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Hey everyone,
Or should we use the universal Detroit greeting: WhatupDoe?
Feels fitting since we’re covering more goods from this year’s Digital Dealer Conference & Expo held in the Motor City at Huntington Place, overlooking the Detroit River. (And Canada, too…)
Below, see the bridges that move traffic (and auto parts) between the two countries.
The elder Ambassador Bridge is out front, and the recently opened Gordie Howe International Bridge is seen behind it. (Photo by CDG’s Julie Walker)
— CDG
As its name might suggest, many of the Digital Dealer sessions centered around online buying, AI-style tools, and control.
Handy because this technology isn’t like learning a typewriter, it’s constantly evolving and dealers are in different levels of adaption.
So, in today’s newsletter, we’re digging into the bet Amazon Autos is counting on, Rohrman Auto’s experience with a data lake, and what happens to the salesperson when the showroom gets digitized.
Amazon is betting dealers will deliver the experience, not chase the leads.
Nearly three-quarters (72%) of consumers say they want to complete some or all of a car purchase online, a market expected to hit $370 billion in the next decade, according to data cited at the "Closing the Experience Gap: How Dealers Can Compete in the Age of Direct-to-Consumer," session on Tuesday (Sept. 22).
Melanie Erff of Amazon Autos said today's shoppers expect transparent pricing, anytime access, and a seamless handoff between browsing and buying, adding that traffic surges on the platform after 9 p.m.
"This is when customers have time to do research... without being interrupted by their busy life," Erff said.
Melanie Erff
Amazon Autos
That expectation, also listed below, is exactly what Erff said Amazon Autos is built around, and why the company doesn't operate as a lead-gen tool that hands off data for dealers to chase.
Melanie Erff of Amazon Autos talks about the digital retail experience. (Photo by CDG’s Julie Walker)
Instead: The platform lets customers complete financing, F&I selection, and pickup scheduling on their own terms, arriving at the dealership only once they're ready.
Carlito Mojica of LaFontaine Automotive Group, which owns more than 40 stores in Michigan, explained why their group signed on so fast.
“Everyone realizes we're under FTC,” Mojica said. “We have to follow the pricing rules. We took that challenge and we did that in a matter of 14 days,” referring to getting transparent pricing live across their own site, plus every third-party marketplace.
Carlito Mojica
LaFontaine Automotive Group
He wanted all 12,000 of the group's vehicles listed as quickly as possible.
Mojica suggests appointing a single "online champion" who fully understands the tech stack, and has a trained backup.
"I don't have every salesperson connected to Amazon,” Mojica said. “This is a privilege."
Other suggestions:
“Make sure your house is right before you invite the guests," Mojica said, meaning, make sure a VIN's price matches across every marketplace it appears on.
Turn a declined finance application into an opportunity to rebuild trust with a different bank, vehicle, or terms down the road.
And don’t skip the pre-arrival call.
"If I make you happy during this experience, you'll remember me...” Mojica says. “If I'm absolutely vanilla, I'm now forgettable."
Erff cited a case study in which a partner matched online listing exposure to in-person sales in a data clean room and found that for every one vehicle sold online, 10-plus sold offline.
In other words, the marketplace listing itself was driving showroom traffic that closed in person, not just completing transactions on its own.
Bottom line: Amazon is betting that if the online experience is frictionless enough, the showroom closes the rest. For dealers, that means the platform rewards whoever can keep the process smooth once the car buyers visit the showroom.
A quick word from our partner
A shopper who’s just browsing can look a lot like one who’s ready to buy, until you know what to look for.
This guide breaks down four real signals of buying intent so your team can prioritize by readiness instead of when a lead came in.
Why Rohrman built its own data system instead of buying more tools.
Also on the topic of lead-gen, Jeremy Nowling and Rick Terry of Rohrman Automotive Group spent their Wednesday (Sept. 23) session, "Beyond the Dashboard: Pairing a Unified Data Eco-System with AI Coaching and Accountability to Triple Close Rate," walking through their Unified Data Eco-System.
That's a Snowflake data lake that pulls together CRM, DMS, and website behavioral data into one place they fully control.
Nowling explained that it keeps the dealership running even if a vendor doesn't.
"If you are, let's say, a CDK partner and a CDK gets hacked... you're completely fine,” he said. “You can still operate completely because your data sits beside this area."
Jeremy Nowling
Rohrman Automotive Group
Rohrman runs 20 stores and has about 1,600 employees, including Nowling and Terry, seen below, with around 900 customer-facing.
Their system is cheap to run at that scale.
Rick Terry, speaking, and Jeremy Nowling, discuss Rohrman Automotive’s unified data ecosystem. (Photo by CDG’s Julie Walker)
Nowling said their first Snowflake bill, after loading their entire customer base in, came to .19 cents, and they've yet to see a single month's bill top $1,000 across all their stores.
Terry also said the payoff is cleaner leads.
“We believe that the customer experience is always best when it doesn't come through a third party, it comes through our own website,” Terry said.
Rick Terry
Rohrman Automotive Group
Since building the system, Rohrman's website-driven sales have grown from 24% to more than 50% of total volume.
Rohrman's close rate has also climbed to more than 30% today, against a 12.5% national average, according to FourEyes national benchmark data.
On new-car opportunities specifically, they're closing 45% monthly vs. a 25% national average. Overall, Nowling said the gains came while spending less on advertising than before.
And when asked about security, Nowling said it's a secure environment and that “we use Snowflake, which powers things like Ford Motor Company, Autotrader, huge pharmaceutical giants that have tens of millions of customers.”
How this all ties back to Amazon's point: Different sessions, same instinct… Control. Amazon's dealers take back the customer relationship; Rohrman takes back data.
More session takeaways:
Nowling compared the tech-to-human handoff to a relay race. "The only time anything goes wrong is during the handoff," he said.
Consider if you need a BDC department. Rohrman eliminated theirs in 2022, repurposing 79 agents so that sales managers directly own accountability and coaching for their own teams.
Set explicit, minimum closing benchmarks by lead type, and coach to them. Rohrman's internal standards include a 12% floor for internet leads, 35% for phone-ups, closing "one out of every two" walk-ins, and an 80% show-rate goal on set appointments.
Build accountability into daily habits, not annual reviews. Their "Rohrman Academy," 90-day scorecard tracks whether an individual salesperson can hit 30 sales off 80 opportunities. (It also triggers automated coaching texts when someone falls under a minimum standard.)
Also, if you build a role play/coaching tool, make the AI feedback specific and score-based. One live example shared during the session: An AI-scored tire-sale role play call graded a rep 42 out of 100, with itemized feedback on exactly what to fix next time.
Terry pointed out that performance metrics are well understood in this industry, but culture and coaching capacity aren't.
Their answer: Build an explicit grid, high or low performer, crossed with high or low culture fit, because it's hard to do without putting a number to it.
Digitizing the showroom doesn't mean giving up control of the deal.
More control-friendly vibes came from Matthew Zabawa, of Rimrock Auto Group and WebBuy, who opened his Tuesday (Sept. 22) session, "Lessons Learned from Digitizing our Showrooms," with a number that's been making the rounds.
A Carvana-owned Stellantis store went from selling about 50 units a month to 998 in June 2026, despite charging more than neighboring franchised stores.
Zabawa's point: Customers will pay more for a frictionless process, even when it costs more.
But first, he reminded folks what counts as digital and what doesn’t. A website widget that spits out a "super lead" isn't it, he said, because nobody at the dealership can actually see the deal.
"It pains me as somebody that created one of these tools, [that] the dealership, the salesperson, and the sales manager aren't able to see what that deal structure was," Zabawa said.
Matthew Zabawa
Rimrock Auto Group/WebBuy
The real version, according to him, is a customer-facing deal screen, such as a kiosk, tablet, or the salesperson's computer, etc., that the salesperson controls in person, not a tool that hides the deal from the dealership itself.
Zabawa, seen below, said he expects pushback from GMs worried a screen replaces the salesperson: "A computer can't hold gross. A computer can't sell the car."
Matthew Zabawa lays out the case for proper digital show rooms. (Photo by CDG’s Julie Walker)
One Rimrock GSM, Steve Moroz, said: "We're seeing our grosses increasing, not decreasing. And most of our customers are going through the transaction in [under 1.5] hours as opposed to 3 hours."
The numbers back that up: +$514 average front-end gross, +$405 F&I gross, and transaction times cut from about three hours to under 90 minutes.
In a video testimonial, one salesperson said the tool cut her deal time nearly in half and let her close twice as many deals a day.
How this ties back to the rest: Same instinct as Amazon and Rohrman, but played out on the sales floor instead of the lead or the data. The dealer stays in control, while the tools help make it a smooth process.
More session takeaways:
Don't let staff bypass the tool. Zabawa pointed to the "Satir Change Model" and said leadership has to "burn the boats," AKA remove paper desking as a fallback.
Expect the rollout's rough patches to be a training or settings problem, not a tool failure. (About 95% of onboarding issues trace back to one of those two things, he said.)
Prioritize DMS and loan-origination integrations first since they save the most time.
For subprime-heavy stores, pull customers out of a single-point-of-contact model. Start with a soft credit pull to shape the deal before the hard pull happens. He said in one example that 61 ups turned into 13 sales in a single day with two sales managers.
One dealer in the audience, 38 years in the business, told Zabawa that a similar shift was a serious upgrade over every system he'd used before, cutting his own transaction time in half.
Bottom line: Two threads ran through these sessions.
None of these tools have or should replace a human.
Tech integrations (and data changes) should help dealers keep control, not lose it.
The idea is to deliver customers a faster, lower-friction experience however possible, without handing over the keys.
