Dealer strategy with showroom-level practicality.
The Dealer Playbook is a brisk interview show for people working inside or around dealership operations. Recent conversations center on AI, customer trust, lender relationships, fixed ops, ad tech, and the daily choices that separate a usable process from dealership noise.
PRESS PLAY
The Dealer Playbook is an interview-driven business show for the automotive retail world. It has a dealership heartbeat. The conversations sound like they come from people who know what a showroom, CRM, vendor booth, and manager meeting actually feel like. Recent episodes come heavily from NADA conversations, with guests discussing AI, ad tech, sales intelligence, fixed operations, affordability, lender relationships, and marketing leadership. The show is not anti-technology. It is skeptical of lazy technology. Again and again, the interviews return to the same question: does this tool make people better, or does it just create another shiny layer between the dealer and the customer? That makes the AI episodes more useful than generic trend chatter. Mackenzie Wiltrout frames AI as needing organic intelligence. Joey Zanetis talks about guaranteed human connection and brand health. Christine Lentz connects lost customers, follow-up timing, and fixed operations to the human side of retention. Matt Lasher brings affordability, broken process, and lender-dealer communication into the same conversation. Ashley Cavazos points at the strategic seat marketing leaders often lack. Jay Ku describes sales intelligence as a way to raise the floor for reps rather than replace them. Subi Ghosh pushes for better data layers and stronger collaboration across advertising. Jeff Swickard talks about building an AI department through iteration, employee input, and long-term organizational learning. Michael Cirillo’s role is active and conversational: he jokes, tests an idea aloud, summarizes what he is hearing, and keeps pulling abstract points back into dealership practice. The show works because it does not pretend automotive retail is clean or simple. It treats dealers as resilient operators facing messy incentives, shifting search behavior, changing customers, and constant process pressure. The result is brisk, practical, and very inside-baseball in the best sense. It is for listeners who want business ideas translated into the language of stores, teams, follow-up, trust, and execution.
Made for: Built for dealership operators, automotive marketers, vendor-side leaders, sales managers, and retail professionals who care about execution. It especially fits listeners tracking AI, customer experience, and process improvement inside auto retail.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its ability to turn industry buzz into dealership-specific operating questions. It keeps AI, marketing, and sales strategy tied to trust, follow-up, team adoption, and what actually happens on the floor.
The Dealer Playbook is the podcast for serious automotive professionals. The ones who think beyond the transaction.Hosted by Michael Cirillo, now in its 12th year, The Dealer Playbook delivers straight-talk conversations with the dealers, operators, and leaders who are actually building something.If you run a store, lead a team, or are building a career worth having, this is your show.New episodes every week. Follow so you don't miss one.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Michael Cirillo turns dealership strategy into concrete conversations about sales performance, financing, customer trust and the operational use of AI.
The Dealer Playbook follows Michael Cirillo into detailed conversations about how automotive businesses sell, finance vehicles, adopt technology and earn customer trust.
Michael Cirillo turns dealership strategy into the conversation you'll wish happened before the sales meeting.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
AI gets a seat at the table, but trust, fit, and brand health still steer the dealership conversation.
In a live NADA conversation hosted by iHeartMedia Automotive and Auto Media Marketplace, Joey Zanidis, EVP at iHeartMedia Automotive, makes the case for "guaranteed human" as a useful answer to AI-era targeting and the drive for smarter data.
Affordability, lender friction, and the dealer-side gap between product and reality.
Matt Lasher of Streamline Auto keeps the focus on a basic mismatch: vendors often think they are solving one problem, while dealers feel another, and affordability only sharpens that divide.
A practical dealership-floor conversation about using AI to make personalized sales habits easier to repeat.
The Dealer Playbook keeps its focus on a useful, grounded question: how AI can help dealership salespeople extend what they already do well. Jay Koo, founder and CEO of Hey Greenlight, explains Wingman through specific showroom scenarios, including having a customer's favorite…
A grounded review of AI strategy in dealership operations, centered on data connections, open communication, and employee involvement.
The Dealer Playbook frames Jeff Swickard's AI work at Swickard Auto Group as an operating discipline, not a shiny side project. As president and CEO, Swickard describes a deliberate look across fixed operations, variable operations, used, and new, followed by the creation of an…
A dealership finance episode that connects per-copy ambition with a disciplined morning routine.
The Dealer Playbook's conversation with Evan Walters keeps automotive finance performance tied to structure, repetition, and per-copy improvement.
A candid Dealer Playbook conversation tying Luke Lunkenheimer's difficult past to trust, discovery, and persuasion in car sales.
Luke Lunkenheimer's path from high school athlete to the car business, then through drug addiction, incarceration, and bank robbery, gives this Dealer Playbook episode a hard-earned angle on persuasion.
Marketing war stories turned into usable playbooks.
Revenue leaders talking shop on AI, pipeline and value.
Luke Lunkenheimer, president of Paid to Persuade, shares his journey from bank robber to car sales expert.
Michael Cirillo interviews Evan Walters, an F&I finance director who averaged $3,000 profit per vehicle over 8,000 deals in five years.
This episode features marketing strategist Ondar Tarlow discussing how car dealers can use VIP events to activate more buyers, with insights on audience understanding and avoiding event failures.
This episode features Shasta Haddock discussing strategies to convert social media leads into car sales, focusing on eliminating ineffective sales templates and leveraging modern techniques in the automotive industry.
This episode explores how dealerships can identify truly impactful AI tools amid market saturation, emphasizing the importance of human oversight and vendor expertise.
AI is making trust feel like the scarce thing again.
This episode explores how automotive dealers can reframe customer defection as an opportunity for recapturing lost business through fixed operations, featuring insights from Kristine Lentz of Urban Science.
Matt Lasher of Streamline Auto joins the host at NADA.
This episode discusses why marketing leaders in dealerships need a strategic role to drive growth, featuring insights from Ashley Cavazos at NCM Associates.
Jay Koo, founder and CEO of Hey Greenlight, joins The Dealer Playbook at NADA.
Jeff Swickard, president and CEO of Swickard Auto Group, describes hiring a director of artificial intelligence and a small staff after finding that third-party tools could not meet every departmental need.
Charles Cannon scripts the exact video message he sends a customer who left without buying a BMW.
This episode features an interview with Alan Dickie discussing the laws of success that top performers in retail auto follow, based on his experience in sales and leadership.
This episode features an interview with Agnes Di Leonardi, who shares her 30-year journey as a woman in the male-dominated automotive industry to encourage diversity and inclusion.
The host interviews Christine Mitchell at the Toronto International Auto Show about avoiding industry mistakes and unlocking customer loyalty, sparked by personal reflections on family and business succession.