You’re all buttoned up. You’re killing it. You’re on top of everything. You’re a marketing savant. You’re a data nerd.
You’re lying to yourself.
Well, if you’re representative of over 90% of automotive dealers (and their vendors), you’re lying to yourself. There are a few out there that have data down. Then, there’s the rest of the industry.
Data. AI. CDP. CRM. DMS. We love acronyms in automotive. The more acronyms, the more invites. Invites to 20 Groups, presentations, opportunities to pitch and open doors at vendors and sell, maybe even to OEMs.
The promise of what most tech conversations are centered around today in the industry are the shiny objects of lust: data platforms, AI platforms, CRMs with both. However when you strip away the code, all that’s left is data (and the humans that are responsible for the data). Every email blast, every equity mine, every retention attempt, every conquest attempt and more are predicated on data. Bad data. Most (yes, most) data inside DMS and CRM stacks is bad, wrong, incorrect. And mostly willfully. Your salespeople are weak, your service writers are weak, heck your customers are weak.
So how do we fix the weakness? With the closest thing to a silver bullet as we’ve ever seen: data hygiene. But how? Where? When? And where should it live? And who should do the data hygiene? Everything starts with data. Where does your hygienist get the cleansing data from? What are they appending to? How are the duplicates removed? How are the deceased removed? How are the vehicles that the customer hasn’t had in 5+ years removed? And there’s another 1,396 questions you should ask related to just the initial factors…
The same folks who have been hocking mediocre software and marketing solutions to the industry for years are now saying they’re really good at data? Bullshit! Most ‘data experts’ are using one or two data points (at best, some are simply using a single data point: a pixel on your website) to validate data and pushing dealers to perilous outcomes on software that has been white-labeled by someone else (or possibly an agentic layer on another company’s AI). First party data is critical for your own proper execution: from retention, to equity mining, to conquest marketing and more (by the way, nearly all sent with antiquated Analytics -UA rather than GA4- tracking, with heavily incorrect/falsified open and click rates, to irrelevant pages on your website at best; that the subject of another post).
However if you’re marketing to dead people (usually that died over a few years ago), or people who moved 1,368 miles away two years ago (that you still show in your neighborhood), or to buy a customer’s vehicle that you sold to them four years ago (that hasn’t been in their garage for six months), your marketing is also failing. As a baseline, bad data roughly represents over 50% of all dealership data by franchise unless you’re a newer, first-generation dealer that has solid internal processes and accountability (which VERY few do), plus manually audits/spot checks on the regular. Most bad customer contact data is entered in your service departments because your service writers are allowed to do that without repercussions (followed by your salespeople and sales managers).
OK, what should you do? Find a reputable data hygiene company that runs an audit, sets expectations on outcomes, charges you based on how many records were actually cleaned, provides the deltas, gives you a go-forward plan, allows you to own and house (warehouse, data lake, etc.) your own data (sure, push it back to CRM and DMS if you want to, however you better have your own repository and execution plan). Honest conversations around cleansing, warehousing, and subsequent use around data aren’t happening. Like most conversations in automotive, it’s driven by cost, misunderstanding of technology/razor-thin knowledge, misconstruing of use, misrepresenting rights and more. And wake up dealers! At the same time you’re considering ‘what’ to do, other providers and the OEMs themselves will take this over if you don’t get real about proper investment, use and care of your (customers’) data.
And remember, you get what you pay for!!!!!!! Under-investment here is just like websites, marketing and facilities. Don’t take shortcuts and don’t buy from the first people walking in the door.
Have a nice day! And watch out for the data hygiene lies!
Best Practices: Professional Insight, Powerful Results.
