DriveCentric held its DC20 event in St. Louis last week, bringing together more than 100 dealership attendees for three days of CRM training, workshops, and networking.
The event included more than 15 speakers and 12-plus workshops covering engagement center optimization, AI agents in the dealership, video and social selling, sales process rebuilds and CRM leadership strategy.
CBT News co-founder Jim Fitzpatrick attended DC20 in person and spoke with some of the organizers, speakers and attendees throughout the event.
DriveCentric Chief Executive Officer Matt Leone said events like DC20 have brought the automotive retail community together for more than a decade.
“Well, we’ve had Steve Roessler, our chief evangelist officer, for many years, and he had this idea of putting together an event like this. And so this is our 13th one of these. Wow. It really is a 20 Group for our power users and our user community. And Steve loves these events. I think these events are a great opportunity for us to pull all of our customers together, talk about all best practices, talk about how to get the most out of DriveCentric. And these events just keep getting better and bigger and bigger,” Leone said.
Roessler, DriveCentric’s chief evangelist, pointed to collaboration as the driving force behind the event’s format.
“It’s good to, you know, give people the ability to go get free training, you know, because we, we want to give back to the automotive community. And, you know, this is our way of doing our own mini little, call it workshop networking show, where dealers can collaborate together, truly collaborate, not just go to like a class and then go back home,” Roessler said.
Joe St. John, a prominent retail automotive sales trainer now serving as corporate finance director at Oakes Auto Group near Kansas City, praised DriveCentric as a robust CRM and communication platform.
“If I was back in retail tomorrow, I would be using DriveCentric as my CRM. And the reason being is it is such a great communication platform. Like my ability to quickly snap a video, send it to a customer from a car and get immediate engagement, is so good,” St. John said.
Danny Zaslavsky, president and co-founder of Vincue, said the intimate size of DC20 compared to larger industry events adds to its value.
“I think the bigger events provide less value and the smaller events provide more value. I was just in a room actually with one of our clients, Brittany, who is one of the executives at Cable Dahmer. And she’s teaching a room of dealers how she solves problems in DriveCentric. Who do you think I want to listen to? I love the folks here, but I want to listen to her,” Zaslavsky said.
Cassie Broemmer, chief revenue officer at Car Wars, described what it’s like conducting live mystery shopper calls to dealerships in front of the DC20 audience.
“Well, we do that a lot. And every time I try to get out of mystery shopping live on stage, I get talked back into it. You know, like, no, you have to do it. And people know when I bring that red speaker on stage, that’s what’s going to happen,” Broemmer said.
Partnership with RockED
During the event, DriveCentric announced a new partnership with RockED, adding the training and certification platform to its Partner Hub. The integration ties coaching, compliance guidance and OEM certification pathways to the customer and operational data dealers already track inside DriveCentric’s CRM, with the combined tools set to go live for shared customers later this summer.
“We think of DriveCentric as an engagement platform, one which helps dealerships sell more cars. And as we have our Drive University and we have a chat feature to be able to get a human on the phone and help the dealership with support of how to use DriveCentric, the partnership with RockED really comes in the form that they do a lot of work with OEMs,” said Matt Leone, DriveCentric CEO.
Speakers and panels
Six dealership operators led breakout sessions on topics pulled straight from the floor. Kevin Pitts, Director of Dealer Performance at Tom Masano Auto Group, covered engagement center optimization. Brittany Ouellette, Director of Operational Tools at Cable Dahmer Auto Group, walked attendees through AI agents built to execute tasks inside the dealership.
Heath Patterson, Corporate Digital Sales Manager at Holler-Classic Automotive, focused on video and social selling techniques. Nicole Overton, Sales Manager at Salinas Honda Gastonia, presented on rebuilding sales processes for speed and performance. John Vincent, Director of Business Development at Apex Automotive Group, offered a sales manager’s playbook for using DriveCentric. Joe St. John, Corporate Finance Director at Oakes Auto, closed out the dealer-led track with a session on cutting rules-based friction from the sales process.
StoneEagle sent two speakers; Senior Vice Presidents of Sales BreAnna McCready and Katie Mares led sessions on F&I data and insights and on building a five-star customer mindset, respectively. Sean Kelly, CEO of Car Motivators, addressed the difference between managing a CRM and leading one, framing it as the difference between a growth tool and a source of frustration.
