Dealer Doc
Blue Mongoose was instrumental in helping us get our product to market and raising our first VC round.
Richard Hannaford, Dealer Doc CEO
Client Info
- Business Type: Startup
- Product: SaaS employee app
- Industry: Automotive tech
- Stage: Pre-seed
- Funding: Accelerator/venture builder
Background
Richard Hannaford is an industry expert in the automotive field, having spent more than a decade leading car dealerships and their sales teams. He had a deep understanding of the problems facing salespeople and managers across the industry:
- Hard-to-understand targets and commission schemes resulting in demotivated sales people
- Missed opportunities for cross-sell resulting in lost revenue
- Sales managers wasting time calculating commissions
After finding no helpful solutions, Richard created a spreadsheet to measure sales person performance for his own dealership. It produced impressive results: increasing sales performance by as much as 70%, saving managers an estimated 2 days per month calculating commission, and finally showing sales people how their commission worked and what they needed to do to improve their pay.
Dealer Doc’s Challenges
Richard knew his challenges were not unique. Turning that spreadsheet into a product could solve similar problems for dealerships across the globe. To do so, he would need to evolve his intricate spreadsheet into a scaleable, intuitive SaaS platform.
After several false-starts with different technology partners – all suggesting wildly different approaches, tech stacks, and price ranges – Richard decided he needed something he could launch quickly and without breaking the bank.
Dealer Doc’s Priorities
1. Meet the requirements of the platform’s different user groups
- Sales people need a quick view of their performance vs target, all on mobile.
- Management need a snapshot of dealership performance, and the ability to drill into the performance of an individual sales exec.
- The admin team needs to manage user access and maintain the platform with up-to-date sales data.
2. Accommodate complex commission calculation schemes
- Tiered targets, multiple ancillary products, different commission calculation methods, compliance penalties… It’s easy to see why salespeople struggled to understand their performance!
3. High data security requirements
- Employee targets, compensation and dealership level performance are all highly confidential.
- Employees must not have access to each other’s performance, and core business data must remain secure.
The Approach
- Blue Mongoose’s design team created separate user flows for each of the different user groups, framing discussions around a detailed suite of wireframes to ensured the platform met the brief long before development began.
- A progressive web app (PWA) approach provided high-quality mobile functionality without the complexity and cost of a native app and without sacrificing any desktop usability.
- The reference client’s full commission scheme was replicated within the database (Glide in this instance), allowing the team to calculate commissions on historic data to ensuring platform accuracy before launch.
- Data security was maintain through a combination of strict user permissions, authenticated logins and AWS hosting.
Results
1. Dealer doc secured their crucial reference client
- The Dealer Doc platform is live with the first reference client, with metrics in place to calculate value delivered.
- This provides critical pricing data, a first case study and testimonials to support the company’s sales and marketing activities.
2. Seed round raised
- Blue Mongoose acted as the company's CTO throughout the fundraising process, participating in multiple investor calls.
- Live product demos and real customer feedback provided investors with comfort that the product was real and working.
3. Ongoing tech and product leadership
- Blue Mongoose continues to guide product direction as Dealer Doc’s fractional CTO/CPO.
- Blue Mongoose continues to provide Dealer Doc’s development and design team, focused on roadmap, feature development and support.