burden of your DMS holding them back.

Efficiency of Outlook

Billy Beane, the father of Moneyball himself, taught the modern sports world to look at information differently. Instead of looking at somewhat outdated and less reliable stats like batting average and RBI to evaluate players, Beane used on-base percentage and slugging percentage to predict future success. This was a revelation at the time and gave the Oakland A’s a distinct advantage in scouting players.

As in sports, your dealership relies on specific indicators to forecast success. And, a modern DMS teaches you to look at your information differently. Rather than relying on the number of cars sold to predict success, for example, your DMS should help you track the efficiency of your service lanes, your sales team, and your turnaround time, and show you ways to make improvements.

In the ultra-competitive game of auto sales, it’s no longer just about your work ethic. Finding ways to sell smarter and cutting costs through improved efficiency is the new way of doing business.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how a modern DMS can improve efficiency at your dealership, download the DMS for the Digital Age guide.

How to Maintain Bottom Line in a Slowing Industry

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The ups and downs of the auto industry are a rollercoaster of emotions, business flow, and balance sheets. From year to year, and even month to month, your financials can fluctuate depending on a number of different factors. And, the hard times aren’t always easy to predict. Especially during downturns, it’s important to have the ability to preserve your profits and weather the storms of a slowing industry. Here are a few ways technology can boost your business, in good times and bad.

 

Empower Your Employees

 

Increasing sales and decreasing expenses is the goal of every auto dealer, but sometimes it’s easier said than done. When times are hard, it’s natural to look for quick and easy ways out of trouble. And, for many dealerships, that means staff cuts that end up being the wrong answer in the long-term, and difficult for everyone involved. Rather than give in to knee-jerk reactions, embrace the potential of your employees by empowering them with the latest and greatest technology. Give them a DMS that’s intuitive and easy to use, to the point that it stays out of their way and lets them do what they do best – sell cars.

 

Your DMS should be a key selling point in attracting, training, and retaining top talent. You shouldn’t have to base your hiring decision on whether or not someone can operate your DMS. Properly empowered with the right technology, your workers can help you avoid the lengthy dips in business performance by increasing efficiency and avoiding many of the problems that come with outdated technology.

 

Prioritize Performance Management

 

Does your DMS come equipped with a team of industry experts, ready and willing to help your business at your beck and call? Many dealerships resort to hiring expensive third-party productivity consultants that explore every nook and cranny of your operations, searching for ways to improve efficiency. But, the very best DMS providers already offer this. They balance cutting-edge technology with personalized attention to help you achieve your business goals and increase your bottom line. Take advantage of performance managers’ expertise to get the most out of your DMS, eliminate unnecessary practices, and give you a leg-up on your competition.

 

Do More with Your DMS

 

If your DMS is a relic of ancient history, and your bottom line is suffering as a result, it’s time to move into the modern age of dealer management. Your DMS should do more than track costs and inventory. It should be easy to use and come equipped with a team of experts to help you take your business to the next level. In addition, your DMS should help increase sales by:

 

  • Giving your employees the tools to seamlessly upsell additional items at checkout.
  • Leveraging your customer contacts to increase traffic to your service lanes.
  • Creating a highly-customized mailing and digital contact list to send out reminders and special offers.
  • Increasing focus on digital sales and streamlining the online to the in-store customer experience.

 

If you’re ready to learn more about ways to boost your bottom line during tough times, request a demo today. 

 

How to Bring your DMS into your Dealership Strategy

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A business strategy is a company’s high-level plan for executing on its vision. Many businesses, including most automotive dealerships, know what they want to achieve, but don’t have a plan for how to get there. A vision and a plan must come together to form a business strategy. Running a dealerships means you need to consider which tools your team will use in their businesses and how they will use them. And in today’s automotive retail environment, no tool has the ability to influence strategy more than the DMS. Here are three ways that you can leverage your DMS in the development and execution of a strategy.

Become Better, Faster, Stronger

Most dealership strategies call for the company to improve, enhance, or add a certain skill. Whatever that skill may be—customer service, transaction time, F&I sales, inventory turn time, or something else—your DMS is probably connected to it. That’s why it’s so crucial to utilize a modern DMS that promotes efficiency through better workflows and intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces. The right DMS can help your dealership get better, faster, or stronger at whatever it is you’re trying to improve.  As an added benefit, intuitive, easy-to-use systems enable dealerships to easily hire and retain the right people to execute on their strategies.

Gain the Freedom to Choose your Own Path

Your dealer management system functions as a technology hub and a central point of access for all other dealership technologies. Because it controls the flow of data between your dealership and its tools, it is a crucial component of your dealership strategy. In order to execute on your unique strategy, you need the freedom to choose your own tools. Many DMS platforms restrict third-party integrations and limit the number of vendors that you can work with. Restrictive platforms limit a dealership’s strategic options and make it difficult to achieve meaningful differentiation. Open platforms, on the other hand, let dealerships decide which third-party software systems best fit their strategic objectives.

Tracking, Reporting, and Metrics

In order to be successful, a dealership strategy must include a plan for tracking and reporting on metrics. Generally, a good strategy will require a company to set benchmarks and goals for improvements. Dealer management systems can provide both of these functions, allowing a dealership to track progress and adjust tactics accordingly. However, not all DMS platforms are created equal—modern systems provide real-time data allowing you to make better, faster business decisions.

Dealerships become successful by developing and executing on effective business strategies. Those strategies involve both a vision for success and a plan for achieving it. Because they touch almost every aspect of a dealership, DMS platforms can play a key role in the development and execution of dealership strategies. As you develop, refine, and execute on your strategy, be sure to evaluate your DMS and its ability to help you achieve success.

To learn more about how your DMS can better fit your dealership strategy, download our guide, “Was your DMS built for the digital age?”

Was your DMS built for the Digital Age?

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Every home has a drawer filled with old technology—remote controls, flip phones, charging cords, solar calculators, and compact discs. These items were built for another age and are no longer suited to provide any real benefit, but still we hold onto them. Is your dealership doing the same thing with its DMS technology? Most dealerships have used the same DMS for decades, even though it was built for a previous era of car buying. The truth is, modern DMS platforms offer very real benefits over older, legacy systems, including the following five hallmarks of a modern DMS.

Hallmark # 1: Cloud-Based Structure

These days, any piece of software not hosted in the cloud cannot be considered modern. The benefits of cloud-based platforms and SaaS delivery are clear. When your DMS is delivered through the cloud—and not hosted on a local server—you get automatic upgrades and the security of redundant data storage on remotely located servers.

Hallmark # 2: Open Third-Party Integration

Today, dealerships can’t rely on a single technology provider to meet all of the demands of modern business. DMS platforms that can’t connect to new, innovative software solutions are holding dealerships back. And, even when they allow integrations, legacy providers often charge high integration fees that hurt dealership profits. Modern DMS platforms, with their open architectures, let you choose the vendors that are best for your business and they work to limit data access fees.

Hallmark # 3: Data Visibility

Digital Age DMS platforms allow dealerships to access their data anytime, anywhere, and from any device. More importantly, they always provide real-time data and up-to-the-minute numbers. Legacy platforms, on the other hand, rely on intermittent batch updates, so it’s hard to be sure that the information you’re seeing is real.

Hallmark # 4: Ease of Use

The best part about modern technology is that it’s easy to use. Because modern DMS platforms have vastly improved their interfaces, navigation structures and workflows, they are easy to learn, easy to train, and easy to use. That means, you can make hiring and retention decisions based on what’s best for the business, not the limits of your DMS.

Hallmark # 5: Efficient Workflows:

One of the biggest problems with old systems is that they were built to align with outdated customer preferences and antiquated dealership processes. Modern DMS platforms align digital workflows with natural, real-word processes. By eliminating the need to jump between multiple screens, enter duplicate data, and dig for information, modern systems make your employees more efficient and your customers more satisfied.

Most DMS platforms were not built for the Digital Age and are not providing the capabilities necessary to satisfy today’s car buyers. But, instead of junking those legacy platforms, many dealerships simply patch up and work around their limitations. To keep up with the changing automotive industry, it’s important to evaluate your current DMS against the hallmarks of a modern system and to modernize when necessary.

To learn more about the five hallmarks of a modern DMS, download our guide, “Was your DMS built for the digital age?”

Margin Compression Solution: Cut Holding Costs

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In auto retail, time is money. The faster you sell cars, the faster you bring in money and more inventory. Rinse, repeat, and reap the rewards of your efficiency. In today’s margin compression environment, it’s more important than ever to find increases in other areas of your business. And, one of the best ways to combat shrinking profits is to cut holding costs by improving your inventory turnaround time.

 

Pass on Holding Costs

The effects of margin compression can be devastating. Not only are product costs rising at a rate that‘s outpacing the prices received from the sale of cars, but costs are increasing across the board, driving some dealerships out of business. And, it isn’t difficult to see why. On average, a dealership incurs a cost of $32 per day for every vehicle it has on the lot. So, if it takes 50 days to sell a vehicle, your dealership will spend $1,600 just to have a single car on your lot prior to sale. Now, multiply that by the number of cars in your inventory and you can see why so many are struggling.

Dennis McGinn, CEO for Rapid Recon, a reconditioning service software for dealerships, challenges dealerships to rethink the recon process to improve speeds. He says that most dealerships have a standard 10-day timeframe for reconditioning. However, if dealers can cut the reconditioning timeframe to 3-5 days through process improvements, reconditioning can become a competitive advantage for your dealership.

When it comes to fighting margin compression, efficiency is the name of the game. And, getting cars frontline ready more quickly means eliminating unnecessary steps between acquisition and sale, including the over-reconditioning of vehicles.  

 

Rethink Reconditioning

By eliminating inefficiencies in the reconditioning process, your dealership can increase gross profit per vehicle sold and turn an unwanted expense into an advantage over other dealerships in your market.

 

If you’d like to learn more about decreasing holding costs, and other ways to combat margin compression, download our free guide, 7 Solutions to Margin Compression, Strategies for Preserving Dealership Profit Margin.

How Dealertrack DMS is Investing in the People Behind the Buttons

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE WRITTEN BY PAUL WHITWORTH, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF DEALER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AT DEALERTRACK

 

Today, the automotive industry has more pressure than ever to drive a seamless, technologically enhanced experience for consumers at all points of the car shopping, buying, and owning journey. To meet the needs of consumers, both dealers and technology providers have often found themselves investing in more buttons rather than the right ones. At Dealertrack DMS, we took a step back and asked ourselves: What is the right strategy for us? What is the best way to serve dealers? To answer these critical questions, we started to dig into the purpose of the DMS and how it was being utilized by dealers. After several working sessions, dozens of customer advisory board meetings, and too many data-deep-dives to count, we came to the conclusion that what dealers really want is a DMS that’s open, easy, and flexible to use. With this insight, we ultimately came away with the mission to focus more on the client experience and less on the buttons. Since that time, our dealers have driven every moment, every design, and every decision that we’ve made.

 

A Look Back at Our Latest Strides:

 

At NADA 2017, Dealertrack DMS unveiled its Performance Management offering, which provides dealers with an industry expert who, similar to a personal fitness trainer, helps dealers maximize the full potential of their DMS and develop both long and short-term objectives to achieve their business goals.

Additionally, in Fall 2017, the company announced DMS Edge, its first annual user event series that brings on-demand training and DMS best practices right to the dealer. DMS Edge reached 3,500 dealer participants in 2017. We also plan to continue our controllers conference as an annual event, where controllers from across the country can learn more about how Dealertrack DMS can help them run their dealership as well as have more peer-to-peer exchange around best practices.

Now, Dealertrack DMS is continuing to double down on its dealer-centric approach with the introduction of DMS 360. Set to debut at NADA 2018 later this month, DMS 360 is an all-encompassing self-service portal where dealers can get support and interact with one another and with Dealertrack DMS team members. At the core of DMS 360 is its peer-to-peer functionality. We’ve developed a virtual community where dealers can collaborate and engage with each other, such as ask questions and respond to other DMS users’ cases. DMS 360 also enables dealers to track and receive real-time support and better understand their DMS. Through DMS 360, dealers gain instant access to DMS help documentation and can search by topic any knowledge articles that exist in Dealertrack DMS’ Wiki or newly created articles that are added into DMS 360.

But our work to drive a dealer-centric business doesn’t stop at DMS 360. We are heavily invested in helping our clients get more out of their DMS and will be providing dealers with ongoing education through a series of online learning courses that we will be releasing this year. We also have a big project underway to share all best practices and processes we’ve learned over the years with dealers in what we are calling Books of Knowledge.

By focusing less on the buttons and more on the client experience, we’ve made it our mission to meet the needs of our clients and build a system that’s easy and flexible for our clients to use every day.

 

To learn more about DMS 360 and our dealer-centric approach visit us at Booth #2737C at NADA 2018, March 23-25.

 

 

Paul Whitworth, Senior Vice President of Dealer Management Systems at Dealertrack, has been at the forefront of automotive retail technology advancements his whole career. Paul graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has held positions with J.D Power & Associates, Accenture, Hyundai Motor America, and Cox Automotive as well as leading several start-up companies.

How to Know What Your Customers Want

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Apple founder and famous tech giant, Steve Jobs, famously said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Throughout his career, he derided customer data and declined to perform market research. Many have suggested that, “Jobs was right but only in the very narrow category to which he aspired: where his products…either redefined or created product categories. That’s not the domain in which most businesses play.” It’s definitely not the domain in which car dealerships play.

Automotive retail is a mature, highly competitive industry where careful attention to customer insights can mean the difference between success and failure. But how can dealerships find and use those insights? Not surprisingly, it starts with their own data.

 

Connect Online to In-Store

It should come as no surprise that the process of understanding what a customer wants actually begins before that customer visits your dealership. Today, most car buyers are beginning their purchase processes online—researching specific models, selecting features, and comparing prices. It’s now possible—and imperative—to greet a customer on the lot and to pick up exactly where they left off on your digital retailing-enabled dealership website. Examining a customer’s own research and preparation is the very best way to understand exactly what they want.

 

Learn From Past Behavior

Most dealerships are now keeping a central record for each customer, with the help of sophisticated DMS and CRM systems. Those records include a history of past purchases and past trips to the service lane. When a customer visits your lot, don’t treat them as if they’ve never been into your showroom before. Reference, acknowledge, and discuss their current and past vehicles to narrow in on what they may be trying to accomplish. Make an effort to surmise what the customer might be interested in based on their last three or four transactions.

 

See Things On the Spot

Of course, it does you very little good to make those connections during post-deal analysis. You need to see and understand customer behaviors, trends, and tendencies during an actual deal. That’s why it’s so important to use a DMS that provides real-time data with remote- and mobile-access. By incorporating up-to-the-minute insights into each transaction, you can make decisions on the spot, whether you’re behind a desk or out on the lot.

Dealerships can’t afford to ignore customer behaviors and dealership data. To succeed in this mature and competitive industry, they must leverage technology to access and analyze customer information, then put it into action. With the right systems in place, dealerships can leverage online activities, learn from past behaviors, and access customer information on the spot. Leveraging that data may not help dealers to redefine the entire world of technology, but it might just help them run a more profitable dealership.

 

To learn more about how a modern DMS can help you, download our guide 5 Ways a Modular DMS Platform Opens New Possibilities for Profit

A Dealer-Focused DMS

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Original article written by Paul Whitworth, Senior Vice President of Dealer Management Systems at Dealertrack

What does it mean to be a dealer-focused DMS?

Two years ago, Dealertrack DMS reframed its strategy to focus on being the High Tech, High Touch DMS. So what does that mean? In short, it means that we are focused on the client. Our customers—dealerships just like yours—are at the center of the way we develop technology and the way we offer our services. Of course, we don’t believe that dealers are regularly raving about their dealer management systems, any more than we expect our neighbors to tell us about their amazing washing machines. In a way, the DMS is an appliance. Dealers count on it to be there and to perform its function while they focus on building and running their businesses.

So, in addition to providing a full set of capabilities, what does a High Tech, High Touch DMS do that is special? How is our focus on our dealership clients apparent in our products and services? There are four main things that make us different.  Our DMS is open, intuitive, and easy to use. Finally, we aim to be easy for dealerships to work with.

Dealertrack DMS is Open

Automotive retail has become very competitive and, increasingly, innovative technology is being used by dealerships to differentiate themselves. Our open system allows dealers to work easily with a broad range of solution providers. Dealers pick the solutions that they need to win and can count on Dealertrack DMS to integrate those solutions into the rest of their systems. We want you to do business your way, not ours. Dealertrack DMS is giving dealerships the freedom to pursue their own unique strategies rather than forcing them to do things just like everyone else.  

Dealertrack DMS is Intuitive

Similarly, a client-focused DMS doesn’t become a central issue in dealership personnel decisions. With employee turnover at an all-time high and the traditional dealership workforce getting older, dealers need more freedom to hire the best people for their business. Dealers need to be able to select candidates based on their skills in the areas of customer service, selling, technology, and management. Too often, however, they are forced to make hiring decisions based on prior DMS experience. To remove the need for prior experience, Dealertrack DMS has developed an intuitive user interface that employees, regardless of background, can learn quickly.

Dealertrack DMS is Easy To Use

Beyond our intuitive interface, Dealertrack DMS is easy to use across a number of dimensions. The platform is fully web-based and works across all types of devices. The system features simple navigation and thoughtful design, limiting the number of clicks required to complete an action. Finally, the system aligns dealership tasks into natural workflows so that employees don’t need to jump between screens or enter the same data twice.

Dealertrack DMS is Easy To Work With

Perhaps the most important part of our High Tech, High Touch approach is our commitment to become a true partner. By definition, a client-centric DMS must make it as easy as possible to do business and to leverage technology. We believe we are the clear leader in this area. Here are just a few examples of things we are doing to put the dealer at the center of our product and service offerings:

  • We offer simple upfront pricing with no long-term contracts.
  • We are deploying DMS 360—an online community and user portal to get our users the answers they need to do their jobs quickly and easily.
  • We provide Performance Managers: proactive coaches to help clients better use our software and improve their businesses.
  • We introduced DMS Edge virtual user conferences and DMS Controller Conference.

When it is time to upgrade your business, be sure to examine the goals and objectives of your technology partners. Look for a company that puts dealerships at the center of its operation. And, please take a look at Dealertrack DMS, the only High Tech, High Touch dealer management system.

Paul Whitworth, Senior Vice President of Dealer Management Systems at Dealertrack, has been at the forefront of automotive retail technology advancements his whole career. Paul graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has held positions with J.D Power & Associates, Accenture, Hyundai Motor America, and Cox Automotive as well as leading several start-up companies.

Operational Efficiency Gains from Dealertrack DMS

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After switching DMS platforms to Dealertrack, dealer groups report consistent satisfaction in several dimensions of operational improvement from streamlined data processes to better performance data.

Efficiency Gains

Personnel across dealerships report that switching to Dealertrack makes their lives significantly easier. “The deal flow is easier for sales to track,” Comptroller, Jennica Krebsbach of the Van Horn Group says. “The deal flow into accounting is a lot easier. Once the service department understood the system completely, it was all OK.”

Assistant General Manager, Brett Henkel says that some of Big Two’s  personnel had to adjust to Dealertrack DMS’s graphical-user interface — its digital look and feel. “We had to explain that Dealertrack wasn’t going to look like their old system and why we were OK with that,” he says. “The big thing was that Dealertrack didn’t look like the old screen looked. But a couple of weeks in, everyone was relaxed about it. And then it was amazing how comfortable they got with it. Frontline employees picked up Dealertrack amazingly quickly as far as being able to write up a ticket or get it through finances.”

Overhead Savings

Krebsbach says that since switching to Dealertrack, the Van Horn Group has added seven more stores to the enterprise — but hasn’t had to add any accounting staff to handle the extra dealerships. As part of expanding the company, Van Horn also centralized its intra-company accounting. Relying on Dealertrack, the company has been able to cut in half its 40 administrative positions even while adding several dealerships. “There’s no way we could have done that with the legacy system,” she says. “We didn’t understand how much overhead we were going to save. But there has been huge payback.”

In addition to reduced overhead, new Dealertrack DMS customers are also seeing net profit growth in the first year. Sisbarro Dealerships reported a tripling of net profit in its first year with Dealertrack and credits a major portion of the growth to the DMS transition.

Reporting Advantages

One thing dealership managers appreciate about Dealertrack is the many extra types of data the DMS provides compared with legacy systems.

“We’ve got some unique advantages in reporting,” Bickerson says. “For example, in people performance data. We can show a service manager how each of his people is performing, in terms of their effective labor rate and gross percentage. That can spot problems. We can show, for example, if one employee’s effective labor rate has been dropping over the last couple of months. This is where we help managers spot opportunities for improvement.”

Henkel testifies to the vast improvement in this area for his company under Dealertrack compared with a legacy DMS. “The ability of managers to drill down and get information,” he says, “is incredibly better. Why are expenses up? You can scroll down to what went where, and why. That was something we used to call ‘the mystery.’ You’d have to call the bookkeeping office to figure that out. But now managers can call in from wherever they are and look at that information on their iPad or Surface Pro, in real time.”

Enabling Customization

Unlike legacy systems that are likely to charge dealerships for each new form or change order, Dealertrack specializes in accommodating special situations as part of the routine of satisfying its dealership customers.

Motorcars of Cleveland, for instance, is a unique operation that depends on delivering an extraordinary customer experience, and Dealertrack helps it succeed.  Its service center is open until 3 a.m. on weekdays, and valets note the license number of every car that drives in, relaying it to the service team so each customer is greeted by name. But the key to their success is a revolutionary quick-service “assembly line” comprised of six service stations, which allows customers to follow along with their car, observe the work and even ask questions — all while being in and out in about 30 minutes. To make that kind of enterprise work, Motorcars must use multiple outside vendors and applications that tie together all their business units and also must make it easy to use to maximize employee efficiency.

Dealertrack DMS has been a huge partner in Motorcar’s effort because of its Opentrack feature, which gives customers simple, secure third-party integration with dozens of other software platforms that can serve specific functions within the multi-faceted world of an automotive retailer. In the salesroom, for example, there has been a proliferation of quote-building software platforms that representatives use to help lure buyers. Many dealership groups have written their own software for this purpose. Dealertrack easily integrates with these programs so that the dealership can execute the final deal on its DMS, process the paperwork and ensure information about that valuable customer is either entered for the first time or updated, to help the company deepen and maintain the personal relationship.

For Motorcars, Dealertrack’s flexibility provides the freedom to choose the third-party vendors that work best for its unusual business model. “If we didn’t have this feature, it would be extremely difficult to find people who could work with us because of the astronomical access fees so many DMS providers charge,” Manager, Trevor Gile says.

Closing Quickly

Dealertrack enables Motorcars Group to close its finances each month in just one and a half to two days compared with 10 or 12 days under its legacy system. “That’s a huge benefit to us,” Gile says. “We not only can close the month faster but we can hold our end-of-the-month meetings faster and get a leg up on what’s happening. We never feel like we’re running behind. We can keep up or move faster than we ever thought possible.”

Shearer, an employee at Motorcars, agrees with her boss that she “wouldn’t want to go back” to closing under the legacy system. “I probably should just get a Dealertrack tattoo which says that. Dealertrack has so many great functions that make it so easy. If someone asks me if I would go back to the same DMS even if it costs less, I would say absolutely not.” Webb Automotive President, Kelly Webb Roberts agrees.  “I wish I would have switched earlier, for the entire group,” she says. “DMS shouldn’t be such a burden as it was. In the past, it has bogged people down. I wanted our staff to be able to have a system there to support them and make them efficient, where we can focus instead on customer interactions.”

For more information about the benefits of switching to Dealertrack DMS, check out our guide — DMS for a Digital Age.

7 Solutions to Margin Compression

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How to Fight Margin Compression

Dealerships may be selling more new and used cars in recent years, but thanks to margin compression this perceived success may be more of an illusion than anything else.

This eBook will provide an in-depth look at margin compression, and the steps dealerships are taking to combat the problem. You will learn:

  • How the automotive industry has adapted and endured to meet margin compression
  • How margin compression applies to you
  • Where all the margins have gone
  • 7 solutions to margin compression