Give Your Phone Number To A Car Salesmen: How A Lesson In Trust and Technology Led To CarCodeSMS’ Success

Give Your Phone Number To A Car Salesmen: How A Lesson In Trust and Technology Led To CarCodeSMS’ Success

Nick, Steve and Prabode had their business plan laid out, their go-to-market strategy was locked and loaded. They just needed to do one thing for their startup, CarCodeSMS, to be successful: Get customers to trust the least trusted people in America – car salesmen.

Their plan wasn’t just to re-establish trust with salesmen, they also wanted customers to be comfortable buying cars from salesmen, and having conversations with salesmen via text. If these goals seem ambitious, it’s because they are.

Nick, Steve and Prabode (known to his friends as Pro) built CarCodeSMS to give customers a safe and easy way to text salesmen questions about cars, instead of having to drive down to a dealership in person, wait for an email response, or wait on hold. “Prospective buyers can text their salesman as easily as they would text their friend. There’s no app for users to install.” said Pro. If they want to stop texting the salesman, they just reply “STOP” to the number, and that’s it.: adds Pro. CarCodeSMS is fully TCPA compliant.

The novel idea of texting customers to land sales caught Edmunds’ eye after CarCodeSMS won their hackathon last year.  All of the text messaging is tracked, logged, and sent through Twilio so salespeople can track leads efficiently. Edmunds, a third party site that connects thousands of dealerships to customers, acquired CarCodeSMS shortly after the hackathon.

“It’s been a crazy year,” said Nick. CarCodeSMS saw 2300% growth, expanding to 4,500 dealerships after Edmunds acquired them. Edmunds themselves are drastically increasing the value they bring to car dealerships. The mobile leads Edmunds bring in close at three times the rate of desktop leads.

“This year has been super exciting.” adds Nick. “All of what we were doing was automotive focused, and applicable in other areas, but since we were so focused on the auto industry and Edmunds is the premier name in the space, it’s enabled our vision to play out on the market.”

You can catch Pro and Nick sharing the vision that led to CarCodeSMS’s success at Signal, May 19th-20th in San Francisco.