Cross-Sell

$32 billion is a lot of money. Why would automobile giant General Motors (GM) invest over $30 billion in the hopes of breaking ground in a new frontier? It is possibly because the something they are looking to innovate is both novel and, most importantly, inevitable.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have lately been meeting the demands of a very patient automotive market. Sustainable transportation is the future, and GM—among many other leading manufacturers—intends to be a front runner in this fast-growing, technologically advanced marketplace. GM's collaborations with car dealerships are set to witness quite a radical change that will redefine automotive sales for years to come.

Car dealerships and other related industry incumbents that had established their operations biased toward the internal combustion engine (ICE) must adapt and evolve rapidly. Accomplishing this is easier said than done, and the challenges such organizations face—dealerships in particular—require comprehensive IT and marketing expertise to deliver on the expectations of tomorrow. Cross-Sell, a longstanding automotive market data and reporting company, has been studying the industry since 1989 and was ready for a change such as this well-before EVs took flight globally. Consequently, it has solidified its position as a respected automotive data source by providing custom analyses of vehicle registration data.

Cross-Sell currently excels at equipping its clients with comprehensive automotive data tools for local markets in the U.S., allowing them to make data-driven decisions based on monthly registration data. The company consolidates information on all registered vehicles, helping clients capitalize on such information sets for sustained growth. The company has recently concentrated on answering the questions of when and where the adoption of EVs is happening today and analyzing market-based trends.

The Guarantees of Data-Driven Decision Making

“Cross-Sell enables companies in the automotive industry to be smarter and one step ahead in this ever-changing and competitive market. We provide the most up-to-date information that helps clients easily identify where EVs are trending; data at one's fingertips,” says David Wall, director of sales and product at Cross-Sell. The company helps its clients make strategic and data-driven decisions by transforming vast amounts of anonymized data and activity signals into actionable, impactful, and profitable intelligence and insights.

Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEM) who may have been slow to partake in the EV revolution can see the EV competition landscape easily by leveraging Cross Sell’s data. The knowledge gained by studying Cross-Sell’s data sets helps clients make location-based decisions on their EV expansion plans.

For instance, following the trend of EV adoption, the future of electric power grids comes into question. Municipalities and metropolitans worldwide will soon be expected to accommodate charging stations and improve their infrastructure accordingly. Depending on such factors, Cross-Sell empowers all EV stakeholders to react faster to vehicle surges in a particular zip code and get ahead of new demand on their networks or inventory.
The company's intuitive flagship offering, the Cross-Sell Interactive platform, is the channel through which Wall and his team of seasoned industry professionals aid dealerships in today’s highly competitive market. Having witnessed how dealerships and big data firms have responded to digitalization over 20 years, Cross-Sell was highly meticulous in designing a solution that made the most sense to them. “The Cross-Sell Interactive platform gives our clients the ability to slice and dice data as they see fit,” explains Wall.

The company first offers clients a host of data points to choose from and then researches relevant information to understand and create dashboards depending on a client's targeted data trends. For example, car dealers can make well informed, strategic business decisions backed by years of market data. The platform is architected to provide clients with a one-stop solution that ensures their competitiveness in this volatile landscape. Thus, Cross-Sell took careful measures to proffer in-depth views on local automotive sales and registrations across the nation to help dealers and their partners create the most effective strategies for increased market shares.

The company’s platform entails various purpose-built tools as well. Cross-Sell’s Interactive heat mapping tools enable clients to identify the hottest selling zip codes, study the areas and trends around them at a granular level, and highlight the top dealerships in that competitive landscape. In addition, the Snapshot view within Cross-Sell Interactive provides an overview of a custom market area for quick visibility on specific makes, models, and zip codes. “Within 24 hours of the DMV closing its books for the month, we can inform dealers, lenders, hedge funds, and OEMs of how many sales took place in the previous month by zip code, make, model, segment, fuel type, and dealer to help determine the latest market trends,” states Wall. The fact that these valuable insights are delivered through an online portal, emailed in Excel or PDF formats—with the option of printed reports— adds a level of convenience that is not easily found in this fast-paced marketplace. However, the company has improved on this front by delivering reports with a new notification system.

Keeping Up with the Online Revolution

Cross-Sell made several well-planned moves toward capitalizing on the widespread adoption of digitalized products early on—alongside their market contemporaries and clients. While digitizing its business, the company also started leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) tools to boost the efficacies of its data and platform. Moreover, much of the dealership has transitioned from the traditional brick-and-mortar setup to a more online milieu.

Cross Sell expected such a shift in the market and pre-emptively innovated solutions to address the same.
This intelligent digitization has enabled the company to notify clients through alerts that elaborate on details pertaining to the kinds of vehicles trending at any given time. Dealerships are now fully informed about the type of inventory to stock up on, eliminating unnecessary expenses.

The company additionally applies a statistical process control (SPC) methodology to revamp traditional practices based on static Excel sheets and PDF reports. Via its ML competencies, the automotive data expert can help its clients apply and study statistics over any given dataset and derive the answers they are looking for expeditiously. Be it a dealership, an OEM, or an emerging EV charging station company, Cross Sell delivers actionable insights based on what the client cares about without having to sift through mountains of data. “We compile data locally, state-wide, and nationally then automate processes to provide the answers our clients are looking for so they can spend more time optimizing their business versus staring at a massive dataset,” says Wall.

A Consultative Approach & Corporate Spirit

It is important to emphasize that Cross-Sell configures its solution to satisfy each client's unique, individualistic needs. When meeting with a potential client for the first time, the company asks a series of consultative questions to understand what they are looking for and how best to service them. Based on the feedback gathered from such interactions, Wall and his team work toward adding the requested features and capabilities to the solution with haste.

Cross-Sell’s sales team has numerous years of experience in the automotive space, whether on the vendor side, at a dealership, or in sales and management areas. And they are entirely dedicated to improving the businesses and lives of each client. “The common theme for us at Cross-Sell is that when we help our clients, we help our own business as well,” says Wall.

With this holistic approach, the company produces the fastest turnaround time while maintaining the highest data quality. Cross-Sell currently houses DMV registration data from 27 states, covering all major markets. Still, the company’s database grows as additional states are added and new dealerships are identified, continually broadening access to additional reputable data sources. Cross-Sell is actively looking out for the first registrations of autonomous vehicles, which the company anticipates to be the next significant disruptor after electric automobiles. The company intends to keep a close eye on the trends and activities of this new segment while advancing the AI and ML capabilities of the solutions currently offered to the market.