DrivingSales Announces Winners of 2009 Vendor Ratings Awards

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- DrivingSales (www.drivingsales.com), the auto industry's leading social media platform and largest online community, today announced award winners in the first annual DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Awards.  The Awards measure dealer satisfaction with vendors by allowing dealers to publicly rate and review their vendors in a real-time, anonymous - yet verified - setting.  Vendors who achieve the highest rankings in dealer satisfaction, as determined by the thousands of dealers who are part of the DrivingSales community, are eligible to receive "Highest Rated" and "Top Rated" Awards.

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"We would like to congratulate the winners of the first annual DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Awards, all of whom have achieved a standard of excellence in satisfaction that is resonating with the nation's dealers," said DrivingSales CEO and Founder Jared Hamilton.  "We launched DrivingSales Vendor Ratings to help dealers find and select the best vendor partners based on feedback from those who know best -- their colleagues who use them -- while at the same time holding vendors accountable to deliver better products for the dealers."

The DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Awards will be presented to the winners at the 2010 NADA Convention and Expo in Orlando Florida on February 13th and 14th.  Award winners are also featured in the inaugural issue of DrivingSales Dealership Innovation Guide, an annual publication that features cutting-edge and proven best practices, as submitted by the DrivingSales.com community.  

"These awards are a natural extension of the collaborative process of DrivingSales.com and the Vendor Rating section inside the DrivingSales community," said Hamilton.  "We are proud to recognize the top three vendors in each category as ranked by the dealers who use them."

The 2009 DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Award Winners are (listed by category):

Full award results are available online at www.DrivingSales.com/innovation.

About Vendor Ratings

DrivingSales Vendor Ratings are the industry's first and only neutral, comprehensive vendor rating forum featuring real-time peer reviews and honest competitor comparisons – searchable by category, company or rating – and are one of the most popular features of DrivingSales.com. DrivingSales.com opened nationally in 2008 in response to the industry's need for an open, objective collaborative forum to help the leading edge of the industry navigate through the current crisis -- and into the future.

Awards Methodology:

Dealers were asked to rate their vendors on a 1-5 star scale, including whether they would recommend the vendor product to colleagues, and why they would or would not recommend the product. All survey-takers were verified to ensure that the reviewers were actual dealership employees. Vendors are scored based on a weighted bayesian algorithm, a standard mathematical calculation that looks at the number of stars the reviewer gave as well as the statistically valid sample size needed, relative to the competitive set, to create a ranking based on the statistical accuracy of the results. The top three vendors in each category earned the awards. All dealers and dealership managers are encouraged to participate in the ratings by visiting DrivingSales.com/ratings.

About DrivingSales

DrivingSales.com (www.drivingsales.com) is the largest and premiere online community for the auto industry, where its thousands of members, including dealers, dealership managers, manufacturers, industry experts and vendors, collaborate and share best practices in a 20-group style setting. At DrivingSales, members create profiles and communicate with each other; build their networks and knowledgebase; share and rate proven strategies, and have access to relevant content contributed by fellow industry experts, including blogs, videos, interviews, a social news feed and more. Dealer members rate and review vendor products - sharing their experiences with the DrivingSales community - while vendors have the opportunity to provide feedback on reviews and showcase their products and services. DrivingSales was created and built from the ground up in 2003 by Jared Hamilton, a third generation auto dealer, as a private automotive business community to network his NADA Dealer Candidate Academy class. The site opened nationally in 2008 and is the auto industry's leading social media custom platform.

SOURCE DrivingSales.com