The Data ‘Up’ Revolution: How a CDP Can Help Your Dealership Monetize Your Data

Imagine a world where you could wake up in the morning and say, “Hey Siri (or insert the name of the smart assistant of your choice), find me five people who will buy an F-150 Lightning today.” Just like that, five potential customers appear on your screen and all you have to do is follow up with a phone call.

This is, in fact, a totally possible thing to do in today’s world of data connectivity. Siri may not be the right address for automotive retail, but dealers who have done the work to connect their data ecosystem and implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can ask this question of their data and identify five, or even 10 people, who are highly likely to buy this car from their dealership who are not a current or active lead. 

This is what happens on the regular at car dealerships. We just don’t notice the treasure we are sitting right on top of because we are always out looking yonder for the greener grass. Truth be told, sitting just under the waterline of your CRM and DMS, you already have hundreds of thousands of data points about people that you can unlock. Once you have unified your data, you can successfully activate it to achieve as many or more sales and ROs as you would like to close over the course of the month.

Proactive v. Reactive Sales 

You walk into a dealership at 10:45 on a Tuesday morning – what do you see when you look around at the showroom? 

Typically, you might see a few people actively working the phones, but for the most part, people will be standing around a desk chatting, sitting on their computers or phones scrolling through social media, shopping, or whatever else it is people do in their spare time. 

In most businesses outside of retail, there is no such thing as just sitting around and having spare time. Most businesses work through proactive outbound activities, actively trying to reach people to make a sale. In automotive, the sales side currently works reactively, banking on ‘Ups.’ 

‘Ups’ as a philosophy is purely reactive. They are an old-school concept that quite literally means to stand ‘Up’ and greet the person who walked into your store. Today we have several different kinds of ‘Ups’- phone, internet and showroom – all of which are people who are actively walking into your dealership or are raising their hands and asking you to engage with them. 

The ‘Ups’ philosophy is dependent on luck, making it extremely limiting. Reality is that most dealerships will have 700-800 shoppers on their site who are behaving like buyers; serious shoppers who you’ve probably emailed, engaged via automated SMSs, direct mailings and more. They are right there but they are not coming into the showroom or even raising their hands to ask to be engaged. They are swimming right there beneath the surface, and the passive approach we take with these shoppers is a huge loss in sales opportunity. 

The Fourth ‘Up’

It’s time dealers accepted that not every opportunity is going to come from a phone, internet or showroom ‘Up.’ There is a fourth kind of ‘Up’ that needs to be engaged that can absolutely transform dealership business: the Data ‘Up.’ 

Data ‘Ups’ involve proactively reaching out to people who show high shopping behavior – people who are actively visiting your website, engaging your chatbot, replying to text messages, but never actively raising their hand for engagement by submitting a lead. All it takes is a quick zoom out to unlock that major piece of the pie. 

High intent shoppers who are very much looking to buy a vehicle who will likely buy from you or a competitor in the next few months. All it takes is activating that unused workforce time to suddenly be talking to a rich vein of sales – the equivalent of asking Siri to tell you who to talk to. 

Understanding Data ‘Ups’

Consider this sample opportunity: Adam Parker. 

Adam visited your website and looked at two VDPs. He then filled out a form on a trade-in. He has a marketing score of four. Adam will immediately be contacted by your BDC simply because he filled out a form. The conversation will reveal that he is not actually in the market right now and was just curious about the trade-in.

Let’s take a look at a shopper who did not submit a lead: Kristin Smith. 

Kristin clicked on a model specific ad on social media, browsed ten different VDPs on your website, opened four marketings, and returned to your website to browse four more VDPs. She then chatted with your chatbot which answered some questions about a specific vehicle but she never submitted her information. Kristin has a marketing score of 9 but the BDC would never even know she exists because she never raised her hand by submitting a lead form. 

Your dealership is sitting on a pile of gold that falls into this category of Data ‘Ups’. When you begin to employ a Data ’Up’ strategy, the time to value is as early as tomorrow or next week. All it takes is a little effort to activate it and the revenues start pouring in. 

Monetizing Data is as Easy as C-D-P

So, what does it take to actually work a ‘Data ‘Up’ strategy? Let’s take a quick look at it through the lens of Fullpath’s CDP: 

Like other CDPs, Fullpath offers dealers a custom audience builder – a powerful filtering system that allows dealers to create lists and segments based on hyper-specific criteria pulled directly from their unified first-party data. Using the audience builder, you can easily identify  Data ‘Ups:’ 

1. Customers who made a purchase over 36 months ago who have visited an SRP or VDP in the last 60 days with no sales leads in 6 months.
   
2. Customers with a last payment coming up in the next 6 months who visited your website and viewed a VDP in the last 60 days who has a marketing engagement score of over 8, with no sales in the last year and no leads in the last 6 months.
   
   
   
3. Customers who made a purchase between 2-5 years ago with a high monthly payment of over $700, who have not submitted a lead in 6 months.
   
   

These are just a few examples of ways you can use your unified data to find that buried gold.  

When we look at the concept of a marketing score – something that was pioneered by Hubspot and adopted by Fullpath and many others – those scores are based on activity. The more activities a person has, the hotter they get and their score goes up. These scores allow for you to filter and cut your data in different ways.

Many CDPs will actually offer you “suggested audiences,” essentially, pre-made lists of Data ‘Ups’ – opportunities – not leads – that you can work to make a sale despite that person not currently being a part of your active lead flow. This is the foundation of tracking a data strategy into the flow of activation: you can print that list and have people call, you can send a targeted email campaign, create a special website experience for this group of people, send a personalized SMS campaign – any of which could be the winning strategy that turns an opportunity into a sale. 

Working the ‘Ups’

Data ‘Ups’ requires there to be someone – a receptor or a hub – for handling Data ‘Ups.’ This is how you make your data more strategic. You can hire a data person or simply leverage what is being offered from the CDP’s automated system. Someone needs to be available to actively receive these opportunities and understand whether or not to follow up. 

After the initial finding or understanding of the Data ‘Ups’, you need someone who can pioneer the script. This is a whole new opportunity for engagement and you can’t just pick up the phone to Jimmy Drammerman and say “Hi Jimmy, I saw you were on my website and I know your loan is coming due in 3 weeks and I have a deal for you that might make you happy.”

Even in today’s world of deep personalization and data sharing, that is next level creepy. 

What you can do is pick up the phone and say to Jimmy, “Hey, I am reaching out to some of our customers who own a specific vehicle. We are looking to buy that model and if you are interested in trading in, I can get you into a 2025 model at this rate. Would you be interested in hearing more?”

Alternatively, the conversation could go something like this: “Hey there! I am from this dealership and I am just calling some of our customers to check in. How are you doing? Is there anything we can do to help out with your vehicle today?” 

Simple, friendly, engaging, with zero pressure to make a sale. That on its own sets a totally different vibe that, 90% of the time, will encourage the customer to join in on the conversation, or at least, be left with a positive feeling about your dealership that can play a massive role in their decision making process.

Data ‘Up’ Implementation

So, how can you get started practically with Data ‘Ups?’

Step 1: CDP

You may not want to hear this, but step one is setting up your data. If you don’t do the work on investing in a data infrastructure, you will struggle to find the ‘Ups’ easily.

Sure, you can start mining your CRM for recent engagements or go through your DMS and start pulling loyalty customers but if you make the investment to connect at least a few of your data silos – at least the big four (CRM, DMS, Website and email), you will instantly see those opportunities fall into your Data ‘Ups’ channel. You will be able to see, oh, that dead row from the CRM? Well, they were literally on my website last week shopping the VDPs, and they clicked on an email and an ad all within the last 30 days. 

In short? You really do need a CDP.

Step Two: Audiences

It’s very important to get to the right audience when working on Data ‘Ups.’ CDPs typically come with audiences out of the box but the ability to freely create audiences will allow you to do so much more. 

Consider creating microaudiences: highly specific audiences that may not be worth an email campaign with just 15 people – but if you can work that list as Data ‘Ups’ and convert 4 into a sale, that’s a really valuable audience. 

With a good CDP in place, those audiences can be built in five seconds or less. If you can dream it up, you can build an audience out of it. You can then see if those audiences are being engaged by your marketing and if not, engage them directly. Give your people lists to call about a specific deal you have going this month so they can engage high-potential shoppers instead of scrolling social media. This will lead to opportunities that will result in major sales. 

Coming up next…

So, what comes after the Data ‘Up’ revolution? 

The way we see it at Fullpath, dealers will begin hiring AI agents: a bot that can do the job for you. One that will be good enough to pick out the best opportunities and enable you to not have to dig through piles of not-so-good options to find gold. 

AI agents will be able to go even further by prepping everything the sales person needs in order to turn the opportunity into a sale – from the script, to a data brief, to specific deals and vehicles they can offer that directly reflect the needs and activities of the opportunity, ensuring everything is there for them before they pick up the phone.

Even more importantly, AI agents will identify segment opportunities that no one would have ever dreamed up. Because they can process millions of data points in an instant, they can run on your entire data set and look at obscure, interesting things in the CDP to spot opportunities and patterns that are really unique. 

These agents will become the workforce for data activation, making it a really economical approach for dealerships. Some dealers fear that it will be too expensive to manage for their dealership, but let’s take a look at it from a different perspective: 

When advertising on Facebook and Google, you get subpar conversions that cost upwards of $30. Only 10-15% of those will actually result in a sale. So, to make 10 sales you’d have to get 300 leads, making it really expensive to close a deal. 

Fact is, all of those leads are already in your ecosystem. You’ve pixeled them on your website and you don’t even know it! So instead, you go out and pay a third-party vendor a lot of money to do the work where you only see a 10% lead turnout when an AI agent can go into your data and find those same opportunities for say, under $5 per lead. This is an economical solution that will transform the automotive industry.  

Simply put, CDPs are becoming table stakes for dealers. Next up is AI, data activation, and how the CDP will plug into other things. This is where AI agents will transform the industry and completely alter the way we do business.

The change is coming – it’s time for your dealership to step into the future. 

To learn more about Fullpath’s CDP and AI activation solutions, click here to book a call with our team – we have a lot of knowledge to share and can answer all your questions on how to get your dealership prepared for the future.

The concepts in this article were originally presented by Fullpath CEO Aharon Horwitz at the Modern Retailing Conference in Palm Beach, Florida, November 2024.