Presented by:
Hey everyone,
If personal stock were a thing, I’d be buying Andrew Habberstad’s. Very bullish.
Had a ton of fun recording this podcast episode with a truly unique dealer operator. Check it out here, if you haven’t already.
— CDG
Welcome to The Breakdown, an analysis of auto retail’s top trends, moves, and insights in under 5 minutes.
Digital platforms have been helping dealers with personalized customer videos for years.
But when the pandemic hit, lockdowns and social distancing made in‑person walkarounds and service lane consultations harder.
So, dealers hit the gas on using visual communication.
The problem is that adoption is still wildly uneven, likely due to lack of employee buy-in, the time it requires, and subpar integrations.
However, CDG News has collected really compelling anecdotal evidence from half a dozen dealers that reveals just how massive the gains from one-to-one videos can be...
When sales leadership owns the video process, lead performance jumps.
Case in point, variable operations director Roy Davila, hard‑wires video into Steele Auto Group’s sales process by making it mandatory for managers and competitive for salespeople.
Every set appointment triggers two manager videos: one within 30 minutes to confirm the visit, and another afterward thanking the customer. Stores that execute this consistently are seeing a clear lift in both set and show rates.
Roy Davila
Steele Auto Group
And to get reps comfortable on camera (plus generate shareable content), he runs “test drive karaoke” contests where top video contributors earn $100.
Across the country, Patrick Robertson, who took over as general manager of Hyundai of Cool Springs, takes a similar approach. After joining the store, he realized that despite onboarding video message platform Covideo, employees had recorded only seven videos in ten months.
Now, he mandates that every lead gets a personalized video within five minutes, routed round-robin to floor sales, and sent through the CRM. He allows canned templates refreshed every 30 days, but benchmarks 90% organic response, which is tied to a monthly bonus.
Patrick Robertson
Hyundai of Cool Springs
His POV: Under the new cadence, the store now hits a 75% video‑within‑five‑minutes rate, and 87.5% of those customers engage with the video, which Robertson said has “without a doubt” had a profound impact on lead close percentage.
Nino Sita, general manager of Lindsay Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram, leads by example. He personally sends around 70 videos in a month, often quick “check‑ins” filmed at his desk with a vehicle page and the store’s Google reviews on screen to reinforce transparency.
Nino Sita
Lindsay Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram
For special cars (Hellcats, Viper, TRX), he still does walkaround videos himself because “the car is the star,” and he expects every car to have a walkaround video tailored to the lead.
The results: 100% video sent rate out of the sales department.
However, sales is only one side of the coin. Dealers are making strides with video in the service department as well.
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Service videos turn customer skepticism into more hours per repair order.
Dave Rogers, fixed ops director at Piazza Auto Group, introduced video multi-point inspections to help process the 32,000 to 33,000 repair orders his stores manage every month.
Technicians shoot and send these videos directly to customers, so there's no gatekeeping what actually gets presented.
And today, video MPIs are created for roughly 75% of vehicles.
“We pay some guys to do it. Other guys, there's just different spiff programs that we've done. But yeah, that's really successful… We took this little Volkswagen store from like 1.5 hours in RO to three hours in RO."
Dave Rogers
Piazza Auto Group
"The delta is an extra six, seven tenths in RO," he explained. "The dollars add up obviously…
But David Cerqueira, service director at Benzel-Busch, told CDG News that it took time to convert the naysayers.
"Once this video MPI gets through to the customer and we see an upsell happen, that's how we got engagement out of them," Cerqueira said. "It's really about shop leadership and being out there and I spend a ton of my time in the shop. I live my life out there with them."
David Cerqueira
Benzel-Busch
Using MPIs to check in with customers on-site every 15 minutes also helps keep them engaged (or as Cerqueira put it) "trigger happiness."
And while not all people have trust issues with the dealership, video MPIs improve transparency for the ones that do.
On top of that, videos also help with language barriers thanks to closed captioning.
The key is consistency. At Crain Automotive's 22 Arkansas stores, advisors weren't completing videos reliably.
"We had an issue where the advisors didn't see the value," vice president of operations, Christian Crain, told us.
Christian Crain
Crain Automotive
His solution: The group now ties a percentage of service advisor gross directly to video MPI completion rates on customer-pay and warranty work. Advisors earn their full gross percentage only if they hit video MPI benchmarks. Miss the benchmark, lose part of the percentage.
Bottom line: It makes no sense to me that the majority of dealers are still not treating these videos as table stakes (especially as margin compression bears its ugly teeth). The dealers getting outsized results aren’t “good at video,” they’ve hard‑wired it into process with simple rules, ruthless consistency, and aligned incentives. All roads lead to execution, after all.
