AUTOMOTIVE technology company Marque Group has bought New Zealand lead management specialist AutoPlay, becoming its third business purchase this year and bringing its stable of sales technology acquisitions to five.

AutoPlay provides lead management solutions specifically designed for sales staff working in the dealership environment.

Together with Aura, Smart Loyalty, Three60 CRM and Vital Software, Marque’s purchase of AutoPlay gives the parent company an enviable breadth of auto-focused services including coverage of trade loyalty, customer experience, service retention, customer relationship management, data and analytics.

Marque Group CEO Gary Martin told GoAutoNews Premium that AutoPlay’s innovative solutions to dealership operations had become a backbone tool in New Zealand.

“It has coverage of more than 80 per cent of New Zealand franchised dealers, and we look forward to helping them grow and expand their global operations,” he said.

Mr Martin said that compared with its competitors, AutoPlay was “very different”.

“It is very focused on what it can do for the management of leads from a multitude of sources, not just one,” he said.

“I think that the OEMs and dealers who use the AutoPlay system quickly realise that it is written by people who really know the sales process.

“It allows consistency and the salesperson, on a mobile phone, to follow a process that is very well thought out and allows sales management to consistently review their activities.”

Mr Martin said data required consistency to accurately measure “and sometimes it is the input of data that is not consistent”.

“That leads to inconsistent results and that is just not an option for the sales staff and for the management.”

The NZ-based AutoPlay has already made steps into Australia and has about 30 Australian dealerships as clients.

AutoPlay founder Craig Brown said AutoPlay’s Sales Pipeline solution had become “the source of truth” for a majority of the NZ franchise market.

“We work to support salespeople with tools that are easy, save them time and help them sell more cars,” he said.

Mr Martin said he believed that in joining Marque Group, AutoPlay gets a solid foundation in Australia and immediately gives them an infrastructure, including the use of Marque offices.

“More importantly, it is about leveraging Marque’s contacts while at the same time allowing a flow of new products into the group,” he said.

“We see a natural home also for AutoPlay in our UK and European operations at the appropriate time with the opportunity to work with our UK-based companies Aura, Three60 CRM and Vital Software.”

In Australia and New Zealand, AutoPlay will work alongside Marque entities including Smart Loyalty – which runs the genuine parts B2B loyalty program GetGenuine; Influence, its latest dealer network performance incentive channel solution and Vital Software, which provides data-driven solutions across CRM, lead distribution, CSI management, service and parts performance reporting.

 

Mr Martin said that the latest acquisition was another step along the way to attracting more businesses into the Marque Group company.

“We are still very active in the marketplace and talking to potential partners,” he said.

“We are not full up, for example, and we can see other opportunities.

“We have made three acquisitions this year – the latest being AutoPlay – which is another key part of the group strategy.

“We are very much customer-focused and driven to provide leading applications using high-quality data services that empower our customers to influence results in an ever changing market.

“There are other pieces that could come into our group and I would expect some further acquisitions in 2019.”

By Neil Dowling