Building The AI Authority In The Automotive Vertical with Devin Daly

Paul J Daly: 0:00

You know, whatever Michael isn't going to be with us

‍Unknown: 0:08

this is Auto Collabs

Paul J Daly: 0:10

I always feel the need to like, do some antics I don't know what they are but in his in his absence because he's the in

Kyle Mountsier: 0:17

some way kind of like raise your eyebrow on one side, make some weird faces to everybody and then make fun of him for being short all at the same time.

Paul J Daly: 0:29

I'll tell you what, if you don't if people don't know that about Michael they just don't know him because he is just like he's like the jester is really really funny. And you can always and sometimes embarrassingly so. Right? Right.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:42

He's an also just like a wizard when it comes to business operating credibly insightful industry insightful on how to work with people and all of that. So yeah,

Paul J Daly: 0:54

I'm excited. We're gonna talk actually, it's a great segue, because today we're gonna talk with Devin Daly, co founder and CEO of impel who just acquired outsell, Devin is one of like, he's just one of those people. When I'm around him. I realized how not smart I am like, he's just maybe I'm emotionally. But he is sharp. He is sharp. So we hope you enjoy this conversation. We'll see what he reveals to us in this conversation with Devin Daly. It is so fun to be on the show today with you Devin because we share a last name spelled the same way. Devin Daly, thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely.

Devin Daly: 1:33

Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:35

There's no we got the same last name. They live in the same cities. And they're both fans of the same football,

Paul J Daly: 1:42

which I just found out y'all later. Once I just found out Kyle Pisa. You don't even know Devon. Thanks for joining us today. Um, yeah, you and I both live in in the Syracuse area. Apparently we're both Eagles fans, which makes sense on why like you. But um, but let's let's do this because, you know, our audience is constantly changing and evolving. You're obviously the leader of a forefront technology company in the auto industry within Pelle just acquired outsell, but you will get to that. But we'd like to start a little bit with a little profile. How'd you get here because you have a really interesting story of why you even started developing merchandising tools. So give us a little give us a quick background of like who you are and how we got here. Like think of it like 60 seconds or so.

Devin Daly: 2:27

You got it. Thanks, Paul. So yeah, from upstate New York, started my career on Wall Street and investment banking, moved into the private equity world after a couple of years. And in that career, I was really investing in vertical software companies fell in love with software as a service and had kind of a subset of our investment portfolio that was focused on what I would call kind of E commerce enablement products. So like chat products, recommendation engines for E commerce. In the way I come up with the idea for what has become impels we realize that subset of our portfolio had really fast adoption rates, high gross retention rates, all the KPIs he looked for were stronger, we peel back the onion to understand why that was. And it was because these e commerce enablement products had really demonstrable ROI cases. It's my co founder and I got together and started racking our brains for what's the next thing and this kind of E commerce evolution came up with this notion that 360 product visualizations were a tried and true way to improve ecommerce conversion.

Paul J Daly: 3:24

What year was this about

Devin Daly: 3:26

that was 2014 is when we founded the business we did that initially focused on fashion, we were in Manhattan at the time based in Manhattan, selling into people like Louis Vuitton Warby Parker converse, the challenge as you can imagine, right? It's a massively long sales cycle of different ad agencies vying for their interests. It has to go to you know, the Arno family's desk for final signature to make a change believe it. And so we got pulled it out. I hired a guy from Ray Ray and the rest of his history, he changed his LinkedIn profile and one of his dealers reached out to him and said, I love what you're doing in fashion. Is it possible you can do this for cars? And that was I remember like it was yesterday with St. Patty's Day. 2015 is when we tell appropriate. Yeah, exactly.

Paul J Daly: 4:08

Well, I mean, because there's the product back then company was called spin car. Or maybe not originally was the company originally

Devin Daly: 4:13

called swipe to spin originally and then swipe, pivoted to auto became spin car,

Paul J Daly: 4:18

because you were like, this was, you know, think of like a pair of glasses, a purse, converse, whatever, right? It was really little things, right? And then someone's like, can you do with cars? And you're like, Yeah, and you figure that and, you know, just like a lot of people you ended up in the automotive industry by accident. Yeah,

Devin Daly: 4:34

absolutely. Yep. That's exactly the story. Yeah. So for six months after that initial dealership sale, we straddle both industries. And then in q4 2015, I remember we had a seminal board meeting we kind of looked at the data and dealers were buying in droves and fashion companies were just threatening to buy and so that's when we decided to focus purely on automotive. Can you tell us who the dealer was planted Honda and union New Jersey right outside of the Holland Tunnel on route 22 I believe it is. I got acquired by Lithia recently, but there's got Bill Feinstein there that was the dealer principal and remains a friend to this day and a customer most important. I

Kyle Mountsier: 5:08

need to know at some point, Devin, I need you to look out for me. I need you to find out what customer number in the auto vertical Nelson Mazda was. I need to know that answer because I think we were like late 2015. It might have been early. Wow. Yeah. So yeah, that was that's that's how long I go back with the spin car family. So yeah.

Devin Daly: 5:30

And the second part of the story, as you know, Kyle, you were early with this fincar family, you might have been like number 123 with the pulse or family that we ended up acquiring and 2021. So yes,

Kyle Mountsier: 5:41

yeah, I think I was the third franchise store on there were a couple like larger, like shift, I think was using them or something like that. I was working closely with that team on all of their communication stuff. So yeah, golly, I'm like, and now we're interviewing you at the outsell thing. This is great. You just

Paul J Daly: 5:58

bought a company for $100 million. A lot of stuff happened between like we can do a 360 video of a vehicle. And we're spending $100 million to acquire a company to build a vertical AI marketing stack. Yep.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:11

Yeah. And in the end, in his free time, he plays the didgeridoo.

Devin Daly: 6:14

That's right. I really, really play the didgeridoo. I do. Yeah, I just play guitar growing up. And if it's an obvious transition, physics teacher that I was really close with. And for whatever reason he was really into didgeridoo gave me an album and I kind of I don't know, I became fascinated with it and bought a few. And nowadays, it's mostly used to entertain my two daughters, or if they're sleeping in too late to wake them up kind of like late.

Paul J Daly: 6:39

So you can circulate so you can circular breathe.

Devin Daly: 6:41

I chat. Yeah, I learned that early on. Yeah, yep, I can, that

Paul J Daly: 6:45

that's, you know, I think I think impel spin car traditionally recognized as like a really solid sales organization. And so being able to, like talk without stopping, really feels like these two things may connect to the next thing and have the breadth of support. So, so maybe let's, let's talk about the transition from like, or the application of merchandising, to marketing. It's something Kyle talks about all the time. And so you started in merchandising, right? And then obviously, you've you've gone very far in deep into the marketing ecosystem. So Can Can you like, tell us your thoughts on like, merchandising, through marketing, and it's like a big question, but like, give us give us your overview and how, what your approach is? Yeah,

Devin Daly: 7:31

a couple thoughts. Right. So impel started, we initially were doing just vehicle merchandising we then extended to start doing like feature and option merchandising, right. So some of the more complex elements of the vehicle purchase process is understanding the difference between the BMW collision avoidance system and the Mercedes, you know, whatever accident mitigation system, for example, we started building really rich content directly on the VDP. What we realized as we continued building these Merchandising Products is we have access to really unique and granular exhaust data. So most vendors in the space can tell you what pages someone goes to or you know, maybe what area of the page they're interacting with. But because we deliver that rich viewing experience, we can really granularly tell that you know Kyle's a performance buyer because he clicks on the engine photo 12 times the performance factsheet nine times the turbocharger video seven times versus Paul's a safety buyer dz interaction safety features. That's when we started to realize this exhaust data can be really valuable to be used in marketing as well as in conversational AI. So we began using that in retargeting. So for example, if you, you know, guys, let's say you both looked at a BMW five series and you left Paul would be retargeted with, you know, the same five series, but maybe an inlay talking about the five star safety rating or IHS safety rating, whereas Kyle might get something with an inlay of the engine highlighting the horsepower of the vehicle. We started talking to our dealer counsel about you know, this is driving outside performance having this additional layer of tailoring where else can we use this? And they came to us and said, you know, we believe there's in the next five years going to be an AI evolution in the space. And dealerships are going to go from being massively human capital staff to really technology and automation enabled. And you know, AI presents another opportunity to leverage that data to do long tail personalization. And so, in May of 2021, we acquired PulseR, where Kyle was a very early adopter, a company based out of the Republic of Georgia, they had probably 25 customers at the time today we have probably 3000 customers on that product. Oh man. And then in October 2020, November 2020 through the same month that open AI release chat GPT Believe it or not, we acquired a company called car labs that has become our service AI product and similarly they had a couple dozen customers today they're in you know, probably 1500 or so of our customers.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:50

Good ness and so I mean, yeah, well and Paul said it like I truly believe like merchandising is marketing but because merch synergizing is so tightly tied to marketing, it really displays so much intent of the consumer. And if you don't get that right, then you can't do all of this personalized stuff, you can't get the person to the right thing that they should be looking at. You can't get them like imagine you have merchandising terrible but all of your marketing is AI generated jargon by a CDP, it's perfect. And you drop them on a page with a with a with a photo that has the little light camera icon that says coming soon. And none of the deep details are there. Like that person will still never convert even though it was perfectly timed to the right to the right person to the right email, you know that they have that car that they want to trade in. Don't ever convert your

Devin Daly: 10:49

speaking our exact language you're right, you should optimize your low funnel conversion engine before you start to spend more money on marketing and by really optimizing your merchandising and your website experience every dollar you spend thereafter on marketing become significantly more performance. So no doubt we 100% aligned with that. Tell

Paul J Daly: 11:08

us about So you brought us through you didn't mention outsell as you were going through the iteration, right? Like this chapter is of the story is just beginning. Tell us what you were in the hunt for like, obviously, you could tell us why would you purchase that outsell and like what your ambitions are for that. But what was the gap? Yeah,

Devin Daly: 11:26

absolutely. Right. So so there is this notion, right? That there will be a bifurcation in the AI markets, right that companies that definitively can declare themselves the winner of a particular vertical with AI, you know, will have long term competitive advantage strategic premiums. And so that is, you know, impels North Stars to really firmly establish ourselves as the de facto standard of artificial intelligence for the auto space. And there's also an adage that as AI becomes more democratized, or even potentially commoditized, he who owns the data or the company that has access to the most rich proprietary training data will really went out and so outsell has phenomenal automated marketing capabilities or marketing automation capabilities that you know, we can talk more about, but really what excites us is they've got 20 years of consumer data every day, they're tracking somewhere around 70 million American consumers do that math. Yeah. And yeah, exactly. And so so the ability for us to use that to train our models on auto specific use cases to do that, really longtail personalization is what you know, excites us more than anything. When you look at you can look at the outsell platform, and you can see one consumers last five vehicle purchases their last 70 service visits, you know which mediums they respond to at what times of data, they like to be interactive, in addition, all the household information, right size of family income, credit score, things of that nature. And again, they've got that going back and enormous 20 years.

Paul J Daly: 12:53

You just blew my mind for a second. Like, I think a lot of people think, yeah, you have data on me or data on consumers. So you know how much I make, you know what I drive, and you know, what I like to watch. But what time of day, I like to interact with things my last 70 service visits regardless of where I had them.

Devin Daly: 13:13

Right? Yeah, yeah. And that sounds good to say, right. I mean, that's a key part of our positioning is sure we have, you know, point solution competitors that, you know, might compete with us in one facet of our product. But to your point, Paul, being able to share those insights across different activation. So when I'm engaging with Paul selling a vehicle, I know he responds Tuesdays and Thursdays between six and eight, because he doesn't have his kids during that time. And he prefers text over email, or what have you that after we sell ball vehicle, being able to use that same insight when I'm trying to get him back in for service retention is really that's a big part of our differentiation. Is one AI brain sharing insights across all the different touch points in the lifecycle.

Kyle Mountsier: 13:50

Yeah, and you know, what's interesting to me is like they have, okay, 70 million, you know, total people, right? That's, that's not the entire size of the market in the US. But it's a it's a big portion. And I think what we, as an industry a lot of times do too often is we go, how do we find 70,000,001 person, right? But if we just cared for the 70 million that we already know a little bit better, we wouldn't have to worry about 70 million in one because we don't actually need that consumer, we only need the 70 million that we already have in the pipeline that we know we know their habits, we know everything point and we care for them. Well, I talked about this all the time. I'm like, you know, you got a dealership with 100,000 people sitting in their CRM or DMS, like you shouldn't ever have to go anywhere else for anybody as long as you take care of that really, really well. Right and this is this is that it's actually it's not just this is what's really cool about this. It's not just like a marketing ploy. It's actually caring for the consumer better.

Devin Daly: 14:56

Yeah, right. Couldn't agree more. All right. We we talked about that all the time. Not Only will AI help improve the customer lifetime value. But truly, from a customer experience standpoint, it's significantly better right? You think about the experience most consumers have they, you know, fall in love with their sales rep fall in love with the vehicle spend $50,000 second largest purchase their life, and then they never hear from the dealership again. Or maybe they get some HTML piece here there. Whereas with AI, you're constantly in touch. Hey, you know, you're getting a handoff to the service department, you're getting an AI based CSI survey, you're constantly reaching out to that consumer reminding them candidly, when we started doing service business after we acquired car labs, we thought people would find those reminders to be a bit of an annoyance in fact, they're super thankful and thank you so much for reminding me Oh, I'm sorry. I've been putting that off kind of thing you know, I think to myself, right? I drive a Landrover not the most reliable vehicles. I wish my dealer had AI to remind me when I was due for service kind of thing. So absolutely it's a second order benefit is customer experience and reputation no doubt.

Paul J Daly: 15:53

Tell us a little bit about the makeup of the company. So your headquarters is and has always been our wasn't Manhattan now. It's in Syracuse. Tell us about like how many people just give us like the overview. I think people like to know like, what's the company structure how much is remote Are you in person what's going to happen without cell?

Devin Daly: 16:08

Yeah, percent. So I'll give you the numbers on a combined without cell basis. So without cell we're roughly 500 employees today, headquarters is in Syracuse, we do business now with around 8000 dealerships. impel is very international, especially with our merchandising products, and we work in around 53 countries. We have other offices in Toronto, Manchester in the UK, Brisbane, Australia and a large office in the Republic of Georgia of their own 75 people outside was headquartered in Minneapolis, they brought 170 employees and 2000 customers to in PAL roughly I think 120 of those 107 year are in Minneapolis impels probably, I don't know, maybe 20 ish percent of our employee base is remote the restaurant, you know, one of our nexuses, if you will,

Paul J Daly: 16:54

what is your is that? Is that an intentional strategy? Or is that just how it washed out?

Devin Daly: 16:59

There? No, I think that yeah, that's definitely definitely intentional for us, you know, we value the in person, environment, the osmosis, the energy, as you said, you know, we're very much go to market heavy organization, I think it's really difficult to do that or replicate, you know, go to market culture fully remotely. So, yeah, now we're pretty pro kind of in office, and pellet mode out.

Paul J Daly: 17:21

explain, explain what you mean, by go to market culture. That's the first time I've ever heard that phrase.

Devin Daly: 17:25

Yeah, meaning, right. I mean, I think, you know, especially early on in a company's lifecycle, I think companies typically have one of two modalities, they're either really, you know, product and technology organization, or go to market organization. And, you know, I think early on, of course, we had phenomenal products. But, you know, we sold direct, we didn't sell through resellers, and, you know, we were really focused on on go to market and scaling that up. And I think that's a really strong, you know, unique differentiator of ours, we got a huge customer success team, a large implementation team, you know, we know how to take care of our customers how to implement them properly, how to support large enterprises, over time, obviously become more balanced right now combined without Sal we've got 170 People working in product and engineering, developing new solutions. But you know, that that element of the business too, I think, really benefits from being in person and being able to, you know, call another product person, you know, work together on a prototype and, you know, look at a design together and that kind of thing. But But yeah, again, without cell combined, we're up to, I think around 170 people between product and engineering. You know,

Paul J Daly: 18:27

we talk we talk a lot about, you know, this more than cars mindset, I have it on my shirt. A lot of it has to do with getting the broader impact of the auto industry and the the blessings and the resources that we have, and using those things to serve the community. I know that you have longtime been very involved in central New York, which is, you know, it's not not a huge city like greater Syracuse is under a million. But tell us about what you feel like the obligation is for tech companies or even industry partners to be impactful in their local area where they're headquartered?

Devin Daly: 19:01

Yeah, I mean, right. I mean, it was it's not the most obvious place for us to continue scaling a startup. But, you know, we felt an obligation to prove that, you know, it could be done in Syracuse, right. There's, you know, philosophy in the, in the technology industry called, I believe, it's called the rainforest philosophy, which is basically, if you can create a couple of successful technology companies, you can really create this virtuous cycle where some of the founders or management team members are able to generate liquidity, learn what it takes to scale a business, and maybe they go on to start their own businesses, or, you know, they go on to invest in other technology companies, and it can create this really, really virtuous snowball effect. You've seen it.

Kyle Mountsier: 19:38

Welcome to Burlington, Vermont. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. You know,

Devin Daly: 19:42

we now have a large cadre, we call them the Burlington mafia. So our my CFO was the CFO. dealer.com So now I think we've got something like 20 people all that were actually.com based in Burlington rectory searching for space to office space to have up there as

Paul J Daly: 19:56

well. Oh, my gosh, that's funny. I mean, obviously upstate New York, right. ACV is As big success story to come out of upstate New York, which is only about two hours from from where we're headquartered, and it's it has been interesting to watch what, like, you know, like, tech is about talent and before COVID remote talent wasn't as nearly as normal a thing. So cultivating that you watched the whole economy change around it, because all of a sudden, you're getting all these national dollars coming into an area, and redeploying those and training people. I love that the rain forest analogy makes makes a lot I've never heard that before. Comparable. Yes.

Kyle Mountsier: 20:30

That's awesome. Well, Devin, thank you so much for joining us a little bit today and and I exposing the timeline of what impel is done. And what you see is on the horizon of AI, personalized connection, merchandising, marketing, I think that it's really insightful, even just in what products you guys are purchasing along the way. It's giving people a roadmap to understand your heart and your vision. So thanks for sharing a little bit of that with us and joining us today on Auto

Devin Daly: 20:58

Collabs. Absolutely. Thanks for having me really enjoyed it

Kyle Mountsier: 21:05

all right, two things. I definitely have to find out what customer number we were back.

Paul J Daly: 21:11

Alright, what the follow up on that one?

Kyle Mountsier: 21:13

Yeah, cuz I already know I was customer 13 And pulsar and that's only because there was a nine rooftop group that signed like three days before I did so. So that was that never was a customer of outsell back in the day. So but I've known Devin and the team art and the whole crew there for quite some time. And they've they've been on the hunt. Since Jump Street.

Paul J Daly: 21:37

I think what he said go to market oriented. I thought that that's like you aren't kidding. That is man. I mean, they are just motivated and incredibly precise. In their approach, which I think is is one of the reasons I think when you follow about companies that are successful, you're see a very distinct orientation towards what it is they're trying to accomplish. Right. And here and some of that there's a lot of that story I didn't know that I just heard. And I think when you see the strategic approach to it with the ability to process it and stay focused for the go to market mentality. I mean, like, definitely, definitely ones to watch. I mean, big ambitious goal, right be the authority and AI in the automotive industry.

Kyle Mountsier: 22:14

Wow. That's strong. Yeah. And I think that they've got a path to path to be there. I liked the acquisition pattern. It's not it's not similar to a lot of other companies and their acquisitions across automotive right now.

Paul J Daly: 22:26

So and we got tons of good people. Great. Weddington. John, John clevis. Like we have lots of friends there. So it'd be interesting to see how we now have a blended family.

Kyle Mountsier: 22:36

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey, on behalf of Paul J. Daly, the guy that's not here, Michael Cirillo, and myself, Kyle Mountsier. Thanks for joining us today on Auto Collabs. Sign

Unknown: 22:46

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