Once these companies get acquired by a publicly traded company, they need to be very careful about what they talk about online.
That is true aside from the part that neither Dealer Fire nor VinSolutions were acquired by publicly traded companies. Having been a part of a company that was acquired by Dealertrack (public) and then Cox Automotive (private) I can assure you there are differences! In the examples you bring up, though, I would argue it is less about public appearances and more about a whole lot of acquisitions of varying types of softwares happening quickly. If your core competence is say inventory, and you buy a CRM company, you're going to need to learn the psychology of a dealership. Psychology is a lot different than economics (inventory). And then there are management changes resulting from the original creators leaving or being demoted. Without the founders leading the charge, the tactics are shifted without knowledge of the tactics that made it successful in the first place.
CRM's in this business are extremely competitive and they work well; there's not much more to squeeze out of them IMO.
Automotive CRMs are staler than bread that was baked 20 years ago. The large DMS systems are even worse. Holy shit are we in need of some newcomers to both these areas.
Would you agree that when a technology is originally coded its core is married to the time period it was coded? Philosophies are difficult to change even though snippets of code can be modernized. AutoBase is a good example of a solution that was destroyed by time. It was built as a sales person babysitting tool (I'm simplifying) in a time before the Internet. Moving from closet servers to a cloud-like database might still not be achieved in some of their clients' stores. Some dealers claim it takes 15 clicks to add an attachment to an email. They deserve one of the biggest WTFs this industry can throw! And that is probably why Dominion is going to be changing their CRM direction soon
DealerSocket's Blackbird is a bomb. I have yet to hear from a dealer; one not provided by DealerSocket's sales team, who thinks they moved forward.
So that makes VinSoutions the next newest tech on the block, of the systems with over 1,000 clients. Ummmm. Yeah.
If I recall correctly, DealerSocket came to market around 2003. VinSolutions CRM was around 2002. Don't quote me on those dates though. But whether I'm off by even 5 years those dates ain't even in this decade.
Oh no, Chris, CRMs are antiquated and bloated on old technology (think of Microsoft being handcuffed to Windows XP). Something needs to come along and knock them all on their asses. And then I hope something modernizes DMSs because we're still living on 1980s philosophies there. Those slime balls are HURTING the industry just to maintain their market dominance. That's just evil.
