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We’re Vanja Terzić and Eli Mishal. Dealers first, now 13 years running Goxee. This podcast is the unfiltered reality of building software that actually fixes dealership problems.
We break down what we’ve rolled out, why we built it the way we did, and how it played out when dealers used it in their stores. You’ll hear about the good, the bad, and the adjustments we had to make along the way.
We talk about things that hit your desk every day: pricing cars to the market, aging and turn, recon delays, CRM and lead quality, market comps, photo AI, and the processes that cut time-to-line and improve gross. No vendor spin. No sponsorships. No ads. Just two guys who’ve lived the grind, sharing what’s working and what isn’t.
If you’re a dealer principal, GM, GSM, used car manager, BDC lead, or anyone building tools for this industry - this is for you.
Eli Mishal (00:00)
Let me ask you a question.
Do you feel like?
what we do today satisfies you.
Vanja Terzic (00:14)
There's definitely parts that satisfy me and then there's parts that drive me absolutely crazy. And the parts that satisfy me are typically the parts that we're in control of and the things that we do, the parts that drive me absolutely crazy is when we know something to be true and when we see a very, very common sense solution to a problem and communicating that and getting somebody to take action on that.
and not being able to do that because of somebody else's habits or things like that. Those are the things that really drive me nuts and kind of always have, whether it was within our own company or talking to dealers over the years or, try this or try that. It's just having somebody.
change their habits for their own good and getting that done and not getting that done has been has been very frustrating at least for me.
Eli Mishal (01:11)
Okay, can you give me an example?
Vanja Terzic (01:14)
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of examples. I mean, you know, when we, um, we suspend a lot of, a lot of time talking to dealers and when we talk to them, we will give for, yeah, I'll give you a great example on our CRM on our, um, so we have this part in the CRM that, that allows you to put in your cost per lead channel and in your cost per lead channel, you know, you put in, I'm paying X amount for this.
And then when leads come into the CRM every week, actually in real time, it tells you this is my cost per lead and this is my cost per sale per channel per month. And to us, it's very valuable information, you know, but it's there, it's evident, yet it's very difficult to get somebody to do that, to look at it, to use it. People just don't, they don't seem to care.
You know, that's that's the frustrating part that that I that I battle with and I know you battle with and our entire support team battles with. You know. And it's ongoing. And my concern is that. With with AI coming in, because you and I know there's a bunch of junk AI out there. It's like everything's being branded as AI and.
Eli Mishal (02:18)
Yeah, sure.
They're
copying from each other.
Vanja Terzic (02:35)
They're copying from each other and they're basically building something that sounds good and where the consumer thinks that, it's going to do this for me. Well, there's still certain things that we need to do as business owners and decisions we need to make. And if we don't understand the data and the reasons why we're making these decisions, we're probably making the wrong decisions. That's what I think. And can any type of AI?
Eli Mishal (02:54)
Mm-hmm. True.
Vanja Terzic (03:02)
make a decision for you.
Eli Mishal (03:08)
Probably not.
I don't think it should be, at least. think you can... Nobody wants an AI to make a decision for them.
Vanja Terzic (03:13)
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (03:17)
the best of all, as an example for AI in general making decisions for you, this ideology of letting AI using data to make a decision for you, false once the AI make one mistake.
the first mistake, you know, that's when you stop trusting it.
Think about it. It could be right the entire times, but once he makes one single mistake, it's over.
Vanja Terzic (03:48)
Yeah. Yeah. Is that, well, do you think that's because like, like if you have an employee and they make a mistake, you have the power, you have the power to control that with them. But with the AI, you don't have power because it's somebody else that, that, that coded it and programmed it. You have no control for most of the time, right?
Eli Mishal (03:55)
You can still talk to them, you can adjust them. Correct, yeah.
Yeah, sure. You don't. well, the power, the fact that you can't talk to it, I think that's the biggest deal of all that breaks it in your philosophy, in the view that the way you look at it, right? Because the goal is to be able to communicate what you're trying to communicate in a way, right? Like you have your own techniques on how to sell, on how to do, how to deliver, maybe even your message, you know.
Vanja Terzic (04:11)
Mm-hmm.
When you
say talk to it, you mean train it?
Eli Mishal (04:37)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I mean, in this case, in the in hey, I write as a model, you want to train it, you want to be able to communicate to it, right. So it will practically clone your message, you know, and be able to deliver it like if you were to deliver it.
Vanja Terzic (04:56)
So what is it that because I was on a I was on vacation in Europe for like three weeks and I come back over here and on my Instagram feed, I probably see 30 ads every single day on on AI car dealers, AI car dealers. Just everything has gone fucking berserk. And even being in this industry and being in the field, it kind of feels confusing for me.
You know, so I can imagine what it feels like for the dealer. So what are the core problems that are being misrepresented with AI in the dealer space?
Eli Mishal (05:36)
I don't know if it's the way they're presenting it as much as the way they understand what they can do with that. Because I think that's the first kind of step. Because if I think that all I can do with that is say, okay, let me replace you. Let me cover on you. Maybe after hours, maybe during hours, whatever that is, right?
I think the biggest issue here is the fundamental thinking that you can replace a human with an AI. I don't think you can. I think most people using CHPT, let's go back to the CHPT era. We're in a new world right now. And I think a lot of people using CHPT either for personal use or business use and for the reason or at least for in the mission to make better decisions. But the decision is still in the hands of the person, not
not in the the trade to be tians to make okay, I do this do that no judge if they always response as a suggestion on what you should do, or how you should do and so on and so on. Right. But I think the biggest issue in our industry in the automotive industry is that a lot of companies sees AI as a replacement to a human, not necessarily enhancement to the human. And that's the biggest issue.
Vanja Terzic (07:03)
Okay, so.
sometimes when you step back from something and then You take a break from it. You go back and you're like you see in a different way it feels to me like there's there's just a lot of There's a lot of people making a lot of products for car dealers who've never sold anything in their life
who've never sold a car in their life. Now that doesn't mean that you can't make a good product if you haven't sold a car, but fundamentally the chat, the AI that I'm seeing for the automotive space is on a chat level. It's basically a one-to-one chat level. It's like everyone's saying, Hey, here's an AI that's going to help talk to your customers and it's going to help you book more appointments. And that's kind of where it stops. So
Eli Mishal (07:36)
Mostly yes. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (07:49)
The question arises, is there more valuable things that the AI should be doing, number one. And number two, do you really want an AI to overtake all of your communications because
Eli Mishal (08:03)
Especially when there are not many, right? Think about that. Add that into the equation.
Vanja Terzic (08:08)
Yes,
right, right. Because like I was over at, um, at keys and Mercedes last, last week, and I was talking to the sales guys and you know, it's, it's kind of mind blowing how many good sales reps are on the floor. They have no one to talk to because a big majority of their BDC department is taking all the internet leads, but yet they're not sales people. And we've had this conversation, you know, in our company too. It's it's like sales.
Salespeople are salespeople and non-salespeople are non-salespeople. And you can definitely tell the difference very fast if you know what you're looking for. So at any point of conversation in a leads life cycle, the question is, would you rather have a well-versed salesperson having that conversation and maybe an AI just kind of being an assistant to it? Or do you want to hand it off to it as an administrative task so you can have
Eli Mishal (08:44)
Absolutely.
Yes.
Vanja Terzic (09:09)
I know, it confuses me. For me, it's confusing. see the old reps complaining. They're bitching. They're complaining.
Eli Mishal (09:12)
Well, I think the question
is mostly who you are to start with, Like who you are. If you're a GM, maybe you have a different perception. If you're a salesperson who being bothered with, unbonded, whatever, whatever you said, know, it's so, yeah, but barred by so many messages and some of those messages are like just crappy and they're not leading to anything. Maybe at that point, maybe you're to say, you know what?
Vanja Terzic (09:30)
Bombarding, yeah.
Eli Mishal (09:41)
I want this to filter for me, you know, but I have a prior question to all of it and I'm questioning it myself, you know, why these other companies start to themselves that that's where AI will be the most powerful to the automotive industry to start with, you know, why did they think that replacing
Vanja Terzic (10:04)
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (10:11)
a human communicating certain messages will be a good thing to do, to start with. I don't think so, honestly. That's a prior question, right? Think about that.
Vanja Terzic (10:20)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, I mean, that's probably an easier path to product because if it
Eli Mishal (10:26)
Well, I
think because they see CHPT from a basic element like, okay, I'm sending a message and I'm getting respond back, you know what mean? So that's kind of like the initial way of thinking, okay, I can do something with that, you know?
Vanja Terzic (10:41)
Well, yeah, but there's another big, big like, think about if let's say the large and I don't even know who that is. I don't even know if they exist. Like whoever is the largest AI, let's call it AI chat company for car dealers today. They live outside of the deal. Okay. So for them to live inside the deal, they have to be their CRM. Otherwise, there's only so much they can do because the chat will then get the get the conversation.
Eli Mishal (10:54)
Mm-hmm.
Vanja Terzic (11:10)
to their CRM and it's their CRM's job to do the rest. So essentially the companies that are putting in chat AI for car dealers, they don't have car dealer software, it's just the chat software.
Eli Mishal (11:12)
Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah, let's name them. Let's name them. What company are we talking about? Like Gabagoo or whatever?
Vanja Terzic (11:26)
I don't know. Let me pull it up. Let's see.
Chat AI for car dealers.
Matador AI.
Eli Mishal (11:38)
Yeah, Gabagood too, right? Isn't it?
Vanja Terzic (11:39)
We have
dealer AI, drivey AI. So yeah, this, mean, this looks like a AI that fully automates sales and service conversations, right? What does it happen after the conversation level? And you know, when I look at the call AI, turn every inbound call into a booked appointment with AI driven conversations that never miss an opportunity. So.
And I mean, I get the frustration from dealers because they're saying, Hey, my guys aren't picking up the calls at all times. But does that justify handing off tens of thousands of dollars of marketing revenue to somebody else's AI?
Eli Mishal (12:22)
Let's redo this question just a bit. I think that a lot of those AIs came alive during time that matters more than today. like, let's say for example, during COVID time when there was like just explosion amount of people trying to communicate to a car dealer and there was a lot of conversations.
Vanja Terzic (12:28)
Bye.
Yeah, totally.
Eli Mishal (12:50)
then at that point it was really helpful to have such a tool that can manage the whole conversation for you. Maybe filter throughout, like I said earlier. ⁓ But today you don't have that many. Would you still give it to AI to decide what to say and what not to say? I don't know about that.
Vanja Terzic (12:59)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, mean, I think there's yeah, probably there's high value tasks. There's low value tasks, you know, and what's a low value task? It could be qualification in simple direction questions and availability questions, you know, and I was, it was used used car week in Arizona. And the conversation was how many how many vehicles does somebody need to look through?
in order to make three phone calls and it was well over 100 vehicles. So to get a phone call or to get a text message or a qualified lead form, I think there's a lot more intent to those today than there was in 10, five years ago because people are really doing their research and they have the tools to do the research online. So if something's coming to you, need to take it super, super seriously. where does AI become powerful? Maybe after hours. I could totally see that.
Eli Mishal (13:56)
⁓ Absolutely. Yeah.
I think so.
I really think so because I think like off the hours just right of the bat you have nobody to answer. So I mean would you rather have somebody answering than nobody answering? I guess the answer is like obvious kind of in a way.
Vanja Terzic (14:12)
Yeah.
Right, right,
right. And yeah, and like salespeople, for example, let's say you have, let's say you're running a lot with 100 units, how many salespeople do you need? Five? I don't think so. Right.
Eli Mishal (14:30)
I agree. I don't
think so. I mean, it really comes down to how many calls you have because some lots that have 100 cars might have a lot of calls and some don't. You know, it really depends.
Vanja Terzic (14:40)
So that's qualification again, you know, you are using AI to qualify your leads. And if those leads are qualified, you're, you're, people are automatically thinking like, are the leads not qualified? And this is why I need an AI. No, the leads are very qualified. They're extremely qualified. If they're calling you and if they're calling you and texting you right now, when, when your interest rates are super high, there is intent. I mean, they might not be
Eli Mishal (15:07)
Yeah, but not always,
they're not always qualified, right?
Vanja Terzic (15:10)
You're
right. You're right. You're right. They might not always be qualified, but there's absolute intent. Right. And if we go back to the COVID days, what made them qualified versus today? Only one thing, interest rates. That's right. That's right. So we know for a fact that less cars are being sold today than were being sold year two, five, 10 years ago. That's for sure. But
Eli Mishal (15:15)
That's for sure.
Injustrate, most likely.
Yeah, for sure.
Vanja Terzic (15:36)
We also know that some dealers are selling more cars today than they did during COVID. Right?
Eli Mishal (15:42)
Hmm... hard to believe in a way, but maybe.
Vanja Terzic (15:44)
Some are,
there's that like 3 % rule where at any downturn, there's gonna be a small percentage of dealers who are doing much better than they did before. The majority will suffer.
Eli Mishal (15:55)
You mean like before, before way before COVID? That's what you mean?
Vanja Terzic (16:00)
Even
before even a year ago, you know, so if you take if you take 100 dealers today, and the the, the mathematics behind it are 3 % of those people are going to be doing better way way better than the other 97%. Regardless of the times at any time, like in the old housing crisis, you know, you had people there were still real estate agents when houses weren't being sold. But a very small percentage of them did way better.
during the crisis than they did before the crisis. So the reason I'm bringing this up is we need to ask ourselves why that is. Why is that? Because decisions lead to actions, actions lead to numbers. If the decisions are wrong, the actions are incorrect and the numbers are off. Simple as that. And there's no AI that can help you make those decisions. So management makes decisions.
Eli Mishal (16:53)
Yeah, I don't think I
mean, I gotta state something here. Like I think that AI should never make a decision for you. It should, again, refine the entire data into a better understanding. And so you can make a better decision, you know?
Vanja Terzic (17:12)
Yeah, so that's ultimately the question because we have a lot of tools that we're using and it's hard to pinpoint. You almost need 10 different types of AI to do different things because dealers need help with aging. They need help with marketing for sure. You need help with marketing because if you're not willing to look at your channels and your cost per channel like we talked about, there's no AI in the world that's going to be able to help you.
Eli Mishal (17:41)
I give you a better one, the best of all, right? Acquisition.
Vanja Terzic (17:42)
Right?
What do mean?
Eli Mishal (17:47)
acquisition, like which cars you should buy and which ones you should avoid, right? I mean, that's kind of obvious because I always say like when you buy good, you're most likely going to sell good no matter what, you know, it doesn't really matter even your marketing to that degree, you know, so I think. Yeah, always, you know, so I think that if we can leverage today's data and analyze it to the degree where we can actually give a
Vanja Terzic (18:04)
Sure. You make your money in the buy, right?
Eli Mishal (18:16)
good suggestions on what you should be again buying and what you should be avoiding. That's just right of the bat really helping you to make better decisions. Maybe the number one most important decisions in this business, buying right.
Vanja Terzic (18:26)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so it seems like the excitement of the AI is pretty big in a sense. Let's call it the promise of AI is really big for a lot of people. And with that promise, there's a lot of really important low-hanging fruit that exists that is being overlooked. Because they're saying, oh, we're going to use AI to communicate with customers.
Eli Mishal (18:45)
Mm-hmm.
Vanja Terzic (19:01)
great, but you have less customers, right? You don't even know which marketing channels let's rewind that you don't know which marketing channels might be working the best. Before that happens. You don't know. You might have DDC or people problem, who are your best sales rep? And where is their time most valuable? Before that you've got acquisitions, you know, at the same time you have aging. So there's a lot of things that are happening. Like the chat AI component is really
Eli Mishal (19:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (19:29)
the smallest and least powerful part of what AI should be doing for a car dealership today. But yet it looks like everyone's banking on that because they don't have, they can't get into the core of the dealership, right?
Eli Mishal (19:37)
Well, I think I...
Well, I think the problem is a lot more like I I started at the beginning, which is like the fundamental thinking of like what AI can do for me, you know? And if you look at it from the kind of idea of like, okay, it's gonna replace me so I can have more time to do other things. I mean, why would, what would you, again, going back to that question, what would you rather do? Give it to the AI to answer in your behalf.
knowing all these data, metrics, data points, whatever, you know, or would you rather take control of those leads and make decisions based on these data, refined data ⁓ that can help you again make a better decision? I think that's what it comes down to.
Vanja Terzic (20:21)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. mean,
yeah. So let's say I go in going back to Prima to the car dealership, you know, is it's a lot easier to talk about it than it is to experience it because we both experienced and if we put our experience had back on, it's a hard pill to swallow because you walk into the dealership and you have so many different tasks that you do on a daily basis and
but you also know that 20 % of the things that you do are going to bring you 80 % of the results throughout the day. So maybe the question is, which are the tasks and the things that I am most valuable at, and what's the things that AI should be doing? And I think maybe we need to get into what types of things we're building on and trying to build and why we're trying to build those things, because as the world talks about chat,
I don't think that, I really don't think that people are thinking like, wait, what else should I really be doing that's a much higher value? Because I still want to make a decision. I still want to ultimately decide, hey, do I want to drop the price on this or drop the price on that? But I don't have the time to analyze how long has it been sitting? How many leads do I have on it? To do that for every car? Who's got that? What's that?
Eli Mishal (21:46)
I have a better way to look at this, like,
in my opinion, like, I think that car dealers is not that they don't have the time. Their mind is just stuck in a certain way in some other ideas, some other thinkings, you know, in which doesn't allow them to stir their minds into, hey, wait a second, I got a car in here, sits in my lot for, I don't know, God knows how long.
Vanja Terzic (22:15)
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (22:15)
maybe
six months and I haven't got any leads for that and it's literally sitting. I think that's the biggest issue because they are so focusing on getting new inventory and hoping that they're going to sell as fast as they can, whatever they can. And I think the issue is right there, like where people are kind of getting like it's kind of a fatigue. Like you're forgetting about what
Vanja Terzic (22:30)
Yep, yep, yeah, sure.
Eli Mishal (22:41)
else you can do, you know, with what you got and you got, you got a lot. Some people have like 60, 70 cars and five or 10 cars out of those 50, 60 cars are just getting, you know, like they ignoring them in a way almost to a degree. There's money sitting in them which can turn into other inventory and so on and so on, you know, that's, I think that's the biggest issue. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (22:55)
Yeah, yeah.
question. So I
watched this really cool. I forget what the what the podcast podcast was the other day. And they talked about if
Let's say you take take an AI model and feed it all the possible information about your business that you have everything right from from onboarding to to HR stuff to sales to support everything you feed that in there. And then you hire a PhD level student who is like who can do any anything who knows so many things. And you tell them, hey, what's our what should we do with this HR?
payroll issue, they wouldn't Why? Because it's business specific. It's business specific to your business. So no AI can make a decision for you. Number one, number two, it needs to be trained on the specifics of your dealership because everybody kind of runs different, right? Everyone runs different. So if you look at AI, maybe if we look at, because isn't that what we're trying to do is figure out
How can we leverage the power of AI for your specific dealership? And then.
Eli Mishal (24:19)
this whole
industry, you know, so they're gonna really get the most out of it. But again, I think the question is, of course, that's what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to get the AI power and leverage it to help you again, make the best decisions as possible, right? But I think there is a fundamental question, which is, again, prior to all of those questions, which is like, you got an AI year, right?
And the AI is a some kind of an entity in your view, which is like a computer, you know, analysis thing, looking into data, data points and all this and analyzing stuff so you can make better decisions again. Let's say even with our philosophy on it, right. But there is a first. First thing that you do naturally.
which is like you questioning it. You questioning is this is for me, is this is something that I would like to do, you know, or I would like to use in order to make better decisions to start with, right? And that comes all from the trustee factor, either I trust it or I don't trust it, you know, and I think, I think that's an issue in a way because most people won't trust in AI. That's a fact.
You know, I don't care how old you are. don't care. Even your tech savvy, whatever that is, you always going to question even if you're an analytical person, if you're not, it doesn't matter. You know, in end of the day, nobody will trust an AI. And I want to express that because I think that they shouldn't be. I don't think they should ever be. And I'm going to bring it that way. OK.
We know even in today's like in all of those chats between, you know, from ChessyPity to Gemini and you just keep going, you know, to all the chatbots that exist out there. They're all stating at the bottom one important thing. It's not always right. You know, it can make mistakes, you know, and just that kind of ideology of
the fact that the AI can make mistakes, leave that small space for the AI to make mistakes. In which in business, we cannot make mistakes. You see, this is the issue. This is the problem. The problem is that we're in such an industry that if an AI, as we had last week, you know, a situation where our AI on auto-respond
was responding that the dealership is not open tomorrow, even though it is, that hurts a business, period. That doesn't mean that we won't go after it and try to fix it. And we fix it over time and we are improving our systems. But those things will always happen. They're obviously too often and they're not going to happen just with us. It's going to happen with everybody. Why? Because it's just not always correct.
Vanja Terzic (26:59)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (27:28)
with these ways of conducting and understanding. So it really comes down to the use case and how you are conducting that powerful tool and what can you do for your business, you know, because even every car dealers is different too. Not all of them are the same, you know.
Vanja Terzic (27:47)
But what's the tool, right?
Well, it's, I guess I'm having a hard time understanding and probably dealers are too. When we say AI for car dealers, what does that, what does that even mean? Because based on the advertising, right? So if you go on Instagram and if you follow like every AI for car dealers, you're going to see is some kind of a communication platform.
Eli Mishal (28:11)
Well, on the most part, yes, because that's how people, as I mentioned earlier, that's their way of using leveraging that AI models into replacement. Again, going back into replacement,
Vanja Terzic (28:13)
Right, so.
So, right. but industry norm
in what we're seeing here is telling us AI is basically a communication model for car dealers, but it's so much more than that. Right. And the reason it's only a communication model for car dealers is because that is the lowest hanging fruit. any software, right? Any software company can come in.
Eli Mishal (28:36)
Absolutely, absolutely, yes.
Vanja Terzic (28:50)
and program a chat GPT bot to basically answer random questions and maybe even inventory specific questions. But again, how much does it know and how much can it know unless you feed it information about your specific dealership?
Eli Mishal (28:56)
Yes.
But a lot of companies can do the same too, without being said. Still, yeah.
Vanja Terzic (29:08)
Well, correct, correct. But, I don't see anybody on the market and
I haven't seen anybody who's running an AI directly on a CRM level in the deal while it's happening and then optimizing your business intelligence, not to make decisions, right? But to do the grunt work that would be a waste of your time or my time in a dealership to analyze, to run spreadsheets and to say, Hey,
Eli Mishal (29:21)
Yes.
Vanja Terzic (29:37)
Maybe you should drop this price or hey, maybe you need to follow up with this person or hey, this marketing channel is costing you way too much money. Because those are much more important tasks long-term than just having a conversation with a customer.
Eli Mishal (29:53)
Absolutely, yes. you know, like, I think that the conduction of what is an AI in this industry and what it should be like, that was defined based on, again, a lot of leads coming your way. And so you couldn't handle them and therefore the AI came alive. And Metador and all those companies, you know, bots.
Vanja Terzic (30:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (30:19)
has come out to resolve this issue in a way, but today we do not have this kind of an issue. And plus, I mean, even if you don't have that kind of an issue and it's still making mistakes in a low scale amount of checks, what did it actually do when there were a lot of checks? Think about that. How many deals have you actually lost during those times?
Vanja Terzic (30:39)
Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Absolutely. mean, it's been a long time
since they were a lot of leads like pre COVID. And we know that none of these platforms that that that are positioning is like your replacements to humans today did not exist back then. And if they did, they were really bad because let's face it, everything's running off. multi billion dollar LLMs like chat GPT like grok like Gemini like whatever they decide to use, you know, so
Eli Mishal (30:53)
Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (31:09)
This is not proprietary technology for a lot of these companies. They are just a bridge that is an answering model based on segments of their data. But there's so much more value for a dealer outside of just a simple chat with a customer, right?
Eli Mishal (31:14)
That's right.
Absolutely,
absolutely. think that all AI, we're just touching the surface in these days. We're 2025, we're July 2025, we're literally just touching the surface. We're not even scrubbing or whatever you're saying. Yeah, we're literally touching it. We're like, whatever the AI, however the AI will come into our really industry, especially our industry, which is like,
Vanja Terzic (31:43)
Yeah, totally.
Eli Mishal (31:56)
suffers from different issues, know, from acquisition again to marketing channels, where should I advertise? What should I do with my money? You know, how should I run my dealership? What should I do with this lead? You know, all the way down to this, you know. I think we are about to discover plenty of things that will really help you, a car dealer, to deliver a better value to your business.
overall and so you can make more money, you overall. We don't even know where it's going to take us. Let's be honest, you know, like we, we started about what I will say four years ago, developing our own thread bot thinking this is going to resolve a lot of problems. We had people in-house programmers and different formulas and ideas of what to answer when somebody asking a specific thing.
Vanja Terzic (32:27)
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (32:51)
And today we're developing completely something else. We're trying to understand a conversation, go down into the tone of the customer and how he's actually trying to or is triggers, right? What will trigger him? What will help him to make a better decision, maybe to come to the lot to test drive a car and so on and so on. So analyzing those data points
in my opinion today is a lot more important than just like, answering yes, the vehicle is available, you know, anybody can do that. And if we to summarize this, like if we have a person, let's say George answering, yes, the vehicle is available, you know, versus an AI boat that can take the tone can take the wordness can
can deliver this extra, right? Then we have done something. It's not just something that answers, but it's something that delivers a value which can make you more self. And that's what we're trying to do in here.
Vanja Terzic (33:58)
see if I can yeah 100 man I'm gonna see if I can pull up a
See if I can pull up a chat bot, I don't know, from a Toyota dealership. Let's see.
Okay, yeah, so here's a gob of goo, for example. Let's see, let me show my screen. I'm curious to see what this looks like.
Eli Mishal (34:21)
Okay. Sure.
Vanja Terzic (34:30)
Cool here, okay So I'm on their site let's go down here, but we're gonna click here our team is available. Hi there Checking in on on the let's say 2025 Camry Se first one that pops up here. Let's see what happens. So this is running by Gabagu. Okay
Okay, my name is Ashley here to help you with that. So what happens now? Like let's say I leave this page. I leave this page completely that lead is gone, right? They can't follow up with me. So they did not grab any information so far. I'm going to say no. Do you have anything used? Actually would let's say would rather have a Tacoma. Let's see.
Eli Mishal (35:07)
Yeah. It's over. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (35:29)
Let me have my team confirm available inventory for you. May I have your name? why doesn't it just give me available inventory? What's the best phone number? I'm just say no.
Eli Mishal (35:42)
I guess they don't really have all the information. They're
trying to connect you to a BTC at this point.
Vanja Terzic (35:49)
Just show me what you have in inventory. Anything under 40K.
Why?
Right, so as a customer, as a consumer, I'm done with this. I'm completely done with this. like, this is pointless, right? I'm gonna close this chat. Then I'm gonna go into use, view all used vehicles and then kind of start over again. And you know, if I get pissed off enough, I'm just gonna leave this website and go to another Toyota dealership or I'm gonna call.
Eli Mishal (36:11)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's not helpful whatsoever.
And most
likely people will do it like that because they're gonna feel like, okay, this is throwing me off. Now, let me ask you a question. What if you're an older guy with no idea that this is an actual AI?
Vanja Terzic (36:31)
Right.
Mm-hmm.
right, right. Well, what if you're me, right? So let's say now I call this company. I call them. like, I, well, I can't find exactly what I want on the website. So I call them and they have an AI voice that picks up and starts talking to him and say, fuck this. I'm going to say, fuck this. I want to talk to somebody. So you're basically spending tens of thousands of dollars every single month.
Eli Mishal (36:45)
That's even worse, right? Think about it.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we buying from people, we're not buying from machine for sure.
Vanja Terzic (37:13)
So you can make it more complicated for people to contact the best people in your dealership who make you the most amount of money. You're taking leads away from their table so you can replace it. You see, we do not know yet what a great AI is in this industry, but we do know, we don't know, right? But we do know that there's a lot of dealers right now, especially big franchise groups that are paying the ultimate
Eli Mishal (37:19)
Yes.
we don't know. Even we, we don't know. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (37:42)
price for putting in shit AI. Right? And this is shit AI. There's nothing until the day the robots buy from robots, the human experience is super fucking important. So if like I just bought a car, when was it two months ago, three months ago, and
Eli Mishal (37:46)
100%. Yes. Yeah. That hurts your business. That does not help your business by any means.
That's a way to look at it, yes.
Vanja Terzic (38:09)
Even though that was kind of an off situation because I was looking for a specific spec. The reason I bought from a dealership four or five hours from here instead of a dealer 30 minutes from my house is because the humanity behind the deal. Okay. I had a guy call. I had a guy go in. He made a video. He sent me a video. I watched the video. He goes, Hey, if you want, I'll take for expression. If you want this, if you want this, if you want this, the other guy treated me like a fucking autoresponder.
Eli Mishal (38:35)
Ahem.
Vanja Terzic (38:39)
Right? So if I get my bot to buy from your bot, cool. But if I'm going to invest my time, I want to talk to a fucking person.
Eli Mishal (38:46)
especially over a hundred grand a car, you don't buy such a car from a bought.
Vanja Terzic (38:48)
actually over 100 grand, you know.
right? Right? You know, but if my experience begins like this, what is the best that I can expect when I go into the dealership?
Eli Mishal (38:54)
No way. No way.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, let me ask you a different question. Another really good point. If the salespeople in the lot are depending on AI to answer on their behalf and they have all the data, let's just say, right? What's going to happen really when I come to the lot and start talking about this vehicle and I'm like, hey, what can you tell me about this vehicle? What happened at that point, right?
Vanja Terzic (39:06)
What do I do?
It's like, yeah, it's like an
outdated Tinder photo. What happened? Yeah.
Eli Mishal (39:32)
Totally man, like imagine you know, like you're
you're confused at this point. You're like, wait a second. I thought you're knowledgeable about this vehicle. Now you're like giving me the feel that you have no idea what we're talking about.
Vanja Terzic (39:43)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe, I mean, man, maybe people think they're smart and they're trying to Amazon experience this but, but it's a different game with cars because the majority of cars sold every year are used cars. Right and used cars have history, they might have issues you need to be confident why but like, I don't need to run a car facts report if I'm ordering a camera on Amazon. It's a different experience. This is probably the second largest financial decision that most American households are going to make.
Eli Mishal (39:45)
Thank
Yes.
That's right.
Vanja Terzic (40:13)
And we don't, you even though the consumer has a lot of insight and information, you still need somebody to guide you in a process of, is, do I really want this car? Right? It doesn't matter how many YouTube videos you watch. The human element, like I want to sit in.
Eli Mishal (40:29)
I think you're referring to like the human element, right? Versus the both element. Which one
is better? And at what point should I, as a consumer, will go with either this or that, right? I mean, that's a very good question.
Vanja Terzic (40:44)
Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally.
Because what's everyone doing right here? They're thinking about themselves. And as long as you think about yourselves and in your business, it's going to cost you a lot of money. So why not switch that mentality and try to figure out is this right for the consumer? Is this right for the shopper? And if the answer is yes, do that if the answer is no, it doesn't matter how much time it saves you because it's costing you money.
Right? So is this right for the consumer? What we just looked at?
Eli Mishal (41:13)
Yeah, for sure.
Vanja Terzic (41:19)
No, absolutely not.
Eli Mishal (41:20)
No, absolutely not. mean, right at the back,
again, like I said earlier, it hurts the business, period. It hurts the whole experience of buying a vehicle. Like in the old days, if we go all the way back to, I don't know, maybe 40, 50 years back, people used to just walk by the lot, enter and just walk around and try to figure out which vehicle do they like. And today, yeah.
Vanja Terzic (41:24)
Yeah, and this isn't free, right?
Yeah. Right.
Absolutely, where the salesperson was the car facts. He was like, this came
from a little lady in Pasadena.
Eli Mishal (41:50)
That's right. so the whole procedure of like buying a vehicle has changed. Absolutely. Yes. But no matter how you flip this, the human element, it's still very crucial. And that's the reason why we're buying from franchise dealers. We talked about that earlier too. And I think that the human element is such a natural piece of making a purchase, you know? And that's something that we can not remove.
Vanja Terzic (42:06)
Yeah, yeah, totally. 100%.
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (42:18)
from the procedure. We should never try to do that because it's like, no matter how you look at that, this is gonna hurt every business. I don't care in what industry you're at. Either you're in the car sales or you're in the barber. Imagine like in, I don't know, 20 years from now, we're gonna enter into a barber shop and we're gonna get an air cut by a machine. We're gonna press a button, put our head into something and just get an air cut. That's, you know.
Vanja Terzic (42:44)
really totally I just saw I don't know if I sent it to
you that massage machine that came in.
Eli Mishal (42:48)
Imagine
that, you know what mean? And there are a lot of massagers and machine speaking off, you know, and some of them, from what I've seen, they're doing good job, but getting a massage and buying a car are two different things, you know, and those are like one of the number one biggest decision, maybe second biggest decision you will make in your life in a way, even though we intend to make it pretty frequent in the US, people are switching cars very frequent, but it's definitely second biggest decision you're going to make in your life.
Vanja Terzic (42:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sure. Sure.
Yeah,
Eli Mishal (43:17)
Always.
Vanja Terzic (43:18)
totally. And you think that like these companies that are producing the software, they're thinking dealer first instead of thinking consumer first.
Eli Mishal (43:27)
I
think they're just not creative enough. I got to tell you the truth. I think they're just not creative enough in pursuing the understanding of the fundamentals of what AI can actually deliver. And that's the biggest issue. I think that we have really, as I mentioned earlier, four years back, try to do similar things because that's like the natural thing you will think, okay, how can I leverage that technology to do something that will be beneficial for the business?
Vanja Terzic (43:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Eli Mishal (43:56)
And I think that a lot of, you know, software companies just like us said, okay, well, let's use CHPT. Let's get it to answer, you know, people and so on so on. But that's not really truly where AI pools can actually boost your dealership, make you make more money overall over time or, you know, sell more cars, which obviously equal to make more money, you know, but.
Vanja Terzic (44:17)
So it comes down
to better decision making than that case.
Eli Mishal (44:22)
That's
right. It's always going to come down to that because I mean, look how many people are using judge B today for the same reasons to make better decisions, right? So, but the decision is still got to be in the hand of the human, no matter how we flip this.
Vanja Terzic (44:31)
Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, to make more informed
decisions so you don't have to be a robot to do the math and the calculations.
Eli Mishal (44:42)
That's right. But you still control that last step. If you have the control of the last step, you will never make mistakes. Think about it. So sure, yeah, I can make mistakes, which is okay. It's okay at that point that it's gonna make mistakes because I can always control it. I can correct it or I can make a decision that will be the best decision for me, for the customer, for the business and so on so on. So as long as we giving you the power to make a decision,
Vanja Terzic (44:46)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (45:12)
Right? Again, without going too deep into the analysis of the data, but you get it right in front of you, and then you make a better decision, then we did something.
Vanja Terzic (45:21)
Yeah, but it does the data analysis
better than you could ever do yourself. ⁓
Eli Mishal (45:25)
There's just no way in the world you can do such an analysis
because there's just too many data points like for example Yeah Correct I'll give you the best example of all price drop suggestion. It's the best, know, like there's nothing Better than this example why because you know price drop solution the way we shaped it is To be able to go deep down into okay. I have this let's say for
Vanja Terzic (45:30)
But it does it on the back end. So the AI does it on the back end and it delivers you options on what.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eli Mishal (45:54)
explorer, let's say, right? And the Ford Explorer does not have a lot of leads, but he has some leads, which just contacted me in the recent two, three days, let's say, right? So I won't give you a suggestion to price drop this vehicle because you might have ongoing conversation with somebody. But if let's say you have on the other end, someone who has like another, let's say, don't know, Ford F-150 that has
Vanja Terzic (46:04)
Okay.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (46:21)
a lot of leads, but in the recent two weeks, you haven't got much, or at least the ones that you got wasn't as warm enough or had a strong intent to really buy it or to come by. Nobody came by, let's say, to look at that.
Vanja Terzic (46:37)
so if the leads are cooling off over time.
Eli Mishal (46:40)
Absolutely. mean,
people are continuing looking at other vehicles at all times, right? So our goal is to give you that edge to say, okay, you know what? You got a few leads, they're not warm enough, let's warm it up. Let's make them, let's trigger something in them in which will allow you to make a sale. And obviously, mean, the only, I mean, there are obviously a lot of things you can do in order to try to make a sale again, like to...
Vanja Terzic (46:44)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (47:08)
bring the car back into the market, I will say, which is like in the old days, like the way when I was like running a dealership was like, let's retake the photos of the vehicle. That was like one of the first thing we do to kind of re-trigger interest in a vehicle. Yeah, or change something because if I go into, let's say a listing site, the car growers, Craigslist, cars.com, AutoTrack, whatever, it doesn't matter, right? And I do see the vehicle.
Vanja Terzic (47:20)
Yeah, right. Well, let's increase the price or let's remove it and post the neck on. There's so many tricks. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (47:35)
As I've seen it before, I'm like, okay, this car has been sitting for so long, probably nobody would have buy it. So why should I? Right. ⁓ so those kind of like techniques that worked in the past still works today in a way to regain, you know, engagement and get people to be interested in the vehicle. But let's be honest. If it isn't got sold for X amount of time, the only one thing you can do to just make it, you know, sold is to drop the price.
Vanja Terzic (47:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Eli Mishal (48:05)
You know, but
how much do you drop the price? What should I do? And when she, when you should do that, those are the, the kind of data points, which will be very hard to calculate, especially if you have 60 or a hundred vehicles in the lot. Imagine doing this to every single visit is literally impossible. And even if you have like 10 people working for you, you know, like taking in consideration all the data points that's happening from your CRM.
Vanja Terzic (48:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's not possible. Totally. 100%.
Eli Mishal (48:33)
to your acquisition and all those little things that happening in the background, that changes everything. That changes everything. That definitely directly taking AI and making it so it works for you. But again, it gives you the power to make a decision of either lowering the price or not. Sometimes we talked about it in the past too. Some really good point is like,
We always said to people, I used to talk to a lot of dealers myself for so many years. And I said, you know what? you know, sometimes a vehicle that sits in your lot and he just, it gets dust on it, let's say, right. And you can sell it, you know, and then the person, and then he comes down to the price. And then I'm like, why don't you lower the price? And then, you know what the dealer says, Hey, I lowered that price already to the lowest I can get to, you know, to lower it to.
Vanja Terzic (49:02)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (49:27)
And there's
no more room to lower it to lower that because I'm to lose already a lot of money. And I'm like, hey, you got to do that. It's like it's obvious thing. It is what it is. You bought wrong. You're going to sell wrong. And that's OK. As long as you as long as you understand that a car that will seat, it won't get sold tomorrow. Or I mean, there are some units. Sure, there are some units that are unique or whatever, you know, but
Vanja Terzic (49:30)
Yeah.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Eli Mishal (49:57)
most of them or not. Let's be honest.
Vanja Terzic (49:58)
But back then I wouldn't
blame dealers for doing it. Like today, I still can't blame dealers for not doing it because of crap like we just saw. So as a customer, I went through there from, let's say I went there through Google. So automatically Google is going to show a non-converted lead. So that marketing channel is no good, even though it was gubbagoo that completely lost the deal. So because they didn't get a cell phone number, they didn't get any information from me. Okay. So for me as a dealer to drop the price, what does that mean?
Eli Mishal (50:20)
Absolutely.
Vanja Terzic (50:28)
I'm going to have to wait another week, two, three weeks for new customers to go back to these marketing channels and hopefully see a price reduction. This is a problem, right? So if the phone number was captured, okay. And on the backend, it said, Hey, drop the price and instantly you're going to notify everybody who was interested in this car today, right? Not hoping they get back on your website later, not hoping they go to car gurus later, but today, like right now,
Eli Mishal (50:34)
Yeah, most likely. Yeah, it's a big problem.
You want the truth, you want the truth
based on data, nobody goes back to your site. No, no, nobody goes back because dealers not as often dropping price. They're keeping the price, they're hoping for somebody to come. We just talked about it. So yeah.
Vanja Terzic (51:00)
Nobody goes back, right? So.
Okay, so,
so if so you look at it as an audience, so every car that's an inventory, it has a lead associated to it. Okay, with itself with a phone number or whatever else that's basically your vehicle audience. And you don't need Facebook retargeting or Google retargeting or anybody else. Right? You basically have your own marketing channel. And you can run your own campaign on a vehicle vehicle level.
Eli Mishal (51:18)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes.
No you don't. That's right.
Absolutely.
Vanja Terzic (51:42)
to the audience who was at one point interested in that vehicle. And when you drop the prices, boom, sends them a text message.
Eli Mishal (51:48)
That's right. But
you know, the biggest challenge of all of this is to be able to trace which one from your leads are actually interested in what vehicle and that that really comes down to our VIR, which is the vehicle interest recognition, which happening on a phone call, which happening on a text message. And it doesn't matter in what format they're they said, OK, I'm interested in, let's add on 2016 this beetle, you know, whatever. Right. ⁓
Vanja Terzic (52:03)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (52:18)
our systems will be able to capture that and understand which bit that customer was kind of interested in, and which will target into the workspace specifically on that lead, right? And that helps us to do that second step, which is like retargeting, as you mentioned, you know? And that makes the whole difference, in my opinion.
Vanja Terzic (52:40)
why
isn't anybody else doing this? Why? I guess my question is, why isn't this? Why isn't this the focus? Instead of just, hey, let's put an LLM model, let's call it AI. And let's have it talk to our customers for leads that are costing us 5060 $80 a pop, instead of people that have been selling cars with us for years. Why the fuck isn't that priority?
Eli Mishal (52:44)
That's a good question.
That's right.
Well, I think it's obvious. These all companies that in our spectrum are in a way, they're running by copying from each other. They don't really innovate. They're not really coming out with like a techniques or ideas that can actually leverage or help the dealer. Like
Vanja Terzic (53:26)
is it because they haven't been in the business of selling cars ever?
Eli Mishal (53:31)
Well, it's a mix of both, right? I think that the fact that we have the technology background as well as the automotive background, we can kind of understand the two worlds in which allows us to understand, something in here needs to open in a certain way, you know, in order for us to get the most out of the technology that is existing today world. I think that's what helps us to shape the systems the way we're shaping them.
Vanja Terzic (53:40)
Yeah.
Yep.
Eli Mishal (54:00)
because we think like a car dealer, but at the same time, we understand the technology and the power behind the technology and what can be done with such technology. That makes the whole difference.
Vanja Terzic (54:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, whoever is not confused by AI right now should be very confused.
Eli Mishal (54:23)
Well, I think it's confusing to a lot of people. And that's totally okay. That's normal to be confused by a new technology. Like I always give the best example of all. Imagine about like our our grandparents, as soon as they were like, I don't know, 50, 60, and then all of a sudden they were introduced to a TV. They thought that's like a UFO shit, you know, like, it's like new thing in your life and it changes your life. Absolutely. Look out.
Vanja Terzic (54:28)
Yeah.
Go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
Eli Mishal (54:52)
How
much Chetchipiti has done in such a short time? That's crazy, right?
Vanja Terzic (54:54)
So, so if you're a dealer,
so if you're a dealer today and you're confused by AI, whatever that AI is, if you ask yourself like, whatever this is supposed to do, is it going to be confusing for my leads? And if the answer is yes, you got to stay away from that shit.
Eli Mishal (55:16)
Maybe, maybe. Well, I think that it all comes down to trying, Trying, failing or succeeding, either or. I think that in the end of the day, majority of those trade bots, as you mentioned earlier, will eventually fail. Why? Because by nature, AI make mistakes. And that's something that any dealer, I don't care if you're a one-man shop or a franchise store,
nobody gonna like those mistakes. So the question is not if you're gonna either like it or not like it, but the main question is like, how can it actually help me from a dealership perspective? And I think that we are about to discover many things as a technology company using our brain and creativity
Vanja Terzic (55:46)
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (56:07)
to put together things that can actually help car dealers. And we're not just doing it with herries, right? We're actually communicating with dealers on a daily base to see how it influence, what does it do and how does it improve in real time. And as we see the feedback, we're adjusting, we're improving, we're maybe even changing our fundamentals too at some points. We're leaving it open completely for interpretation because
Vanja Terzic (56:14)
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (56:36)
we don't know that's the truth that we do we do not know where he's going to go to yeah
Vanja Terzic (56:41)
Yeah, we don't. Yeah, we don't know what we
don't know. But in this case, what we just looked at, I promise I'm not trying to go back to this. It's like, the dealer doesn't know that this dealer has no clue that this just happened. No clue.
Eli Mishal (56:54)
Yeah, absolutely.
Neither maybe he cares too, because he thinks you're spam. Maybe what this company drops will say to back up themselves in order to keep that customer keep paying the bill. You know, like that's the question. Like, what can you say about such a thing? You know, probably nothing. You know, I think just by the fact that they did not conduct your basic information.
before anything and you were just gone, technically there is no value in this service whatsoever.
Vanja Terzic (57:27)
But I mean, they tried. Let's give it to them. They tried.
Eli Mishal (57:29)
But that was
late in the conversation. I think it should start from the beginning. mean, technology wise, of course, it's like, what would you do? What's come first? And I think that it doesn't really matter that they tried. The only one thing that is important out of all of this is that they don't have your information. And that's right. And that's what matters.
Vanja Terzic (57:49)
No, they don't have the information and they're not going to get a lot of information
because it's a web based browser. Like if you.
Eli Mishal (57:54)
It doesn't matter.
could be web browser, whatever it could be like web, could be SMS, could be whatever, right? The point is that they do not have a way to get you back. And that's an issue.
Vanja Terzic (58:07)
right, but they don't get my information because at that point in the conversation, I don't want to be spam. I don't want to give them my information.
Eli Mishal (58:15)
Sure,
sure, sure. But the point is, again, if I'm a dealer, right, if I'm that company, Gabagoo, right, and my selling point to you will be like, hey, you need a chat bot so you will be able to answer certain questions, blah, blah. But let's say it answers certain questions, but it does not, again, grabs your information. What's the point of it?
Vanja Terzic (58:22)
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (58:41)
What's the idea behind it? Why would I, as a car dealer, will support people with certain questions to a certain degree, right? Let's say not to the fullest, but to a certain degree. But I won't be able to get your information. So why do I need this jet bot in the first place?
Vanja Terzic (58:58)
Well,
you that's the problem. They can't get the information because they they don't deliver enough information to me in order to justify me giving my information. Right? If I ask you do if it's a chat AI if I asked you do you have any use Tacoma's in inventory, you're supposed to say yeah, we got here they are, right? I'm gonna go to that page, right? I want to continue this conversation. Hey, you know, do you have anything under 40k? Right? Is it a clean car facts? At that point, I can say
You know what? Let me connect you with somebody or connect it with somebody who can continue the conversation where it left off. Otherwise, I'm not giving you my fucking information because I know what's coming. I'm going to start getting emails and text messages and a bunch of automated bullshit like this has been.
Eli Mishal (59:45)
But I can get you another, a lot of other, you know, fundamental issues with this all chat bot to start with, okay? I'll give you one simple example. Let's say you're in your lunch, right? And you're like, okay, I'm gonna look for a car because I'm looking for a Tacoma, whatever that is, you know? And under 40 grand, whatever, right? I'm gonna go into this website. I'm gonna start clicking. I gotta finish my lunchtime finished. I gotta go. See you later, you know? I'm getting out.
You don't have my information still. Let's say still gonna go into the vehicle. I'm still gonna look into the vehicle. I'm still gonna spend time on the website. I'm gonna go from one vehicle to another. I'm gonna filter. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna talk to you. You're gonna respond me perfectly. Let's just say you still don't have my information. What's the point of all of it? Nothing, zero. You can't do anything with that. I think a chatbot, it's not to be able to fulfill, you know,
the mission of like being able to answer questions. Well, it needs to conduct first of all the information of who you're talking to. And if you, if he doesn't do that, what's the point of it to begin with?
Vanja Terzic (1:00:41)
Yeah, you got to deliver value. You got to deliver value, right?
But how can it do that if it doesn't, if it's not able to give you what you need? It tries to, because you see they're trying to do that. They're saying, what's your name? What's your email? What's your phone? And I'm saying as a consumer, fuck you. I don't know you. I don't want to get spammed. So you have to give me value first in order to get my information. No.
Eli Mishal (1:01:19)
Well,
that's your case. But again, I'm talking about the majority of cases because there will be different type of cases. You keep focusing on like, wait a second, it didn't even answer my questions. It didn't answer my concerns. It didn't guide me. It didn't do what it's supposed to do. If you were to be human, probably were to give me better answers, right? But what I'm saying is better. I'm saying like, if that were to be a human, okay? And it did not.
Vanja Terzic (1:01:29)
Right. Yeah.
Absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (1:01:46)
get my contact information right at the beginning before he's trying to assist me, I see a fundamental issue because the dealer paying a lot of money for this service and you're just gone. You're gone. You're not there anymore. And there is no way for them to get anything from this lead. Technically, there's no lead. There's never been a lead. That's a bigger issue, in my opinion.
Vanja Terzic (1:01:51)
Mm-hmm.
I mean, they tried, they actually did try.
Eli Mishal (1:02:15)
But that
was very late again in the discussion. That shouldn't happen like that. That's a fundamental again issue.
Vanja Terzic (1:02:18)
Well, here are a few.
What are you most interested in? And then it said, may I have your name? I said, no, what's the best number? I said, no, can you please provide your email? I said, no.
Eli Mishal (1:02:29)
Yeah, but you see what I'm saying? Like they're doing it in such a wrong order. I understand. Like they're trying to grab kind of like your attention to answer certain things. But again, did not answer as good as they should have. And that pulled you off even more. So, but if at the beginning, right off the bat, when you have a question, just from a fundamental thinking, ⁓ You were to be asked like, who am I talking to so I can, you know,
Vanja Terzic (1:02:52)
Mm-hmm.
Eli Mishal (1:02:58)
I can assist you better. And in case this, let's say my disconnect, can I have your phone number, you know? Just think about it, right? Yeah, sure.
Vanja Terzic (1:03:00)
I'll give you my name. Me, I would give you my name.
But I wouldn't. Here's why I wouldn't. I wouldn't unless it felt
like I was talking to a human or something of value.
Eli Mishal (1:03:17)
But that's you. Now I want you to think of majority and in this let's say methodology, would you think you're gonna have more leads in your CRM or less? Obviously yes, more. I mean, that's yeah, for sure. I mean, that's kind of like, that's what I'm trying to refer to. I think that the biggest issue is that, yeah.
Vanja Terzic (1:03:29)
You probably have more people, yes, yes, but.
But wait a minute, bro. Didn't we, wait, didn't we drop this
whole website because we had a website plugin, like a website live website chat, but we dropped this thing years ago. Okay. Like four years ago and said this real time browser chat doesn't convert leads nearly as nearly as good as opening up an SMS conversation, right? Because in an SMS conversation, I don't need to ask you what's
Eli Mishal (1:03:40)
We still have it, yeah, of course.
No, it never converted leads. It never done a good job at that, for sure.
Yes.
Vanja Terzic (1:04:04)
you know, what's your phone number?
Eli Mishal (1:04:05)
I don't need to even ask you what's your name. I have it. That's right.
Vanja Terzic (1:04:08)
I don't need to ask you anything, you know,
so I just get straight to the meat and start having that conversation. Hey, do you have any Tacomas? Yes, we do. Here they are. Because that's lead first, not dealer first.
Eli Mishal (1:04:16)
Yeah, for sure.
Correct.
So the order needs to be right to start with, you know, because if you don't have the order right, right of the bat, you're losing. Period. That's the fact. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (1:04:31)
That's right.
If right off the bat, if you do not have a phone number or email, you can contact them on. You're done. You don't have a lead. You don't have shit.
Eli Mishal (1:04:37)
That's it, it's over man. You don't have a lead man. Why does it matter that you answer
let's say a hundred questions even if you answer them right. Doesn't matter. Yeah.
Vanja Terzic (1:04:45)
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. So, and
this was just me going to their website, right? What if I'm going from a marketing channel and I end up on a car. Let's do that. I end up on a car and I'm gonna click this car here. I'll share my screen again. Let's see what happens. Share. Okay.
One sec, screen.
Okay, so we've got this.
love this car. ⁓ What's let's say does it have a clean car fax so I'm on this car
I'm looking at this 2019 Tacoma, let's see what it does.
Eli Mishal (1:05:40)
Nah, doesn't even know that you're in that vehicle.
Vanja Terzic (1:05:40)
Okay, I
can help with that. That's not the car I'm looking at.
Eli Mishal (1:05:45)
try. Yeah, it doesn't know. The tread bot doesn't know.
Vanja Terzic (1:05:48)
looking at.
I'm looking at, and I'll even give it a VIN number at this one.
Eli Mishal (1:06:07)
It doesn't even ask Rebecca, there you go, it's thinking. takes a very long time.
Vanja Terzic (1:06:07)
Nothing. Here we go. Here we go.
Yeah.
Okay, great.
Okay. No, no, no, not yet. Not yet. I mean, it's just showing me a link. We have it. Okay, I know.
Eli Mishal (1:06:20)
Did he answer the question that you were asked prior to this?
So this is just availability kind of a case. if the vehicle is available, but I can see on the website it is available, most likely it's the same data that the chat bot using anyway.
Vanja Terzic (1:06:30)
Correct. Yeah. Again. What's the car? Yeah. Because
so consider that I landed on this page from a paid marketing channel that the customer that the dealership is paying thousands and thousands of dollars for. And this is what I'm getting. So it needs to know where I'm at. Let's see what it's Great. I can help you provide that car facts report. Great. I'll need to collect some more information. Why do you need my information to give me a damn car facts report?
Eli Mishal (1:06:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Why again, I think that the fundamentals of order of sequence of things it's broken in here to begin with,
Vanja Terzic (1:07:08)
Yeah.
Eli Mishal (1:07:12)
Especially that that creates frustration in a way if you think about it, you
Vanja Terzic (1:07:15)
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you see, and this is kind of what we were talking about. There's a huge disconnect between a chat bot and the backend system because the Carfax is right here. I can click on this, show me I understand your concern. Unfortunately, I need to collect some basic info to provide you with the Carfax report. Come on.
Eli Mishal (1:07:25)
Absolutely.
but it's on the site. I mean, that should answer. So I think they need to decide, the Gabba Good gotta decide either they're conducting the information at the beginning and don't open conversation or giving all the information and then trying at some point during conversation, try to collect the information, but not delivering the Carfax, not giving you the Carfax to be able to look at, I think is broken completely, right?
Vanja Terzic (1:07:37)
It's right here. It's right here.
Yeah,
I agree. I agree. So I'm giving him my name. It's asking for my last name. And what is it saying now? Thank you. Could you please provide your phone number so we can follow up with the Carfax report? OK, I mean, I see what it's doing, but this is too confusing. Bye. Let's see what it says. Let's see if it can counter it, because this is an objection. It should be able to counter some kind of objection, you would think, right?
Eli Mishal (1:08:28)
Yeah,
for sure.
Vanja Terzic (1:08:32)
Boom, just lets me go. That's it.
You just let me go.
Eli Mishal (1:08:39)
Unbelievable. Yeah, you wasted all this time. They spent thousands of dollars on this chat. And in the end, they got nothing, you got nothing. You got actually very confused and you end up just walking away. You will never buy from this dealership for sure. That's right.
Vanja Terzic (1:08:54)
And this is a franchise dealer with
a budget with a massive team of people. And unfortunately, there's not, mean, it's not their fault. There's nothing they can do about this. What would happen if, what would happen if an independent dealer who's barely getting by says, you know what, I really need this because it's going to help me. It's a problem. Yeah. This is a problem. This is a problem. Nothing against Gabagoo. Now again, nothing against Gabagoo.
Eli Mishal (1:09:15)
It's gonna ruin their business for sure.
Vanja Terzic (1:09:22)
is just whatever you decide to do right now, more importantly than ever, it has to prioritize the lead experience and the buying process because there's no doubt about that. And if anybody disagrees on that, let's see your sales.
Eli Mishal (1:09:30)
Absolutely.
Yeah, for sure. I agree.