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Announcing: LVL Up Auto - Vendor Management Platform

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jon.berna

jon.berna

D.R. Truth
Nov 14, 2011
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Jon
#1
I'm thrilled to introduce LVL Up Auto, the first vendor management platform for dealerships. First some quick PR stuff then I'll get into the idea and the features that came from the beta last year in the posts that follow.

LVL Up Auto empowers dealership teams to effortlessly manage, discover, and enhance their vendor relationships. The platform offers comprehensive tools for handling vendor demos, purchases, renewals, invoices, and reviews. With LVL Up, your team can seamlessly collaborate on crucial milestones, providing visibility to those who need it the most. Whether you opt for our free or premium version, LVL Up Auto is now available for all dealerships.

Linkedin Post.jpg
 
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#3
Tallcool1 said:
Jon, this is cool! I see the Landing Page says over 300 Vendors. Is there a list of Partner Vendors that you could share?

Good work! I see dealerships buying this.
Click to expand...

Thank you Clint. Here are the product categories: Marketing, Fixed Ops, Data & BI, Inventory, Digital Retailing, BDC and Telephony, Reputation, Accounting & Office, CRM, Consulting, Vehicle Media, DMS, HR and F&I

The list is tied to a pretty powerful search feature that is indexing over 50 attributes on each company. Even includes if they've been acquired, by who etc. I have spent way too long making it to share it outside the platform, but also want it to be super accessible that's why it's free to join and leverage.
 
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#4
Last year I was itching to start something new and went through a bunch of ideas. I started building a massive list of all the companies and their products thinking about who was innovating and what the challenges are for dealerships...as I stared at this list one last night I it hit me that this list doesn't exist anywhere else. That was the jump off point and the rest of the ideas came from there.

One of the central beliefs I have is the way dealerships acquire new software is fundamentally broken. Quick background, I started at dealerships in 2008 and started a software company, driven data in 2013 so I have seen this problem from both sides. Here are the primary ways dealership acquire new technology:
  1. Go to a conference: these are seasonal and require large capital expenses by the dealership and especially the vendors. Conferences have value but they only happen a couple times a year and don't cater towards discovery; they are more social, and awareness driven. New innovative companies have a large barrier to entry and therefore are off dealerships radar.
  2. Outbound Sales: Get blasted with outbound calls from vendors until they do a demo. Both dealerships and vendors hate this.
  3. Other ways: There own research, consultants, their agencies etc. Consultants and agencies are often incentivized to recommend specific vendors, typically 10-15% of reoccurring revenue.
 
#5
I started development around May of last year. Finished the beta in Oct and shared it with a few folks on Dealer Refresh for a private beta. Some really great ideas came out of the beta. Here were two of my favorites:

- A complete review system with a twist. You can review vendor demos as well as what it's like to own products separately. This feedback aggregates into a central place where dealerships collaborate and develop their proposal mock ups. This allows the platform to compare the gap between these two metrics as often times the best demos don't translate into the best ownership experiences and vice versa.

- Compare your expected vendor spend versus actual, automatically without doing a DMS integration. This was a result of conversations with @Anthony G. and Bill Playford.
 
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#6
As a smaller Independent Dealer, I find it really frustrating when I am looking for solutions for my dealership.

Say I want a CRM, I Google, call each one of them, have to book a demo, we fall in love with each other, and then I find out that they are far too high maintenance for me. So I move on to the next one. By the time I finally find one that is even close to my budget I am so pissed that I have probably given up.

I can't tell you the number of times that I have wished for a way to filter through all of the high cost solutions so that I can focus on the stuff that is in my range. How cool would it be if there were a category for "Small Independent Dealers". Holy hell I could subscribe to literally every single platform out there at rapid pace. I wouldn't have any money left over at month end, but It would damn sure be easy!

I really like this Jon. Seriously, great idea. I will be a user!
 
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#9
At the heart of the schema is a database of vendors with sub collections of their products and corresponding reviews.

Its grown out to capture all the actions users, within dealerships, within their auto groups taken over the life cycle of a relationship they have with their vendors. Like the demos they've had, proposals, contracts and subsequent cancelations.

I've also connected the invoices the dealership receives to each so they can automatically monitor the actual versus expected cost. This uses the latest ai parsing offering from google and is quite impressive how accurate it is. I've thrown some ugly faded scans at in testing.

I've also set it up so dealership admins can connect with other dealerships and link their accounts within 20 groups. Each store within this group can quickly see what vendors each is working with and their details. I can see a big opportunity to make communities leveraging the ease of which you can connect dealerships together.
 
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