Solving the "Coming Soon" Problem with Colby Joyner of Liftkit.io

Kyle Mountsier: 0:00Speaking of crunch enhancers,

‍Unknown: 0:08

this is Auto Collabs. Did

Paul J Daly: 0:10

you know that a crunch enhancer is a non nutritive cereal varnish that they put over the flake to keep the milk from penetrating?

Kyle Mountsier: 0:17

I know that one time my uncle told me that my great, great grandfather, who used to work for like, P and G or something, actually helped with the candy coating on the Eminem. Oh, they got it wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Paul J Daly: 0:34

Now they got it right. Melts in your mouth, not in your hand, not he came up with that marketing slogan. I want to meet that crazy

Kyle Mountsier: 0:40

Michael. I

Michael Cirillo: 0:41

take that all the way down every podcast like that would be my claim to fame. You know, some like, people are like, I met Elvis once and like, that's become their whole talking thing years. Needs to be met.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:51

Like every podcast told me, once I get on every father, yes, and just tell him I met you one time.

Paul J Daly: 0:58

Wow. Like an otter. Well, listen, speaking of speaking to somebody that does,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:04

speaking of someone that we met one time. Hey,

Paul J Daly: 1:08

good deal. You can tell this is the first one after the new year.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:12

We've never done this before. This is a new thing for us. We never podcast.

Paul J Daly: 1:16

I know, but, but today's guest is a repeat guest, Bobby Gaudreau. He's a runner. I'm gonna ask him about that. But he's also one of those people that lives in the Northeast. I know a lot about Bobby because he's a repeat guest, but, but, but he's he's also always somebody that like has this ability to be like, doesn't that just make sense, that we would do it this way and not this way? So that's why I like when he's on, because I need those people in my life. Kyle. Kyle, you and Bobby get along? Well, I can tell we have some good chats. So Bobby's got more, like, I don't know, probably more social barriers in between him and saying what he actually thinks. You tend to just say it.

Michael Cirillo: 1:52

Typically just come out with it. Kyle always asks nice, intellectual questions, and I'm sitting here like, Don't crack a fart joke. Don't crack a fart joke. That's how my brain works. Like I was instantly like he's a runner, but if he were a blower, do you think his coaches good row?

Kyle Mountsier: 2:13

We hope that you enjoy fart. Fart jokes with Bobby good Joe. That's not

Paul J Daly: 2:16

happening. Just, let's just get into the get into it. Bobby, it's so good to be with you again. Thanks for giving us some more time today on Auto Collabs.

Bobby Gaudreau: 2:27

Yeah, good to see you guys again. Great to be here. All right, so last time

Paul J Daly: 2:31

we spoke, we talked a bit about running, which got Kyle all excited, like it always does naturally between that time and this time, though, I heard you've done some serious running.

Bobby Gaudreau: 2:42

Yeah? I did in August. I did a 50 mile race in, yeah, in British in British Columbia, so in a car to do this on the last episode, yeah, I may, yeah, I may. I had been, I had been training for it for a while. So is this? It was called the Squamish 50. So I was actually originally signed up for the 50. So I turned 50 this year. So I turned 50 in September. So this is like my entrance into being 50. So it was 50 and 50. Yeah. So I ran, I ran 50 miles on a Saturday, and I was supposed to run 50k on Sunday, but about halfway through six miles, I was like, I think I'm just gonna finish. You've

Paul J Daly: 3:28

been listening to way too much. David Goggins, I can tell that already. You got, you got a Spotify Premium subscription. You started listening in the Goggins, and you're like, I went to a 50 miles and a 50k in the same weekend. It

Bobby Gaudreau: 3:41

is funny, actually, when I was driving back a few days later and I was actually listening to a different podcast that David Goggins was, was was on, coincidentally, you mentioned, naturally, I

Paul J Daly: 3:51

knew it, it, found it That's amazing. Well, all of that energy and all that motivation to run something like that, obviously, is indicative of someone who is motivated and driven. Let me just ask you to the other side. What have you been working on, on the professional side of your life? Because we know you've been running 50 and 50.

Bobby Gaudreau: 4:11

Yeah, no, I mean, on the on the on the professional side and on the work side. I mean, we've, we've, since the last time we've talked, it's, things have been kind of progressing, you know, quite quickly. And we've made a lot of, we've kind of made a lot of strides. So we've, you know, we've kind of officially launched kind of a, you know, a true CDP where we're very much focused on data quality. We're very much focused on marketing activation. We're running about six different journeys. We're starting to execute marketing through different channels now. So we're starting to do stuff on websites with identity resolution. We just launched our first customers with our with digital. So we're actually now extending everything out into into digital, and then we're going to be starting to do some betas pretty soon with pulling in CRM as well. So we were very, very focused on kind of getting it buttoned up on DMS. And. Now we're gonna start pulling in CRM data pretty soon as well. So a lot of stuff that as we lead into nada, that we're excited to kind of keep rolling out and announce as we head into nada.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:09

So what we're really hoping is that no one was playing a drinking game or bingo with that first with that first montage, because you hit on some of the terms that I think our industry has just almost become like it's a part of the vernacular over the last year, but still is like we're a far cry from really understanding, I think, personally, as an industry, what all of those things actually mean to business outcomes, performance, like what it actually has has done and is gonna do for business. You know, I think the first time you and I actually talked about you all like leveraging Salesforce and thinking about CDP in a different way, was a little over a year ago at Brian passes MRC and and then was still fairly early. Talks on, like, what is CDP? You know, clairvoy had been talking about identity resolution for a few years. Some others had been but what's, what's been, the journey you think of like automotive kind of discovering and fighting through the early stages of what a CDP is can do and should be over this last year, setting the stage for like, people thinking about how to approach it around. Nada, yeah,

Bobby Gaudreau: 6:32

no. I mean, I think it's, that's a that's a good question. That's a good loaded question. He

Paul J Daly: 6:37

loaded 13 rounds in that one. Hold on. I'm not done yet. Hold on, 123, all right, hot weapon. You take it

Bobby Gaudreau: 6:47

on a quick run and kind of get my thought,

Paul J Daly: 6:50

well, quick run for you is open for debate, right?

Kyle Mountsier: 6:52

We'll see you tomorrow.

Bobby Gaudreau: 6:55

No, I mean, I mean as a, kind of, as, you know, as a level set right? And I mean, we've all been in this space for a while, and this is, like a little bit, I'm being a little bit trite, and I'm being a little bit tongue in cheek, but I'm also being, I think, factual, that it just it feels like retail, automotive is always a couple years behind everything else, right? For sure, websites or CRM, or, you know, digital retail with, you know, Omni channel and so CDPs. While CDPs is a relatively, you know, newish term for us, I mean, in B to B, B to C, technology, software, cells, it's the fastest growing segment outside of automotive. I mean, I think this year it's finishing as like a five to $8 billion industry, and by 2028 it's going to be close to a $30 billion industry worldwide, right? Yeah. And, you know, when we started, so to kind of, you know, part of your question there, Kyle was like, how did we start on this journey? We kind of fell into it by accident, right? So, you know, we had some standalone products, whether those were some email retention tools. You know, we had a pretty strong standalone equity mining tool. Our investors like, we don't want to be in that business. We don't want to be in that standalone business anymore. So figure something out. And so we kind of looked, you know, over the fence. We brought in some outside consultants to help us take a look at things, and their recommendation was you guys. And I've mentioned this before, but it's always worth repeating is you guys meaning kind of dominion and deal act or deal activator, activator, dealer solutions. You guys have done a really good job over the last 20 years of figuring out how to extract data out of a DMS and organize that and create audiences, but it's kind of stuck behind some old technology when it comes to executing that from a marketing standpoint, you know, a A for effort, right? Like you did what you were supposed to do at the time, but it's just not keeping up. And then you guys should also introduce this thing called the CDP. We're like, we like, four or five years ago, what's a CDP? And, you know, and I'll give a lot of credit to Brian Pash. I mean, Brian tells the story about, you know, he was meeting, I think it was John clavidasher who had left cars.com and then, you know, went outside automotive and was introduced to CDPs in, I think, you know, the consumer packaged goods world. Yeah, that is what it was, yeah, this would be so helpful in this industry. And so, you know, I think some of the initial things that first came out with some of the research papers. It all looked good, but, you know, internally, we kind of said, well, man, this picture that these guys are painting is Shangri La, right, like there's so many things here. Of course, it all makes sense, but

Paul J Daly: 9:36

that that word wasn't on the bingo card, by the

Bobby Gaudreau: 9:41

way, no, that'll be our new, that'll be the new. If it was,

Paul J Daly: 9:43

you win somebody. He bet somebody before he come on the show. He's like, watch me use this word

Bobby Gaudreau: 9:51

the way that, even as we even internally, right where we're, you know we're, we're explaining to some folks in kind of other departments, here's what we're doing. Doing. I'll start by saying this, the recommendation that we had from an outside consultant when it came to marketing automation systems was, you need to, you need to introduce a marketing automation system as it's defined in the world outside of automotive, right? It's got to do certain things. It doesn't mean that it's it can just deliver email. It doesn't mean that it can follow some sequences. It's got to have be able to ingest data. It's got to be able to understand signals. It's got to be able to understand data, like, how would HubSpot, or how would Marketo, or how would you know? How would marketing cloud or or sales forces Pardot define it. It's the same thing with the CDP, right? Like a CDP means something, right? And it would, it's, it's a piece of technology that's made for marketers, that's designed to help a company ingest all of the data, right? Like, not just some of the data, not just like this cool data over here, all of the data, right? So that means, so what we've done at activator is to just kind of organize. This is we're thinking about things in three bands. So the first band is the one that's closest to the dealer. So this is, like, all the operational stuff. It's web, it's CRM, and it's a DMS, okay, then there's the second band. And we were kind of putting those into segments, right? This is all of the cool first party data stuff, right? These are the things that are iframed into a dealer's website, or they're extensions of the dealer's ecosystem, right? So it's chat, it's telephony, it's digital retail, it's video, it's all the payment tools, it's all the stuff that. And then when you look at those, we've got six segments double click into that. Each segment probably has four or five companies that dominate probably, you know, 80 to 100% of the marketplace that we want to ultimately be able to partner with. And then that third band, that third band, that's the stuff that's kind of outside of the ecosystem. So that would be the marketplace sites, cars gurus, etc, the OEM websites, and then other, you know, garage data from Amazon or other really important first party data that you could ingest into the system. So we, that's how we think about the world. But now in that Shangri La right that second, that's where the, you know, that's where the juice is right. That's the point of a CDP is to be able to collect all the information, and all that first party data in that in that second band, is what's going to really help to unify and just build a stronger profile. But the assumption is that there's all these APIs that exist and it's just that it's not

Kyle Mountsier: 12:40

just not there. Yeah, so here's, here's, I'll give you another hard one if you're okay with it. How do we, how do we actually ensure that the CDP doesn't become like the digital retailing of 2018 here's what I mean by that. Is one buzz word, right? How do we ensure over Yeah, I have that. It's on my website. Yeah, I have that. I do the CDP thing. It works. I don't know if it works. 50% of marketing that whole thing, right? But two, and I think actually, closer to what you're saying here, is, you know, back when we installed digital retailing it would in looking historically now you go, Oh, it's a payment calculator, it's a trade tool, it's a finance application, and it's a scheduled test drive tool, all of which I had on my website previously, but now I have together, yep. How do we not make a CDP? Just be like, Oh, it's an audience builder and Facebook marketplace. It's MailChimp for dealers, and it's a text solution that we had with text to drive for my service scheduler, right? Like, how do we not just come up with, like, oh, wait, we were kind of doing this before. It's kind of in one platform, but we didn't really get much difference out of it. How do we escape that as an industry?

Bobby Gaudreau: 14:01

No. I mean, I think that's, that's the, that's the $64,000 that's a $64,000 question. And I think there's, it's, I think we start with it is just educating. What are these things support? What are, what are the outcomes that you're trying to achieve from us, right? And so if we go back to what you know, what's the Why does, why is the CDP space, outside of auto growing so fast, right? It's because you've got these other business I just use new balance as the example. I used to live in Boston. There's a lot of shoe companies there, and so New Balance. New Balance had a CRM, right? They had a marketing automation system. They probably had a mass or they have a massive team of people, you know, posting content and running all of their digital channels, right? What they didn't have was the CDP. The CDP just, it doesn't replace any of those things. It compliments it, right? And so, from our standpoint, you know, what we're seeing out there is, there are, here's one of the things I like to say, we're majoring. On the majors and minoring on the minors, where a lot of people out there are majoring on the minors, right? And they're and they're focused first on all the cool outside stuff. And I'm doing first party data, first party data, first party data, but then there's nothing for it to dock into. I was at a conference this fall, and there were two. There was a dealership and a company. They were talking they were 10 months into it. They're 12 months of their first year of launching this CDP, and 10 months into it. They really hadn't even launched any campaigns yet because they hadn't figured out how to clean up the customer data. Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of people are skipping over that. And you know, we're hearing about data lakes, and data this, and data that, like, we're starting to say, avoid the data swamp, right? Like, this is just gonna turn

Paul J Daly: 15:46

that's great. That's a great term. That's great. We did us.

Bobby Gaudreau: 15:50

We had a sales kickoff two weeks ago or three weeks ago in Columbus, Ohio, and just with our internal sales team. And that was the whole deck. Is the data swamp. Like, how do if you aren't bringing

Kyle Mountsier: 16:00

us a small data swamp to nada and putting it in the middle of your booth, you're doing it, you could

Paul J Daly: 16:05

just bring the whole ghillie suit. It's like the data swamp thing, right? All your marketing problems. Oh, it's Michael Cirillo in there, right?

Michael Cirillo: 16:17

Michael Cirillo wearing a ghillie suit, dressed in dippity do gel. I'm thinking about like 38 years from now, Bobby, when flying cars, right? Because, like, the Jetsons is a thing and and we're watching a documentary about the conversations we were having before the world became the matrix, and they will feature snippets of you talking on an Auto Collabs podcast. What identity res like, all of the things like. It's kind of funny to me. I'm interested in all of your take actually, on this. I know a lot of other industries, we tend to look at other industries at how advanced they are, but then we have conversations like this, and I'm like, I don't know. I think there's so much advancement and innovation happening right inside the auto industry that that I think you're right. We've somehow, like, accepted that happens more in other spaces. And I'm listening to this, and I'm like, okay, so you figured out how to piece the bits and the bobs and doodads and the gadgets and gizmos and gizzards, and now all of a sudden we have this advanced thing that is going to change the way we transact forever more in this industry.

Bobby Gaudreau: 17:35

Yeah, no, I mean, I think the the, I mean, this is, I think my 20th, something year in this space. And I mean, the advancements, it's, you know, and it's not linear, right? Like, what's happened over the last four or five years is greater than probably what happened the 10 or 15 years prior to that. And, you know, I'm going to take the red pill now, by the way. But the, the I wanted to go to your matrix joke, but the, but the whole point on the on the CDP is, is, if you're, if anyone's installing a CDP, it's really, there's two outcomes that you're keeping score on. It's, how are you managing the data, and how are you executing on marketing? And so when you look at the stack that is in place, right? That's now the new buzzword, what's your stack? What's your marketing stack? But it makes it understands what that means, and are all the pieces there in a position to be able to actually do something with it? And I think you know, to go back to their question, how do we avoid, you know, kind of digital retail this sounds great, but then everyone fell on their face, and part of that was, is just, in many cases, it just the dealerships. Processes weren't set up right, or it wasn't strong enough of a change management in terms of some of the stuff that did it good enough, right? I really believe, and not just because I've, you know, I'm working for a company that's now doing CDP, that if this isn't, if this is deployed correctly, and you've got the right things in place, this can be an absolute game changer, because, to your point, Michael, taking taking advantage of all these other really good innovations, like all of those cool things that are in that second band that I keep talking about, those that's why CDPs exist, right? Because those are just without the CDP. Those are just silos of information and silos of data and silos don't have. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, like that's just, that's is what it is. It's a silo of information. The CDP Can, can actually ingest it, but if it doesn't dock back to information in the DMS, which is ultimately where someone is going to be, you know, keeping track of all their financial records, all the RDRs and all the arrows, and if it can't execute on marketing, it's your you're gonna have another, you know, you're just gonna have another expensive thing, you know, another

Paul J Daly: 19:50

bunch of things, right?

Michael Cirillo: 19:52

Yep. Do you think this leads to a future where all of us make money but don't know how we're making it anymore? Because, like. I did the marketing and the marketing. I

Paul J Daly: 20:04

mean, that doesn't sound like the worst future I can imagine I'm in. Let's go count is that what the Jetsons is like? That's fine with me?

Bobby Gaudreau: 20:13

No, I hope it's actually the I hope that it's the I hope that it's the opposite, and and again, it's, you know, the, you know what, what we're starting to see now with, you know, we've with, and part of it is because we've got access to all of this cool technology, and we've spent so much time building the infrastructure, and now we can just go so much faster. Is our ability to have, we've got a, you know, what we're creating as a customer profile, and we've got this customer profile report, and it really is either kind of shining a black light on the things that are working and aren't working how, you know, we can defend all the stuff that we're cleaning up, and we can defend all of the incremental lift that we're bringing in, whether that was incremental from an engagement standpoint, or that was incremental because that person, ultimately, you know, came into the dealership to do some kind of a transaction. So I think as the as you kind of go down the funnel, this has an opportunity to really put a lens on things that we hadn't seen, that we haven't been able to see before, because it's been a swamp of data, unreal.

Michael Cirillo: 21:17

Okay, let me ask you this. As we wind down, you're going to be at nada. Tell us a little bit about that.

Bobby Gaudreau: 21:21

Yeah, so we'll, we'll, we're going to be at nada. We've, we, you know, we're going to be making a couple of announcements on some of the new products that we're that we're rolling out, and we're going to be sharing a couple of incentives that are going to be coming out a little bit closer to the to the show. And, you know, I think from for many of us, this is, you know, we're in double digits on times that we kind of nada, so we're very much looking forward to that.

Michael Cirillo: 21:45

You heard it here first, folks, Bobby, can be trusted. Not a single leak of what's coming that. Not a single leak this guy, that's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Bobby, how can those listening and watching get in touch with you? In touch with you and connect

Bobby Gaudreau: 22:04

before the show? So my my email address is you can either use Robert or Bobby. So Robert dot, good, row, G, A, u, d, R, E, A, U, if you guys see it on the screen@activator.ai and my cell phone number is on everything too, which is 617-833-9735, and then you can just go to activator.ai, and we've got all sorts of ways that you can contact us that way as well. Boom, gave it all to us.

Kyle Mountsier: 22:32

Nice, Bobby, thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us on Auto Collabs today. Man, it's been a pleasure.

Paul J Daly: 22:41

We dropped, we're in this episode, and we talked about running 50 kilometers and 50 miles, and then he starts talking about CDPs. I was like, if he says web speed, Kyle's gonna leave this podcast and go, like, move

Kyle Mountsier: 22:54

To Vermont to be closer. We're

Michael Cirillo: 22:57

just gonna see Kyle lift off like rockets underneath them.

Kyle Mountsier: 23:02

Yeah, absolutely, you know what? I personally, I'm really excited about the question, like, the question that I have had in my mind, and I think he did a beautiful job addressing it, is like, what happens when we turn around and we go, oh, we had these 18 things previously, and now we just brought them all into one thing. And is that he almost didn't like complete the sentence, but he said it in the middle of it is, is if we ask ourselves the question, what's the outcome that we want out of this before we start, that's the win. And if you listen to Melissa Cartagena or Gary Ledoux and some of the best marketers out there. Every conversation that I have with them about this is they started by asking, what's the outcome that we want for our consumers, for our business out of this, instead of like, what's the new shiny thing that I can try and make work? Right? It's what's the outcome that I work want, and how do I get the things tied together that bring me that outcome? And I think that's a question that we can ask of any tech at this point. At

Michael Cirillo: 24:03

this point. We just got to be like, I hope people are paying attention. Because you remember when the whole buzz was, look how fast everything's moving, and it was like, Why? Because you can Google stuff, and just in the time period from that like, I think about if this podcast were 160 years ago, it would be about how you don't have to boil turnips anymore. You can fry them in a skillet like that was the most advanced. Yeah, we're talking about a world in which computers will more rapidly understand the needs of a customer. So you can, I don't know, like so that you can do nothing and

Kyle Mountsier: 24:46

be freed up to have real conversations, human conversations. Actually, I think that

Michael Cirillo: 24:50

requires a soul, yeah, and I think that

Kyle Mountsier: 24:53

the that the thing that will be the most attractive about employees will not be their ability to work with the. Tech, because so much of that will be solved. It will be their ability to work individually with humans, on a one on one relationship, and those people will get paid the most over the next five years. Yes, that's

Michael Cirillo: 25:09

emotional intelligence. Is like the Come on we need to be talking about. Because I love how you said that. That is the last 30 years we built up a bank of people whose professional value is tied up in how well they can use tech themselves. And we are now guys like we're leaving that now that is like going away. And I love how you said that. That's the work that requires a soul. Well, we hope you enjoyed this episode with Bobby Boudreau. Good row. Thanks so much for joining us here on Auto Collabs. We'll see you guys at nada.

Unknown: 25:45

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