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Host Michael Donovan welcomes Strolid Vice President of Product Development Matt Watson to explore how conversational data reshapes dealership strategies by unlocking previously inaccessible customer insights. Watson details Strolid’s development of the vCon standard, an IETF global standard for structuring phone calls, texts, emails, and chats into searchable, actionable records (i.e., “robot food”). He contrasts traditional CRM limitations (lost context, siloed data) with vCon’s ability to unify interactions, enabling dealers to identify trends like geographic demand shifts or stalled inventory opportunities.
The episode highlights practical tools like Strolid Search, which allows dealers to mine conversations for keywords (e.g., competitor names, vehicle stock numbers), and Strolid GPT, which will enable dealers to ask questions in natural language (e.g., “Show me customers who are unhappy with their experience,” “shopping the competition,” etc.). Strolid GPT uses AI to generate hyper-personalized follow-ups based on customer sentiment and history. Watson shares a case where analyzing “out-of-state” mentions revealed 80+ missed monthly sales opportunities, prompting process adjustments. A pivotal insight: “Conversational data isn’t just about resolving complaints; it’s about spotting the $70,000 truck buyer who mentioned ‘Staten Island’ once and crafting a pitch before they walk to the competition.” Learn more about how Strolid helps dealerships Never Miss opportunities for dealers at https://www.strolid.com.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Conversational Data
02:16 Matt Watson's Journey in the Automotive Industry
04:19 The Evolution of Strahlid and Conversational Data
10:41 Breaking Down Data Silos in Automotive
13:25 Creating a Global Standard for Conversational Data
17:05 The Role of the Conserver in Data Management
23:01 Real-World Applications of Vcons in Dealerships
26:01 Understanding Attribution in Paid Search
30:08 The Power of Conversation Search
33:11 Leveraging AI with Strala GPT
40:30 Identifying Opportunities in Customer Conversations
47:10 Introducing Signals for Proactive Insights
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Conversational Data
02:16 Matt Watson's Journey in the Automotive Industry
04:19 The Evolution of Strahlid and Conversational Data
10:41 Breaking Down Data Silos in Automotive
13:25 Creating a Global Standard for Conversational Data
17:05 The Role of the Conserver in Data Management
23:01 Real-World Applications of Vcons in Dealerships
26:01 Understanding Attribution in Paid Search
30:08 The Power of Conversation Search
33:11 Leveraging AI with Strala GPT
40:30 Identifying Opportunities in Customer Conversations
47:10 Introducing Signals for Proactive Insights
Creators and Guests
Host
Guest
Matt Watson
Matt Watson is the Vice President of Product Development at Strolid, Inc., bringing over 10 years of automotive operations experience across multiple dealer groups and extensive expertise in business analysis, strategic planning, and product strategy, where he has been instrumental in developing innovative vCon standard that transforms how automotive dealerships manage customer communications and data.
What is Dealer Insights Podcast?
Interviews with Strolid CEO and Founder Vin Micciche, BDC industry icon and veteran
The road ahead has never been more
clear. Success belongs to those who take
the lead. Welcome to Dealer Insights,
the podcast that puts you in the
driver's seat of growth. Hosted by Vin
Machichi, industry leader with over 30
years in
automotive. This is where experience
meets innovation. From cutting edge
technology to gamechanging strategies,
we go beyond the surface to bring you
the insights that matters. Real
conversations to help you navigate the
everanging automotive landscape. Buckle
up. Your next competitive advantage
starts
now.
Imagine if every conversation your
dealership had, every phone call, email,
text, or chat could talk back to
you. Not just repeat what was said, but
reveal what was meant. Who's ready to
buy? Who needs help? Who's slipping away
to the competition across town?
What if your next biggest opportunity
wasn't in your
CRM, but it was an alert on your
phone or sitting in your
inbox. Welcome to Dealer
Insights. My name is Michael. I'm here
with Matt Watson. Matt, how you doing,
man? Doing good. Good to be here,
Michael. Yeah, thanks. Really appreciate
you uh joining up here. And I know this
this particular topic,
conversational
data, it's your world. It would be
insane to talk about this. Not that I
haven't had conversations with other
people, but uh creme de la creme.
And I just I want to take a minute for
the viewers if you don't know what
conversational data is. It refers to the
digital record of all communication
between a business and its customers
across channels like phone calls,
emails, SMS or text messages and live
chats.
Conversational data when structured and
analyzed reveals actionable insight into
customer behavior, sentiment, intent,
and in in your case, dealership
performance. Matt, if you could just
just give give us a little history. I
mean, you're not just uh of course your
current position, but your history in
the business. Can can you talk to that
and just let everyone know? Yeah, I grew
up in the car business. I had aunts and
uncles and and parents. We we all grew
up in the the car business and uh and so
I I started just doing yard work at the
at the car dealerships was my first job
and ended up working every role
possible. even started our first
BDC in a family store and we had as many
as three and I moved through multiple
other dealer groups as well. And so I
got to see the technology and processes
and communication change over almost 20
years now in the car business.
So, you and I have been in the business
about the same amount of time, but
obviously two totally different our
paths almost
crossed,
right? Uh I think you used an agency
that I actually helped start and uh and
used to work for. That's right. Way way
back in the day. It's actually how I
started in this business. There we go.
So, thanks for sharing that. Uh, what
brands? What OEMs? You were franchised,
right? Not independent. So, I worked
with Nissan,
Toyota, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, and
goodness, what else did we have? That
was the majority of Yeah. Up to four
Nissan stores at one point. Oh, wow.
Okay. So, look, if you're in the
business, you
know, being involved in a Nissan
dealership, I mean, that's like that's
like basic training and boot camp for
retail automotive, man. Yeah. Yeah. It
was trial by fire for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
It's an interesting brand. We'll leave
it at that. So, what are you doing now,
Matt? Well, now I'm the VP of product
development here at Straw.
What's that mean? So, I I help us as a
company prioritize what we're building
for our customers, sometimes
ourselves, based on what the most urgent
need is at this time and and how much
work and how much cost is factored in.
And so, that's it. Yeah. Just I maximize
our our impact dayto day.
I've seen some of your work
and I know it may it could come across
as me being a little biased because well
we're on the same team, right? But it's
impressive and beyond being impressed,
it's
important. The
industry is not only
evolving, but we are at the precipice of
a revolution.
that hinges on today's topic. This is my
opinion.
I think you agree, but I'm not here to
speak for you in any way, shape, or
form.
Can
you can you give
us
about the changes you've seen from when
you know day one at
Strolled and how that's evolved into the
work that you're doing today and you
know tie that back to conversations.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, first off,
thank you. Thank you for the compliment.
Um, good to know the hard work pays off
and uh, yeah. So, so to talk about kind
of the growth, when I joined Strawley,
it wasn't much different than the car
stores I left. And what we're used to in
the car business is
everything as it relates to to the data
and conversational data. Um, all the
data in the car business comes from the
DMS. It comes from an inventory
provider.
the DMS data can come from external or
it's something we type in and then the
CRM as well right so almost everything
is the structured data or it's human
input and and so that's where Strolid
was everything we did was in our system
and the dealer
CRM everything was manually entered or
if we had some automations that was
happening too and what clicked
was what none of the services out there
have whether I could list I mean how
many vendors are out there now in the
automotive world but they're all using
the same data as well right or they're
asking you to input more data but what
very few had was the conversational
data right and what the conversational
data was was a whole layer of
information that specific people listen
to if I'm a BDC agent for instance I
have my CRM form in front of me I'm
listening for those blanks I need to
fill in. What car do I want to look at?
What am I interested in? Right? But I've
got one form field, year, make, model,
or I could pick from my inventory. I've
got one trade field, color, miles. I've
got a name, a phone number, an email,
but that's what I'm focused on.
Everything else, as a BDC
agent, some things may be important. I
may be trained to say what zip code
they're in based on financing things. I
may ask, are you military? I noticed it
was a a USAA lead, right? There's a few
things like that, but if you're not
trained to recognize it, it it just all
goes
away. And that's
into the ether. I mean,
you have to understand BDC
agents and
advisors are dealing in volume. Okay?
It's it's a contact sport.
and to
expect to have
comprehensive overview of a five minute
conversation when they're going for the
appointment. They have a comment field
in the CRM. They're trying to put
something in there so they remember the
next time they speak with that customer,
they can pick up where they left off.
Maybe, right?
and and all of the conversational data
was was gone is it it just it was never
accessible and when I joined the team I
was introduced to a very
uh interesting phrase dark data and it
helped me understand and have that aha
moment that we have data and insight now
that was unex unaccessible and and and
we are not talking. I have to make this
point, Matt. If you think you have
conversational data because you have a
transcript, you you're wrong. I'm sorry.
I'm just going to be blunt and honest,
not sugarcoat it. That is not
conversational
data and what we're talking about. same
thing in in the in the CRM when it comes
to a a phone call, but also the text,
the chat, and the email, those are those
historically have been
silos, right? And when when we know from
our
CTO, not that it takes the CTO and to to
tell us that silo data is bad, it's just
bad because it's limited. And Matt has
broken that barrier down, ladies and
gentlemen. So that's where that's where
the excitement comes from on this topic.
What type of impact have you seen and
and what things, you know, with that
retail experience like how
has that changed your mindset and your
approach and like what's what's the the
magic behind it for you? Yeah. Well,
that Yeah, I can I'd love to talk on
that because that's huge. We recognize
the silos, right? Our CTO pointed that
out and I'll illustrate that. So, a a
great company, we use them, uh, Car
Wars, right? They they record your call.
They can you can get a number for your
your cars.com listings or back in the
day, your newspaper listings, right?
Whatever it was. And so, you could do
market analysis that you've got your
call recordings. They have somebody
listening to them and scoring them
and great company, right? But that was a
silo. And and what I meant by that is if
I wanted some somehow to analyze those
conversations and and know when somebody
mentioned maybe my competitor's name,
there's technology for
that. But my recordings and transcript
lived in the car war silo and I had no
way to feed that somewhere else unless
I'll just use my own phone system, but
then Car War says, "Wait, that's not our
silo. We need that in ours." And so that
conflict spreads to SMS to email lead
data questions in the lead. So what we
did is is got with our CTO. He comes
from the telecom world and we wrote an
internet standard, a global internet
standard, the
IETF. I I call them the they're the the
knights of the round table in the in the
telecom world and everything has to go
through them. So your WW is was IETF,
right? something we type all the time.
So, we created the VCON and the purpose
of the VCON was it's a data standard for
conversations and and anything else that
gets attached to it. And when we build
VCON, which we do today, that enables us
to have a set of data, the recording,
the transcript that we can then feed
anywhere else. And and all these
applications, I mean, look at the growth
of AI now, right?
November, a couple years ago, Open AI
came out, right? I mean, that's changed
our world
completely. But do they have access to
car wars? No. Right. But now with the
VCON, a phone system that publishes VCON
for the dealer can be fed into chat GPT
and and tools are coming out every day
and are changing to ingest VCOons as
well. So, as that grows and becomes more
adopted, Yeah. that's uh it makes that a
whole lot easier. It solves the silo
problem.
So with the
uh I I I think just touching on on the
the IETF
briefly to create a global standard
isn't that's not for the faint of heart.
You don't just uh fill out a form and
get approved. That's right. It's a
pretty extensive thorough vetting
process and then once once your protocol
is
uh is has been vetted and I I think they
do just a couple per year if I'm not
mistaken. That's right. That's right. Um
you know two maybe three per year and
and like Matt said you know www that is
a global standard.
um HTTP global standard, HTTPS global
standard, uh emails, right? MX records
and a name and and all of this technical
stuff that is uh it's probably over your
head. It's over my head a little bit. I
mean, I understand it with a digital
marketing background. Uh you know, I I I
know the purpose of it, but like the
actual inner workings is is beyond me.
Uh
so so with this
standard we're able
to take conversations that happen in
various
channels and structure
them the same exact way while
maintaining the integrity of the the
conversation, the source of
it.
And so so
now where does that go? The the the
emails and the text messages like
technically let's just give a little bit
of insight. So
um so the the the viewers and listeners
understand the the components that are
in play here. Sure. Yeah. So it's all
built around what we call a a
conserver, right? And so any company,
any enterprise can can deploy their own
conserver. It could be in the cloud, it
could be on a server behind a firewall,
back in a closet
somewhere and and it's got open-source
software on the back end. So as we're
building plugins, which we need to do,
becomes available to everybody. So being
the ones who built the first what we did
is say okay what what do we plug into
our conserver and first thing is a phone
system and maybe we have a secondary
phone system for another use case we
built a plugin for that an
adapter text messages
emails customer replies that come
through different sources CRM data and
you we build these adapters that are now
shared between everybody and as it hits
the conserver it takes whatever format
it's in and and dumps out the same VCON
format regardless of where it came from.
So all of the conversations flow in to
the to the
conserver. It does its its magic, right?
It processes all of that and then it has
an output. That's right. And the output
is, you just mentioned it, a
VCON, which is an abbreviation for a
virtualized
conversation. The virtualized
conversation, not to be confused with a
virtual conversation. Okay. Two totally
different things if I'm not mistaken.
That's right. Okay. Because these are
actual conversations. They've been
virtualized. Now, where does that go?
wherever you want it to go. And that's
that's what's exciting,
right? So you can store them. We want to
store them. And there's use cases for
for doing
that. But wherever you want, in fact, uh
early name we gave them was the VCON is
is robot
food. So show me a
robot, we'll send it there, and they'll
run with it. And so we've built a few
applications which I'm happy to talk
about that consume vcons and and now
again out in the telecom industry
everybody's starting to slowly develop
these applications so they can consume
our VCON or somebody
else's for whatever need.
What what's really
impressive is how all of this has has
come
together. And so Stralid, right, 11
years over 11 years ago now. And Vin uh
for over 30 years has been living in
this world that
revolves
around
conversations
and the alignment between
himself, his
thoughts,
Thomas, Shauna, uh the team, right? the
the amazing
team figured out a way to tap
into dark
data that can actually have a
significant impact not only to an
individual dealer but my earlier
statement about the revolution. This is
an automotive revolution.
I would I would love to hear about the
applications that we've built
internally. But before we get into that,
I just want to I just want to make two
points.
One
is a conserver can be deployed for any
business, any industry, anywhere in the
world, as long as there are
conversations. And it doesn't matter
what channel, even if it's a channel
that we didn't mention, if it's a
conversation, you can get VCons creating
that robot food, that data to feed to an
AI
model. And we're agnostic on the AI
model. That's right. So, think of the
conserver as your operating system.
Whatever you want to
see or do with that information, if you
can think it, it can be
done. The second point is just to give a
little bit of context. If you've heard
of uh AI, you've probably heard of Open
AI or more commonly known as their their
product Chat GPT.
chat GPT if you use it currently
uh at this point in time April 30th
2025 you have to select which AI model
you want to use but the most recent is
uh 40 I believe maybe four or five I'd
have to look I think oh yeah four or
five well let me give you an idea of
what 40 was trained
on the 40 model was trained on the
entire open
internet. So excluding the dark web, the
internet that we all use cuz we're not
weird, the entire open internet, okay,
that was over 13 trillion
uh tokens of
text and that's what it was trained on.
So when you ask it a question and it
gives you this
response, it's because it
just researched the entire internet on
that
that topic, whatever you're asking it to
assist you
with. If four had the entire open
internet, what does that tell us? That
AI
is running out of
data.
Well, every single conversation that a
customer has with your dealership, yeah,
one customer may be calling on a on the
same used vehicle as another customer,
but those conversations are unique and
and and that data
is is unique.
So with those two points somewhat
long-winded, my apologies on that, Mr.
Watson, two points,
can you share with us in our uh captive
office structure, right? What what real
world problems did we start solving for
dealers with this superpower? It's what
it is. Sure. And I'll I'll take you down
the path. And it's been fun because
we've we've got to develop the
conserver and and mature the VCON as we
were developing applications because
they helped us prove things out. So the
very first thing we did which we often
don't talk about externally because it
was purely an internal tool but we built
a dialer that that utilize
VCON and and now this technology isn't
new but building it on VCON is right. So
what our dialer now does is if I'm an
agent in a
BDC here at Strolled for instance and a
customer calls in, if it recognizes that
phone
number, we've got a database of econ
with that customer's data with analysis
tied to it with transcriptions. It's
going to populate all sorts of great
information on the screen. It's going to
tell them the last conversation that was
had. Right? That
alone can completely change how that
conversation goes. I think that alone
can give you I call it like a little bit
of a Ritz Carlton effect, right? If if
you've been to a Ritz Carlton, it's
magic how they do it. You can walk in an
elevator to go to your room, you've
never seen the guy in the elevator
before and he says, "How are you doing,
Mr. Watson?" Right? And that just blows
your mind. So, in the same sense, our
our popup that our agency can can say
they were on a call 30 seconds ago,
right? So, right away, you could see,
"Oh, I I saw you just hung up with
Michael. Were you disconnected? Can I
can I get you back there?" Right? I
mean, think of all the phone calls you
have in a month, whether it's your your
car insurance, your health insurance,
your doctor's office, your contractor to
fix your house, whatever it is, right?
You never get that type of service,
right? But we provide it now
instantly, right? So we see the outcome
of that call as well. We see, oh, they
have an appointment for later today,
right? Were you call in reference to
your appointment today? Do we need to
reschedule? Is everything
good? We we know if they had an
outstanding question because we turn
over these questions to our dealer.
Maybe it's, hey, they they they're
curious about your your u your partner
programs based on where they work. They
want to see if there's an extra
discount, right? We they see that data
right away. And this is before they
answer, right? So, at a
glance, they know, oh, I can be I can be
equipped for this. Here we go. And then
once they answer, we present all that
data and a little bit more for them. So,
we've just AI and VCON, we've just
equipped our agents to just be assassins
on the phone.
So
when I it's mindblowing. Look, I have a
marketing background,
right? And I've mentioned this in the
past. I I don't recall me talking about
it specifically with
you. As as a former agency
owner, we're running paid search, right?
and
and we're tracking phone calls. We had
our attribution model and would do the
dynamic phone swap and and cookie and
right track them for a period of time
and and we would report back, hey, Mr.
Dealer, you had this many phone
calls from your paid
search. The first question every dealer
asks, how many of those were sales?
I don't know. I mean,
we, you know, we we have a sales number
and a service number, right? So, we try
that and and and then, you know, the
dealer wants to go back to a single
phone number and and with the IVR and
and Right. But but when people can't get
through to the busy service department,
they just want to talk to somebody, then
they'll call back and hit the sales
line. And now we have sales with service
conversations after, you know, but you
don't discover
it until you're in this reactive
environment where pressure is being
applied to find out. And there's no way
to
listen to
589 phone
calls for the month from paid search.
Like it just is
unrealistic. I could only listen to 24
hours of phone calls in a 24h hour
period, right? So, I mean, we didn't
even get into the I I don't want to
discount that's amazing tool
and the customer
experience is the
objective. So that's phenomenal and very
powerful, very
relevant,
and I I'd like to hear more.
All right, let's go along the timeline.
So the next item we address is we said,
"Okay, let's we've got VCOs and we're
doing things with them, but we don't
really have they don't have a face,
right? whether it's us at Straw or our
dealers, let's let's give everybody a
way to look for VCons and then make them
look pretty on a screen so they can see
all the data we have. Right? So what we
did is we created we call it
conversation search. And so conversation
search allows me to go in and type a
keyword or somebody's name. So, uh, one
example I use is is if I'm a dealer in
Brooklyn and I'm trying to expand my
market share right into a neighboring
market, steal some of their deals. I
could search Staten
Island. And what that's going to do is
look through customer names and info.
It's going to look through lead data
because we attach that to our VCON, but
it's also going to look through summary
and transcript of every phone call,
text, email. And what it's going to do
is present in a nice picture when I say,
"Okay, I want to see conversations, not
customers named Staten
Island, all those when they happened, a
summary. I could drill down to that
customer and see all their
conversations." But it's it's it's that
easy. Whereas, as you were saying, as a
marketing person or maybe I'm a trainer
at a store responsible for for QA of my
own sales team, right? I would have to
listen one phone call at a time hoping
to hear that, right? So, here we are. I
type Staten Island and bam, there's 50
of them in the last month.
So, scalability is there and it brings a
level of
precision that we've never really
had, right? It all starts with a
lead. Then what?
Well, the goal is it
ends with an amazing buying
experience. I used conversation search
recently. Tariffs.
Yeah, there you go.
I wanted the baseline and I seen in the
first three weeks of March there was
some
talk not a lot right
the following
week the last week of
March surpassed the previous three
weeks.
So and then the first week in April, it
tripled
again more than a
3x. In fact, if we compare the first
week of March to the first week of
April, we're we're talking an 800%
increase, right? Yeah. I mean, it's
tapered off. Yeah. Great. marketing
research is incredible use case, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to share
that I had done a little little digging
and uh you know again like I I find
these tools
uh very insightful
and wanted to share some of some of how
it could be used if if you're well I'm
glad you gave that that example Michael
because I I knew from talking in with
the team internally same timing a dealer
had that
question and So we showed him again,
hey, this is tool we've released for
you. This great use case. And so he went
in there. Tariffs is what he searched
for, right? And now it's because he's in
the news. He's a dealer. He's worried
about the impact. It was very early. And
to your point, there was really none
there, right? But as a
dealer, why did he do that? Right? Why
why would he ask that question? Because
he's being proactive. He's ready to
pivot. He's ready to shift marketing and
messaging. How could he ever know that
before, right? A a survey walking around
the store asking people, right? Asking
his team. But again, even down to the
BDC, what are they what are they listing
for? Vehicle availability needs
questions that no one's going to
remember they mentioned tariff.
No, it's it's it's moving into the
proactive mindset. That's what it
allows where you can
identify and act. So super powerful.
What came after conversation search? So
we have the dialer and conversation
search all powered by VCON. Um what's
next in this in the road? Yeah. And I
and I'll I'll lead into that with this.
One of the outcomes we didn't really
expect with search. We thought it would
be purely a research tool.
What we found is is it became a way to
find these problems and solve problems
or opportunities like you said u we saw
things I won't say we kind of open a
Pandora's box right we started to find
things we didn't realize were there um
which was exciting but then we said man
I wish I could do a little bit more than
than search a term so here comes the
LLMs right so this was our our first
trip down that path with our robot food
feeding it to chat GPT
And and that's where astrology PT came
along and and it has been just unreal.
It's been so fun to play with
and and I and I'll give some examples of
that. But what we're able to do is feed
the
VCON again all the conversational data
including replies to emails and
texts. We're also able to feed in other
data we may have
inventory lead data which is the source
and the comments.
um customer data and it's and we know
their whole history and and Michael I I
I don't know where your your audience
stands on on chat GPT and their
familiarity with it.
Well, that's that's a good question. Why
don't you drop in the comments, leave a
note if you are using chat GPT or
another LLM or AI in your daytoday or is
it something that you've um not explored
yet? like if you could let us know and
that'll help us with um you know kind of
building our content out to
uh to to either educate and show you
some creative ways on how you can
leverage it in your day-to-day. Uh we
actually just released a a great white
paper. Uh you can go to
strait.comwitaper and it's AI in the
automotive uh industry, right? So
download that white paper if you're
unfamiliar with it or you're hearing AI
a lot, right? I know a lot of vendors
are throwing that out there. It's uh
it's the buzzword of the century and
again it's a it's a big driver of this
this revolution. Got it. Okay. Okay. So,
let's let's assume then we we've got a
broad spectrum of understanding here.
So, if you've heard the term LLM, it's a
large language model. So, to keep it
simple, it's it's a chatbot that
specializes in in the English language.
Not that it can't do all the other
languages, but it understands questions
like you wouldn't believe. And it and if
you go play with chat GPT, you can ask
it anything in the world. You can ask it
how to do things. You can ask it to
teach you things. You can ask it to
write for you. And it's so good with the
English language and all the data it
knows as Michael mentioned um it could
just perform every action. So imagine
that instead of just knowing the
internet now it knows your your business
your your dealership, right? And so it
can ask it can answer questions at
scale. So again before we used to say we
searched Staten Island and just gave us
a static list, right? Well, with Straw
GPT, you could say list customers who
said they were shopping dealers in
Staten Island, right? And it could say,
"Hey, great. I found 25 of them in the
last three days. Here they are." And now
here's where it gets more fun is it
doesn't stop there. Like search you
continue to work on those. So maybe the
first one was a guy named Michael,
right? And he said they're closer to me.
They've got a similar vehicle, right?
I'm just maybe you could just help me
out with price. I could then say write
me an email to
Michael to to lock down that deal to
convince him to come here to Brooklyn
instead of purchasing in Staten Island.
And it will write a very impressive
email to Michael. And it's that simple.
And it's and it's
tailored based on the
VCON.
Okay. So for Michael, maybe Michael
emailed and called and had a text,
right? And it it's going to look at all
of those
conversations and start speaking
Michael's language, hitting those hot
buttons to, right? It starts with a
lead. the conversations, the kind of
meat and potatoes and the objective and
the goal is for you, the dealer, to have
an opportunity to show what that
customer experience is and win the deal.
That's right.
So, let me give you two great great use
cases that we've run into so far with
Astrology PT. The first one we ran an
internal session demoing astrology PT,
right? And so the first prompt we threw
at it and and prompt is a term of the
the question or the first message you
send to it and we we said list customers
who who refused to set an appointment,
right? Pretty nice, right? You want to
know about the customers that called in
and for whatever reason they declined,
right? And and we were just doing a demo
at this point, not even researching. So,
we're going through the list and we grab
one and the and the customer says, you
know, I'm out of state. I'm uh I'm
hoping to do a lot of this remotely if I
can, if that's even an option. And and
the agent went on to say, you know, we
we need you to come in to do some of
these things, right? And and right away
we kind of said, I wonder what that's
about. And luckily somebody from our
team that had been involved all the way
we promote a lot with then he had been a
a manager for this dealer group and he
said, "Oh, I I know what's going on.
They've had tons of problems in the past
with out ofstate customers and for for
dealers here listening." Yeah, it can
get a little funky, right? Your all your
rates and things can change and how you
do your tag and title, you know, it's it
can become a headache depending on how
how you're staffed, how how many cars
you sell. So he said they they asked us
to just not even set appointments
remotely out of state
anymore. So we said, "Okay, well we said
I wonder how how often that happens,
right?" So the dealer never had the
ability to do that before. So we said,
"Lists," and we were able to filter by
this dealer. List customers who
mentioned they were shopping from out of
state. And so it found eight in a in a
3-day period.
So based on what we just learned that
dealer
said up to I mean do the math that's up
to 80 potential customers in a
month that he he said I I don't want you
know too much trouble right I think for
customers a dealer would transform their
processes or or go grab some some
software tools to help simplify that
those headaches right or mitigate it. So
I Awesome. Right. I think eight deals
would be enough. Yeah. No kidding.
I agree. So that that was a big one.
Right. And so that's just something you
could never do before. Right. Right.
Again, impact the the the objective is
is to look this is something new, right?
So understanding what the resource what
current resources are available uh not
that this is a sales pitch but you have
to you have to put a little time in
researching what's out there. again that
white I'm going going back to the white
paper because it kind of
guides and and you know
it provides some insight to what some of
the traps are as well right don't always
chase chase the shiny
object there are actual solutions out
there so just make sure you understand
the
objective and the objective of what
matter Pat and his team have built
is
insight based on what customers are
saying and
obstacles that are in the way of selling
more cars. Identify them once you know I
have yet to meet a dealer when given the
challenge or an obstacle that they don't
know a way around
it.
So there's
um there's more product. Yeah. And it's
I want to give I got to share one more
example. I love my world and then we'll
touch on the last product that's that's
not not out yet. So this example I love.
So I I was heavily involved with
inventory and and the used cars and
keeping inventory turn as low as
possible. Every every dealer lives with
that, right?
And and if you've got maybe a used car
manager, he's out there and he may help
promote or push an older vehicle, talk
to the sales managers, he can talk to
salespeople, he can adjust pricing to
move an older car to be sold as soon as
it can. But this is a great use case
that solves the problem I talked about
at the beginning, which is that CRM are
just formbased and there's so much
information that gets lost. So, imagine
a scenario where a customer calls in and
says, "Hey, look, Michael, I'm I'm
looking for a pickup truck. You have two
different blue
Tacomaomas. They're beautiful. That
would be my ideal car. Uh,
unfortunately, they're the price is a
little bit higher than I'd like. You've
got a red Nissan Frontier that's more in
my price range, right? It's not Tacoma,
but it's I'll be happy with it. It It
fits my use case, right? So, as a BDC
agent, as a
salesperson, your script, you've been
trained your whole life is about great
when you know what's better, right? 12
or three, right? Whatever it may be,
right? And you go and you just try to
get them in the store and close them
before they go somewhere else, right?
And and not that that's wrong, right?
Good on them. You got them in the store
and sold them. But now, picture this.
Two two Tacomaomas and a Frontier. What
if those Tacomaomas, one of them's 60
days old, another one's 80, probably
some would argue shouldn't even be on
the lot anymore. And maybe that Frontier
is like eight days
old, right? So imagine a used car
manager being able to to say, "Hey, list
conversations
today on vehicles over 45 days old,
right?
I mean, that would be massive because
all it takes
is that alert coming to a or a used car
manager discovering that he can now go
to that
salesperson or get involved and lower
the price of that vehicle before he
loses a lot more money potentially.
Right. Right. But what happened to the
customer? They're thrilled.
They're thrilled. They set an
appointment on a car that was the next
best and and they got a call back
saying, "Hey, we're going to make your
favorite one
work." Massive. And that could happen
all day long. Which this leads me I
started to go down the path a little bit
to to the last piece of of our products
that we're building. So be before we
Sorry for the interruption, Matt, but
before we jump in, can you
just So you covered a couple of the
prompts. We have these built out very
easy. Uh kind of some some
pre-esigned
prompts and they range. I think right
now there's what 15? 15. Yeah. That if
you hit those daily, you're going to
sell more. That's right. And you're
going to know more about what's going on
in your dealership
uh than you did without it. I I can
guarantee that. It's well worth the five
minutes. So that's that's the
investment, right? It's a it's a small
time investment. Five minutes in the
platform for a a a significant
return. So uh I I suppose, you know, I
can just list them in the in the
comments. If you're if you're watching
along and listening on YouTube, go down
into the uh the description and I'll put
some examples. If you'd like a demo, you
can go through that process, too. Yeah.
And yeah, I'll speak on that real quick.
We we did 15 example prompts. They make
it easier for our dealers and users,
right? But it's important to note that
they are generic and and I mean that
they will work and they're valuable to
all dealers. But the real value of the
VCON and these tools is it does what an
a similar company out there, maybe one
that analyzes phone calls does is they
base all of their value on on the
industry. This works for the industry
because they don't have your data. They
can't say this works best for Michael
Donovan
Ford, right? And now and that's what
this really
unlocks, right? So, the prompts are
there to guide you and help you
understand or are the the suggested ones
on screen, but really the value comes
from you exploring and playing around
and asking questions that you've never
been able to before. And and so they
don't have to use one of the 15. They
can enter any question in about their
inventory, their leads, their
um competition. I It's all of that
insight is unlocked. That's right.
Outstanding, Matt. Product. I'm on the
edge of my seat. Yeah. So, so this one's
this one's big and this is important.
So, we understand that this the spectrum
of of techsavviness in the car business
is all over the place, right? Dealer
groups I'm in, we you've
got you've got people that are retired
and they're just there looking through
phone calls just as a side job, as a
small gig, and they're not really good
at at technology. Um you you've got your
sales managers or sales people that are
just working non-stop, right? Just
pushing, selling cars, doing a great
job. They've got no time on their hands,
even if they are techsavvy. And then
some of these dealer groups or even a
smaller family business, they may have
somebody that's very tech-savvy and has
time to research and they're good at it,
right? So
um across that spectrum now the guys
that have time can go into GPT and learn
but for most everybody else that either
aren't techsavvy or don't have time
right how how do you really get value
from from these tools from the insights
and so what we've built or in the
process of building is called
signals and I'll use my same use cases
before so let's use the use case
of show me customers today who who
mentioned vehicles older than 45 days
old, right? That used car manager in a
smaller dealership, he may be going to
auctions. He may be messing with recon
and pricing and he's doing so much,
right? He doesn't have time to go do
that every day. Signals allows him to
type that prompt in and then say,
"Deliver that to
me whatever method he wants." So it
could be an email or in this case he may
say, "Send me a text
message and he'll say as it happens or
he could say at the end of every day."
Right? Okay. So, what it does is it
says, "Okay, or enables dealers or
employees, whoever it may be, um to say,
"Here's what's most important to me.
Here's the value I found. It's things we
don't even know yet. Deliver it to me so
I don't have to remember to go look
every day because we know you're busy,
right?" And so, that's we're hammering
that out and we'll probably have have
some previews of it next quarter. Okay.
So by I I think it's safe to say by the
end of
2025 signals will be available. Oh yeah.
And these alerts will just
hit text message, email,
uh here are deals, just grab them, just
call them, right? It's almost like that
virtualized to based on the
conversations and and again unlocking
that dark data. Yeah, that's it. It's
outstanding. Matt, do you have any any
advice that you would give dealerships
that are new to
conversational data?
You know, I start just start exploring
it if you can, right? spend more time in
it. If if you if you're a if you've got
a a tool already that transcribes calls
for
you, start to look through there and
maybe start with the question, if only I
had known. If only we had known, right?
The stuff that happens in your store
every day when a customer walks out
upset or a deal didn't come together and
you think, "If only I had known." and go
see if you could dig in your
conversation data and find an example in
which maybe you find one and say, "Man,
how many
more?" Or or maybe you just run out of
steam. You spend 15 minutes and say,
"This could take all day." Right? That's
uh that's the proof's there.
Right? That's that's great advice. Just
dive in.
So before we uh before we break, I I do
want to mention that this episode of
Dealer Insights is proudly sponsored by
Straw, the automotive industry's trusted
partner in tech enabled BDC solutions.
At Strolled, our mission is clear to
empower your dealership with cuttingedge
technology, actionable data, and
unparalleled expertise so you never miss
a lead. Never miss a deal and never miss
an opportunity to drive performance.
Ready to see how Strolled can transform
your dealership success? Visit
straid.com today and discover why
leading dealerships choose
Strolid. Matt, it's been a great
conversation. Really good to to hear
about all of the work. I can see the
conviction and passion uh on a daily
basis that you have in the work that
you're doing and it's important not
only to Stralid but for the industry man
true pioneer and um you know I I would
like to ask everybody
to give us some some feedback on dealer
insights hit us up on
socialsstral.com lot of resources lot of
information. Uh big special thanks to to
Vin Shauna and the entire team here at
Strolled. Um if anyone's interested has
a a guest you'd like to hear and see on
Dealer
Insights, go to our website. We have a
page has all the
episodes and you can
submit yourself to join the show. We'll
look at every one of those opportunities
seriously. So, thank you again. Have a
great day and we'll catch you on the
next one. Thank you, Michael. Thanks,
Matt.