Lessons from the Road: The Features Dealers Want Most, and What That Says About the Industry’s Future

"The two requests I get the most by far are data—more data, more reporting—and AI. That tells me the RV industry is growing up.

Five years ago, this wasn’t something they were asking for, especially not at the level of granularity dealers are looking for now. The need or desire for data warehousing and data analytics solutions—especially from non-enterprise customers—has really surprised me. We’re talking five-location dealers, single-location dealers asking for BI-type analytics and warehousing tools. That just wasn’t on their radar before.

In my experience, the best-performing dealers are data-driven. Of course, there are dealers who move a lot of product, and yes, they’re profitable. But they’re not the most profitable because they’re not data-driven. The ones that are—those are the dealers looking closely at every number: open work orders, average service ticket age, finance penetration per salesperson, margins by model and year. All these data points add up and have a real impact on the bottom line. These are the kinds of things we make visible in Leadership Insights."

"Dealers all want integrations with their providers—with manufacturers and other vendors. I think the more open we are to that, the better off we're going to be in the industry. And our dealers want their own industry. They don’t want to copycat something else. Whether each dealer recognizes it or not, they are all working towards moving the industry forward as a whole in some form or fashion.

We’ve also observed a generational or leadership style shift in dealership management. Some of the places we’ve been going to have been making that transition—from first to second generation or even third generation.

And how does that affect what they expect from a DMS? I would say they definitely want modern solutions. They want it to be able to do things faster, quicker, and easier.
It’s really a unique industry in that there’s a generational mindset—this is a legacy I can pass down to my children and grandchildren. There’s not a lot of businesses that do that in today’s world.

I think that’s a very special quality about our industry—these generational handoffs give the overall industry a family oriented feel."

"During COVID, there was a focus on rolling units. They sold the living brakes off all their units, and their service department, honestly, was drowning.

Then after COVID, there was this resurgence of focus towards the customer, and customer-facing stuff on the service side. They're not just there to sell units; they're there to service them into the future.

These last five years have probably been the most turbulent in every industry, but especially in the RV industry. There was steady growth—you could look at the last 10 years of data and see that. Then in 2019–2020, you saw this weird spike, and then a really weird low. Now it's starting to creep back up.

There are also underlying trends depending on what department—like finance and insurance, for example. The average down payment, the average monthly payment—they’re steadily increasing depending on which country you're in, Canada versus the United States."