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A Data Refrigerator Full of Takeout Boxes with Bobby Gaudreau · Auto Collabs

• 0:00
  Some days when we start these, all I want is lunch, and I don't have it yet. [upbeat music] This is Auto Collabs. No, I have lunch. Look what I have. I have a bag- Oh, you have it... of Chipotle. Oh, you had Chipotle.
• 0:17
  That's unbelievable. I have guacamole. I'm ready for a podcast. Guacamole. Yeah. It's the worst food to eat during a podcast. We're fighting. By the way. You know, did you know that, um, what's his name?
• 0:26
  Bobby, uh, Bobby, um, Flay, he, he says, uh, in- instead of Chipotle, it's Chipote. Oh, that's what- Like, he has a little bit of a...
• 0:38
  Yeah, so that's, like, one of the w- a world-renowned chef, Bobby Flay, messes up Chipotle by saying Chipote. That's how Sebastian Maniscalco says it in his skit. Yeah, he says Chipote. "Chipote." Yeah.
• 0:52
  "Go down to Chipote." Chipote. "They got a pretty good burrito down there." [laughs] Well, hey, look, we're not talking about Bobby Flay today. Different Bobby. But we are talking- [laughs]... about Bobby Goudreau.
• 1:02
  I don't even know how we did that, guys. That was not- The king... Dude, you're the king of, you're the king of segues. I'm just gonna- I don't even know- Stop... how that even- [laughs]...
• 1:09
  how we got there, from lunch to Chipotle to Bobby Flay- [laughs]... to Bobby Goudreau. Uh, he runs the sales, uh, organization over at Activator, and, uh, they're doing some cool stuff over there from what I hear.
• 1:22
  So I'm excited about this conversation. I don't know about you guys. Let's go.
• 1:25
  I always like having another person that I know is a marathon runner on the podcast to make me feel absolutely overachieving [laughs] in life. As your office smells like Chipotle. Guacamole. [laughs] Chipote. Yeah.
• 1:38
  [laughs] I needed my race energy. [laughs] Yeah. Yes. I, I'm always excited to hear from people like... I, I was looking at his bio briefly.
• 1:46
  I'm sure we'll get into it in the episode, but, like, he's been a part of some pretty major moves throughout automotive. Mm-hmm. And it just,
• 1:53
  it sticks with me that my journey in automotive, like, if I were to think about what I've done in automotive, my affiliation automotive, it's startups. Mm-hmm.
• 2:02
  His affiliation with automotive is a completely different trajectory. Like, there is so much space in this industry, so I'm excited to, you know, maybe get into some of the things that he's done in his career. All right.
• 2:14
  Here's our interview with Bobby Goudreau. All right. We've got Bobby here with us. Bobby, I'm super excited that you've joined us. You and I are just gonna have a conversation for the next 20 minutes.
• 2:27
  We're gonna see Paul and Cirillo out of it, because apparently we're just gonna talk about running for the next 20 minutes. You good with that? Great with that. Great with that.
• 2:34
  [laughs] I, I'm, I'm starting that way because we found out that you have run a ridiculous amount of miles, marathons, Ironmans, bike things in your life.
• 2:48
  Is that, is that fact, or is it just something we wrote, like, on a, on a, uh, press release to make it sound cool? Yeah, no, I... Uh, no, it is, it is, it is, it is fact.
• 2:58
  I have run my fair share of, of marathons and, and other long events, so. It wa- that wasn't the part of the bio that got me.
• 3:07
  It was the first part of the bio, where it's like, "Sold AutoBase to Dominion, Dealer Rater to Cars- [laughs]... IMN to Reynolds." And I just, like... And then I hit, the running hit me at the end.
• 3:17
  [laughs] I was like, "I'm just gonna go home and eat ice cream for the rest of the day." When do you, because when do you have time for all of this? [laughs] I'm gonna eat ice cream for the rest of the day, I think.
• 3:24
  [laughs] No, this is good. You guys make me feel good. I'm gonna talk to you guys more often, so. Well, 'cause we're gonna drop the hammer in, like, 30 seconds. [laughs] Yeah.
• 3:33
  [laughs] The pig always feels really good before they go like, "Oh, I'm dinner." [laughs] Right. That's...
• 3:39
  [laughs] So, okay, but no, I do have to ask, uh, you know, when it comes to, to your running entrees, and I know, you know, the, it...
• 3:48
  Obviously, we're talking auto, auto business, but, like, where did that desire come from to run, you've run, what, 25 marathons or something at this point?
• 3:57
  Y- yeah, no, I mean, it's actually, it's, it's, it's a, it's a e- easy story to tell, 'cause I've said it many times. I, I, I was... You know, I kinda just played the traditional sports growing up.
• 4:07
  I went to a small state school in, uh, New Hampshire for college, and I, I joke, I was, I liked it so much, I stayed there for five years. So I, I enjoyed my- myself in college. And my,
• 4:18
  what should have been my last year of college, I went with, uh, a good friend of mine, who was actually, ultimately, who was the best man at my wedding. And we saw his, at the time, girlfriend, now wife of 20-plus years.
• 4:29
  She ran in the 100th Boston Marathon. So we actually went down to Boston- Oh... to watch her run. And, you know, we stayed at his brother's house, and we went partying the night before.
• 4:39
  And then we went to the finish line, and I felt like a loser at the finish line. And I'm like, "If I ever, after college- [laughs]...
• 4:46
  if I move to Boston," which I was planning to do, I'm like, "I'm gonna run this thing the first year," and I did. I had no idea what I was doing.
• 4:53
  And this was obviously way before the Boston Marathon bombing, and so you could run as a, what was a bandit runner. Like, they encouraged that. So you start at the back of the pack, and you could run.
• 5:02
  And they, you didn't get a- Yeah... medal, but they, you know, they kind of cheered you on, and you got a little blanket at the end. [smacks lips] And then I never ran... After that, I was like, "I'm done."
• 5:11
  [laughs] Probably ran twice the next year. And that following year, when the marathon came along, when Boston came along, I kinda missed it.
• 5:19
  And then I went home after work that day and started running, and just kinda picked up on it from, from, from then. And, uh, yeah.
• 5:26
  And for a period of time, uh, when I started dating my now wife, every year we'd, I'd usually run Boston. And then before we had our son, we would go somewhere, and we would, you know, kind of a vacation marathon.
• 5:39
  So I'd usually run a marathon. She'd run a half marathon. We did that for a num- number of years. And been doing that for, for a long, for a long time. So that's- I think that's how Cirillo plans his vacations, isn't it?
• 5:48
  [laughs] That is not how our vacations work now, for the record. But... You're muted, Michael. I know. Un- or you're just, or you're just punking us. Your Rodecaster's muted. No. [laughs] His face. Oh.
• 6:01
  Which is great, 'cause now we can just... Yeah, Michael- What's great about this is I think he said, like, a l- a, a-Probably 50 words since we started- Has he really? [laughs]... and nobody's known.
• 6:10
  No, I'm just messing with you. [laughs] It's still good. Is he still muted? I don't know. He's still... Yeah. He looks confused. It's not- So we're gonna keep moving. Um- I'm just gonna keep going.
• 6:17
  [laughs] So- This is what you get here at Auto Glass... we, this is a question we ask a lot of people I know, I know. But can you tell us about your journey into the auto industry? I mean- Yeah...
• 6:27
  your path isn't like New Hampshire, college, marathon- Yeah... auto industry, right? [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:32
  It's, yeah, so it, it was, I don't know if it was, uh, conventional or unconventional, but I, I, I had, uh, a uncle who was actually was a, it was an executive with Volvo, and I really, after I graduated college, I wasn't really sure what I was gonna do.
• 6:46
  I thought I was gonna move out to Colorado and ski. And after a terse conversation with him- [laughs]... I ended up getting a job working at [laughs] at Boston Volvo Village in, in Brighton Mass.
• 6:56
  So that was really my first job out of college. It was nine- late 1998, and I was the f- I was the first internet manager at the, at the dealership, and we literally got internet leads.
• 7:07
  Well, explain, explain that, the first internet manager, because everyone's got a really interesting story around what internet manager actually was in the beginning. Yeah.
• 7:15
  So the, uh, the internet manager then, we got internet leads over a fax machine. So [laughs]- There you go. I knew it was gonna be something like that. Yes. Knew it. And, and- It's perfect...
• 7:23
  you know, I had graduated from college. I knew how to turn a computer on. I sat in the corner of the showroom on a dial-up on the- Which fully qualifies you to be an internet manager. Yeah. [laughs] Correct.
• 7:35
  That's, still today actually. That's still, still today. [laughs] That's true. Yeah. Next to a f- like the fax mach- or the photocopier and the KeyTrak machine where people would go for test drives. Yep.
• 7:45
  And that's where I, that's where I p- that's where I parked myself. And then, uh, in early 2000, I had left the retail side and I worked for a UK-based variable data marketing company, um, called The Lateral.
• 7:58
  So I was at the very top of the dotcom boom before it burst. And, uh- Yeah... I was calling into, you know, Fortune 1000 companies and up in, you know, kind of big box retail, automotive, um, uh, financial services.
• 8:13
  And then when the 9/11 happened and then the, the bubble burst, I went back to business school. And, um, since 2004, after I got out of school, you know, I've worked for a series of companies.
• 8:25
  It's all been software, probably 90% in the, in the automotive space. And so I've been lucky and I've kind of worn all the hats. I've been an individual contributor. I've been a area director.
• 8:36
  I've been a national sales manager in the last 10 years or so. You know, I've been in the, you know, own the P&L and own the strategy and kind of run, run, run sales and, run sales and marketing.
• 8:47
  And I've been lucky to have worked for some pretty cool companies that have been, you know, kind of right at the start. So, you know, I like to say I sold many dealers in New England their first CRM system.
• 8:58
  Probably many of them are now on their fourth or fifth. And, you know, it was early days at- That's awesome...
• 9:03
  at DealerRater and, you know, ear- early days at a company called IMN that kind of did e- email, e-newsletter marketing using data and, and content marketing.
• 9:13
  Um, and then, you know, I've been at, at my current job at, at Dominion and specifically with Activator, um, for gee, seven years, which is probably the long- the, which is, not probably, is the longest I've been at a, at a, at a company.
• 9:27
  Well, you're slowing down. You're slowing down. Yeah.
• 9:28
  What, what I find int- what I find always intriguing is like, you know, you're, you had the dealer and then, uh, the dealer experience and then the industry partner experience and the o- and the auto side, and then you've taken journeys outside of auto and come back, uh, it seems like a couple times.
• 9:45
  Yep, twice. Um, yeah, so talk to, I wanna hear a little bit about like when you've gone away, what do you think the things that were the biggest key learnings that you've brought back each time?
• 9:59
  Like what are maybe a couple of the m- the moments or key learnings that you're like, "When I get..." or when you came back to auto that was something that you've retained- Yeah...
• 10:07
  as something that you've been able to bring back to auto? Yeah. No, um, the, the gr- great, great question. It, it, it, so- I wanna know the answer too. Oh my gosh. [laughs] No. I, and I- That was fantastic. [laughs]...
• 10:21
  had no idea that these were gonna be questions that you guys were gonna ask. So, um, so I worked for, um, I worked for a company called LivePerson. And while- Yeah...
• 10:29
  at LivePerson, it was, I often say to this day, like when I was there, like that was like the best company that I worked for.
• 10:37
  And I probably have had more fun working at other places, but just in terms of learning and just kind of being stimulated and being around a lot of really smart, accomplished people where, you know, I kind of was often intimidated, where I'm like, "Man, these people are so good and so smart"- Mm...
• 10:53
  was, was, was LivePerson. And, you know, today I actually ironically looked at their stock price the other day. It's not, not doing so, not doing so well. But when I got there- They didn't feel so intimidating...
• 11:03
  it was kind of, they were, they were at really at a r- at a really cool time, and they were very much established as an enterprise leader, very much established in the, in the small business market.
• 11:15
  I joined when they were gonna kind of enter into mid-market. So really that had largely been ignored, but that was probably the biggest ham was all of these companies.
• 11:23
  And we categorized a mid-market company that did about $100 million to roughly $1.5 billion in, in annual sale, uh, sales.
• 11:33
  So I was calling into some pretty cool companies like Patagonia and, you know, products and services- Ah, yeah... that, you know, I wore or were in my closet or, or were in, you know, in my, in my house.
• 11:42
  But the, the way the, the, the guy that ran the sales and services department and a lot of the managers there all kind of came up through, um, working at, um, Xerox, which was like, you know, the equivalent of working at, you know, salesforce.com or one of these like cutthroat, you know, kind of sales environments.
• 12:01
  And a lot of them came through PTC, which was like the crème de la crème on sales process.
• 12:06
  And so the things that I learned and, uh, and just some of the processes in terms of h- how to run a sales team and how to manage a sales team and how to forecast, I all learned there. And so I- Hmm...
• 12:18
  I had an opportunity where, you know, whether it was because, you know-A lot of things are fly by the seat of your pants in this industry, or I've been working for a lot of startup companies that just haven't figured stuff out.
• 12:30
  Everything was figured out then, and so I had an opportunity to see this is what it looks like when there's a, when there's a marketing engine that's delivering qualified leads.
• 12:39
  Like, this is what it looks like when you're actually following a sales process and it becomes repeatable and, and predictable.
• 12:45
  And so there's so many things that I learned there and adopted there that I have then ca- carried through in, in every job that I have.
• 12:54
  Probably a day doesn't go by that I'm not using something that I learned at, at LivePerson. And they ironically, I think, bought a company and then entered into the chat space in, in automotive after I left. So...
• 13:05
  That's wild. Yeah. So, I mean, you t- you talk about the startup,
• 13:10
  uh, kind of mentality, and moving forward to n- now, you know, Dominion has, uh, you know, been, been around for a while and delivered in, uh, a bunch of different, like, market segments, acquired a couple companies.
• 13:27
  But from what I understand, there's a very, like, startup mentality to this new Activ8tor- Mm-hmm... uh, piece of the business.
• 13:37
  Can you talk about, like, how it, how it feels being in kind of, like, an enterprise-y legacy-style company, but being a part of the, uh, like, almost startup arm- Yeah... of what's going on?
• 13:49
  Yeah, I mean, it's g- it's g- it's g- it's great. And I mean, it's, it's...
• 13:52
  if it's helpful, like, you know, the kind of the, the background or the history of, of d- of Dominion was, you know, the, the parent company started off, you know, it's a 100-year-old privately owned company.
• 14:04
  It's always been owned by the same family, the Batten family, and they started off as a holding company around newspapers and then, you know, kind of became a big conglomerate in that space and then started the Weather Channel.
• 14:16
  Um, I think everyone's heard of that place. And then- Yeah, once or twice. [laughs] What? They s- sold that and, um, and then through that, there was kind of- Really?... investors, a few of the different, um, companies.
• 14:26
  But they, they created a, um, Dominion Ventures, which is basically a private equity arm, to start looking at how can we diversify outside of traditional media and go into other software services, um, in segments like automotive, obviously, real estate, franchise services.
• 14:44
  Um, and so they started a period of time, probably around 2005, 2006, where they started to invest in all these companies. And so- Hmm...
• 14:51
  at one point in time, you know, there were probably over 10 companies in the automotive subsidiary. Today, there's probably four or five.
• 14:59
  And so Activ8tor, [clicks tongue] when I joined Dominion in December of 2017, I was responsible for sales over kind of an umbrella of a number of companies.
• 15:10
  We had CRM, we had websites, we had a lot of different digital companies, and we had equity mining and customer retention marketing.
• 15:17
  And kinda over a period of time, we looked at some of these businesses where maybe we just, we weren't as competitive or they were just hypercompetitive, and they just, they didn't fit the portfolio that Dominion wanted to be in.
• 15:27
  We kinda just whittled that down. And around 19- around 2000
• 15:33
  tw- like, probably around '20, right before COVID, we kinda were at a crossroads where we had our equity business, and our CEO said, "Look, equity's good, [laughs] but it's ubiquitous, right?
• 15:45
  It's so good everybody has it, and so we don't, we no longer wanna be in the standalone equity business anymore. And so f- figure something out." So we started to build around that to say, "All right.
• 15:57
  Can we kind of evolve outside of just targeting people at the bottom of the funnel and start implementing kinda true kind of funnel marketing strategies and introducing in more channels into the mix beyond just email?"
• 16:11
  And we had a r- really, starting in 2000, even after, even... or 2020, sorry.
• 16:17
  A- even after COVID, we really started to get some pretty good momentum, some really good momentum, and then boom, the inventory crisis came and kinda hit everyone square in the face. And what that did for us
• 16:31
  is that just put a lens on the fact that we had some... We, we were on the right track, um, but our technology that had largely been homegrown was good, but it was really difficult to, to flex and go fast with that.
• 16:44
  And so we w- we kinda hit a crossroads, right? We could go backwards, which wasn't an option, [laughs] right?
• 16:50
  We could continue to invest, and that's what's nice about Domin- Dominion, where, you know, I don't have a blank check, but we're owned by a really big company that has a lot of resources and a lot of capital that they can in- continue to invest in us.
• 17:03
  And w- it's not like other places where you have to go out and raise institutional money, and then we've got these, you know, bloodthirsty, you know, investors constantly asking, "When am I gonna get my money out?"
• 17:14
  So we put together a business case, and we made the decision in order for us to go fastest, we would invest in kind of building the software outside.
• 17:24
  So we didn't outsource our ideas, we didn't outsource our 20 years of experience, we didn't outsource, um, you know, the, the, some of the proprietary things that we have, but we outsourced where we built this, and so we ended up partnering with salesforce.com.
• 17:38
  And so we rebuilt our marketing engine inside of Marketing Cloud.
• 17:42
  Um, and then we rebuilt, or we shouldn't say rebuilt, we built a customer data platform using Sales Cloud, and then, then we were able to really leverage what we were really good at, which was segmenting information out of a DMS and organizing that information for equity and, and customer retention marketing.
• 18:01
  And then that was kind of our first use case that we said, "Okay. Now what happens when we execute these things through this marketing engine and starting to leverage the benefits of a customer data platform?"
• 18:12
  And then it's just we've taken off from there. We started to build new journeys. We're starting to ingest different first and third-party data sources.
• 18:20
  Um, and then we've created what we're referring to as a, as a, um, data management layer that's basically this iron dome that sits around everything to protect all the nasty stuff coming in, and- Good visual...
• 18:31
  never would've been able to go as fast as we've been over the last year were we not building this in Salesforce, and we never would've been able to do it without the support, you know, the, the guidance and the investment from our, from our parent company being Dominion.
• 18:47
  I don't think a lot of people know thisThat Salesforce has one of the largest machine learning algorithms on customer data in the world. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:00
  Like, they've been, they've been talking about CDPs before they even had a name for it. Yeah.
• 19:05
  And so that, that really stands out to me, because I remember 10 years ago learning about Salesforce integrating all these different machine learning, AI, this, that, and the next thing, as far as customer data was concerned.
• 19:19
  So that's really interesting that you guys have tapped into that.
• 19:22
  Well, yeah, and two- two- two thi- two things on that is, so and we've also, we- we brought in, there's a, there's a outside consulting company that we brought in that's kind of helped us through this process, and the company's called Remio.
• 19:34
  It's not a, it's not a pitch for them. But the- the- the gentleman that runs, it's a small kind of boutique consulting firm. And I've worked with them in two other jobs.
• 19:43
  One other job, they kind of just did a small project where they helped us with our instance of Salesforce, and another job, they, it was transformative, and it was more data work that, that they did.
• 19:53
  But the guy, Ned Liddell, who- who runs the company, you know, I refer to him as a, kind of a data forensic guy, and he teaches actually a course at, at, um, at NYU to master students who are learning about marketing automation and data and CRM systems.
• 20:10
  And so he teaches one of the requisite courses that these students have to go through. So we initially brought them in to look at everything and help us make recommendations.
• 20:20
  And it's, you know, it probably, you didn't need to have an advanced degree to realize that we, they pointed us in the Salesforce direction.
• 20:27
  Um, but it's just that has, they've been such a good partner to help us peer around the corners as we've been building this stuff. And then the second thing to- to that point, um,
• 20:37
  is one of the elements that we have here now is we're doing all of our reporting through Salesforce, and specifically through Tableau.
• 20:44
  So it was kind of like Tableau and Domo were kind of the two big reporting companies out there, and Salesforce bought Tableau, I think in 2017.
• 20:52
  And what they immediately did is they combined that with their Einstein AI data layer, and so it's all combined.
• 21:00
  And I mean, even right now, we haven't even scratched the surface on what we're gonna be able to do with that. So we just kind of launched our new reporting with that around six or seven months ago. So...
• 21:11
  Tableau and Domo sound like two of everyone's favorite '80s hair bands. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Was that, was that Boudreau and Thibodeau? Was that cartoon? [laughs] Did you get your Domo tickets? [laughs] Good point.
• 21:26
  That's a great one. That's awesome.
• 21:28
  What, um, when, when you think about, like, all of the data work, all of the work you've done integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud and the, and the things that, uh, so much enterprise around the world is doing, and then think about, okay, what does that mean for an individual or a two to five store group that now kind of gets this access to an enterprise-y thing that on their own would never maybe have the resources or the time or the energy or the development resources to go and get.
• 21:58
  But now they have, like, unique access to enterprise-grade technology. How do they track that to, "I'm engaged with it now, and I can... And start to sense, like, business results from it"?
• 22:11
  What does it really mean to a dealer that you've gone and contracted and worked with these consultants and done all this crazy new stuff? Yeah. How does that get to the ground? Y- yeah, no.
• 22:21
  I, I mean, I think there's, there's a couple, the, there- there's a couple different ways that, you know, we can look at that.
• 22:26
  And there, you know, as this space is, you know, emerging and evolving, you know, with anything, there's a lot of c- there's a lot of confusion out there in terms of what does this mean and who does what and, and who, and who does, you know, who does this and who does that.
• 22:41
  I think the, the immediate, um, I think there's, there's two immediate benefits that, that people or our customers have experienced when they've come on board with us, right? One is,
• 22:52
  because of the way that we have designed this, and we, we didn't come up with the term, but, you know, kind of this concept of a hybrid CDP, right? So we've got the customer data platform and the marketing fulfillment.
• 23:03
  And so we started, right, with what we were good at, which was doing equity mining and marketing and doing retention marketing. And so we started with those journeys in place, where a lot... And this isn't a knock.
• 23:17
  This is just where everyone... There's a lot of other companies in the space that started engaging customers on websites or on digital, right? And we're all kind of, kind of come, come to the middle.
• 23:26
  But right away, we're turnkey, right?
• 23:29
  So when people come on board, and we're able to all of a sudden cast this much wider and deliberate and targeted net over their entire database because we have these, you know, handful of service and sales journeys that are already running.
• 23:43
  And because we have the channels now through Marketing Cloud, whether it's email or direct mail or SMS, are all embedded together, we see instant engagement improvements because we, it's much easier for us to id- to find and reach customers because we've got all of those different contact points as opposed to them being all disparate all, all over the place.
• 24:04
  So we can see that, and then we can kind of prove it to ourselves and to the customers through the reporting. And then the second thing, and we, not that we underestimated it, but it was hard to quantify, right?
• 24:17
  As long as I've been in this space, everyone's always said, "Oh, dealers' data stinks," right? Like, I've never not heard someone say that.
• 24:24
  N- now we can actually put a number on it, and frankly, [laughs] it's, it's way worse than we thought, and we organize, like, the data pro- You, I could, I could talk to you guys for five hours on the data, and I, I know we only have, you know, 20 or 30 minutes.
• 24:37
  Would you spare us the details? We can't use all of it up. That's what I thought. [laughs] But we, we, we organize the data problems into three buckets.
• 24:44
  So we look at duplicate records, we look at malformed records, and we look at kind of bad emails.
• 24:49
  So bad emails are invalid, spam traps, um, et cetera.And so Ned, who I mentioned before, he, when he works with clients outside of automotive, his rule of thumb is when he looks at a database, he wants to have 1% or less of that database as duplicate records, right?
• 25:07
  They're a fact of life, right? They happen all the time. It's just way worse in retail automotive because no one control... Everyone has access to the database, right?
• 25:16
  I refer to it, it's like the refrigerator in a company break room, right?
• 25:21
  Everybody has access to it, and some people are polite and some people are slobs, and they leave a Chinese box of food in there for four weeks- [laughs]... and it destroys everything in there.
• 25:32
  And that, and that's what we're finding. So, you know, we can say, "Hey, we're doing the right thing," but we can't control what three other marketing companies may or may not do when they're accessing that same data.
• 25:42
  Right. So what we found is, so if Ned's rule of thumb is you don't wanna have one per- more than 1% of that database as duplicate records, what we find on average, it's well into the double digits.
• 25:52
  We've seen some dealers it's as high as 50, 60%.
• 25:55
  And so what that means is, you know, I run some kind of a campaign, maybe it's a equity campaign, and I pull that down and there's, you know, four records for Paul and eight records for Kyle, and they're all attached to the same VIN.
• 26:10
  All of those are gonna get pulled into whatever marketing campaign you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're delivering that through a sophisticated
• 26:17
  marketing engine like we have with, with, with Activator and through MarketingCloud, or I'm just doing it through my, through my personal Gmail account.
• 26:25
  All those things are gonna get staged and they're gonna get sent out. Um, and then the second area is the, the, the, the, the, the h- the sheer number of invalid and spam trap addresses blew us away.
• 26:38
  So last summer we evaluated across about 200 dealers, 8 million customer records. Oh. And out of those, there was a quarter of a million invalid email addresses. [laughs] And of those, there was 40,000 spam traps, right?
• 26:52
  Like, that's Russian roulette [laughs] with the ISPs. And so what we've built is what we call is a data management layer.
• 27:00
  And so we leverage tools that are in the, in the app exchange through Salesforce, like Atdata, used to be called Tower Data, that has the ability to identify and then help isolate all those bad email addresses.
• 27:13
  And then we would never, [laughs] I mean, w- there's no human that's gonna be able to, to, it's like the- No... equivalent of a, of a needle- Definitely not, yeah... an invisible needle in a haystack.
• 27:24
  And then we apply the same logic when we can say, now we can go into a database, whether it's 20,000 people or 100,000 people, and we're at the early throes here of saying, "Okay, now we're gonna identify all of these dupes, all these malformed records, and kinda group them together and then make sense of it."
• 27:39
  Love it. So it's hard work, but we're- You know, coming into this podcast episode, you know, when we said you were gonna be on, people were like, "He's low energy. He's an underachiever," all these things.
• 27:49
  [laughs] I didn't pick up any of that stuff during this entire thing. [laughs] Hey, and thank you so much for sharing just your energy and your insights and your experience with us.
• 27:58
  Um, I know that our audience is gonna pull some stuff out of this and really get them thinking in a different way. Thank you for the meaningful work that you're doing- Thank you...
• 28:04
  in automotive to make the whole industry better. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us today on Auto Collapse. This has been great. Thank you, guys. [upbeat music] You know what's crazy to me?
• 28:16
  You sit down with guys [laughs] who have been part of massive exits and acquisitions and, and I think as a result of that,
• 28:28
  the other big things they do in their life, like, I don't know about you, but it's like the other th- big things they do in their life are like, "Yeah, whatever." Like, you're like- 'Cause the world gets smaller...
• 28:36
  "Hey, you ran 107 miles, and, like, you're gonna run another 50 this, and you rode your bike for 104 miles, and then..." And he's like, "Yeah, it's just what I do." Okay. But it's like, if that was me, I would be like...
• 28:49
  I, I'm like, I wonder what it's for- Yeah. "No, no, no, I wanna tell you what I work on every day. Let me tell you about my running," right? [laughs] Yeah.
• 28:55
  For me, I'm like, I, I run my mouth, I run the starter on my motorcycle. [laughs] I run out my wife's patience. I know. Yeah, right. I wonder. I, I don't know. What are your guys' thoughts?
• 29:10
  I gotta wonder if because he's done so many big things, that it's like, big things to the regular people just don't seem big anymore. 'Cause it's like you've just already, you've climbed massive mountains.
• 29:22
  I think the big- It must be... I think kind of the answer to that is, you know, I've read Elon Musk's book, the biography by Walter Isaacson.
• 29:29
  I've read several other of those biographies, and what a, a common thread is that it seems like big things to everyone else. To them, it seems like the logical next step. Like, why wouldn't somebody- Hmm...
• 29:41
  why wouldn't somebody do this thing? And I, like, pick that up from him. Like, look, we have this, we have this, we have that. Like, why wouldn't we just do this? And- Yep... the scorecard- Absolutely...
• 29:51
  the scorecard isn't really as important as the like, can we fix this problem with the tools we have in a new and innovative way? That's, I don't know, my two cents. Yep.
• 30:01
  And, and just the fact that, like, the, the very next thing for Activator to be, you know what, we've built all this really cool stuff that dealers are using, we're not satisfied. Hmm. Bring in Salesforce, right?
• 30:13
  That's a, that is an energetic thing for the industry that came out of a hundred-year-old company that started with newspapers and the weather channel. Hmm.
• 30:23
  You know, like, that's really cool for me to see because a lot of times you look at legacy companies and you go, "There's no way," nothing, and nothing new, net new, really cool, innovative is gonna come out of that.
• 30:35
  And so to see something like Salesforce, Tableau, you know- Mm-hmm... a net new- Yeah... uh, thing come out of a company like that, like, it, it gives me hope for every large, m- medium, or small company.
• 30:50
  Well, hey, I mean, it goes to show that partnerships equal innovation, and they definitely caught onto that, and that's something we care deeply about at So Do More Than Cars.
• 31:00
  So, uh, hey, we hope you enjoyed this episode with Bobby Goudreau. Uh, would love for you just to click that subscribe button wherever you're listening or watching to this right now. Yeah.
• 31:08
  On behalf of Paul Jay Daly, Kyle Malsecra, myself, Michael Cirillo, thanks so much for joining us on Auto Collapse.
• 31:15
  Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news in automotive, retail, media, and pop culture. You can get it now at asotu.com. That's A-S-O-T-U dot com.
• 31:28
  If you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
• 31:34
  [upbeat music] Welcome to Auto Collapse. Welcome to Auto Collapse. [laughs] Why are we recording?
• 31:51
  Are we rolling yet? Not yet.