DealerInt said:

Dan — that level of transparency is rare and genuinely useful for anyone doing due diligence on Drive right now.

On the reporting side — the customization gap vs Hive and FourEyes is real. Those tools built reporting as their core product, so CRMs will always lag there. But the salesperson self-reporting gap is the one that compounds quietly. When salespeople can't see their own lead performance, you get two problems: managers spend time pulling reports instead of coaching, and salespeople have no accountability loop between deals. VinSolutions adding it after years of requests tells you how much pain existed around it.

The AI training limitation you described is a surprisingly nuanced problem. Most stores don't even realize their AI reps are creating confusion around third-party widgets until a customer complains or goes cold. The 700Credit example is exactly the kind of edge case that erodes trust in AI-assisted conversations — the customer doesn't know what happened to their data, and the AI can't explain it because it wasn't trained to. That's a human-in-the-loop failure point that's hard to anticipate until you've seen it happen.

The DNC visual alert gap is the one I'd be most concerned about at scale. As TCPA enforcement tightens, "we didn't have a visual alert on the record" is not a defense that holds up well. Hopefully Drive prioritizes that one given the liability exposure as Steve confirmed.

The Tekion variable ops accuracy being solid is the key thing — if booked deal data is clean, the manual desk build is painful but workable. The Fixed side gap will matter more as your service retention strategy matures.

Sounds like you've pushed the Drive team hard on these — which usually gets results faster than most vendors admit.

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Still want to be clear. If ranking the CRMs today, Drive is still the number 1 choice.

DealerInt said:

Is that gap mostly on the service side for you, or are you seeing it on variable ops deal data too?

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There is no Fixed integration with Tekion DMS and Drive Centric at this point. Variable Booked deals do report accurately.

DealerInt said:

but if the desking push and deal data aren't flowing cleanly into Tekion, you're reconciling manually somewhere downstream.

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The desking tool in Drive is better than Tekion's, but if they desk in Drive they have to manually build out the deal in Tekion (aside from some customer data that does push). They are all desking in Tekion at this point BUT the managers accept their fate because they love DriveCentric for what it does well as a CRM.

In transparency, my historic complaints about Drive, and this is well known in forums and with the Drive team, are:

- Reporting customization and diversity isn't what VinSolutions was and not nearly close to some third parties like Hive and FourEyes. The level of reporting I WANT isn't what most stores use or will use so I'm a unicorn in this regards.
- There is no salesperson-based reporting for individual salespeople. VinSolutions created this after I had pushed for years. Salespeople should be able to see their own Lead performance without having to rely on a Manager to show them.
- No Tekion Fixed integration for customer life-cycle that includes Service visit data for household or VIN
- I cannot train the AI for our custom needs. For instance, I cannot train our AI reps with a prompt like, "Don't say 'because you were on 700Credit.com' when the shopper was using the 700Credit soft pull widget framed in on our site. It confuses the shopper because they weren't on 700Credit.com so they are immediately cautious of what happened to their data. Say 'thank you for using the pre-approval tool on the site' when you see 700Credit Soft Pull as the source on the lead'" The AI reps ARE crazy good overall though.
- They have no DNC integration for visual alerts on phone numbers on customer records like other CRMs have. This is a growing area of concern once you've been sued...

I have had product requests, as many others in the Drive community have submitted as well, that they have added and updated ongoing. I just want mine done first LOL

DealerInt said:

@Brad Burlingham This is still a relevant question in 2026. For 12 stores on Elead, the switching cost isn't just the software — it's the 6-12 months of retraining your BDC and losing institutional knowledge baked into your templates and workflows.

VinSolutions has the widest adoption so finding staff who already know it is easier. DriveCentric has a genuinely better UI but thinner support infrastructure for larger groups. DealerSocket has struggled with stability post-merger.

For a 12-store group the real question is whether your variable ops leadership can enforce a consistent process across all stores in the new system — most CRM migrations fail on adoption, not technology.

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@DealerInt don't take this the wrong way, but that is a very narrow world-view of CRM changes in today's automotive retail world. We went from VinSolutions to DriveCentric years ago because I knew we NEEDED TO LOSE INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE, TEMPLATES, and WORKFLOWS. They have a completely different view of what automotive CRM and process look like, and it's refreshing. We only have 7 rooftops but the change was great, adoption from all was the fastest thing we'd ever seen and accountability for all, even those that were hanging on to the "comfortable" previous system, was key is a smooth transition. DriveCentric is by far our best adopted and engaged tool within our dealership software and tools lineup. New hires take to it immediately whereas it did take someone 6 months or more to get used to VinSolutions, eLead, and before that DealerSocket.

Your comment of "...but thinner support infrastructure for larger groups." is based off what? They have the best and most responsive support team and channel we have ever seen. Basic users have direct and immediate access to their support team in St. Louis for issues.

Oh, and your comment here is spot on. Drive's adoption is crazy high with sales teams. Like I said, best I've ever seen in my 25 years in auto.

most CRM migrations fail on adoption

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Our only issue is the Tekion pairing is limited with the DMS integration compared to if we still had a CDK, Reynolds, etc. They're working on expanding that so we can get our Service integrations and desking push perfected. More than happy to give you a tour from a dealer view if you want.

We're in the process of adding Impel to our "team". There are some grumbles from at least one person here. His concern isn't unjust.
We are a family owned & operated small Chevy dealership, and have been doing business on a more personal level since the beginning. Where our larger competitors treat customers like cattle with dollar bills stuck to them, we treat them with respect and dignity. Ok, not to step on any toes out there, but it's true. We are slow paced where it matters, and face paced where it matters. We value time and do a great job of not holding customers hostage for hours.

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I think it's going to become common that different AI tools will become part of company teams. I think everyone right now is trying to figure out the tuning; what sort of intro's do we want the agent making vs salespeople, what sort of redundant things can we delegate to those tools, and then having a way to keep everyone in the loop on all the customer interactions. You can definitely do a lot more with less, and offer a richer experience by adopting these tools. But I think right now everyone's in figure it out mode while it changes so fast...

douglaskarr said:

I've done some additional research and come up with my own... is this current?

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Douglas, amazing list. Would love to see how they claim what makes them different, or, what their strengths are.

p.s. I'm a merchandising zealot, and I am a fan of Ovefuel

Burt Lewis said:

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View attachment 9802

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Oh man - I thought I responded to this, but I never hit the "Post Reply" button.

Anyway - Love it!

Max_Fullpath said:

I think the conversation around CDPs is as relevant today as it was 2 years ago. All I suggested is that you might want to take a look for yourself. All good if it's no longer of interest to you. I started posting here again because of a recent post that hit my inbox this morning.

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I agree the CDP conversation is still alive and well. What I took some offense to was being called out after 2 years of silence. Normally, people who bump a thread add to the conversation with new information rather than picking at old things that have been quiet for a long time.

Welcome back. Hopefully, in the future, you will check the dates on things before jumping back in.

Ummmm.... welcome back to the conversation from 2 years ago

I’ve used their link-building and audit combo before, and it helped patch up some weak spots on my site without any guesswork. If you want to see the same setup I tried, you can check the details, since it covers their services and how they handle reporting in a pretty straightforward way.

ryanlucia said:

You're building an Ai experience on the website so when Ai comes to your website it interacts with it?

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Yes.
Websites are build for humans. AI is an intelligent machine that has a mission (created by its user). AI acts on behalf of it's user's mission.

DJ nailed the spec:

DjSec said:

he real strategy now is topic gaps, not keyword gaps. You create a knowledge network that is designed to feed the AI's.

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MattCopley said:

@Brad Burlingham based on what we saw with a few of the Audi stores on our platform the move to the new OADD site was an existential disaster. The CMS is puposefully painful to operate (far worse than DDC) and EXTREMELY limited in it's structure. You also roll up as a subdomain of the OEM giving you very limited ability to differentiate from on or off brand competitors. Our flagship Audi store saw close to 80% collapse in traffic overnight, had their worst 3 weeks in store history before going back to dealer.com, and later moving to an out-of-program website provider. Here's the daily performance story A) - Before Google indexed the OADD site
View attachment 9770

Here's after OADD site indexing (audi would not allow a programmatic migration of all of their SEO content)
View attachment 9771

And Here's where they are now on an off program site and with all their migrated content infrastructure
View attachment 9773
Added Average position in search trend for context as well . 3.6 across 205k impressions ain't too shabby for one day.


Proceed with caution. Have a contingency plan to bail out and bury that OEM site in the darkest corners of the internet if you need to.

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So doesnt that mean you give up all of your coop? we were forced to move to the new site.

JK,
I'm building a twist to this theme, hopefully beta soon. Love to ping you and talk about this to run a test on your site when we're ready.

My Take:

Jeff Kershner said:

The main goal of the LLM.TXT files is to assist with content discovery. Similar to the website's sitemap showing Google different pages, we are mapping all your content to LLM tools to help improve placement and rankings in AI and SEO simultaneously.

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JK,
Ahhh... you can pass on that offer. it's a moneygrab.

@Ryan Everson Is all over this concept. He was 1st to break news about this right here on DR, it's called WebMCP. Ryans Post
Structured Data is Critical for Dealers To Get Into AI Search Results

Brother Ryan also posted another where CloudFlare customers can buy a "LLM.txt" like replicate for AI bots to navigate your site.

jackcarlson said:

We are seeing so far an average of 39% increase in engaged time/session & 30% increase in session duration when our information is front and center, and legacy VDP bits are pushed below.

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As a fellow merchandiser, our clients with the shittiest VDPs see the highest lifts

Once your product shows that level of lift, then, they...

RESPECT YOUR AUTHORITAH!