From Engineering Spec to Sales Conversation

CDK Global's AVRS division sold SaaS software into the automotive dealership market, one of the most competitive and consolidated software categories there is. Dealers had real alternatives, switching costs were survivable, and every competitor was shipping features on a similar cadence.

I was Head of Integrated Marketing for the division. When product management and our internal development teams identified an opportunity and built a new capability, my job started: turning a technical feature into something the people who actually sign contracts could understand, evaluate, and want. Easy Fee was one of those features, and I owned it from naming through go-to-market.

Fee calculation was a genuine operational pain point for dealerships, and the product team had built something that solved it. But a well-built feature and a well-positioned one are not the same thing.

Easy Fee arrived with no name, no positioning, and no messaging. It also had to do double duty in a competitive market:

• Acquisition. Give sales a reason for a prospective dealer to choose AVRS over an incumbent or a rival bid
• Retention. Give existing dealer clients a reason to feel the platform was actively getting better, in a category where customers were being courted constantly

And the audience was not one person. Decision-makers and influencers inside a dealership evaluate software differently from each other, and none of them were going to sit through an explanation of how the calculation engine worked. The technical value had to be compressed into something bite-sized without being hollowed out.