Mo Zahabi

Senior Director, Product Consulting

Mo Zahabi is the Senior Director of Product Consulting at VinSolutions and Dealertrack, where he educates dealers on best practices and ensures their offerings exceed industry expectations. Mo has applied his strong foundation in technology-based applications to the automotive industry for the last 18 years. Prior to joining VinSolutions in 2008, Mo was a respected Internet Director and eCommerce Director for two different automotive groups.

Have a question or comment for Mo? Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Articles by Mo Zahabi

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3 New Year’s Resolutions Your Dealership Should Make

Keep up with changing industry and customer trends with these three New Year’s resolutions: 1) be ready for the arrival of artificial intelligence in automotive retail, 2) leverage big data to better understand your customers, and 3) utilize your technology to its fullest to get a leg up on your competition.

Webinar

How Duplicate Processes are Costing You

Data entry is a time-consuming process, but it is a critical part of the engine that keeps effective, profitable dealerships running. Watch Mo Zahabi's webinar to learn how to eliminate double entry at your dealership.

Watch the Webinar

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3 Steps to Personalizing Your Digital Sales and Marketing

Your customers want a car buying journey that’s built around their individual interests. With the right technology, you can collect customer data, identify buying trends, and build a marketing plan that caters to your customers. Here’s more detail on these three important steps to personalizing your marketing efforts.

Webinar

Demystify AI: How Artificial Intelligence Can Enhance Your Dealership

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in the last several years. But what does artificial intelligence really mean, and what does it mean for your dealership? Watch this webinar to find out.

Access the Webinar

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4 Artificial Intelligence Applications that Will Revolutionize Auto Retail

Artificial intelligence is being called the next giant leap forward in auto retail. And savvy dealers are paying attention to the technology trends to implement these four artificial intelligence applications.

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4 Marketing Trends Dealers Need to Know

When customer interests feel like a moving target, dealerships’ marketing efforts are often off the mark. By paying attention to changes in technology and marketing trends, dealerships can deliver more relevant, timely messages that catch their customers’ attention.

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A Proactive Approach to Creating and Converting Leads

Opportunities are dwindling in today's market, and dealers can't afford to wait for customers to call them up. The dealers who succeed in an environment like this are the ones who don’t wait for leads to identify themselves. They proactively dig into their data for behavioral cues, and use it to improve the shopping experience.

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Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality and Other Takeaways from Digital Dealer

Artificial intelligence was one of the hot topics at Digital Dealer 26. With this technology now becoming reality, dealership staff are trying to sort out what artificial intelligence will mean for their jobs, businesses and the broader auto retail market.

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Capitalize on the Holiday Shopping Lift All Year Long

With a few simple and smart actions, the holiday spike in car shopping can continue to provide good tidings well into 2019.

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Dealership Death by Double Entry

At many auto dealerships, a game of Telephone is being played – with customer data. When customer data is entered and get re-entered into dealer software platform after dealer software platform, the transformation of information is often just as dramatic as that phrase in Telephone. But the results you get are far less funny.

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Debunking the Myths behind Artificial Intelligence

With unsettling science fiction as a backdrop, it’s easy to see people are businesses are wary of artificial intelligence. But with myths and fears about artificial intelligence come opportunities for those dealerships willing to discover the truth.

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Decrease Marketing Volume to Increase Sales

When creating dealership marketing campaigns, it is easy to fall into the trap of sending all your emails to all your customers. You’ve already spent the time and money to develop the email, and it doesn’t cost you anymore to send it out to a few more customers, so why not?

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Does your technology help you take action?

We live in a world full of technological widgets. There are as many “solutions” out there as there are potential challenges, and not all of them are created equally. In automotive retail and other industries, many of these solutions deliver up fancy-looking bells and whistles that lack meaningful insights. So many technology solutions today make the path to action unclear.

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Get Up Close and Personal with Your Marketing Messages

Using customer information in your CRM, you can segment your customers based on common attributes and deliver more personalized, relevant marketing messages. Learn the importance of audience segmentation, the benefits of personalized messaging and how to get started.

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GoPro: How Proactive Insights Lead to Sales

Today’s most successful dealerships are no longer waiting for opportunities to come to them. These dealerships are taking a proactive approach across the business and seeing great results, but there’s one area in particular that can positively and quickly impact performance for most dealerships: proactive insights.

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Hire Introverts to Increase Sales

I’ve never had the traits of an extrovert that so many dealers consider critical to sales success, and time and time again my approach was met with skepticism. And yet, in my time at dealerships, I was consistently one of the top performing salespeople. Many dealers are missing top talent by failing to look outside the box when hiring sales teams.

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How Data Mining Creates Resale Opportunities With Existing Customers

With auto sales volume slowing, many dealers are wondering how to acquire enough new customers to stay profitable. But dealers already have a gold mine of sales opportunities at their fingertips: their existing customers. Even if winning new customers becomes more difficult, there are more sales opportunities already in your database than you might think.

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How to Get the Most Out of Customer Data by Using the Personal Touch

The auto industry is blessed with an abundance of data that can help us do our jobs better. But there are too many situations where that data is not used effectively – and customers’ expectations aren’t met, leads are missed and sales are lost. As an industry, we’re currently falling short in giving customers a great experience. But if we use the data we have to personalize the customer experience, sales and retention will improve.

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How to Keep Data Double Entry from Haunting Your Dealership

Data double entry can be ghost-like. Many dealers understand it is haunting their business; maybe your software platforms aren’t integrated or your processes aren’t quite right. But many dealers fail to recognize how double entry is wreaking havoc on all areas of their business: their processes, their culture and their customers. Take these three steps and you’ll be on your way to escaping death by double entry.

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It’s Time to Shift to a Single View

Today’s most successful dealers have transformed operations across their business see each customer as what they really are: one person. There are three major reasons for shifting your operations to be focused on a single view of the customer: data hygiene, streamlined workflow and customer connection quality.

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Key Info to Communicate to Your Customers

Now is the time to set yourself apart from your competitors with an experience that makes customers feel like VIPs, even from their living rooms. Here are some key pieces of info you need to make sure your customers can find quickly and easily.

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Make the Most of Your Customers’ Wish Lists

Good inventory management is all about having the cars your customers want. With the right tools and strategies, you can get the necessary insights into what customers want and how to deliver that perfect vehicle to them.

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Meeting Demands in the Age of the Customer

One in three Americans would rather go to the DMV, do their taxes or sit in the middle airplane seat than go through the process of buying a car. In today's post-peak market, dealerships must adjust to the current business cycle: The Age of the Customer. Here’s a quick checklist to see if your dealership’s customer experience is up to the expectations of shoppers in the Age of the Customer.

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Physical + Digital = Great Customer Experience

As customer expectations have changed, it has become more critical than ever for customer experience to always be top of mind for dealers. In today’s marketplace, that experience goes beyond the four walls of your dealership. It starts online. Learn how you can connect the digital and brick-and-mortor experiences for your customers.

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Reach Customers with the Right Communication Channels

What you say isn’t the only important consideration for your dealership’s customer communications; it is also important to consider the channels you use to say it. Here are a few key channels to focus on as you continue to connect with your customers digitally.

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Read the Signs Your Customers are Ready to Buy

One of the best ways to ensure your dealership continues to capture business is by anticipating customer needs – not waiting on customers to make the first move. Dealership software platforms are a treasure trove of data. But many dealers aren’t sure how to harness the powerful insights at their fingertips – and ultimately drive sales and retention.

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The Proactive Approach to Inventory Management

In most dealerships, inventory management is a reactive process. Inventory becomes available, and dealers react by deciding whether that vehicle is a good choice for their lot. But with today’s shrinking margins and plateauing new car sales, today’s most successful dealers are leaving reactive inventory management behind. Learn how to take a PROactive approach at your dealership.

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The Value of Outsourcing Your Dealership’s Marketing

Outsourcing your dealership’s marketing can save costs and boost your brand’s perception. Plus, it can help you take full advantage of your data to give your customers a better, more personalized car buying experience.

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Understand the Terms behind the Tech: Key AI Phrases

To understand how artificial intelligence can help your dealership, you should understand what artificial intelligence and other key related concepts mean.

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What Artificial Intelligence Can (and Can’t) Do for Your Dealership

While Hollywood’s interpretations of artificial intelligence are entertaining to watch, they have left some misconceptions about the technology as it finds its way to dealerships. What can artificial intelligence deliver? What’s the reality and what’s the hype? Read on for more info on what AI can and can’t do.