F&I and Showroom, April 2014

Executive Spotlight cent years wasnt surprised by this acquisition But why dont you tell our readers what the motivation was behind this purchase Sundaram Clearly the biggest motivation for us with Dealer com is being in a leadership position from the standpoint of digital marketing Digital has become more pervasive What we are excited about is we now have the industrys leading digital marketing platform F I Youve released several plug ins for dealer websites in recent years Could this purchase change the way you build those solutions In other words could we see you guys developing TrueCar like buying sites for dealers Sundaram Your comment is an interesting one That is one of the added benefi ts Our vision for digital retailing remains the same as we will continue to go down the path of both building services and plugins We think thats a smart way to go and it needs to continue The advantage of having Dealer com is they will be able to absorb the services and create a much richer experience on their own F I Talk for a second about your digital retailing strategy which you began discussing last year Sundaram It was in its infancy We didnt have all the drivers launched We have SmartFind PaymentDriver FinanceDriver and now TradeDriver but we had only two things last year that we talked about Since then weve launched a more enhanced version of PaymentDriver The big news 90 days ago is we launched TradeDriver Whats important to note here is in some cases were into the second generation with these tools TradeDriver is new but everything else including what we launched for mobile devices has already gone through based on dealer input what works and what doesnt F I Is taking transactions online the play here Sundaram What we are after is creating the richest online experience a dealer can deliver to their customers 24 F I and Showroom April 2014 Dealertracks Raj Sundaram says the fi rm remains committed to building web services and plugins but he believes the acquisition of Dealer com will allow the combined entities to create a richer online experience for dealers websites one that is a lot deeper than what it is today Today we can all agree that inventory is fantastic There are great pictures a lot of descriptions a lot happening What I think were offering dealers are tools to say not everyone comes to a dealers website to search his inventory For the dealer the challenge is attracting that customer who says I know the car I want Whats the payment going to be I dont want to hear the Come on in Dont worry Ill tell you Were not saying all customers want this but that becomes compelling So the real opportunity here is the dealers investment in digital marketing You draw in all the eyeballs you want to make sure you have programs that are compelling So what dealers really need right now is for the websites to deliver higher conversion rates Were offering them tools that will drive that What we are not after is dictating that this has to be done this way We have to be fair and say some customers are more comfortable saying I saw the pictures Im willing to come in for that appointment Hey not everyone was comfortable buying everything on Amazon but now everyone is Its the same thing here F I Everyone is talking about the big change thats coming to automotive retailing but could we already be in the midst of that change Sundaram Yes I think were experiencing the change now In terms of whats an infl exion point 2015 might be that springboard I dont have a crystal ball but heres why Im confi dent were already in the middle of this The stakes are so high from a standpoint of digital advertising spend Its incredible how much OEMs and dealers are pushing digital advertising Thats already happening And as I said before you cant spend that much money on digital advertising to drive customers to your website and not have the tools to drive the funnel conversion So again I would be shocked if it wasnt 2015 But mark my words 2014 might surprise us with respect to some of this stuff All it takes like everything else in this industry is a few dealers starting to see a lot of traction F I Does the current regulatory climate slow things down Sundaram I think it accelerates it Heres why I think what were putting out here is the ability to diffuse the issues raised by regulators For a dealer the advantage is not only can he deliver on some of the compliance or so called transparency comments we keep hearing he can control what is getting displayed in a very secure manner I think it actually provides an excellent platform for dealers to embrace this and leverage it