In early January, TrueCar shared several updates to its Dealer Pledge initiative for 2017, following up on the March 2016 overhaul it made in how it conducted business with dealers.

These latest updates are among three focus areas for TrueCar in 2017, said president and chief executive officer Chip Perry.

Auto Remarketing examined those updates in Part I of this series.

The other focus areas include upgrading the TrueCar website and starting work to broaden the company’s services beyond its current offerings, and that’s where we begin Part II.

Website improvements

In an interview ahead of the NADA Convention & Expo here in late January, Perry said that TrueCar has taken steps to upgrade its website.

“We’ve made some changes in how we present pricing information. We’re working hard to make TrueCar more well-rounded and less focused on just price shopping and low pricing,” he said.

The company has put more of an emphasis on dealers being able to “explain their broader value proposition while they are making very specific offers to consumers based on specific units in their inventory,” the latter being known as VIN-based offers.

“We’ve moved significantly away from virtual car certificates, and that drive continues,” Perry said.

These improvements, he said, make the site more productive for dealers. Leads heading dealers’ way are going up, and based on the training TrueCar is offering, close rates are climbing, he said.

Upper-funnel opportunities for TrueCar

The third item on TrueCar’s roadmap would likely change, or at least augment, how folks utilize the company.

Perry said that this year, the company will “begin to expand TrueCar’s value proposition for consumers and dealers beyond being a pricing tool when they’re close to buying a car. We think there are really big opportunities in the upper-funnel shopping experience in America.”

A new product coming from the company this year — which had yet to be named at the time of the interview — is designed to “enable more car buyers to realize more of what they need through TrueCar, and reduce their need to visit other sites, and therefore pull more real car-buyers and generate more leads through our marketplace.”

It will touch more upper-funnel concerns, like research, vehicle comparison, building a consideration set, matching cars to budgets and finding car to meet their needs through reading others’ reviews of those vehicles, Perry said.

“Those tasks today are not done easily, and they’re extremely chopped up with display advertising. Our plan is to create a much more consumer-centric approach that we think will be a breakthrough in the industry,” Perry said.

“So as we think about expanding our value proposition, we’re going to move upper funnel and we’re also laying plans to work more closely with our dealers to enable them to promote much more strongly the positive aspects of the purchasing experience that they provide their buyers,” he said.

“We hope to become a stronger catalyst for enabling the really great work of our dealers to be put on a pedestal and differentiated in the marketplace,” Perry said. “Our ambition is to provide a much stronger end-to-end experience for consumers over the next few years, with 2017 starting to lay the track to do that.”

That experience, he said, would include upper-funnel tasks plus the “close-to-purchase and price shopping” tasks done through TrueCar today.

“And then beyond that, working closely with dealers around the actual retail experience … in a way in which we would be a positive catalyst for dealers to promote the good things they’re doing,” he said.

“Because we believe it’s the dealers who sell cars. There are many great dealers in America who are doing a fabulous job selling cars. And our job would be to focus attention on them in our marketplace.”

As part of plans aimed at the second half of the year, Perry said TrueCar also wants to help provide additional transparency to consumers on trade-ins, but help dealers in doing so.

“We have people on our team who are very familiar with the existing products out in the marketplace. Because in our prior careers, we were deeply involved in pioneering the first generation of consumer transparency trade-in tools,” Perry said. “We now think there’s a great potential for second-generation tools that address the shortcomings of the existing tools and take them to a new level.” 

Certified pre-owned expansion

During the interview, Auto Remarketing also talked to Perry about certified pre-owned, which is one area TrueCar is looking to grow this year. This process will involve allowing CPO listing to be presented via TrueCar.

“The first-generation third-party sites pioneered the presentation of CPO in the search process. TrueCar is a late comer to doing that. But we’re going to address that in the coming year,” he said. “We’re going to start to enable CPO listings to be presented in TrueCar, and we think that fills an obvious gap. But beyond that, we have the capability and we have plans to bring to market products that will enable the OEMs to offer very efficient, targeted incentive offers along with the presentation of a CPO unit.”

These efforts will help TrueCar put certified “on the pedestal it deserves compared to non-CPO units” and utilize “the existing target-incentive capability that will enable us, we think, to provide some pretty interesting offerings for the industry.”

He emphasized: “These are on our roadmap; they’re not here yet.”

‘Credit to TrueCar team’

The final point of this series goes back to the Dealer Pledge discussed in Part I and the progress TrueCar has made in the year since the pledge’s launch.

Perry said TrueCar has made “significant progress” — as evident by the increases in dealers using TrueCar — but it is still in the “second inning.”

It’s early in the game yet.

And to use another baseball analogy, Perry was the mild-mannered manager who heaped praise for wins towards players and fans.

“I want to give all the credit to the TrueCar team, who were ready, willing and able to embrace these changes when I arrived,” Perry said. “And without that readiness, we would not have been able to move as fast as we did in 2016.

“So, my hat’s off to them,” he said. “And I’m extremely grateful and humbled by the dealers who have given us a second look and have continued to support our business despite the shortcomings we had, despite the issues that TrueCar created for their businesses.”