Walk into almost any auction across the country on sale day. You’re likely to see most dealers there looking at the phones as they go through the process of buying cars for their lot.

That’s one example Black Book’s Mike Williams shares as he illustrates the mobile usage in the wholesale market by dealers, a group he calls the “greatest early adopters” for utilizing technology in business.  

But as Williams emphasized, there are improvements to be made in the process — particularly with interconnectivity between people in the field and home base — and that’s where Black Book hopes to come into play.

“The technological maturity (among dealers), it’s light years beyond what everybody thinks,” said Williams, who is vice president of mobile and direct sales for Black Book . “Dealers are the greatest early adopters of any group of users for technology. If they can save or make another dollar, they’re going to adopt a device or platform.

“If we started to break down categories and groups and industries, the dealers are probably the fastest ones in growth in usage of mobile,” he added. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to go to almost any auction and not have the vast majority of people looking at their phones.”

Yet there is so much work to be done for mobile usage in the wholesale arena to truly be optimized.

These days, the data is abundant and widespread, the technology and self-sufficient data model is there, Williams said,
but the ergonomics of utilizing that information needs fine-tuning.

Consider what he observed during his prior experience working with helping remarketers utilize dashboards in the lanes.

“A couple years ago, when I started doing dashboards for some of the factory remarketers, we used to say that ‘we’re not re-inventing the wheel … we’re just giving you a better calculator and an easier way to use it,’” Williams said.

“The dashboards started to catch on fire in the lanes and that was probably the first hint at everybody wanting to get a handle on real-time information and use their own information more efficiently,” he continued. “The problem was, you just never had a vessel to do it. Now, you have a combination of technology, data and the self-sufficient data model in most places, whether you’re talking about the national remarketers or ‘Joe Dealer.’  

“You’ve got these great data sources where they can keep a self-sufficient model going and give them insight day to day,” he added. “They’re in a real unique position now to turn that corner, same as us, where that presentation of that information is going to give them a lot of decision-making power in the next couple of years.”

So how can remarketers and wholesale sellers increase that usage of mobile in the auction environment?  Williams started by looking at what he called purpose-driven architecture and the programs’ mechanics.

“They’ve been overly complex. They’ve focused more on the bells and whistles of technology rather than the business driving the technology,” he said. “So, in this case, a good example is that in our revamp (at Black Book), we’re going back to an offline mode, something that disappeared in the last two or three years.

“Nobody develops to work offline. They assume that in the lanes, you have Wi-Fi … and the reality is, it’s spotty,” he continued. “What happens is, you get intermittent connectivity and lose a handle on things. I think the devices are great, but some of the architecture that has cropped on the devices isn’t working. Getting to an offline mode is going to be a major step.”

Another major step, Williams said, will be making it easier for users to connect back to their respective home bases to facilitate coordination between the command center and folks out in the field attending the auctions, particularly for some of the larger operators (like a CarMax).

While it’s currently possible to conduct simplified tasks like pulling up values, “you can’t do second-level decision-making with them or coordinate with others on your team,” Williams said.

“So, I think a lot of the next-generation is just that,” he continued. “Some of the things we’re working through and putting out are communication programs, so that you do have access to all that data wherever you are.”

Williams would later elaborate on the importance of mobile device interconnectivity between buyers working remotely and the home base, hammering home this point: “That’s a multi-layered thing. You can apply the same concepts to the dealer and his lot, and trade apps on his lot … you’re going to have this command center with a deal-worker mentality where it’s the guy buying or trying to sell your units in the lanes or whether it’s one of your salesmen working a deal and taking a trade-in, all of that data is going to merge into one point. So you’ve got somebody in control, one command.”

He added: “There is a difference in real-time, knowing the information, whether it is your transaction on a given vehicle or your entire portfolio that you had on sale that day. Having that interaction with the home base and being able to set up adjustments along the way,  that can mean the difference in millions for the national scale and thousands on a couple of given units.”

Joe Overby can be reached at joverby@autoremarketing.com. Continue the conversation with Auto Remarketing on both LinkedIn and Twitter.