Driving Solutions with Jim Fitzpatrick, powered by CBT News

Revolutionizing Dealer Operations with automotiveMastermind & DriveCentric

• CBT News • Season 1 • Episode 13

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automotiveMastermind and DriveCentric announce a strategic partnership that will integrate Mastermind's predictive data intelligence directly into DriveCentric's CRM platform, creating a seamless experience for dealership staff.

• automotiveMastermind brings 15 years of machine learning algorithms that predict customer buying behavior
• DriveCentric provides the engagement platform and operational tools dealerships use daily
• Integration eliminates the need for dealership staff to switch between multiple systems
• Partnership focuses on clean data flow between systems, ensuring consistent information
• Private incentives from manufacturers can now follow customers from marketing to showroom to F&I
• Matt Leone, now CEO of DriveCentric, previously served as CEO of automotiveMastermind
• DriveCentric is opening its API to create a more connected ecosystem for dealerships
• Data hygiene and enrichment will improve accuracy of AI communications
• Beta testing is underway with full implementation expected in Q4
• Joint customers will only need to sign an authorization form to activate the integration
• No additional cost to dealers who already use both platforms


Driving Solutions is the go-to podcast for dealership professionals who want to stay sharp, informed, and ahead of the curve. Hosted by Jim Fitzpatrick and powered by CBT News, each episode brings you real strategies, smart tools, and expert insights to help you run a more profitable operation.

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Announcer:

This is Driving Solutions exclusively on cbtnews. com.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Hey everyone, Jim Fitzpatrick, Thanks so much for joining me this morning. I'm excited to welcome Mr. Aaron Baldwin, CEO of auto Mastermind, and Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric. These two industry leaders are here to share an exciting announcement that brings their companies together in an important way for the future of the retail automotive industry. We are thrilled to have both of you in the studio with us. Matt, I think this is your first time. You're an old hat at this, so you've been here a few times.

Aaron Baldwin:

Just a couple

Jim Fitzpatrick:

-But welcome.

Matt Leone:

Yeah, it's great to be here, thank you, thanks for having me.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Sure, so big news and we're so honored that you chose CBT News to announce this. I happen to know what it is, but I'll let you talk a little bit about it.

Aaron Baldwin:

Yeah, Matt, do you want to lead us off here?

Matt Leone:

Yeah, you know, I spent five years at Automotive Mastermind as their CEO-,

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Did?

Matt Leone:

Yeah, yeah.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

And you are now.

Matt Leone:

It took me five years to actually form this strategic partnership, but really what we're here to announce is a strategic partnership between our two companies. The heart of what mastermind is is a data company. I won't steal Aaron's thunder and couldn't think of a better successor in the world to take over such a great company with great employees.

Matt Leone:

Yep, you know, and at the heart of what Drivecentric is is an engagement tool, an operational platform, and one of the things that we really want is, you know, some of the rich data that that Aaron and an automotiveM astermind has. You know they have 15 years of machine learning algorithm to create a prediction score of who's about to be in market, why, what for what, how they're going to transact.

Matt Leone:

They have sister companies of Polk and Carfax and markets can and credible some of that data can really fuel leads, not only into DriveCentric, it can be integrated, where we'll have an API open up to allow for that integration to happen. We want that data to flow back seamlessly and so that Aaron and his company can use some of that lead data for the insights and the algorithm that he runs on his side of the business and we can use that to understand good quality leads that's enriched, that's cleansed, that has the hygiene, that has the updated vehicle information, and this will be the tightest integration between a company like Mastermind and a CRM platform like DriveCentric. That's great.

Matt Leone:

Should have in the marketplace. Here we're in beta testing right now in Q4.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

That's great.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

So I'll let you pick up on that.

Aaron Baldwin:

That's great. So I'll let you pick up on that no-transcript Yeah, absolutely. And just to piggyback on that point, I mean, one of the things that's important for us at automotiveMastermind is making sure that we're taking all of this great data that we have spent years curating so that we could really understand who the consumer is to make sure that they still own the vehicle that it says they did from the DMS and merging that with all of our third party data that we have across the S&am;ampP Global Mobility umbrella, as Matt mentioned, with Polk Automotive Solutions, our friends at CarFax, but we want to make sure that that's always right there in front of the salesperson, the BDC manager, the BDC agent and within the tools that they're working in today. So being able to bring our behavior prediction score, our data intelligence, directly inside of a great CRM like DriveCentric is just going to be great for all of our dealer partners and everybody working inside of it. Keep them in one screen, but give them all the intelligence they need right up front.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

The easier, the better for people that are on the front line right, and there's no line about that. So, Matt, tell me, is this a new approach for DriveCentric? Because you guys have kind of been known in the marketplace as kind of a closed off operation there as it relates to this. Talk to us about that.

Matt Leone:

I'm gonna be about 100 days into the CEO role here and this is a company that's rapidly grown and I'm so thankful for our co- founders. There's three of them that are still with the business, still very much advisors for me. I talk to them on a regular basis. They were so laser focused on building a world-class new engagement approach for operations of a dealership that building out a partner ecosystem wasn't top of their priority, and I think they were focused on building something really special. And now that I think we've built to a point, it's now time to kind of start to figure out how to open it up in a way that makes sense, and the first thing that makes sense is just as many leads as possible.

Matt Leone:

Well, Mastermind generates a lot of demand and leads, and that's good lead data that should be coming into the CRM platform to run the engagement. Then how do we take household data in and how do we take vehicle data in? I could check all three boxes with household data, vehicle data and lead data from Mastermind. And then how do I make sure that that lead data is cleansed, enriched, suppressed if needed? Well, I get a lot of that through this strategic partnership. What does that do? It fuels our AI and our genius product.

Matt Leone:

Our automation products allow that engagement to happen, either through the human interaction or through the AI and dealer's choice of how they want to have this happen, but it allows it to be done with trusted, safe, clean data through the partnership and then, conversely, pass that back over so his algorithms get that much smarter and that much better. So, yes, it's new, but we spent a lot of time building out this API to open up Drive Centric, and our first step of this journey is to open up, lead traffic in and cleanse data in and then finding the strategic partners to push this to to complete a journey right, and if we can do that end to end at a dealer's operation, all the better. Right From sales all the way through service and F&I. We should be able to be that operational platform hub, and these are the types of partnerships we're starting off with and I'm sure there's gonna be many, many more that we'll work with.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

What drove this new approach for DriveCentric? Was it competition? Was it the the, the dealers saying, hey, we want you guys to work together? What it.

Matt Leone:

I think we're known in the marketplace and we've grown tremendously by being an engagement platform. And if we're the engagement platform, the word platform has some meaning. But if you're really only focused on new and used cars, you're limited on being an engagement platform and, as you know, there's obviously an F&I process. We do desking in our system, but there's an entire third of the dealer's revenue and profit that's coming out of F&I and there's always the service side. If we don't open up a partner ecosystem to ensure that 100% of leads come in, I think we'll be limited on what we could do. So it wasn't driven by competition. It was driven by the need to truly fulfill our mission, which is be the true operational platform to run the entirety of a dealer's operation and let legacy players do the accounting, and they do that really really well. It's something I don't think DriveCentric is ever going to get into, but everything else that touches a dealer from an operation standpoint is something that should be powered by DriveCentric. As long as it's fueled by data from trusted sources, we can then fulfill something that we're trying really quickly to become right.

Matt Leone:

As the CEO, I had three core missions. It was hey, let's open up the API. Let's build out the partner ecosystem. What is that going to do? It's going to get us the all the lead data, the vehicle data and the consumer data. Let's ensure that that's fueling our ai. So let's invest in our core and our ai and then let's make sure that we have the true end-to-end products that can do everything within the dealer's operations, minus the accounting sure, sure.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Last time you were in our studio you're with force marketing, yeah, and you guys formed a partnership there. Will we see more partnerships coming out of Mastermind?

Aaron Baldwin:

Absolutely, especially where they make sense. When we look at it, we've done an amazing job over these last 15 years building out an incredible ecosystem of data and, for any dealer or dealer group that has gone down the path of trying to put together a cdp or even a data lake or a data warehouse, they understand the types of integrations that you have to build into it, from hygiene to national change of address, to vehicle suppression, and all of those things have been layered into the mastermind ecosystem over time, so it becomes one central place in order to to collect all of that, to truly understand that full, comprehensive, 360 degree view of the customer.

Aaron Baldwin:

That's what powers that best in class behavior prediction score of BPS. Now, so, getting that out and providing it to an agency like a Force Marketing, so that they can execute their campaigns more effectively for the dealership, and then simultaneously giving that same data into a CRM and an operations tool like DriveCentric, you now have three partners that are working in concert with each other to help drive the business of the dealership. And I think, the most important part about this I'll use private incentives as an example. We talked a little bit about Mazda before we went on air here, but for Mazda, we're providing private incentives. We're identifying those core customers in combination with Mazda Financial Services, to say, hey, these are the people who are most likely to purchase, but they need a little incentive to push them across the edge, to pull ahead.

Aaron Baldwin:

Now we're building that in, we're predicting that, we're running that calculation inside of our system through our sister company in MarketScan, and then we send out the marketing to the end consumer to generate that demand.

Aaron Baldwin:

Now imagine a world where we're sending that out. We're also providing that into digital agencies like Force, who are also hitting that same group of first party customers and then when that customer comes in and whether it's submitting a lead through the website and ultimately that's tracked back through the CRM or they just come into the showroom floor they go into DriveCentric salesperson's inside of DriveCentric, they bring that up and then when it's in the desking process, as they're running through that workflow, they're able to pull that private incentive right then and there. And it's all still off of the market scan API and all seamless, exactly. So what was quoted here to get their interest is the same thing they are seeing when they're inside of the store. So we're not only driving the best deal for the customer, we're also driving the highest profitability on the deal for the dealership themselves Right,

Jim Fitzpatrick:

And that's a beautiful thing.

Aaron Baldwin:

It is, and I think the most beautiful part about this is it allows the dealers to stop having to go into multiple screens, multiple systems to understand how I should be talking to my customer and they can just purely focus on the process to deliver the best possible consumer experience while they're in the showroom taking delivery of that car. And that's what we've always been great at as an automotive industry let's take good care of our customers, and that's really how we went in the market.

Matt Leone:

I just want to add one thing to that, because the partnership he has with Force, something that I think is a beautiful partnership, because there are things Mastermind will never do not to put words in your mouth that DriveCentric will also not do Some of the things.

Matt Leone:

Agencies really do a special job with a lot in social streaming things of that nature. If leads can come in, especially unique leads like a private offer that's working with the manufacturer, that should be coming through print and email that Aaron's company can generate through an agency like Force, but also through AI channels, which I think DriveCentric fills in that gap for AI and automation, and then you have the communication hitting in every channel. But then you also have that consistency that Aaron was talking about, because the backbone of DriveCentric is also using the same API for pricing and we kind of look at it and say, hey, we can bring somebody from a complete journey, end to end, all the way through desking, and use the same price uniformity but hit every channel in marketing. And the only way to do that is have a more open platform where data is exchanged a little bit more seamlessly between companies and not in the traditional sense where there's a fee to charge for access to the data. We just want a great customer experience and we want the dealer to run a great operations.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

And that's what we're looking for with these partnerships. It sounds like it. Now there's going to be vendors out there that watch. We've got a ton of vendors that are subscribers to CBT News and they're going to hear this. They're going to go. Wait a minute. If he's out there doing this with automotive Mastermind, what about our company?

Matt Leone:

Yeah, it's such a good question and you know I try to think of myself as a steward of the ecosystem of auto tech. You know I've been studying it for years and there's thousands of companies out there and new ones starting every day. I'm blown away by how many companies focusing on AI have 20 employees, 10 employees and I already have 300, 400 dealerships.

Matt Leone:

I know, and it's every day a new one pops up and I can't keep up with the demand that's out there for getting access to DriveCentric Right. There's a list already piled up of companies Now. We've spent a ton of time building out the API, our first step into this process of a dual-direction API. We've always had FTP and We've always had FTP and we've always had data lead pushes back to the OEM, back to the DMS. This is now truly opening up drive centric, but it needed to start with. We need to ensure all leads flow in. So we're going to prioritize every lead so we can own the lead generation of not the lead generation, but the lead hosting of all the lead sources. And then it needed the data cleansing and hygiene and things like private offers. The next step of our openness to the vendors that are out there listening is we will get to everybody to be able to say how do we layer in this?

Matt Leone:

But we needed to layer in a few of these steps first and there's a couple of important things we need to prove out in the marketplace to allow this to happen, but I'm open to it. Right, we want the seamlessness for the integration. I just feel like in a world of vendor consolidation, profitability, dealers looking at the bottom line, fewer vendors are probably better than too many vendors. And we're in this explosive growth of innovation. Ultimately, I think what's going to happen is natively built products that deal with the process of operations is a core element that shouldn't have a thousand vendors bolt on, right. Right, there's data companies, there are operations companies and then there are accounting companies. Right, I don't know if you need a ton of partnerships in the ecosystem, but we know there's dealer choice and everybody's got their own flavor what they do with, and I don't ever want to say no. And so if a dealership says I want to use this tool, for whatever reason, I don't want to disrupt that as long as we're running the operations for that dealership okay and that's kind of the mindset we're gonna have of saying, yeah, we'll open it up to anybody that wants to integrate, but we're gonna do it logically and then we're to do it with dealer feedback of who they want us to integrate to on a stack rank order.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Okay, so now for the dealers that are watching how quickly, and what does that look like for those dealers out there that go? This sounds like a powerhouse relationship that I want to be part of. What's the onboarding? How quickly would they be able to be one of your clients?

Aaron Baldwin:

Yeah, so the onboarding is going to be quite simple. If you're a current mastermind dealer and you're using the DriveCentric CRM today, as we get out of beta testing, which we're hoping to be kind of running full force by Q4, we'll absolutely make you aware of it. It'll be a simple authorization form that says yes, we agree for the data in mastermind to be shared with DriveCentric and vice versa. Our team will facilitate that and then, behind the scenes, between the DriveCentric operations team and the Automotive Mastermind operations team, we'll get it all wired up and activated. So it'll be a really simple process. Once we're there. We just want to get through a little bit of beta testing right now to make sure everything's in place as we enter q4. We'll be in production and and ready to rock and roll,

Jim Fitzpatrick:

so certainly by q1 2026?

Aaron Baldwin:

absolutely

Jim Fitzpatrick:

,Y ou could have dealers up and around.

Matt Leone:

Our expectation is we're going to be demoing this.

Matt Leone:

We host a conference called dc20. We'll be out in california and my goal was, between Aaron and I, let's make sure this is fully demoable in a production environment by the October/N ovember time frame right, and I think that joint customers. This is only going to be a huge benefit for them. Why would I not want you to be able to have all this data flowing in? So what Mastermind's known for is a behavior prediction score, and if that data, that insight, has flowed right into your operational tool, I think that's a huge win.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Oh yeah for sure.

Matt Leone:

If we can ensure private offers are flowing in and if we can ensure that the data is enriched and cleansed so it's uniform between these two platforms, then we know the AI engine of DriveCentric is using the same mechanism, so that the use case for using AI is a little bit more trusted, a little bit more secure a little bit more accurate in terms of the best Ai is the best data, and the best data coming out of Mastermind allows us to kind of put that out there into the market system very quickly, and I think, since I've only been here roughly 100 days, it just speaks to how fast I think we can build things now. Sure, these aren't the days of six months to build a product. These are the days of a couple of weeks to build it out, a couple of weeks of beta testing, a couple of weeks of making sure we can logically roll this out.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

I would think during your tenure at Mastermind you had to have those aha moments that you went. You know if DriveCentric were to work with us on this because you have such a great knowledge of- no, seriously right- I mean running Mastermind. I mean in 100 days to make a move like this is pretty swift. Something tells me you were thinking about this, definitely.

Matt Leone:

And I think that's why Aaron is such a good CEO for Mastermind. I think he has the same vision that I had.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Well, you guys were close as a team-

Matt Leone:

Yeah, but his vision is probably the same that I had, which is... At the heart of it. Mastermind is probably the powerhouse data engine in the industry. I mean, they have so many sister companies and so many years of machine learning-

Jim Fitzpatrick:

World-class brands.

Matt Leone:

-that data is gold. And at the end of the day, he's not an operation system, he's not a CRM. And as much as the industry always asked me when I was a CEO hey, can Mastermind just become a CRM?

Aaron Baldwin:

I got asked it last week.

Matt Leone:

I chuckled because, yeah, so you know we should have been feeding this data between these companies, because it only makes the two worlds more seamless and we could never DriveCentric replicate 15 years of machine learning yeah, but they can also not replicate a true operational tool. We both have beautiful UIs that dealers love and both simple use systems, but at the end of the day, you're going in there for understanding, to build insights, and if that data can be fed directly into your operational tool now I get the best of both worlds, and I always had that vision while I was at Mastermind, and I think this will be the tightest dual-way integration in the industry scene, which is seamless data flow between two powerhouse companies that is very tightly integrated to run a dealer's operation. I'm really excited about this.

Aaron Baldwin:

Yeah, and we joke about the CRM comments a mastermind. It is absolutely something that comes up every single year without fail. But on that dealer visit I referenced from last week, the reality we, if we ever pivoted and did something like that which is a lot of the discussions we would have over the years is it would be a major distraction from what we really do and what we really do best, which is data and predictions right and generating, generating demand for.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Leave that to the people that do

Aaron Baldwin:

Yeah, leave that to the people who are really great at it, like DriveC entric, and let's just figure out a way to integrate into the ecosystem to make it better

Matt Leone:

And t he aha moment I think Aaron and I both had was we. We both worked on a big dealer group that used the, the mastermind data, to feed their cdp platform and you know I looked at the world of cdp. Crm is sort of blurred now. Why is the data only feed into a cdp from mastermind? Why isn't it being fed into a CRM?

Matt Leone:

And why couldn't those worlds be one and the same?

Matt Leone:

If we have all the lead data and if we have all the household data and we have all the vehicle data and we're allowed that data to go out for other things, like a Force marketing, to be able to use that data, well then, do you really need both platforms? And I think that this is that step in that journey, that path for us to be able to say we are the data aggregator of lead, lead management and let us run the operations of the dealership, but we needed to be able to get to the marketplace, this API platform.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

The data hygiene has been a struggle and a challenge for dealers for almost forever right.

Matt Leone:

They're all doing the same thing. We're all pulling out of an accounting general ledger to pull out data and, you know, is that the best source for pulling out data.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

I just got a letter that they want me to come back in for my 2016 BMW. That I, you know, has been gone a long time, you know, and I'm thinking to myself wow, that's amazing, that's, you know. It doesn't bode well for the dealer. They're spending money on it. It makes them look foolish, you know.

Matt Leone:

And now layer AI into that and sort of like. That's why this advances our AI engine greatly by assuring that the 24-hour-a-day, seven days-a-week AI engine is also not doing the same thing that maybe an agency was sending out that letter to you, that's right.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

That's right. And then, of course and you touched on earlier, in terms of the number, if that number that you're getting, that's online, that you think, okay, it's going to be this much per month, it's got to be an Amazon deal where you get into the dealership, you work the deal, it's that much per month Can't be. Well, that was a different situation. I mean, and I think that you guys do an incredible yeah,

Aaron Baldwin:

I mean with intolerance, right, because you know you can only be so good at estimating a trade until a dealer physically puts hands on it, it's a hard number against it.

Aaron Baldwin:

You can't be perfectly accurate in these worlds, but if all those numbers remain consistent, we should be right there and it's within a tolerance that's acceptable by consumers. Sure, because they know. Look, you know, a car is a depreciating asset. It's on the road, it's moving around and somebody has to physically inspect it before the final number line that's right.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

That's right, yeah, so that's great. I mean, this is I would imagine you're both going to be at NADA and talking about this what is it like 90 days away, or 120 days away? It's crazy.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

I would imagine your booths are going to be busy going. Hey, tell me about this.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Saw it on CBT News

Matt Leone:

We looked at each other's booths and where we're at and where we're strategically located. But yeah, we're both going to be talking about this quite a bit because I think the several thousand dealerships that run Mastermind or the several thousand that run Drive Centric are going to get an instant win out of this.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Oh yeah, for sure.

Matt Leone:

And then I think it'll only build from here, and especially that partner ecosystem that we both are planning to build out further.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

And why would they not? I mean, why would a mastermind client not jump on something like this right?

Aaron Baldwin:

There's no reason not to.

Aaron Baldwin:

All it is is benefit and there is no cost implication for the dealer to do it. So this is just value add and we just want to make the ecosystem better for them so it's easier for them to do their jobs.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

It's big news. I'm sure that you've got a few competitors that'll be watching this broadcast going uh-oh, we may have a problem here. Right, but that's fantastic.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Congratulations on the big news, thank you.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

Aaron Baldwin, CEO of automotive Mastermind, and Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric. Thank you so much for joining us here in the CBT studios.

Aaron Baldwin:

Thanks for having us, Jim.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

We got to do a follow-up to see how things are moving along on this topic, on this partnership.

Matt Leone:

We'll do it at NADA. We'll come show you a live demo and a real live customer.

Jim Fitzpatrick:

That would be great, I'd love it. Great Thanks so much. Yeah, perfect, thank you.

Announcer:

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