In the Highbeams, with Ted Roberts Auto People Weekly| October 2007
Ted: Please tell our readers a bit about the history of
DealerSocket.
Ord: DealerSocket was incubated by me and my partner Brad
Perry. We had worked in the CRM space prior to this company.
We knew a lot about customer relations management, and about
integrating CRM solutions for a bunch of different industries;
anywhere from professional sports teams to American Express
and a bunch of diverse industries. We learned how to make
people successful using technologies to get the right business
processes and actions that would drive the business, whether it
be selling products and services or making customers more
successful and reputable. We did that for a number of years.
We grew that company and sold it. We saw a huge need in the
dealer space, so we actually developed a beta version for some of our dealer friends and they said, "Great, but only
three of our people are going to use this." We responded, "You need to have your whole staff use it and get value out
of it.” They said, "Yes, you're right. But you guys aren't car guys and you don't understand the business."
Ted: So how did you handle that?
Ord: We actually went in and worked inside of dealerships for a year. We worked for free so that they wouldn't fire
us, because we asked way too many questions. We really tried to understand the business as well as we could. We
came out of that and understood what they were telling us to begin with. We then created DealerSocket on the heels
of that with our knowledge of CRM and our experience with Siebel and Onyx and a lot of the generic CRM tools in
play. We coupled our CRM experience and our dealer experience to create the DealerSocket application tools.
Solutions for Dealers
Ted: What solutions does DealerSocket offer dealers?
Ord: DealerSocket manages every prospect interaction that a person has with a store; everything from the sales side
of the house, including Internet lead management, showroom tracking control, as well as telephony management. We
replace companies like Who's Calling, and Call Source on the telephony management side. We replace companies like
AVV and ICar on the Internet lead management side, and in showroom traffic control we've replaced companies like
AutoBase and HigherGear. We basically consolidate everything that the dealer needs to do with the sales side of the
house into one easy-to-use tool.
We also have a big application play inside the service side of the business, which is a big differentiator from our
competitors. We manage all of the online service appointments and the operation codes that are being assigned to
those service appointments. We manage the client for recommended service type of marketing campaigns. We
manage all of the different business rules and interactions that will drive people to service their car more often and
more profitably at the dealership. We also make sure that those customers are followed up on at the right time with
the right type of customer satisfaction message to resolve their concerns and make sure that they are going to be a
customer for life.
Ted: What is DealerSocket University?
Ord: We found out a long time ago that we could have the best technology in the industry, both in terms of breadth
and depth across the functional areas of business, but if people did not know how to use the technology or found it
too cumbersome, it didn't matter how much value the technology provided. So we created DealerSocket University,
which is basically an online training tool for our dealers to teach them about DealerSocket technologies and how to use them. It also teaches them to implement best practices that can be leveraged and used to drive the value in a
way that was not thought possible. DealerSocket University has been huge, and we train about 10,000 users per
month through the university.
A Toyota Dealer Sees Sales Skyrocket
Ted: Any recent success stories you'd like to share with us?
Ord: There are quite a few of them that we have had. One is a Toyota dealer here in California that had never sold
over 240 vehicles a month in the history of their store. I got a call in April that they had just gone over 360 vehicles in
a month, just based on easy implementable stuff. It wasn't rocket science; it was following up on the customers that
they should have been following up on and the accountability tool to make sure that happened every day with no fail
and no exceptions.
Ted: Please tell us about your history. What did you do before founding DealerSocket?
Ord: I am bit of an interesting bird. I got my master's degree in Accounting with an emphasis in Information Systems
and I had been in the entrepreneurial world before I went to graduate school. After graduate school, I went to work
for Ernst & Young and was on their operational assistance consulting group. I went around the country and did job
cost and core financial systems consulting for the top 100 home builders. At the tail end of that tenure, I spent time
integrating the sales office systems with these job cost and accounting systems and found that there was whole other
world out there on the sales force automation side and showroom tracking control side and in integrating that with
the transactional accounting systems. It just created so much more value for the enterprises that we were getting
involved with.
I helped grow a new company that was totally based on CRM at that point and tried to figure out how we would
integrate that in a generic basis, from customer relations to management back through order entry to the transaction
or accounting system. We built that company and we were the 43rd fastest growing company in the U.S. at one
point. We grew that company and sold it. We did about 250 different customer relationship management
implementations over a five-year period, and we were basically a consulting firm that billed for hours. What that gave
us was a great knowledge of how to make people successful using this type of technology and what the pitfalls were
and what the successes were and how we could really drive that success home. That was one of the building blocks
for DealerSocket.
Ted: What do you like to do in your free time?
Ord: I have five children. I have two girls and three boys and so my wife and I are fairly busy when I have do have
free time. Most of the free time is spent with my family and doing stuff that they like to do. I have three soccer
games on Saturday and I try to coach their basketball teams. From a free time perspective, I look at all of my time as
free time and I choose to spend all of it either in the business or with the family.
