![]() Salespeople can do an entire deal from start to finish on those iPads. What we found is that if you want to help dealers evolve and succeed in retail you have to support in-store and online. “It’s worse now because spent time doing an online purchase but nothing is synchronized,” he said. ![]() So far the results have at least piqued the interest of a handful of dealerships, Rohrssen said, ![]() To test that, dealerships brought in fresh salespeople - who weren’t accustomed to the traditional process - and equipped them with iPads to see if it worked. The other goal was to unify the whole sales process into a single unit, while dealerships are used to jumping from six to eight different services. So they went back to the drawing board with that information and ended up with the result here. Rohrssen said this serviced a niche-within-a-niche part of the sales component for dealerships, but they found that a few were running it on iPads internally and kind of bending the service to work toward the way it does now. Like so many other startups, getting here was more of a discovery process for Prodigy, which started off as just focusing online. Our mission from day one was, we want to build software that equips dealers with the tech they need to handle these customer changes and deliver.” When they get there they’ve done so much research chances are they know more than the salesperson does. The consumer has changed significantly over the last 5-10 years, yet the dealership hasn’t changed much. “Those customers are doing an average of 18 hours to 20 hours of research before going in. “Car buying habits are changing - you have customers visiting 1.6 dealerships down from 6 dealerships,” Rohrssen said. Prodigy today said it has raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by 8VC, Battery Ventures, SV Angel and CrunchFund. So, for example, customers might want to come in and try a few things out, and then go home and continue to research. Instead of walking into a dealership knowing exactly what you want, Prodigy aims to make that part of the experience as well by creating a service that customers use online and salespeople use on-site to help a buyer discover the right car for them. He and his co-founders started Prodigy, a company based on extending that same kind of experience you have researching cars online to the actual dealership itself. If you’ve ever tried to buy a car, there’s a good chance that a lot of your research has shifted online as it’s become easier and easier to figure out exactly the kind of car you want - and less of it is about going to a dealership.Īt least, that’s what Michia Rohrssen is baking on. ![]()
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