What Digital Retail Really Means for Your Dealership

Born and raised in an automotive family, Joe St. John has a lifetime of industry experience and success. Currently serving Stone Eagle as SVP of BizDev, Joe started his retail automotive career early...selling his first car at age 5. From there, Joe grew into a role on the sales floor and became the General Manager of a dealership by age 30. He expanded his toolkit in Silicon Valley, taking on leadership roles and deepening his understanding of technology. His academic and career successes earned him a teaching role at Oklahoma State University, where he has been celebrated for his passion and innovative teaching style. A seasoned expert in technology, data, and retail automotive, Joe St. John’s mission at Stone Eagle is to help dealers maximize profitability.

As our industry reshapes in the wake of 2020’s global pandemic, Joe sees tremendous opportunity for dealers in the adoption of technologies and the embrace of consumer data. 2020’s lessons taught dealers the bottom-line value of adopting technologies that improve the customer experience and shorten the distance between a customer inquiry and a sale.

According to Joe, investments in automotive retail technology are investments in the consumer lifecycle. Technology increases efficiency, improves margins, and creates upsell opportunities for dealers of all sizes.

In this fun and fact-filled episode of The Walk Around, Joe St. John and JM&A Group’s very own Nick Funsch address these important questions:

• Why is digital retail being embraced by some of the industry’s biggest players?
• What are some of the trends in automotive retail technology for 2021?
• At the dealer level, what is the “x-factor” in digital retail?
• How are new vs used margins being impacted by the events of the past and present year?
• What should dealers be preparing and planning for?

Joe leaves us with an insightful takeaway: Efficiency is the magic lever to pull for profitability. Technology plus a human can be better than either one or the other.