One thing I would add to what I wrote above is that although I had submitted those write-offs mentioned during the course of about 4 or 5 months, they were the ones we keep getting invoiced for and I kept telling accounting not to pay them. There were many others I had submitted which they quickly and without question wrote off. It was because my CRM screenshots clearly showed that a prior engagement within the past couple of days, or even 30 days or more had taken place, whether they were showroom visits, outbound prospecting calls from our BDC, or other lead sources. They were not difficult to discern. The other 7 or 8 were in my opinion likewise not difficult to discern that we had obvious prior engagement, but for some reason they were not written off until it was taken to a higher level at Truecar and then they were finally written off, all but one and so we didn't continue arguing for that one but just let it go and we paid it.
My point here is that yes there could be different outcomes for different dealers as Michael Timmons said, but that is only because Truecars didn't have a clearly stated policy. It would be easy enough to have a policy that was similar to Autobytel or others. Prior engagement with X number of days (true engagement, not some automated email of course, which is marked as such by most if not all CRMs) with documentation from the CRM via screenshot or CRM report.
Now there seems to be a policy which clearly states what the parameters are as Joe Webb has shown us, but clearly this policy will not be sufficient for a lot of dealers including us.
So that nailed it for us. Had it stayed the way it was, we might have remained with them. But it wasn't meant to be.
Another thing I think needs to be mentioned in this forum for any dealer who opts out of Truecar is to not forget to stop your inventory feed to them. Would really suck if they used your inventory to send leads to competitors like Cars.com apparently does.
My point here is that yes there could be different outcomes for different dealers as Michael Timmons said, but that is only because Truecars didn't have a clearly stated policy. It would be easy enough to have a policy that was similar to Autobytel or others. Prior engagement with X number of days (true engagement, not some automated email of course, which is marked as such by most if not all CRMs) with documentation from the CRM via screenshot or CRM report.
Now there seems to be a policy which clearly states what the parameters are as Joe Webb has shown us, but clearly this policy will not be sufficient for a lot of dealers including us.
So that nailed it for us. Had it stayed the way it was, we might have remained with them. But it wasn't meant to be.
Another thing I think needs to be mentioned in this forum for any dealer who opts out of Truecar is to not forget to stop your inventory feed to them. Would really suck if they used your inventory to send leads to competitors like Cars.com apparently does.
