Why Automotive Dealerships Must Embrace Technology for Growth with David Boice

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, David Boyce. Now I'm going to read David's bio to make sure I get this right. David Boyce is the CEO and co-founder of Team Velocity. He's a self-made and innovative pioneer in the auto industry and with technology. Throughout his impressive career, he's owned numerous companies in the automotive, tech, recreational vehicle, marine, and real estate sectors. He co-founded his first automotive technology company called AutoMark with his father when he was just 22, and then he sold that in 2000 as part of one of the largest technology transactions in the industry. In 2008, he broke through what was a very challenging economy and co-founded his current company, Team Velocity, which is a leading marketing technology provider serving the automotive industry where he currently serves as CEO. So David, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so thanks. I really appreciate you joining. And you obviously have a lot of deep expertise, you know, within a certain area, but I also heard some other things there from You know, real estate and technology. Tell us a little bit about kind of your entrepreneurial journey of, you know, how you got focused on technology and how you got focused within this particular sector and really came to your current company at Team Velocity.

Well, you know, my story is a lot like entrepreneurs where you find yourself in a business and it really was accidentally. I mean, honestly, So I was coming out of college in the late '80s and, um, thought I was going to get this really great job in pharmaceutical sales. That was a big job to get at the time, and it fell through at the last minute. It fell through when I found myself in the car business, and I fell totally in love. I mean, I didn't— never thought about it, didn't cross my mind. And next you know, I'm, I'm making a living inside car dealers and showrooms, and, um, I loved it. And but I found out rapidly that there was just a lack of real automation and technology there. It was all green screens back in those days. But PCs, if you remember in the late '80s, early '90s, was really coming, you know, personal computing was making a, I mean, it was a boom.

Yeah.

And so I was interested in technology and I wanted to start developing technology for the automotive business because I felt like, so I was kind of a worked at car dealerships by day and worked on this business by night. It was one of those bootstrap stories that was wonderful. My dad and I put this first business together. We named it AutoMark. It went on to become one of the largest technology companies in the space in about 15— I think we sold it maybe 2000, between 2000 and 2003 is the period of time. And that's when the entrepreneurial journey just began and it hasn't stopped. We also became very interested in anything with an engine in it. Because the car business obviously is this wonderful, large, huge addressable market. But, you know, RVs and boats and powersports and motorcycles, they have the same basic business model, right? You've got a manufacturer, they have dealers, they sell their products through this distributor network of retailers. And we were able to apply a lot of the technology that we learned in the automotive space to those industries and have had a number of technology companies in that space. So, you know, and here we are today. We sold those companies and we started a company with just a little bit of a bigger vision than we did with the first round. And here we are again with one of the largest technology companies in the space, certainly the fastest growing. And that's what I do on a day-to-day basis.

So tell us about Team Velocity specifically. What does that company do?

So Team Velocity offers The OEMs and—

That's the manufacturers of—

Yes, sorry, OEMs is kind of an inside baseball term.

So original equipment manufacturers, right?

Yeah, the car manufacturers, right? The Toyotas and the Hondas and the Fords and the Stellantis of the world and their dealers, an all-in-one solution that automates the entire car ownership experience from research to buying another car 3 or 4 years later and everything in between. It's a It's a large transaction. There's many touchpoints with it. Obviously, you probably have a car or 2 in your household. And so you know what I mean. And so we automate that entire process. This industry that we're in is incredibly fragmented. There are 14, 15 different technology solutions that a car dealership has just in selling a car. Forget servicing it. Forget operationalizing their business, just 13 or 14, 15 companies that help them in the, in the business of selling a car. And it's inefficient. It usually provides a very poor customer experience, especially online. And so we aimed to try to solve that problem by creating one solution that would harness those 14 or 15 different types of siloed single-point solutions into an all-in-one solution. And in simple terms, that's what Team Velocity does.

Gotcha. So that's an interesting dynamic. And I know a lot of our audience sort of, you know, deals with that kind of dynamic of maybe they have a more comprehensive solution, whether it's software or even professional services versus, you know, their competitors or substitutes that are sort of like point solutions that might, you know, just do one thing. As you've, you know, sort of grown your company and found traction in the marketplace, how did you sort of position yourself against those point solutions to really resonate in the mind of your customers? Or do you find that it's about finding customers that want a particular type of— talk to us a little bit about how you've navigated that kind of challenging market dynamic.

Yeah, it's much easier today. When we first started, What we did, Mark, was we actually have always had really good single-point solutions. And so, you know, think of a single-point solution in the car business as a website, or I think single-point solution is advertising, or single-point solution is, you know, targeted communications to people who need service, whatever it be. So we've had single-point solutions, and we just came to the conclusion by being part of the ecosystem that it yielded— it was inefficient, it was expensive, and it yielded a very poor customer experience. So what we did is we built single-point solutions, and then over time, we iteratively integrated all of those solutions together and automated many of the functions within the solution. So I would tell you, it wasn't day one we didn't have the product that we have today.

Uh-huh.

Over time, it became You know, kind of almost what Salesforce is to a company like we use Salesforce. What Salesforce is to us, we are to a card, right? Single single source of truth that everything you know wraps into, and then that's what we are. So today our value proposition is really that. But over time we had to we had to build really good single point solutions to have an an amazing all-in-one solution. Yeah, because you have an all-in-one solution doesn't mean it's any good.

That's right.

So, you know, you have to have the components there as well. So that's what we've been able to do, you know, over a period of time. It's been an iterative project, and I think that we've invested— I think the last figure that I got was $120 million since 2012 in this all-in-one solution. So, you know, it's a massive capital investment that we've made to try to have a phenomenal solution and all-in-one. Those aren't easy to do together.

That's right. Well, that's interesting though. And it's actually a fairly common path to success is to start with these sort of single-point solutions where you can be the best at a thing and then build some client base from that. And once you build that credibility and trust with those clients, they'll trust you to do another thing that maybe you're not the best at yet, but you can start to expand into those. You know, I guess it's sort of a vertical integration as you start to expand within that particular marketplace.

That's a great business model. And one that, you know, what it does is it helps you make sure that you're the best at what you do. And one of the beautiful things about it from a growth perspective is a lot of our growth, sure, we add clients, rooftops, customers, whatever you want to call them, But we have a significant amount of growth that we've added per customer. I mean, we've quadrupled our revenue per customer and increased our retention just by adding in a bigger, broader solution. So it helps not only, you know, just position the company, but it's just a good financial model as well.

So I'm glad that you brought that up because that's such an important thing. You know, a lot of the clients that we work with in the sort of professional services space or, or, you know, other technology or SaaS, they're so focused on, I need more new clients. And oftentimes they aren't as focused on, you know, activating their existing clients to either expand their relationship with them or deepen their relationship with them. Talk to us a little bit about how important that has been, you know, For your growth and how that fits into your mindset as an operator?

Well, you know how it works for a lot of people. It's who you hire, right? So you put these people in customer support that are very tactical and they're wonderful and they're great with customers and they're checklist-oriented. And the sales guys are killers. They're hunters, right? They go out and that team was full of men and women, in our case, that, um, like the thrill of going out and courting new business. We just separated them. I mean, let— look, you got to let dolphins swim in the ocean and giraffes, you know, run on the Serengeti, and they're different.

Okay.

But what we did is we said, you know what, let's put some people in our customer support department that have a— and a pay plan in place that have some salesmanship to them that understand That that selling customers additional solutions improves our relationship with the customers. It's not just selling, you know. It's it's it's a little different. Obviously, the the beauty is you don't have to cold call anybody. You don't have to hunt anybody down, set up appointments. You're meeting with these clients anyway, and I think companies make a mistake by filling the entire roster of support people with people who are highly technical and and tactical and have that personality profile. And then they wake up one day and say, why can't we sell our current customers anything?

That's right.

We just have, I think, have been around long enough. Look, we made every mistake in the book, right? So I've been doing this long enough to know that the team that you have in place, we named the company Team Velocity for a reason, but the team you have in place is really gonna dictate the velocity of your company. And so we, I think we've learned some lessons there and now we have 2 phenomenal teams with just different skill sets.

That's right. Yeah, one of the things that we always get our— try to get our clients to do is to think about revenue not just as marketing, not just as sales, and certainly not excluding customer success and sort of client growth, but instead to have sort of like a unified approach where marketing can learn from customer success, What do our clients really love about us? And that, you know, then informs that marketing that they used to go to market that's authentic. And, you know, sales, when they have to look at customer success on a regular basis, doesn't sell things that can't be delivered and renewed because it keeps more accountability and more relationship there. And, and, and so there's a lot of sort of synergistic benefits that come from bringing those 3 different roles together and sort of a revenue team and having some leadership connection there.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what we did that helped everybody is we put together, and this is easy for your listeners to do if you have an audience of entrepreneurs, right? Put together a customer advisory board. That's what we did. You know, I was sitting around one day, you know, like everything else, I'll tell you a story. And it was the same thing. It was like, well, we can't sell it because of this and dealers don't want that and it's too high priced. And, and, you know, and on and on. And we're not growing as fast as we want, but it's not our fault. It's their fault. And it's his fault. Your support can't support and so on and so forth. And I, and, you know, you, you tend to listen to people. Uh, it's not a matter of who's right or wrong. It's whose opinion is going to prevail.

Yeah.

And when you have some very strong personalities, as, as we do in our organization, oftentimes the strongest opinion and the ability to articulate them, they prevail even though it's wrong. So I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, we're gonna develop a customer advisory board. And I selected the customers on the customer service. Some were big, some were small, some were new, some were old. And we rotate that customer advisory board out about every 18 months because, you know, we derive from them what they— we need. We treat them great. We give— we take them on a trip and we do some stuff like that to make it feel special. But I'll tell you what. I got everybody in the room and we all sat and we listened to real customers and said, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And boy, did that make a huge difference for us because we were no longer listening to interpretations of people that dealt with our clients. We're actually listening to our clients at the management level. And it was fantastic. Yeah, it also helps facilitate some incredibly long-term relationships because once people serve on your customer advisory board, they kind of become ambassadors for your company because they feel like they're helping you. You know, just being paying the bill, but they're really helping a business along the way. So that's, that's, you know, a piece of advice that, that we did very well with and maybe some of your audience can do as well.

Yeah, that's definitely something we always recommend because just as you described, not only do you get that voice of the customer, but it also changes the relationship from a transactional, you know, vendor-customer relationship to much more of a partnership. Where you can grow together. And so often, you know, companies, especially in the services or even, you know, sort of technology empowered services, sometimes your customers don't want you to grow because they're afraid that if you grow, they won't get as much of you. But when you sort of build this more mutual relationship, they start to understand that your growth is my growth because you're gonna grow and then develop new things that's gonna make my life better and easier. And you really get that sort of chance to create that dialogue and that relationship when you have those advisory boards. So that's not surprising that you've had such great success with it, but so great to hear that story.

Yeah, you know, I think you're right. Customers want, if you have the right relationship, they want to see you be successful because they want to work with successful companies. Why wouldn't you? But on the other hand, they want you to feel small enough to care, but big enough to be able to innovate. And that is a balancing act that we've had to to deal with because our companies are growing rapidly. I mean, we're at right now, this company is growing 30% year over year, and that's hard to do when you're a $250 million a year company.

Yeah.

And so there is a bit of like, are we growing too fast? Are these, you know, are we not able to meet the needs of our current customers? None of it's true. It's just a perception, not a reality. But you have to have very, very, very close relationships with your customers. And advisory board is just one of the many. We survey our customers. We are constantly trying to evaluate where we are in the relationship. We've got red, yellow, green systems. We've got all kinds of folks inside the company that because our clients tend to be big. So we when you have a lot of large clients, car dealers are very large local businesses.

Right.

Big businesses. You don't want to lose them. You know you want to keep them forever, and that lifetime revenue really really adds up. And they, they also— it's a small circle. There's about 17,000 car dealers. It's a pretty big number, but you'd be surprised how well they all know each other because they're all Lexus dealers or Toyota dealers, and they get to go see each other at all these events that the manufacturers put on. So you, you can get a reputation real quick inside that ecosystem, I guess. Um, and it, it, it, it better be a good one. Um, and you got to work really hard for it. Nothing good's easy.

That's right. Well, it's funny when we, you know, work with companies to identify niches to go after or markets that they're working in. One of the key factors is how self-referential it is. And you talked about, you know, these car dealers, they talk to each other a lot. And that is a really powerful double-edged sword because if you build a good reputation, you can explode really quickly into that sector. Because they're self-referential. Like, oh, you need to get, you know, go talk to David. He's got this great solution for this and we're having such great experience with him. Alternatively, if you have a hiccup with one of those people, they'll be out there telling everybody, don't ever work with David. We tried his product and it's too full of bugs. You can't, you can't trust that guy. And, uh, it's, it's really such, so interesting how that dynamic can go both ways.

You couldn't have said it any better. Um, and you have to, to really work hard. Look, you have to have a good product. That delivers on its value, its promise. So, you know, we're very fortunate that that is the main ingredient in our organization that we focus on is does our technology do a better job of what it was supposed to do in the first place? And a lot of ours is just delivering a better customer experience. But you're, yeah, self-referential. That's a good word. I'm gonna steal that.

Sure.

These guys just talk a lot. You know what's the other thing that's unique about that? This is probably an automotive thing. But these franchisees, these Toyota dealers, let's just say, say you're doing a Toyota dealership. Well, there's 1,200 other Toyota dealers in the country. They all get compared to one another.

That's right.

Constantly by the manufacturer. So when they see someone moving in the, uh, uh, up north, right, they're like, wow, this guy was 17th in the country and now he's 9th and now he's 7th. Whoa, he's 4th. Something's going on there. Something's happening beyond the norm. Um, and we have been really fortunate to, to have a lot of dealerships that have moved so far up in the rankings in a short period of time because of our technology platform and are willing to give us some level of credit towards that success. Unfortunately, uh, that it's been helpful toward— to us. I don't know if that happens in other industries as much as it does here, but there's a lot of transparency into the Uh, into the business. And most often people want to follow leaders. So if you want to grow your business, one of the things I do is say to our team all the time is take down the elephants first. The deer and the squirrel are going to follow. Just take the elephants down. And if we can hold them, get them, you're going to get a whole lot of people that, um, just by nature want to be like them. You want to be like them? Use the same technology as them, or whatever it is that your audience is selling. But that's a, it's a little longer sales cycle. It's a little harder, but it pays massive dividends towards your credibility.

Yeah. Wait, so I, you talked about, you know, how similar this is to other dynamics. We actually use a KPI and sort of measuring success, you know, for the clients of our clients, which is how many of them get promoted? Because that's how you know you're really delivering that sort of transformational benefit To their business that, you know, the either the service that you delivered or the product that you delivered was so good that the person that brought you in was your champion, got promoted in that organization. That's a great overarching KPI that you can use as a success metric sort of throughout.

Great. It's a great one because people take risks and take chances. Oftentimes they're not the decision maker, as you know, but they're the person who's gonna fulfill whatever it is and they're putting their Neck on the line, they're risking a reputation saying I think we should switch. See, change whether good or bad is resisted with equal intensity. It's it's crazy.

Humans are resistant to change. That either good or bad might be the best thing in the world.

And so when people are, I always believe the people that are willing to change, not if it's bad, but but just willing to change if it's if it's an obvious. Logical thing to maybe do, are rewarded. And that's what happens with us. You're right. We have people who say, "You know what? I'm good with the twelve single point solutions." Matter of fact, it's nice because I I have a job of working with twelve vendors. That's right. Bring in one vendor.

I got security.

Yeah, I'm good. If I bring them in and it doesn't work, I might get fired. But if I bring them in and it works better, which it always does because it's integrated and it's it's just better. Then this is gonna be good for my career. And I always applaud the people who are willing to take some risk and make some changes. It's easier after 1,600 people have done it in the past. But, but you're right, some of those, some of those clients have gone on that, that handled our, our solution are now running their business.

Right.

So it's, it's great. I, I like that. We've never looked at that KPI before, but I'll definitely add it to our list.

Yeah, we actually, as part of building out, you know, sort of the personas of the decision makers within a buying committee and the champions and all those things, you know, some solutions that we work with or, you know, that our clients, they're more, you know, kind of legacy or, you know, conservative. Others of them like yours tend to be more innovative. And it requires someone that's sort of open to that, you know, trying something new. And so then we use that as a signal of, If they're not the trying something new type of people, then they're not really gonna get your pitch. And so we use that as a way of kind of segmenting, are they a good prospect for us or a bad prospect for us? Should we be putting a lot of resources against winning this deal? Or in the end, are they never gonna buy us because they just don't— they're not okay with taking risks? And knowing that about the customer can be really powerful.

Yeah, it's smart. You know, we serve an industry with exactly that. You know, the automotive industry, sometimes it's 4th generation family. I mean, they're very successful. They don't need to change a thing. This thing has lasted 100 years. Let's just not rock this boat. And others, these sometimes are publicly traded. They're big regional groups. They're privately owned. They're, they're, I don't know what even the right word is. They're so desperate for change because they believe fundamentally the one thing about the industry that I've served, and I guess I've had a job for a long time doing it, is the customer's experiences aren't great. They just aren't. I mean, I wish they were. I love my clients and I want everyone to have a great experience, but customers often have a very fragmented experience. You know, they're online, they're trying to buy something, they really can't. They come to the store, it's totally different. Yeah, uh, they want to do 80, 90% of the work online and then walk to the store like I do with Apple. I just do most of it online. I walk in, I pick the phone up. I like to pick it up because I want someone to talk me through it. I want to get it all set up. I don't want to— I'm not ready to do it all. But my daughters, they just order the products from Apple and they show up to the, to the, to the house and they open them up and do their stuff. But so, you know, people who believe that the car business is phenomenal and incredible, it just needs to make some improvements in the way that the customers are, the experience that most customers have. That's our customer. That's who we want to go after. They're passionate about it. The ones who are like, we're great, nothing's changing, grandpa did it this way and Grandpa Joe and Uncle Bill, and now it's me and my brother's turn or my sister's. That's usually not our, our best candidate. Fortunately, uh, the customer is king. So customers are getting wonderful experiences with Amazon. I mean, heck, you got a great experience buying a cup of coffee now with Starbucks. They know what you want and how your coffee's made and how hot it needs to be and helps you pay for it. You just walk in and pick it up. So, you know, I get excited and passionate, as you could probably tell, about that one thing. But that one thing is a big thing.

Yeah, that's right. Majoring in a major thing. So I've loved our conversation. We could talk all day, but I got to be mindful of your time, David. But before we go, tell us something that's, you know, on the horizon for you and Team Velocity that you're really excited about.

Oh, definitely AI. I mean, you, you, AI is so powerful. I'll give you a story. About this. I said to our team the other day, I said, look, I'm, I'm watching, seeing AI, it's all over the place. I mean, obviously in our personal lives we're using, you know, Google's AI to write copy, whatever it might be. But I said, why can't we just create like a video on a car that has everything you need to know about that car? The price, the finance, the lease payment, the color, the key features, the miles, whatever it might be. But I don't wanna do a video, shoot a video. I just want AI to create the video.

Yeah.

And with a voice that sounds like a human. Like, can't we do that? I mean, it seems like we should be able to do that. And they're like, yeah. And about 4 months later, we had a video and I said, well, no, that's not created by, that's not AI that someone did that video. That's like a prototype, right? That's what you're going for. They're like, no, that was created in one second. So now, I mean, it's wild. So we're probably most excited about AI because we are looking at— so our platform is full of data. So we're looking at ways to enable AI more and more. I think we're gonna probably introduce next year a CRM that is fully AI enabled where it does a better job than humans will do. It's not gonna replace all the humans, but it certainly would make it a— you can't really distinguish the difference anymore, as you know, between AI and a human.

That's right.

And so if that's the case, uh, we are very excited about the future and using it responsibly, uh, as part of the, the overall, you know, solution set that we provide. So I'm pretty excited about that. Other things too, but that's probably got me most excited.

That's—

I—

lots of, lots of opportunity for innovation in there. And, and the key is having that data And then having it organized in a way that you can make sense of it, make use of it. That's what's gonna really open the doors for AI for companies that, you know, thinking about how they can use it. So, David, for those that have been listening and are like, you know, love what Dave's talking about, maybe they work in the automotive space, wanna learn more about Team Velocity, how can they get in touch with you?

I think it's easiest just to go to teamvelocitymarketing.com. That's it. If you just Google Team Velocity, you'll find us. We are, you know, fairly well known within the industries that we serve. We're always looking for great people too. I mean, we're growing so fast right now that even people that come in that, that, that aren't from the industry that are really good at customer support, if you're technically savvy and you're listening to this, or you have a son or a daughter or cousin that's, that's looking for a job, it's all remote work. And we still have remained a remote company despite our growth, which has been pretty cool. So yeah, I'd say teamvelocitymarketing.com. Check it out.

Awesome. David, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thank you, man.

All right, talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B service tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.