Summer Series: An Interview with Rich Deiley

RoadVantage regularly seeks feedback from our agents and dealers to make sure we’re providing the best customer service possible. We ask our agents and dealers why they’ve chosen RoadVantage, and about their experience working with RoadVantage. We’ve learned a great deal, and to wrap up the summer, we’re sharing our interview with Rich Deiley, National Sales Manager, TST Inc.:

Rich Deiley, National Sales Manager for TST Inc., first encountered RoadVantage at the F&I Summit a number of years ago. At the time, TST was selling the product of another, competing provider, but they knew of Garret Lacour, owner of RoadVantage, so they decided to stop by and say hello. It was the RoadVantage Bus, he noted, that made it hard to miss them.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

“We got to talking, and we hit it off,” Deiley said. “Garret was there, and Brad [Blizzard], his national sales manager, who became our associate. They were easy to talk to, and wanted to know what we did.”

It was the simplicity of the product, how it worked and RoadVantage’s approach to sales and claims that really drew them in. Deiley was at the show with Tom Sullivan, the general manager of TST, and they had both come to the show knowing they were looking for new products to add to their portfolio. After speaking to Garret and Brad, he said, it stood out immediately that RoadVantage was taking the same approach to business that they themselves had taken.

“The car business can get kind of hectic,” noted Deiley. “But we’ve done very well at what we do because of the approach we take. I base everything on the three ‘Ps’: People, Process and Product. The people at RoadVantage were wonderful right from the start. I didn’t know much about their products until I started to deal with them, but I was impressed. And as we’ve done business and see how they work their process… it was kind of a no-brainer for us to work with them.”

TST is based in Pittsburgh, Pa., and is a specialty chemical company. In business since 1978, the company has built a reputation around having the finest appearance protection products in the automotive industry. For Deiley, partnering with a third party could have gone very wrong, since he was putting his name and reputation on the line every time he sold it. Today, that’s not something he ever worries about.

“I am in the field, in the foxhole with the sales people in the stores,” he noted. “I am not only telling them how high-quality our products are, I get in there and show the products to their retail customers as well. And this is what Brad did; he didn’t just tell me how good the products and process were, he actually showed me. Brad had great insight on how to explain and market the proper way, instead of just selling us a product and walking away. He has the same mentality I have.”

RoadVantage also takes as good care of the end user as it does its agents, Deiley noted. “Exclusions are minimal and easy to explain to the end user – what’s covered and what’s not. And RoadVantage made it even better when they came out with True Coverage – they made a good product even better. There are a lot of loopholes in competitors’ products, but I don’t have concerns now. It is easy to explain to both the people I’m training and customers buying it. They walk away knowing exactly what they have, and if they do have a claim, it is handled in such a rapid time frame it’s amazing. It puts another feather in our cap.”

At the end of the day, Deiley believes that the partnership with RoadVantage is pretty close to perfect. The way the two companies do business just fits together, and he appreciated that RoadVantage is always looking forward, and making sure TST and their other agents are involved and included. “We were meant for each other.”