wow.
the UX's you can spin up from this is simply mind boggling.

Alex Snyder said:

This is a Customer Details Page on steroids! It exists for EVERY customer you have sold or serviced. If it is in your DMS, it is here.

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Don’t spam here. This site ain’t the one, chief.

Alex Snyder said:

I spent years chasing this metric and working to make it top of mind for every person involved in the sales departments across my dealer group. I then took it to be a central next step movement in a CRM I helped build. But don't you dare call me Mr. Appointment because I'm now second guessing whether it is that necessary any more?

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Alex, I still think appointments matter. The problem is we made the appointment count the goal instead of the next step.


If the customer agreed to a real time, the vehicle is there and ready, and somebody owns the visit, that’s an appointment.


If they said, “I might stop by Saturday,” and we put it in the CRM so the board looks better, that’s not an appointment.


I’d still track set, show and sold. I’d just rather have 10 real appointments than 25 pencil-whipped ones.


Mr. Appointment can stay. He just has to stop counting maybes.

We made some really cool updates that transform that dark DMS you have sitting in your store into a full-blown intelligence machine primed for making car deals on.

This is a Customer Details Page on steroids! It exists for EVERY customer you have sold or serviced. If it is in your DMS, it is here.



1. Every vehicle, and where the equity sits
Value, payoff, and equity on the card. Alongside it, the vehicles they've been shopping — with the payment they were quoted and the stock number, so you know whether the unit is even still on the ground.


2. Every dollar they've spent in your store, against what the car is worth
We take the customer's actual spend history in your store — service plus loan payments — chart it against current market value, and project it forward. Where the two cross is the peak.
The example below: $29,772 invested ($1,167 service, $28,604 loan payments), car worth $25,465, payoff $23,195. That customer is past their peak and still has 44 payments left.
I haven't seen another tool put store spend and market value on the same axis. If something out there already does it, I'd honestly like to know — point me at it.



3. Warranty that counts miles, not just dates
Coverage expiring "Mar 2028" is useless if the customer drives 20k a year and the cap is 60k. This watches mileage and tells you when they'll actually run out — which is usually well before the date on the contract.



4. A worklist built from what people actually did
Not a score. Filters on observed behavior — ran a payment comparison, used the trade tool, browsed inventory, looked at warranty, scheduled service — plus what they own and what they're shopping for.



5. And a plain-English read on each one

"11 quote configurations. They're calculating whether a move is affordable." A sentence a salesperson can act on. In this example, it is all about sales, but this entire Customer Details Page works for Sales, F&I, and Service. We have deleted the line in the sand between departments.

How do you know the call is missed in the first place? Systems like one of our sponsors, GoTo, will catch that. But where are you finding your missed call? Do you even know they're being missed...

Or they aren't being missed and the person who answered the call did not log it?

interesting...

Are they rating the dealer? Is the franchise dealer paying for CarGurus?

TopSalesman said:

Can someone help me with how to batch post on craigslist ?

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Go to the Craigslist market closest to the store, hit Create a posting, then choose Cars & Trucks — By Dealer. From there, enter the year, make, model, trim, mileage, VIN, actual selling price, dealership information, and a solid set of real photos.

The main thing is keeping the ad clean and accurate. Don’t use a fake $1 price, stuff the title with keywords, or post the same vehicle in a bunch of different markets. That’s usually when ads start getting flagged or removed.

Craigslist currently charges $5 for a dealer vehicle listing. After you submit it, they’ll send a confirmation email, and the ad should show once the verification is completed.

Here are Craigslist’s own pages covering the process:

Posting instructions:
https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting/create

Dealer posting fees:
https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees

Reasons listings get removed:
https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/reasons

For a couple of vehicles, doing it manually is easy enough. Once you’re trying to keep a larger amount of inventory updated, that’s where it becomes a real process.

iWish AI said:

I am assuming in the past, people picked up phone when someone called. Now they dont. So the sales person thinks, I would call 100- 95 wont pick up. Out of those 5, maybe 1 would agree to schedule a TestDrive. The number of people who picked up in the past was probably 30+ and half a dozen folks agreed to test drive? Are these numbers directionally correct?

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Directionally... sure

Today is more about leaving a clear and concise voicemail for a transcription service. But follow-up is still one of the most important jobs of a sales agent.

Yeah, this is becoming a rare phenomenon in the car business... the salesperson who actually follows up. So "follicular fluid" is just another version of FU

Dave Lemmon said:

Brent is the best...but as a former DD loyalist, multi year and location speaker, absolutely not for the kind of money they want. I skipped Vegas (and we skipped a booth) for the first time in over a decade last year. I intended to walk it this year because Detroit is drive-able.

Then I heard the ticket price.

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$3,500 and no early bird. Same as last year. Absolutely outrageous for what you get.

um... anybody seen the Refresh-branded 11-foot poles?

You've birthed a terrible analogy here Sir. I wouldn't repeat this one at parties, especially to any second or third generation owners. They don't really go for that sperm talk.

Mitch Gallant said:

I think the highlight and reason to go would be the Brent Wees AI Hackathon, he's a beauty and a pro: AI Hackathon | Digital Dealer

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Yes he is - I also think the AI educational/news content he's putting out on LinkedIN is some of the best in a sea of AI slop posts.

We did just book our booth for Digital Dealer, so we'll find out soon enough if Detroit works.

I think the highlight and reason to go would be the Brent Wees AI Hackathon, he's a beauty and a pro: AI Hackathon | Digital Dealer

joe.pistell said:

Some times, AI is a PHD level brain, other times is a pot smoking teen ager that needs a firm boot.

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I am finding that the solution to this is a combination of sub-agents or orchestration.
I now have 2 workflows that are working very well:

1. All my Claude Code projects now go up 1 directory instead of living in the project code - I then store many well organized files in that directory that explain to Claude how the project works, what the rules are and (most importantly) a well refined skills file that explains what it can and cannot do and how to work on the project. Better guidance = better results, it rarely if ever disobeys these files. One simple fix that helped me debug alot was to add "Fail loudly" to the skills file.
   
   
2. I moved any non-code projects to a Hermes workflow with sub-agents and model selection and orchestration. I send a message to hermes and it uses knowledge about me and skills files to decide how to handle it. The agent runs on 3 separate models:
   1. The main agent runs on my ChatGPT subscription using codex cli - all main orchestration and decision making happens with GPT's latest models. This agent deploys work to the other agents and then checks their results against the request (similar to a loop in Claude) until it believes that the agents have performed what I wanted
   2. All programming work or scripting is done by latest qwen coding model, running locally on my macbook (slow, but "free")
   3. All thinking and strategy work is done with latest qwen thinking model, again running locally

joe.pistell said:

What is your fav voice-to-text tool?

Love using Whisper flow.

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MacWhisper here. I wanted a pay once solution that didn't make calls to the cloud. Mostly because I wanted something contained to my personal AI operating system.

What is your fav voice-to-text tool?

Love using Whisper flow.

Openlane Auction Sucks said:

This particular thread is about Otolane. Working with any auction is all well and fine until it isn't. Look at the poster I'm attaching that they sent to all the dealers describing the "Otolane Promise" Guess that was just marketing B.S to fool the buyers.

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Well that starts to make a touch more sense.... I'll be honest, i didn't watch the video at first and your user name is calling out OpenLane, not Otolane - "OPENLANE Auction Sucks"... i just thought you didn't know how to spell as you ranted. OTOLANE is a mystery to me, although it does say its Canadian and its dealer to dealer.

If you keyed on the "no smells" in the listing and stuck to that in your arb you might have gained more mileage. If your language and demands were more professional you would have had a better outcome.

You're not wrong, but I think this book is in order.. (canadian link for you too!) (How to Win Friends and Influence People)

Did you just create an account with the sole purpose to bash a vendor? LOL

I have nothing but great things to say about OpenLane. I have worked with them on and off for the last several years and they have always been great.

Brian Michael West said:

What's your go-to image generator? There's a ton out threre, and I know, trust me, it's more about the quality of the prompt than than the tool itself. Below I entered the same exact prompt into 3 generators - these are the results.

PROMPT: Hyper-realistic 2025 Hyundai Elantra in metallic #0D7FC1 (DealerRefresh Blue) parked in front of a modern car dealership, captured with a 50mm DSLR lens. The car is shown at a slight three-quarter angle, highlighting both the front and side. Sunlight reflects naturally off the car’s metallic blue paint and the dealership’s glass windows. The scene includes clean asphalt, subtle background cars, and a modern building with large glass panels and signage. Cinematic composition, realistic shadows and highlights, ultra-detailed textures, photorealistic 8K rendering, natural daylight, shallow depth of field for professional focus, reflections and glints carefully rendered on glass and paint.

View attachment 9620 DEEP AI

View attachment 9621 GOOGLE GEMINI

View attachment 9622CHATGPT

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My go-to right now is ChatGPT.

The biggest reason is not just the first image it creates. It is the back-and-forth. I can keep refining the composition, vehicle angle, lighting, background, text placement, logo treatment, and platform size without starting over every time. It is especially useful when I already have an image and need specific changes instead of a completely new concept. ChatGPT currently supports creating images, editing uploaded images, changing selected areas, adding text, and generating different aspect ratios.

Midjourney is still excellent when I want a strong cinematic look or visual inspiration, and its personalization tools are getting better at learning a consistent style.

Firefly makes sense when the work is going directly into an Adobe workflow or commercial-use safeguards are a major concern. Adobe says its Firefly models are trained on licensed and public-domain content and that non-beta outputs can be used commercially.

But for day-to-day automotive content, my answer is ChatGPT because I can treat it more like a creative partner than a one-shot generator.

I agree with you on the prompt too, but I would add that the editing process matters just as much. The first prompt gets you close. The next five decisions are usually what make the image usable.

Obviously there are many openLane points but in my experience OpenLane employees and their arbitration processes and policies are amazing, fair and simple. Did you just say some rude shit while having a tantrum and they decided it wasn't the day for your shit?

Some times, AI is a PHD level brain, other times is a pot smoking teen ager that needs a firm boot.

I just wrote this to GPT 5.6's highest model:

"This is a critical error. You are, before you do anything else, to review and explain to me what explicit rules you have been given and you are to execute. We have a mission too execute. If you have questions or ambiguities, you are to ask me. You need to get back on track now."

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AI has a long way to go.

YourSalesConsultant said:

They you so much for your honest response. I will take your post to heart to make a service that will work for both sales consultants and dealerships

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Glad it helped. I do think there is a real opportunity there if you can balance the salesperson’s personal brand with the dealership’s need for visibility and control. Interested to see where you take it.