Eight of the sessions we have covered from NADA Show 2026 were given by people with something to sell. This one is not. Wired to Win: Digital Retailing Tools was presented by Andy Seidenman, an Academy Instructor at NADA, and its argument is almost the opposite of every vendor pitch on the floor:
Use digital tools to reduce friction, not add steps.
The slide that follows is titled “Digital Tools You Already Have… or Should”, and the list is deliberately unglamorous: smartphone, tablets, OEM website, dealer website, trade tools, OEM inventory tools, apps, CRM. Nothing on it needs a purchase order.
For a South African dealer group that has been pitched three AI platforms this quarter, that framing is worth more than most of what was said in the halls outside.
The First Quality Response
The most immediately usable thing in the session is a checklist for the first reply you send an online enquiry, which he calls the First Quality Response, or the online handshake. Nine elements:
- A subject line worth opening
- A thank you
- Direct answers to what they actually asked
- Open-ended questions back
- Video or photos
- An introduction to the salesperson
- A walkaround of the vehicle
- An introduction to the service department
- Why buy here
Read that against the reply your dealership actually sends. Most South African first responses are a variant of “Thank you for your enquiry, when would suit you to come in?”, which answers nothing and asks the customer to do the work.
The detail worth stealing is the service department introduction. Almost nobody includes it, and it is the part that tells a buyer what owning the car will be like after the sale, which is the thing they are actually nervous about.
Why this matters for your dealership: this is a template, not a project. One person can write it this afternoon and the whole floor can use it tomorrow.
Two sentences on your website that most dealers fail
The website audit slide is short: is it pleasant to look at, is it easy to navigate, is the content fresh. Then the homepage: hours, contact, location, all departments represented.
And then the line that should stop a dealer principal:
Most visits are service-related.
Look at your own site with that in mind. The homepage is almost certainly built as a shop window for new vehicle sales, with service buried behind a menu, while the majority of the people arriving want to book a service, check what it costs or find out whether their plan covers something.
The next slide is a single question, and it is the best slide in the deck because it costs nothing to act on: can you navigate your own website? Not your marketing manager. You, on your phone, trying to book a service without knowing the URL.
The statistics need handling with tongs
This is where an otherwise sensible session gets careless, and since we have been checking every deck in this series, we checked this one too.
The video slide carries eight figures: organic traffic up 157 per cent, conversion rates up 80 per cent, brand recall up 95 per cent, click-through up 96 per cent, 91 per cent of customers want more video, 85 per cent who watch buy within fourteen days, 90 per cent watch on YouTube, personalised video lifting engagement 93 per cent. The app slide carries five more, including that app users are 73 per cent more likely to buy from that dealership and spend 7 per cent more.
The credits, printed in full, are “Porch Group Media, Zight.com” and “DMEautomotive, Retail Drive”. No report title, no date, no URL, no sample size.
Those are not research houses, and none of the eight video figures originates with them. We traced each one. They have eight different sources and an average age of well over a decade: the 96 per cent click-through claim dates to 2010, the 80 per cent conversion figure to around 2012, the 157 per cent traffic lift to a video-hosting vendor’s marketing deck from about 2015 with no published methodology, and the 95 per cent recall claim to the late 2000s. Two of the eight could not be traced to any origin at all.
The 95 per cent is the one to know about, because its author has publicly retracted it. It began as a small survey of roughly 200 business buyers by an agency called Insivia, whose own site now says the figure “was directional. It was not a peer-reviewed neuroscience study” and that the percentages “represented a pattern in our survey, not universal laws of cognition”. The deck has also quietly changed what it measures: the original claim was about message retention, how much of a message someone kept from video versus text. Here it is relabelled as brand recall.
A statistic that its own publisher has walked back, seventeen years old, measuring something else, presented in 2026 without a date.
The app slide is worse, and it matters more because it is the one asking you to spend money. The 73 per cent and the 7 per cent come from a 2014 analysis by DMEautomotive of dealerships running DMEautomotive’s own app, which is a vendor measuring its own product. The 25 per cent service figure comes from a different 2014 study, welded into the same sentence as though both described one group of people. The 72 per cent could not be traced to any study at all. And “Retail Drive” is a misspelling of Retail Dive, which did not conduct the research either: the page carrying it is archived trade coverage of somebody else’s 2014 press release. Citing it as a source is citing the newsstand rather than the magazine.
And then there is the one that argues against the session’s own case. The deck says 29 per cent of buyers completed financing steps online. Cox Automotive, who actually measured it, published that as a gap: 29 per cent had applied for finance online, while 96 per cent said they were willing to. The entire finding was the sixty-seven point chasm between what buyers wanted and what dealers offered. Stripped of the 96, it reads as a ceiling on demand when the source was measuring a failure of supply. A session arguing for digital retailing is quoting a statistic that, in its original form, is the strongest argument in the room for doing more of it.
None of this makes video a bad idea, or the session wrong. It makes these particular numbers unusable in a board pack. Use the argument, drop the decimals.
The app advice we would not follow here
The session’s position is that a dealer-branded app lets you own the customer relationship. Set aside that the supporting evidence is a decade old and produced by the app vendor: even taken at face value, we would not follow it here.
In South Africa we would tell you not to build one, for three reasons.
You would be asking a customer who buys a car every six or seven years to install and keep an app for a business they visit twice a year. The install cost per active user is brutal and the deletion rate is worse. Second, the job the app is supposed to do, meaning reminders, booking, offers and a direct line to a person, is already done here by WhatsApp, which your customer has open anyway and which costs you nothing to reach them on. Third, an app that collects customer data is a POPIA responsibility you now own and have to maintain.
Why this matters for your dealership: the underlying instinct is right. Owning the customer relationship rather than renting it from a portal is the correct goal. In this market WhatsApp Business and a properly maintained Google Business Profile get you there for a fraction of the money.
What changes when you bring this to South Africa
“Avoid emojis” is American advice. The texts and emails slide says to be professional and avoid emojis. In a South African WhatsApp conversation, a total absence of them reads as cold or annoyed rather than professional. Match the customer’s register. The rest of that slide is sound: reply promptly, one question gets one reply, document it in the CRM, honour opt-outs.
Opt-outs are not a courtesy here. The slide treats honouring an opt-out as good manners. Under POPIA it is a legal obligation with a defined process, and the request has to be actioned across every channel you hold that person on, not just the one they asked in.
Online financing does not mean what it means there. As above, the American finding is that buyers overwhelmingly want this and mostly cannot get it. Here you can take the application and get an indicative approval online, and the banks are quick about it. What you cannot do is skip the rest: the National Credit Act requires a documented affordability assessment, and motor dealers are accountable institutions under FICA, so identity and address verification has to happen properly. Sell the speed of the pre-approval, not a fully online deal you cannot actually deliver.
You may not need to build the calculator. The session says 59 per cent name price calculators as their favourite online tool. That comes from EY’s global mobility survey, spanning eighteen countries including China, India and Mexico, with fieldwork from 2022, and in the original ranking the calculator beats booking a test drive by a single point. It is not a South African finding and it is not really a winner. What is true regardless: those tools already exist here on the marketplaces your stock is listed on. The question is not whether to build one, it is whether your own site gives a straight answer to someone who arrives having already used one.
The phone is even more central here, but not for the reason the deck gives. The 70 per cent claim does not survive checking either. The nearest real measurement is Google research published in 2016, resting on internal data from 2015, and what it counted was the share of searches for list prices that happened on mobile. That is a query-mix number. The deck turns it into a claim about people and their primary research device, which is a different thing and does not follow. South African car buyers are genuinely mobile-first, for reasons that have nothing to do with that statistic and everything to do with how most people here get online at all. Which makes page weight a commercial problem: a heavy vehicle detail page on mobile data is a customer lost before the images load.
On rands: there are no monetary figures anywhere in this deck, so there is nothing to convert. Every number in it is a percentage, and every percentage is American.
What to do this month
- Write the First Quality Response template against the nine-point checklist and make it the standard first reply.
- Add the service department introduction to it. Nobody else does.
- Open your own website on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to book a service. Time it.
- Move service to where the traffic is. If most visits are service-related, the homepage should say so.
- Check your voicemail greeting. It is probably wrong, out of date, or someone else’s name.
- Put WhatsApp Business where you were being told to put an app, and get the opt-out process right before you scale it.
- Strip any of these statistics out of your own decks unless you can name the study.
The honest summary
This is the least commercial session in the series and, for a dealer who is being sold to constantly, one of the more useful. It contains no product, no platform and no acronym you have to license. It tells you to answer enquiries properly, to make your website usable on a phone, to pick up the telephone, and to stop treating the tools you already pay for as somebody else’s job.
The weakness is the evidence. A session urging dealers to be professional about their digital presence should not be citing marketing blogs for thirteen statistics without a single date between them, and the app recommendation rests on research old enough to be misleading.
Take the checklist, take the website question, take the instruction to reduce friction rather than add steps. Leave the percentages where you found them.
If you would like us to audit your enquiry responses and your site on a phone, and tell you honestly which of your digital tools is actually earning its keep, get in touch.
This is the ninth piece in our series on NADA and ATD Show 2026, alongside Preparing for the Next Generation of Car Buyers, Shift Happens, Jumpstarting Your Sales Team’s Social Media, The Age of AI Search, 6 Marketing Mistakes and How AI Solves Them, Disrupt Yourself Before the Market Disrupts You, Leading With Emotional Intelligence in the AI Age and Driving Service Revenue With AI and CDP Advertising.
Source
- Andy Seidenman, Academy Instructor, NADA, “Wired to Win: Digital Retailing Tools”, NADA Show 2026, Las Vegas, 3 to 6 February 2026. Written from the 16-page handout and the session recording. The session audio could not be transcribed on our equipment, so this covers what was on screen rather than everything that was said.
- The deck’s statistics are credited only as “Porch Group Media, Zight.com” and “DMEautomotive, Retail Drive”, with no report title, date, sample size or URL on any slide. We traced them rather than repeating them. Where a real primary exists it is named above: Insivia’s own late-2000s survey behind the 95 per cent recall claim, which Insivia has since publicly qualified; DMEautomotive’s 2014 studies of its own app product behind the app figures; Cox Automotive’s Car Buyer Financing Journey Study behind the 29 per cent, whose companion figure is that 96 per cent were willing; EY’s Mobility Consumer Index, 2022 fieldwork across eighteen countries, behind the 59 per cent; and Google research published in 2016 on 2015 data behind the 70 per cent.
- The deck contains no monetary figures, so there was nothing to convert into rands. The South African commentary on WhatsApp, POPIA opt-outs, National Credit Act affordability assessments, FICA obligations for motor dealers, marketplace tools and mobile data, and the case against building a dealer app, are ours and not the presenter’s. Nothing here is legal or compliance advice.