Foureyes to Unveil Their CDP at NADA: A Solution for Unified Data

Brian Pasch0:00Hi, this is Brian Pasch, and welcome to my podcast. These episodes are being recorded to highlight some of the companies that are bringing new products to NADA this year. I'm so happy to welcome David Steinberg, CEO of Foureyes, to today's podcast as we talk about the new Connect platform that he's bringing out at NADA. David, welcome to the show.

David Steinberg0:35Brian, great to see you, as always.

Brian Pasch0:37So, David, let's talk about the industry in general before we talk about the platform, because I don't think that most people realized for the last year behind the scenes, you've been working on a number of big data projects, but over the last three years, I've been writing about CDPs, the need to have a unified customer profile or a UCP. People kind of laughed at that. But now with AI, it seems like everyone's realizing clean data is so important, but it's hard to get there. So, why do you think our industry is so fractionally divided, data silos everywhere?

David Steinberg1:24Yeah. I mean, I think like we've talked about this. We talked about this a little bit at MRC. We've talked about it. I think there was sort of an original sin in automotive, which was that back in 2015, when there was like the big data revolution, everybody, you know, NADA, 2015, big data, everyone.

Brian Pasch1:41Right.

David Steinberg1:42That whole concept, what that created was basically data plumbers who were going into every industry had legacy software. So, going in and extracting the data into a more normalized platform, and that started, you know, to say, okay, now we've got to collect more data and organize more data, and it started huge data organization and sort of de-siloed data across every industry. Now, two things happened. The same exact thing happened in healthcare that happened in automotive, was that when the data plumbers came in to sort of plummet and say, okay, we've got to get data out of these legacy systems, in automotive and healthcare, they got sued and shut down.

David Steinberg2:18So, there were three big lawsuits in healthcare. There was obviously the Authenticom, CDK, Reynolds and Reynolds.

Brian Pasch2:24Right.

David Steinberg2:24Like, what happened in 2016, 2017, when that happened, is the data plumbers left the industry. Everybody who was doing any sort of data plumbing said, this industry is not worth working in. It's too hard. I don't want to work there. I'm going to work in other industries. So, for the next eight years, both automotive and healthcare became sort of this distorted ecosystem where they didn't have data plumbing. And you could feel it. Everybody could feel it. Everybody would talk about siloed data and all our data.

Brian Pasch2:55Or the lack of APIs or the lack of standards.

David Steinberg2:59Exactly. And you could feel it. I think other ways you feel it were like the fact that you have to unsubscribe seven times when you're talking to a dealer that they can't even track their unsubscribes. You feel it. And, you know, that's where you get $2,500 to do services that are really are $11 outside of automotive. Because every single software provider, the only way you can work in automotive is to stand up your own little sort of broken plumbing to fix some of the data plumbing.

Brian Pasch3:29So, why did you decide to take on this challenge of being part of some pioneering companies to centralize, unify, and create a robust platform to allow dealers and their select vendor partners to have access to a unified customer profile or UCP?

David Steinberg3:54Well, so, first of all, what happened for us for Foureyes uniquely was we were in the sales enablement space. And we were one of, you know, if you look at sales enablement as a category where you say, hey, what we're doing is we're building software to improve close rate. That outside of automotive sales enablement is a huge category. Inside automotive sales enablement is a very small category. And the reason was because of the lack of access to data. So, in order to be a sales enablement company, we had to build better and better access. So, like, basically, what really happened with us was in 2020, 2021, a bunch of large

David Steinberg4:29dealer groups called us who were struggling to get their own data and said, hey, we hear that you have really good data. Can you show us what you have? And we started showing them what they have, what we had. And they said, oh, wow, this is what we've been trying to build for years. And so, that started, like, what we launched with our reporting platform and our UDP and a lot of that stuff came out of that, basically, saying, hey, we have really good data collection. Our applications were only using this much of our data. But in order, if I'm going to tell a salesperson to follow up with somebody, or I'm going to

David Steinberg5:01tell a GM that a salesperson didn't do their job, I have to have really deep access into the data in order to do that.

Brian Pasch5:07That's right, accurate data.

David Steinberg5:09Accurate data. So, that's what sort of started, we were always on that data collection mission.

Brian Pasch5:14And I've talked to you for years about some of the problems. Yeah. And then, you know, you tell me, hey, Brian, we're working on some really cool projects. You want to hear? And I'm like, yes, I want to hear. And, you know, more recently, the Morgan Auto Group picked you and Impel to build their custom data platform for activation, for unification. And I was, honestly, I was pleasantly surprised how professional your onboarding team was, the commitment to doing the right thing with data. So, is this two or three years of undercover dealer group data work coming out publicly now as Foureyes Connect?

David Steinberg6:02It is. And I think that the other piece that we always struggled with, and I'm really proud of, like, the work we've done to re-architect our platform, is, and everybody in automotive struggles with the same thing, which is integrations are hard.

Brian Pasch6:15Correct.

David Steinberg6:16And my whole piece is that what also happens when you have broken plumbing, like the ecosystem that we've had in automotive, is every vendor wants to be your contractor. So, every vendor says, I got it, I got it, I'll do everything you want, I'll do everything. I'll build something for you. Just put everything through me. And that approach is really problematic in a decentralized system like automotive, because that approach creates vendors who become all-in-one fax machines, where they do everything and it's kind of not, it's a little bit broken over here and a little bit broken over here, and it creates a bad customer experience over here.

David Steinberg6:56And that my whole belief is that what the industry needs is, like, more portability. If you look at AI and you look at all the things happening right now, everything that's happening with data is happening because your data is portable. You can move data to here to do something, you can get data back, and you can accept that into your system. That architecture does not exist in automotive.

Brian Pasch7:19So, not in any easy fashion, for sure.

David Steinberg7:23No. So, what we wanted to do was say, well, why does that architecture not exist? And what we realized was there's things changing in the way data is architected. And so, let's re-architect our platform to make integrations really easy. So, we can say, oh, you want to extend your data with something that we've never even thought of. You have something, dealer group, that we've never even considered. It's nowhere on our roadmap. How can we say yes to integrating that without creating tech debt, right? The other piece is that a lot of that happens in fast-growing companies is you just, oh, yes, yes, we'll do that.

David Steinberg7:55And you have these old pockets of tech debt. And suddenly, you can't innovate because you're stuck every time you try to build something dealing with all the tech debt.

Brian Pasch8:03And, you know, one of the things that you were a leader on, I picked up on, because I think you and I think along the same lines, all of these individual silos of data, all these individual products that were filling gaps, who were communicating with customers, were collecting different opt-in and opt-out signals, keeping them in their own ecosystem. And, you know, I was afraid that no one was thinking about what happens when you have an AI for service and an AI in your CRM, another AI tool trying to do lifecycle marketing or recalls. Some are doing texting. Some are doing emails. Some are doing now digital outbound calls.

Brian Pasch8:49And I was like, who's keeping track in the UCP? Did this customer opt out? And are all the vendors seeing that? And the answer was no. And I think part of my questions for this Connect platform, have you built a framework that would allow a dealer's vendor partners to dip into the UCP and see what permissions are currently open for communications for each customer? Tell me where you are in that.

David Steinberg9:22Yeah, absolutely. So we've rolled it out. We now have, I think we have over five dealer groups now rolling out our consent, the consent portion of our Connect platform. And so the consent, the way it works is that basically we connect the most granular consent signals we can, which is like, did they opt out of text, transactional, transactional marketing text, transactional email, transactional email text, voice, call, mail, every channel you're going to communicate to the customer. The idea is anybody who's communicating to the customer needs to do two things. One, they need to send their communication back into the platform. So you have a unified view of all the communication that's happening with your customers.

David Steinberg10:03One of the things is so many dealers, when they know they're over communicating, but they don't, they can't, the only way to find out is to mystery shop themselves.

Brian Pasch10:14That's right. Which of course still doesn't even reflect because you don't know where all these vendors are pulling data from.

David Steinberg10:25Yeah. And I'll tell you something that's actually been interesting. So, so one, we're, we collect all the communication and we all, we collect all the consent signals so that when you get a consent signal of, I opted out of transactional text messaging, we publish that to every other vendor. So they know to update their system.

Brian Pasch10:42And so important, so important.

David Steinberg10:44And then now the other pieces, we then give the dealer control on if that's written back to their CRM and DMS. Because what happens is, so the pattern of like, of just writing directly to your CRM, a lot of times will unsubscribe everybody. And you're like, well, now I can't market to my platform.

Brian Pasch11:02Right. This is a big fear about that.

David Steinberg11:04Correct. Yeah. I didn't collect the right granularity in, in when did they opt out? What did they opt out from? Um, so the system is designed to solve for that, but also for the over communication problem. And, and the interesting thing that's been interesting so far, you know, a lot of vendors get scared because they're like, okay, you're going to put my communication in and they're going to see my communication. So, well, yeah, if you're talking to a dealer's client who owns that communication, I mean, I believe in dealer rights. I believe like that is very clearly the day. If you're having a conversation with the dealer's customer because they hired you to have a conversation

David Steinberg11:38with their customer, then that conversation is the dealer's conversation in their system. Now what's happening and the counterintuitive thing that's happening is dealers are looking at a lot of it and going, oh, I really like some of this. Oh, what I want is I want this message. I love what they're sending here. I just want it maybe changed a little bit or set different to a different time. But now that they have the visibility, the dealers are actually making really smart decisions about, oh, I just, it's not that I don't, I thought that dealers were going to go in and start firing vendors.

Brian Pasch12:13Oh, I mean, because all of these communications, whether it's inbound, outbound call, uh, text messaging, email, direct mail are in a timeline.

David Steinberg12:23Yeah. And the problem, for example, is like, we've found examples where there's like three different vendors asking for an appointment. And then when you schedule an appointment, the other two vendors don't even know.

Brian Pasch12:34Right.

David Steinberg12:34So like there's a lot of stuff, there is stuff like that to clean up and like bringing in all the communication. But then the, the other piece is a lot of times what happens is dealers are now seeing, they're giving vendors credit that didn't always get credit for good communication, right? Like it's not, it's not an all bad thing. Um, you know, light, uh, what is it? Light is a disinfectant. So I think that like a little bit of it is when you shine the light on it, dealers are seeing opportunity to, um.

Brian Pasch13:02David, I want to flip the script on this, on consent management to something you and I haven't talked about, but I was just visiting a client and we were talking about the unified customer profile or the UCP. This idea of, um, can a CRM be the CDP and the conversation went something like this. The CRM could be the CDP if they built another layer that did, um, data evaluation, data checking, um, synchronization before sending something in the CDP. But today most CRMs don't do that. They don't have that extra data layer. And I want to ask you something about connect. I really didn't think too much about it when you're taking into the CDP updates from the

Brian Pasch13:58CRM updates from the DMS, right? Phone call logs, texting logs. The person asked me, it's like, Brian, how do we know that the CRM and the people who are using the CRM aren't eventually degrading the quality of the UCP, which everyone is using? And I was like, you know, I don't think I've asked people what is their processing logic of CRM updates to a master UCP. So I'm going to ask you that question. What's your current thought? Like a customer calls in, the guy, uh, misspells their address, um, miss types in their email. And that gets processed that night. What's going on in connect that would maintain, say, a UCP from being corrupted by sloppy data input in the DMS or in the service drive or in the CRM?

David Steinberg15:06Yeah. So let me, let me, I'm going to answer your question in two different ways. So first I'm going to say there, there is definitely confusion about the CRM and a CDP. And what are the, how do those two things coexist? Which your first part of the question sort of alluded to. And I think here's a framework I'll give you that makes it really simple. The CRM's job is to give the salesperson or BDC rep the most up-to-date information and the next best step and make sure they do it.

Brian Pasch15:33Right.

David Steinberg15:33That's the fundamental responsibility of the CRM. Now, the, the challenge that every dealer can relate to is that what happens is if they think the CRM's job is to store all of the data they collect on the customer, then every single time a sales rep or BDC rep opens their, their customer record, it's a book they have to read.

Brian Pasch15:55Right.

David Steinberg15:56And, and then you get, you get bad follow-up and you get in, you can't analyze activity and you get all of these downstream other problems from doing that. The job of the CDP is to be the book and the book's job is to write the CliffsNotes to the CRM so that at any given time, any CRM user understands the most up-to-date information, the next best step, and you can hold them accountable to that. That's sort of the, the framework of it. You know, again, you load up your, your CRM with everything. And, and I'll give you also a different, a little bit of a different thought exercise, which is that if you look at, let's start with Amazon.

David Steinberg16:33You look at Amazon, Amazon owns a hundred percent of their systems. So they have all this data collection going on. You go to the website, they collect everything, they collect it, they do everything. Automotive, you're using 20 vendors to run your system. So they're all generating data, but you don't have any core data collection. You're, you're, you're, they're all generating data that you could potentially use to make the customer experience better.

Brian Pasch16:55And I guess that's my point. The dealer's CDP is going to need to interpret, prioritize, evaluate before updating the UCP. And I don't know if there's been a lot written about what differentiates one CDP platform for another in the way that it ingests, evaluates, and then decides how to update the UCP.

David Steinberg17:21Yeah, and I think, I think too, like if, in, in good software design, if you're really truly, truly doing good, building good software, your job is not to editorialize. Your job is to present the, the data in such a way that the user who's smarter than you, who always has more context can editorialize. So for example, right, the job you just brought, the customer misspelled something. Okay, so we have processes that you can now automate and connect that will go through and they'll find out, oh, this email address is wrong, or this email address is bad, and can alert that, hey, this email address is bad.

David Steinberg17:57They can alert that, hey, this spelling looks like it's incorrect. There's some, some issues here. Could potentially even update, but the job is not to give an opinion. The job is not to, the job is to present the bad data, present the, show the dealer the workflow of what happens when you have bad data, but not to editorialize. And I think this is where, where a lot of software fails is it starts to editorialize.

Brian Pasch18:24Yeah, I just, but here's what I haven't seen, David. I haven't seen a morning process saying, yeah, we processed your DMS files, your CRM files, your call logs. We found these 20 different exceptions. I need someone to evaluate, you know, before we update the UCP. I haven't seen that. I agree with you that it could be dangerous to make decisions. I just bring this up is that if the UCP is really important to be sacred, up to date, accurate, so that AI can use the most updated summary of the state of each consumer. I think in the future, we need to talk about what those business update rules look like.

Brian Pasch19:15That's all I'm saying.

David Steinberg19:15For sure. And I, and I think where the lowest hanging fruit on updated information comes, it comes from the fact that, that a customer profile is, is combined across a bunch of different entities right now. And so like, even, and we see this when we listen to calls and we see this all the time where a customer feels like they're really valuable because they bought three cars from you. And so in the customer's mind, they're like, I'm a good customer of this dealership and they call up and they get, they have a bad interaction.

Brian Pasch19:46Right.

David Steinberg19:47Or someone doesn't even recognize their inbound phone number as a customer. They didn't even get recognized as a valuable customer and it made them not feel special and it may turn them off of doing business with that. That is that, I mean, that sort of scenario happened is happening in the time that we've talked, that's probably happened 300 times in the time.

Brian Pasch20:06Well, true, but the key to that is having a platform, I think you referred to it, that is re-engineered to allow the telephony system to do an API call, to do a data dip, to see if that number's in the database. So, you know, part of these broken processes across a dealership is that it wasn't cost-effective, easy, or wasn't allowed to do those data dips to create a better experience. Like when I called Delta or United, they know who I am. They thanked me for being a Diamond Medallion member. And I think that's why you decide to tackle this is because you're trying to create a framework for everyone to play in the same safe sandbox.

David Steinberg20:53Yeah, and like, you know, it's been really interesting. So one of the things that we put in place in our framework is what we call the validation engine. And the validation engine is basically says, okay, for every data point we collect that's key to understanding your business, sales, appointments, opportunities, leads, all of this, we also identify a secondary way to get access to that information that emails or sends information to our system that we can automate and run checks against to make sure we're correct. Because one of the problems, and you've seen this, I know you've seen this a thousand times, is everybody claims they have really good data collection, and their data collection's wrong, and nobody realizes for months and months and months.

Brian Pasch21:40And that's why I was getting like, I think, three years establishing the cost of dirty data, what the solution is, the introduction of CDPs, the evolution of different people coming in the market, the different strategies for activation. Then it kind of, now as we're going back, let's just say we're not in the first or second inning, we're in the third or fourth inning, and I'm starting to say, okay, you can have a framework, but you got to make sure that this thing is not going off the rails, and your UCP becomes corrupt, because unwinding bad updates, holy cow.

David Steinberg22:19Well, yeah, and I'm still a believer in good old-fashioned sales process, where like, just having really good access to understand, are your salespeople performing how they should be performing? First and foremost, are you getting the juice from the squeeze? I mean, the reality is, and this is the dirty secret about all of us tech guys running around doing everything we're doing, we haven't moved the needle in 30 years. Results have not changed at the salesperson level, despite all of the software, and all of the advancements, and all of the things we're doing. And so, at its core, I believe, like, if you're a data platform, the very first thing you need to be able to do is prove you're right.

David Steinberg22:58And look, I say this from having made mistakes of doing data collection, and we have data, and we have data, and maybe we're collecting it from an API, but we don't realize that the API is not sending us closed opportunities. And a lot of opportunities are closed, and we're running around going, hey, this salesperson's not doing their job, but we weren't measuring it correctly, because we're missing closed opportunities. When you have broken plumbing, you have this ecosystem of data that has existed for the last 10 years in automotive that's broken. When you fix it, guess what? There's still little mistakes here and there. And you have to be a vendor that says, hey, we've identified that there's a mistake here, or let's look at it, and let's fix it, because we can't hold people accountable to inaccurate data.

Brian Pasch23:45David, you're right on point, and that's why I'm excited for NADA, and that's why I'm interviewing different companies, because I want dealers to understand the ball is really moving in new directions. New thought processes, I've been working on this massive CRM research report, even the framework of what CRM will be in two years from now will be very, very different. And so I want to encourage dealers who are listening in, especially if you're focused on how am I supposed to organize my dealership data, how am I better equipped to leverage AI, how do I coordinate all the communications to my customers, and then, of course, other functions of CDP, which we've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about.

Brian Pasch24:41David, do you have a booth at NADA? Can people come and see Connect live?

David Steinberg24:45Of course, we have a booth.

Brian Pasch24:53Hey, listen, people will find you. I always say, don't tell people the booth number. No one's writing it down. But if you're going to be there, I just want to encourage people listening in, there's going to be some amazing products in the CDP space this year. I think that, you know, David, you know our ecosystem. There's some very cool stuff coming out from Client Command, very cool stuff coming out from Fullpath, some cool data services from automotiveMastermind. I mention these companies because not everyone's a perfect fit for everyone, but they need to educate themselves. And the thing I loved about your approach, at least with the Morgan Automotive project, is that you were very open-handed, willing to listen and design a framework that worked to achieve the business objectives.

Brian Pasch25:50You said ROI. So I'm looking forward to learning more about the Connect platform, and I just want to encourage dealers that AI activations, AI opportunities, or an agentic framework where we have some specializations running different workflows across the entire business, is going to need clean, centralized, unified, actionable, connected data, and you need to find a partner in your dealership who works with your culture, with your tech stack, and to achieve what you need. So, David, best wishes for the NADA show. If somebody wanted to email you, David, set up an appointment. What's your best email address?

David Steinberg26:38David at foureyes.io.

Brian Pasch26:40Easy. Okay. .io. Remember that? Well, this is just one interview and a series of interviews with tech leaders I'm going to be having prior to NADA. Add Foureyes to your shopping list, and I hope to see you at the show. I'll be wandering around the show floor. I don't have a booth this year, but reach out to me if you want to connect. David, thanks so much for being on the podcast, and best luck with the new Connect platform.

David Steinberg27:07Thank you, Brian. That was great.

Brian Pasch27:08Thank you. Great. Thanks for listening in, and I hope to see you at NADA. So have a great day. Bye.