Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Podcast Recap—a rundown of key lessons from top operators, founders, and execs shaping the future of auto retail.
Today’s guest is Jake Cronin, CEO of Siro.
We discuss how dealers are using real conversation data to coach faster, enforce process, and connect marketing spend directly to in-store outcomes. We also dig into adoption, consent, and why this tech is about collaboration, not surveillance.
The most valuable data in the dealership lives in F&I conversations.
The conversations between customers and dealership finance managers provide some of the most valuable data a company can have, yet most dealerships have never captured it.
"You capture this data, which I would say is the most valuable data in your company. What are your customers saying and what is your business saying to your customers? Like I think that is the most valuable data that a business can have."
The dealerships that start recording these conversations now will have insights their competitors can't access.
Dealers are seeing 15-20% PVR increases in 1-2 months by capturing conversation data.
When dealers have full visibility into every F&I conversation, they can ensure every manager offers every product to every customer every day, and the impact is immediate.
"It's just like when you finally know what's going on, you can finally make sure every F&I manager is offering every product to every customer every day."
If the dealership isn’t measuring what happens in the F&I office, then it can't be managed.
F&I managers are terrible at prejudging which customers will buy products.
One dealer group increased product offers by 2x but saw penetration rates jump 5x, meaning the customers they assumed wouldn't buy were actually more likely to purchase.
"If you're offering it twice as much, but it is 5x is the penetration rate, that means most of the time that you were prejudging someone to not offer this product, they were actually more likely to buy in those scenarios. And what that says more simply is people are really bad at prejudging customers."
Savvy dealers have stopped assuming they know what customers want. Instead, they offer every product during every transaction.
One dealership took maintenance penetration from 3.5% to 21% in two months.
The product was only being offered in 40% of conversations, and hardly anyone was buying. Once the team started offering it consistently, penetration skyrocketed.
"When we looked at the data, this was only being offered in 40% of conversations. So less than half of conversations had maintenance brought up and they were only getting it into 3.5% of deals. After 2 months…the penetration rate went from 3.5% to 21%."
In other words, the gap between what dealers think is happening and what's actually happening in F&I, is costing them serious money.
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2. CDK Global - Dealers—big news. CDK just leveled up their CRM in a massive way. We’re talking next-gen AI baked right into your daily workflow: Automatically following up with internet leads, surfacing buyer insights, and giving you instant AI-generated summaries of every customer interaction—no more digging through notes. And CRM Video is here. Record, send, and track personalized videos to customers—all inside the CRM. Check out the AI enhanced CDK CRM @ here!
3. Siro - Siro captures and analyzes every face-to-face conversation in Service, Sales, and F&I, giving auto dealers real-time visibility like never before. Stop guessing what's happening in the service drive, the box, or on the floor. Accelerate auto sales with Siro's AI powered coaching, learn more here.
Watching F&I game tape reveals that even top performers don't know the products.
Many dealers assume their experienced teams know what they're doing, until they listen to actual conversations and realize people are selling products they can't properly explain.
"When you start capturing the data of what's going on in those conversations, you realize, 'Holy cow, my team actually has no clue what our 360 protection is.'"
Pushing these practices helps to identify any messaging gaps, which only boosts the likelihood of a customer buying in on the product.
Recording F&I conversations is a compliance asset, not a liability.
The dealer group that brought Siro into automotive had just been sued and needed proof of what actually happened in conversations, and recording became their insurance policy.
"We need a way to have film, have data, have a trail of what actually happened in those conversations. Because right now we're stuck in a he said, she said. Now that…you know what actually happened, you can defend yourself."
If something goes wrong, having a record protects the dealership from emotion-driven disputes and costly lawsuits.
AI scorecards make F&I coaching objective instead of emotional.
When an AI scores each manager's performance on product explanations and objection handling, feedback becomes data-driven rather than subjective criticism.
"Your F&I managers are getting their own AI scorecard so that now the F&I director doesn't have to be the bad guy of like why aren't you, why is your penetration rate for this product so low. It's like Siro is scoring you and it's telling you that you are actually a four out of 10 in explaining this product."
Removing emotion from coaching conversations makes improvement faster and less contentious.
Dealers are using conversation data for marketing attribution that goes deeper than Google Ads.
By training F&I managers to ask discovery questions about how customers heard about the dealership, dealers can now track attribution back to specific videos and content—not just broad channels.
"Through Siro you can ask hey how are people hearing about us and it's not just Google ads, but it's like, this specific video is how they heard about you, which then made them Google you, which then made you do this that and the other thing."
Marketing attribution has always been a black box, but conversation data is finally cracking it open.
This level of accountability drives immediate improvements in performance.
Unlike most business tools that require months of effort and behavior change, recording F&I conversations delivers results almost immediately with minimal ongoing work.
"Usually, it takes a lot of work. In the auto space, in the F&I office especially, like you just turn the switch and this thing increases revenue in a crazy way."
The gap between current performance and potential in F&I is bigger than almost anywhere else in the dealership.
The biggest AI limitation this year will be getting data in one place.
AI tools are already incredibly powerful, but most businesses can't leverage them because their data is scattered across systems and hard to centralize.
"My prediction for this year is that there's going to be a lot of tooling developed to collect and organize data. The limitation is getting the data together."
The dealers who solve the data collection problem first will extract the most value from AI.
