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.

I named it. "Easy Fee" was a deliberate choice: the product's entire value was that it removed friction from something that had always been tedious and error-prone, and the name needed to carry that promise before anyone read a single line of copy.

I brought sales in before anything was final. Rather than building positioning in a marketing vacuum and handing it over, I pressure-tested the name and the messaging against how a rep would actually pitch it in a live conversation with a dealer, not how it would look on a slide. If a message could not survive being said out loud to a skeptical general manager, it did not ship.

I built the translation layer. I took the technical capabilities and converted them into bite-sized, understandable value for two audiences at once, prospects and current customers, so the same launch worked as both an acquisition play and a retention play.

I kept the loop open after launch. I tracked adoption and gathered sales feedback, then adjusted the talking points around the objections that kept recurring. The launch was treated as the start of the positioning work rather than the end of it.

Easy Fee contributed to a 20% increase in sales that quarter, driven in part by the sales feedback loop and the messaging adjustments that came out of it.

More broadly, this was the operating model I ran across the AVRS portfolio: identify the opportunity with product, translate the build into market-ready positioning, enable sales directly, and work every launch from both acquisition and retention angles. Applied across the division, that approach helped drive $55M+ in new sales, 300+ dealer clients, and 30%+ market share growth, turning around a business unit that had been underperforming in a crowded category.