While most dealers struggle with 20 to 40 disconnected software systems, one group located in the heart of California's Silicon Valley has spent three years building a unified data platform that survived the CDK Global outage and now generates predictable customer lifetime value.
"In automotive over the last 5, 7, 10 years, each dealership has 20, 30, 40 different sources that have data. None of it is normalized. None of it comes together in any sort of central hub," Jeremy Beaver, CEO of Del Grande Dealer Group (DGDG), told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Yossi Levi.
Why it matters: Without a unified view of customer data, stores can’t tell who is already in their database. So they end up running expensive conquest campaigns when a simple retention message would have worked better and cost much less.
To fix this, DGDG built a Microsoft Azure "data lake" in-house that aggregates everything (DMS transactions, service records, marketing touchpoints, industry data) into one normalized system. The three-year project created what Beaver calls "consumer journey models."
Full-time data teams develop business intelligence models that can forecast everything from customer behavior to market trends.
And the system combines financial and operational tools, giving managers real-time visibility across all business functions rather than checking many separate systems.
The technology can also predict when customers' leases end, calculate trade values, anticipate service needs, and recommend vehicles based on buying history.
And the system got a real-world test during last year's CDK Global cyberattack disruption. While dealerships across the country went dark, DGDG kept selling cars.
"We had so many redundant systems on data that we were not really impacted too much because we had the ability to extract our own data and operate our own systems," Beaver explained.
Their internal dashboard pulls from many different sources, so when one vendor goes down, everything else keeps running. That investment in data independence probably paid for itself that week alone.
Beaver believes this approach will lead to a change in how dealerships are valued.
"Today they trade on multiples of EBITDA, you know, four, five, seven, 10 times. When these dealerships have significantly different value in the future because of technology, and they start trading more like tech companies or SaaS companies, that's where they gain the ability to invest in larger and different scales," he said.
Between the lines: The strategy still requires real people doing real work. DGDG employs 1,000 team members and puts serious money into leadership coaching and training programs.
"We think that humans still play such a vital role in this business," Beaver explained. "At the end of the day, people want to come see a car. They want to come test-drive a car. They want someone to talk to when they need it."
Bottom line: Most dealers are drowning in disconnected systems without realizing how much it is costing them. DGDG's approach shows how unified customer data can turn dealerships into predictable revenue machines that investors will pay premium multiples to own.
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