A Data Refrigerator Full of Takeout Boxes with Bobby Gaudreau

Kyle Mountsier: 0:00

Some days when we start these all I want is lunch and I don't have it yet

‍Paul J Daly: 0:09

this is Auto Collabs No, I have lunch look, I have I have a bag. I had Chipotle, they have guacamole. I'm ready for a podcast. So worst food eat.

Michael Cirillo: 0:23

We're fighting you know,

Kyle Mountsier: 0:24

did you know that? What's his name? Bobby. Bobby Flay. He he says instead of Chipotle, it's Chipotle. Oh, that's what he has a little bit of a yes. So that's like one of the world renowned chef. Bobby Flay messes up Chipotle by saying to polti That's

Paul J Daly: 0:49

how Sebastian Maniscalco says it his skit. He says they got a pretty good burrito down there.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:55

Well, hey, look, we're not talking about Bobby Flay. We are talking about Bobby Gaudreau. I don't even know how we did that, guys.

Michael Cirillo: 1:04

That was not You're the king of You're the king of segues. I'm just gonna I don't

Kyle Mountsier: 1:08

even know how that even how we got there. From lunch to Chipotle to Bobby Flay to Bobby Gaudreau. He runs the sales organization over at activator and they're doing some cool stuff over there from what I hear. So I'm excited about this conversation. I don't know about you guys. Let's

Paul J Daly: 1:25

go. I always like having another person that I know is a marathon runner on the podcast to make me feel absolutely. overachiever.

Michael Cirillo: 1:33

Like as your office smells like. Guacamole.

Paul J Daly: 1:37

Yeah. My race energy.

Michael Cirillo: 1:41

Yes. I'm always excited to hear from people like I was looking at his bio briefly. I'm sure we'll get into it in the episode, but like he's been a part of some pretty major moves throughout automotive and it just it sticks with me that my journey in automotive like if I were to think about what I've done in automotive, my affiliation automotive at startups, as affiliation with automotive is a completely different trajectory. Like there is so much space in this industry. So I'm excited to, you know, maybe get into some of the things that he's done in his career.

Unknown: 2:13

All right, here's our interview with Bobby Gaudreau.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:19

All right, we've got Bobby here with us, Bobby, I'm super excited that you've joined us You and I are just going to have a conversation for the next 20 minutes we're going to see Paul and Cirilo out of it because apparently we're just going to talk about running for the next 20 minutes you good with that?

Bobby Gaudreau: 2:33

Great with that great

Kyle Mountsier: 2:36

i I'm starting that way because we found out that you have run a ridiculous amount of miles marathons Iron Man's bike things in your life. Is that is that fact or is it just something we wrote like on a on a press release to make it sound cool?

Bobby Gaudreau: 2:55

Yeah, no, I know it is. It is. It is. It is fact I have run my fair share of of marathons and other long events.

Paul J Daly: 3:04

It was that wasn't the part of the bio that got me it was the first part of the bio, where it's like sold auto base to Dominion DealerRater cars, I meant to Reynolds I just like and then I hit a running hit me at the end. I was like, I'm just gonna go home. The rest of the time for all of you eat ice cream for the rest of the day.

Bobby Gaudreau: 3:25

You guys make me feel good. I'm gonna talk to you guys more often.

Paul J Daly: 3:28

Because we're gonna drop the hammer in like 30 seconds. The pig always feels really good before they were like, Oh, I'm dinner. That's

Kyle Mountsier: 3:39

so okay. But no, I do have to ask. You know when it comes to to your running on treats, and I know, you know that. Obviously, we're talking auto auto business, but like where did that desire come from to run? You've run what 25 marathons or something at this point?

Bobby Gaudreau: 3:57

Yeah, no, it's actually it's it's a it's a it's easy sort of hell because I've said it many times. I I was you know, I've kind of just played the traditional sports growing up. I went to a small state school in New Hampshire for college. And I joke I was I liked it so much. I stayed there for five years. So I enjoyed my myself in college and my, what should have been my last year of college, I went with a good friend of mine who was actually ultimately it was the best man at my wedding. And we saw his at the time girlfriend now, wife of 20 plus years, she ran in the 100 Boston Marathon. So we actually went down to Boston to watch her run. And you know, we stayed at his brother's house and we went partying the night before. And then we went into the finish line. And I felt like a loser at the finish line. And I'm like, if I ever after college, I moved to Boston, which I was planning to do. I'm like, I'm gonna run this thing the first year, and I did I had no idea what I was doing. And this was obviously way before the Boston Marathon bombing and so you could run as a what was abandoned runner like they encourage that to use At the back of the pack, and you could run and they didn't get it at all, but they, you know, they kind of cheered John and you got a little blanket at the end. And then I never ran. After that I was like, I'm done, probably ran twice the next year. And that following year, when the marathon came along, when Boston came along, I kind of missed it. And then I went home after work that day and started running and just kind of picked up on it from from from that. And, yeah, and for a period of time, when I started dating my now wife, every year, we would usually run Boston. And then before we had our son, we would go somewhere, and we would, you know, kind of a vacation marathon. So I'd usually run a marathon, she'd run a half marathon. We did that for a number of years and been doing that for for a lot for a long time. So

Paul J Daly: 5:45

that sounds to Rolo plans, his vacations, isn't it?

Bobby Gaudreau: 5:49

That is not how our vacations work. Now.

Paul J Daly: 5:52

You're muted, Michael. I know. You're just or you're just punking us. Your road caster is muted. Know, his face.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:02

Now we can just yeah, what's great about this is I think you said like, probably 50 words since we started, and nobody really knows. No, I'm just it's so good.

Paul J Daly: 6:13

I don't know. It's confusing. We're gonna keep moving. I'm just gonna keep going.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:18

So it says what you get here. question we

Paul J Daly: 6:20

ask a lot of people I know, I know. But can you tell us about your journey into the auto industry? I mean, your path is like New Hampshire College marathon auto industry.

Bobby Gaudreau: 6:31

Yeah, so it was I don't know if it was conventional or unconventional. But I, I had a uncle who was actually was a it was an executive with Volvo. And I really, after I graduated college, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do, I thought I was going to move out to Colorado and ski. And after a terse conversation with him, I ended up getting a job working at Boston, Volvo village and Brighton mass. So that was really my first job out of college. Because the night late 1998, and I was the I was the first internet manager at the at the dealership, and we literally got internet leads,

Paul J Daly: 7:07

well explain, explain that the first internet manager because everyone's got a really interesting story around what internet manager actually was in the beginning.

Bobby Gaudreau: 7:14

Yeah, so internet manager, then we got internet leads over a fax machine, I knew it's gonna be something like that I knew it. Perfect. You know, I had graduated from college, I knew how to turn a computer on, I sat in the corner of the showroom, on a dial up,

Paul J Daly: 7:31

which fully qualifies you to be an internet manager.

Kyle Mountsier: 7:35

Still, today, actually, still today, next to,

Bobby Gaudreau: 7:39

like the fax machine or the photocopier, in the key track machine, where people would go for test drives. And that's where I, that's where I, that's where I parked myself. And then, in early 2000, I had left the retail side, and I worked for a UK based Variable Data marketing company called the lateral so I was at the very top of the.com, boom, before it burst. And I was calling into, you know, fortune 1000 companies and up in, you know, kind of big box, retail, automotive, financial services. And then when 911 happened, and then the the bubble burst, I went back to business school. And since 2004, after I got out of school, you know, I've worked for a series of companies, it's all been software, probably 90% in the, in the automotive space. And so I've been lucky, and I've kind of worn all the hats, I've been an individual contributor, I've been an area director, I've been a national sales manager in the last 10 years or so, you know, I've been in, you know, on the p&l and on the strategy and kind of run, run, run sales and run sales and marketing. And I've been lucky to work for some pretty cool companies that have been, you know, kind of right at the start. So, you know, I like to say I sold many dealers in New England, their first CRM system, probably many of them are now on their fourth or fifth. And, you know, it was early days that DealerRater and, you know, early days at a company called IMM, that kind of did email newsletter marketing using data and, and content marketing. And then I've been at my current job at dominion and specifically with activator for about seven years, which is probably the last day which is not probably is the longest I've been at a at a company slowing

Kyle Mountsier: 9:27

down. What I find is what I find always intriguing is like, you know, your you had the dealer and then the dealer experience and then industry partner experience in the in the auto side, and then you've taken journeys outside of auto and come back. It seems like a couple of times, yep. Twice. Yeah. So talk to, I want to hear a little bit about like, when you've gone away, what do you think the things that were the biggest key learnings that you've brought back each time like what are maybe I can Both of the the moments or key learnings that you're like, when I give, or when you came back to Otto, that was something that you've retained as something that you've been able to bring back to Otto?

Bobby Gaudreau: 10:10

Ya know, on the great, great question.

Michael Cirillo: 10:14

I want to know the answer to oh my god, ah

Bobby Gaudreau: 10:21

questions that you guys are going to ask. So, so I worked for, I worked for a company called live person and I person it was, I often say to this day, like when I was there, like that was, like, the best company that I worked for, I probably have had more fun working in other places, but just in terms of learning and just kind of being stimulated and being around a lot of really smart, accomplished people where, you know, I kind of was often intimidated, right, like, man, these people are so good. And so smart, was was was live person. And, you know, today, I actually ironically looked at their stock price the other day, it's not doing so not doing too well. But when I feel so intimidated, they were they were really at a at a really cool time. And they were very much established as an enterprise leader, very much established in the in the small business market, I joined when they were going to kind of enter into mid market. So really, that had largely been ignored. But that was probably the biggest tam was all these companies. And we categorize a mid market company that did about $100 million to roughly one and a half billion dollars in annual sale sales. So I was calling into some pretty cool companies like Patagonia and, you know, products and services that I wore are in my closet, or were in your in my in my house. But the way the guy that ran the sales and services department, and a lot of the managers, they are all kind of came up through working at Xerox, which was like, you know, the equivalent of working at, you know, salesforce.com, or one of these like cutthroat, you know, kind of sales environments. And a lot of them came through PTC, which was like the creme de la creme on sales process. And so the things that I learned and, and just some of the processes in terms of how to run a sales team and how to manage a sales team and how to forecast all learned there. And so I had an opportunity where, you know, whether it was because, you know, a lot of things are fly by the seat of your pants in this industry, or I've been working for a lot of startup companies that just haven't figured stuff out, everything was figured out then. And so I had an opportunity to see this is what it looks like when there's a when there's a marketing engine that's delivering qualified leads, like this is what it looks like when you're actually following a sales process. And it becomes repeatable and predictable. And so there's so many things that I learned there and adopted there that I have then carried through in every job that I have probably a day doesn't go by that I'm not using something that I learned that at live person. And today, ironically, I think a lot a company and then entered into the chat space and automotive after I left. So

Kyle Mountsier: 13:05

that's wild. So, I mean, you talk about the startup kind of mentality. And moving forward to now, you know, Dominion has, you know, been been around for a while and delivered in a bunch of different like market segments acquired a couple of companies. But from what I understand there's a very like startup mentality to this new activator piece of the business. Can you talk about, like, how it how it feels, being in kind of like an enterprise, the legacy style company, but being a part of the, like, almost startup arm of what's going on? Yeah,

Bobby Gaudreau: 13:49

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's great. And I mean, it's, it's helpful, like, you know, the kind of the, the background or the history of dominion was, you know, the parent company started off, you know, it's 100 year old, privately owned company, it's always been owned by the same family, the baton family, and they started off as a holding company around newspapers, and then you know, kind of became a big conglomerate in that space and then started the Weather Channel. I think everyone's heard of that place. And then they sold that and and then through that there was kind of investors a few of the different companies but they they created a Dominion ventures, which is basically a private equity arm to start looking at how can we diversify outside of traditional media and go into other software services in segments like automotive, obviously, real estate franchise services. And so they started a period of time probably around 2005 2006, where they started to invest in all these companies. And so at one point in time, you know, there were probably over 10 companies in the automotive subsidiary today, there's probably four or five and so active Vadar when I joined Dominion in December of 2017, I was responsible for sales over kind of an umbrella of a number of companies, we had CRM, we had websites, we had a lot of different digital companies. And we had equity mining and customer retention, marketing. And kind of over a period of time, we looked at some of these businesses where maybe we just we weren't as competitive, or they were just hyper competitive. And they just they didn't fit the portfolio that Dominion wanted to be in, we kind of just whittled that down and around 19, around 2000, like probably around 20, right before COVID, we kind of were at a crossroads where we had our equity business. And our CEO said, like, equity is good. But it's ubiquitous, right? It's so good, everybody has it. And so we don't, we no longer want to be in the standalone equity business anymore. And so figure something out. So we started to build around that. And as Eric can, we kind of evolve outside of just targeting people at the bottom of the funnel, and start implementing kind of true kind of funnel marketing strategies and introducing and more channels into the mix beyond just email. And we had are really starting in 2000, even after even or 2020, sorry, even after COVID, we really started to get some pretty good momentum, some really good momentum, and then boom, the inventory crisis came and kind of hit everyone square in the face. And what that did for us is that just put a lens on the fact that we had some we were on the right track. But our technology that had largely been homegrown, was good, but it was really difficult to to flex and go fast with that. And so we were kind of hit a crossroads, right, we could go backwards, which wasn't an option, we can continue to invest. And that's what's nice about Dominion dominion, where, you know, I don't have a blank check. But we're owned by a really big company that has a lot of resources and a lot of capital that they can continue to invest in us. And it's not like other places where you have to go out and raise institutional money. And then we've got these, you know, blood thirsty, you know, investors constantly asking what am I going to get my money out. So we put together a business case, and we made the decision. In order for us to go fastest, we would invest in kind of building the software outside. So we didn't outsource our ideas, we didn't outsource our 20 years of experience, we didn't outsource, you know, the some of the proprietary things that we have, but we outsource where we built this. And so we ended up partnering with salesforce.com. And so we rebuilt our marketing engine inside of marketing cloud, and then we rebuilt or we shouldn't say rebuilt, we built a customer data platform using Sales Cloud. And then then we were able to really leverage what we are really good at which was segmenting information out of a DMS and organizing that information for equity and, and customer retention marketing. And then that was kind of our first use case that we said, Okay, now what happens when we execute these things through this marketing engine and starting to leverage the benefits of a customer data platform, and then it's just we've taken off from there, we started to build new journeys, we're starting to ingest different first and third party data sources. And then we've created what we're referring to as a data management layer. That's basically this Iron Dome that sits around everything to protect all the nasty stuff coming in. And the visual never would have been able to go as fast as we bent over the last year, were we not building this in Salesforce, and we never would have been able to do it without the support, you know, the the guidance and the investment from our from our parent company being dominion. I

Michael Cirillo: 18:47

don't think a lot of people know this. That Salesforce has one of the largest machine learning algorithms on customer data in the world. Yeah, yeah. Like they've been they've been talking about CDP's before they even had a name for it. And so that that really stands out to me because I remember 10 years ago, learning about Salesforce, integrating all these different machine learning AI this that the next thing as far as customer data was concerned. So that's really interesting that you guys have tapped into that.

Bobby Gaudreau: 19:22

Well in to two things on that is so and we've also we brought in there's a there's an outside consultant company that we brought in that's kind of helped us through this process. And the company's called Remy Oh, it's not it's not a pitch for them. But the the gentleman that runs it's a small kind of boutique consulting firm, and I've worked with them in two other jobs. One other job they kind of just did a small project where they helped us with our instances, Salesforce, and another job they it was transformative. And it was more data work that they did but the guy Ned modell who runs the company, you know, I refer to him as kind of a data forensic guy and He teaches actually a course at NYU, to master students who are learning about marketing automation and data and CRM systems. And so he teaches one of the requisite courses that the students have to go through. So we initially brought them in to look at everything and help us make recommendations. And it's, you know, it probably, you didn't need to have an advanced degree to realize that we, they pointed us in the Salesforce direction. But it's just that has they've been such a good partner to help us pure around the corners as we've been building this stuff. And then the second thing to that point, is one of the elements that we have here now is we're doing all of our reporting through Salesforce, and specifically through Tableau. So it was kind of like Tableau and Domo are kind of the two big reporting companies out there. And Salesforce bought Tableau, I think, in 2017. And what they immediately did is they combined that with their Einstein AI data layer, and so it's all combined. And I mean, even right now, we haven't even scratched the surface on what we're going to be able to do with that. So we just kind of launched our new reporting with that around six or seven months ago. So

Michael Cirillo: 21:10

Tableau and Domo sound like to have everyone's favorite 80s hair bands.

Paul J Daly: 21:18

Boudreau and Tibideaux Zencart.

Bobby Gaudreau: 21:22

Do you get your Domo tickets? Good point, a great one.

Kyle Mountsier: 21:27

It's awesome. What, um, when when you think about like all of the data work, all of the work, you've done integrating Salesforce marketing, cloud and Sales Cloud and the things that so much enterprise around the world is doing? And then think about, Okay, what does that mean, for an individual or a two to five store group that now kind of gets this access to an enterprise, the thing that on their own, would never maybe have the resources or the time or the energy or the development resources to go and get, but now they have like, unique access to enterprise grade technology? How do they track that? To engage with it now? And I can start to sense like business results from it, what does it really mean to a dealer, that you've gone and contracted and work with these consultants and done all this crazy new stuff? Yeah. How does that get to the ground? Yeah,

Bobby Gaudreau: 22:21

no, I mean, I think there's a couple there's a couple of different ways that, you know, we can look at that. And there, you know, as this space is, you know, emerging and evolving, you know, with anything, there's a lot of, there's a lot of confusion out there in terms of what does this mean? And who does what and who? And who does you know, who does this? And who does that? I think the the immediate? I think there's two immediate benefits that that people are our customers have experienced when they've come on board with us, right? One is because of the way that we have designed this, and we didn't come up with the term, but you know, kind of this concept of a hybrid CDP. Right? So we've got the customer data platform, and the marketing fulfillment. And so we started right with what we were good at, which was doing equity, mining, and marketing, and doing retention marketing. And so we started with those journeys in place where a lot, and this isn't a knock, this is just where everyone, there's a lot of other companies in this space that started engaging customers on websites or on digital, right, and we're all kind of kind of come come to the middle. But right away, we're turnkey, right? So people come on board, and we're able to all of a sudden cast this much wider, and deliberate and targeted net over their entire database, because we have these, you know, handful of service and sales journeys that are already running. And because we have the channels now through marketing cloud, whether it's email, or direct mail, or SMS, are all embedded together, we see instant engagement improvements, because we it's much easier for us to, to find and reach customers, because we've got all those different contact points, as opposed to them being all disparate all over the place. So we can see that and then we can kind of prove it to ourselves into the customers through the reporting. And then the second thing, and we not that we underestimated it, but it was hard to quantify, right? As long as I've been in this space, everyone's always on dealer's data stinks. Right? Like I've never not heard someone say that. Now we can actually put a number on it. And frankly, it's, it's way worse than we thought and we organized like the data probably, I could I could talk to you guys for five hours on the data. And I know we only have you know, 20 or 30

Michael Cirillo: 24:37

details. But

Bobby Gaudreau: 24:41

we organized the data problems into three buckets. So we look at duplicate records, we look at malformed records, and we look at kind of bad email. So bad emails are invalid spam traps excetera and so Ned who I mentioned before, he when he works with clients outside of automotive, he His rule of thumb is when he looks at a database, he wants to have 1% or less of that database as duplicate records, right? They're a fact of life, right? They happen all the time. It's just way worse in retail automotive, because no one control, everyone has access to the database, right? I refer to it, it's like the refrigerator and accompany break room, right? Everybody has access to it. And some people are polite, and some people are slobs, and they leave a Chinese box of food in there for four weeks and destroys everything in there. And that and that's what we're finding. So, you know, we can say, hey, we're doing the right thing. But we can't control what three other marketing companies may or may not do when they're accessing that same data. So what we found so if Ned's rule of thumb is you don't want to have one person more than 1% of that database is duplicate records, what we find on average, it's well into the double digits, we've seen some dealers, it's as high as 50 60%. And so what that means is, you know, I run some kind of campaign, maybe it's an equity campaign, and I pull that down. And there's, you know, four records for Paul and eight records for Kyle, and they're all attached to the same Venn, all of those are going to get pulled into whatever marketing campaign you're doing, it doesn't matter if you're delivering that through a sophisticated marketing engine, like we have with with it with activator and through marketing cloud, or I'm just doing it through my through my personal Gmail account, all those things are gonna get staged, and they're gonna get sent out. And then the second area is the, the, the, the, the, the sheer number of invalid and spam trap addresses blew us away. So last summer, we evaluated across about 200, dealers, 8 million customer records. Out of those, there was a quarter of a million invalid email addresses. Of those there was 40,000 Spam traps, right, like that's Russian Roulette, with ISPs. And so what we've built is what we call as a data management layer. And so we leverage tools that are in the in the AppExchange, through Salesforce, like at data used to be called tower data that has the ability to identify and then help isolate all those bad email addresses. And and we would never, I mean, there's no human that's going to be able to it's like the an invisible needle in a haystack. And then we apply the same logic, when we can say, now we can go into a database, whether it's 20,000 people or 100,000 people, and we're at the early throes here of saying, Okay, now we're going to identify all of these dupes, all these malformed records and kind of group them together, and then make sense of it. So it's hard work, you know,

Paul J Daly: 27:41

coming into this podcast episode. You know, when we said you were going to be on people were like, he's low energy, he's an underachiever, all these things. I didn't pick up any of that stuff. Thank you so much for sharing just your energy and your insights and your experience with us. Um, I know that our audience is going to pull some stuff out of this and really get them thinking in a different way. Thanks for the meaningful work that you're doing in automotive to make the whole industry better. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us today on Auto Collabs isn't doing great. Thank

Bobby Gaudreau: 28:09

you guys.

Michael Cirillo: 28:15

You know, it's crazy to me, you sit down with guys who have been part of massive exits and acquisitions. And, and I think as a result of that, the other big things they do in their life, like, I don't know about you, but it's like the other big things they do in their life or like, whatever. Like, you're small, you ran 107 miles and like, you're gonna run another 50 this and you rode your bike for 104 miles. And he's like, yeah, it's just what I do. Okay, but it's like, if that was me, I would be like, I'm like, I

Kyle Mountsier: 28:50

wonder what, like none. And I want to tell you what I work on every day. Let me tell you about my running.

Michael Cirillo: 28:55

For me, I'm like, I run my mouth. I run the starter on my motorcycle.

Paul J Daly: 29:04

I run out my wife's patience.

Kyle Mountsier: 29:07

Yeah, right

Michael Cirillo: 29:08

under I don't know what are your guys thoughts? I gotta wonder if because he's done so many big things that it's like, big things to the regular people just don't seem big anymore. Because it's like you've just already you've climbed mastering the big I think

Paul J Daly: 29:23

must be kind of the answer to that is, you know, I've read Elon Musk's book, The Biography by Walter Isaacson. I've read several other of those biographies and what a common thread is that? It seems like big things to everyone else. To them. It seems like the logical next step, like why wouldn't somebody why wouldn't somebody do this thing? And I picked that up from him. Like, look, we have this we have this, we have that, like why wouldn't we just do this? And the scorecard? The scorecard isn't really as important as the like, can we fix this problem with the tools we have in a new and innovative way? That's my two cents.

Kyle Mountsier: 30:01

Yep. And just the fact that like the very next thing for activator to be, you know what we've built all this really cool stuff that dealers are using, we're not satisfied. Bring in Salesforce, right? That's a that is an energetic thing for the industry that came out of 100 year old company that started with newspapers and the Weather Channel. You know, like, that's really cool for me to see. Because a lot of times you look at legacy companies and you go, there's no way nothing and nothing new net new, really cool, innovative is going to come out of that. And so to see something like Salesforce, Tableau, you know, a net new thing come out of a company like that. It gives me hope for every large, medium or small company. Well, hey,

Michael Cirillo: 30:51

I mean, it goes to show that partnerships, equal innovation, and they definitely caught on to that and that's something we care deeply about. So do more than cars. So, hey, we hope you enjoy this episode with Bobby Goudreau, we'd love for us to click that subscribe button wherever you're listening or watching this right now. On behalf of Paul J. Daly Kyle Mountsier. Myself, Michael Cirillo, thanks so much for joining us on Auto Collabs.

Unknown: 31:20

Welcome to Annika Are we recording

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