Richard Simard

Hailing from New Hampshire, I got my start in automotive in 2012 working for a large dealer group in the Boston marketplace, Quirk Auto Dealers.  We had a small in-house marketing team of about 6 people that effectively covered all digital marketing for the fourteen rooftops. We pulled premier ranking for sales with nearly every brand that we sold without the help of an ad agency, or contracting with any classified sites (i.e. Cars, AutoTrader).  We achieved this through extremely tight workflow efficiencies and software automations. After nearly 3 years at the dealership, I decided to move to the vendor side where I could scale my dig-ad strategy and design skills into the auto industry at large.

I started with Dealer Inspire in 2015 when it employed around thirty people.  I worked as a developer on the website platform building features for my first two and a half years with the company. Development was a lot of fun, but I eventually decided that my industry knowledge was not best applied behind the scenes and spread my wings into a bigger client-facing role.  Dealer Inspire’s CEO offered me the opportunity to lead a new team of Success Managers who would be responsible for building, training and supporting (retention) our ancillary products: Conversations, a chat software, and Online Shopper, a digital retailing software. Then in early 2018, after Cars.com acquired Dealer Inspire, my department was disseminated and I was offered an opportunity to work in a new department, Business Intelligence.

The goal of Business Intelligence was to improve workflow efficiencies, data quality and governance, and product revenue tracking and reporting.  I worked on Salesforce as a super-admin, architect, and developer, gaining valuable insights into revenue operations, healthy sales-to-fulfillment workflows and change management.  Among other things, I migrated our client services teams from scattered systems and articles into a streamlined documentation system, Confluence. I strategized and implemented record-based workflows in Salesforce for teams that were using inefficient, inert task-management systems that did not meet our company’s growth goals.  I commissioned cost-effective integrations that helped to distribute Dealer Inspire’s product data bi-synchronously into our CRM for reduced manual labor, increased accuracy for billing and reporting and, most importantly, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. By the time that I left Dealer Inspire, it employed nearly 600 people and in 2017 had earned the position of 37th fastest growing company in the U.S. (5th fastest in Chicago).

I am just beginning my journey at Dealer Teamwork on the product team and am excited to see what I can do for this rapidly growing family.