What’s the most urgent challenge for the world’s car dealers right now? And how do the most successful dealers deal with it? Phyron’s Anton Johnsson works with major car dealers across Europe every day of the week.
Hi Anton. What’s the number one headache for dealers right now?
Everybody feels the impact of the high interest rates and slowdown in the economy. Consumers have less money to invest, many feel unsure about the future, or even about their jobs. So they keep their car for another year, buy a less expensive model, or a second-hand alternative. Which means less revenues for the dealer. For many people the car or cars make up a major share of the household budget.
So, what are the dealers doing about it?
One answer out of many is to speed up the turnaround time. A more dynamic rotation of cars means that more potential buyers can find what they are looking for. It also enables them to acquire more cars at more favorable terms, which improves their business margins. And every day in stock costs a lot of money. Interest on the capital, storage space, value depreciation, and a whole range of other costs.
So, they’ve got every reason to speed up the turnover. If they succeed they could enjoy a snowball effect where all the positive factors reinforce each other. More buyers, more attractive cars, better margins that allow you to invest in new sales activities, and so on.
To maximize the average turnover speed it’s important to take ALL cars into account. Including the least attractive ones. Maybe they can avoid selling off some slow-moving vehicles to an auction house or a dealer at the lower end of the market.
That’s, as you just said, one answer. HOW do they go about selling the cars faster?
One thing the winners seem to have in common is that they really focus on the buying experience. So each potential buyer spends more time with the car or cars they are interested in. Which is not easy when other temptations, like another dealer site, is never more than a click away.
You only have a few seconds to catch the interest of a potential buyer. Attractive pictures help, but also high-lighting the right selling points, stimulating the right buying motives. One way of doing that faster and better is video.
Yes, what about video, that seems to be a hot topic now?
… and for good reasons. Video has always been the most effective way to present a product, but with hundreds of cars in stock it’s a time-consuming and costly effort to do manually. They need some form of automation, not only to present the cars on their websites. They must present them where the buyers are: In marketplaces, social media, and so on.
To get video for all your cars you need an automated solution, and since a few years back there is a fully automated service that seems to tick all the boxes. And the future is even more exciting, there is a lot of research and development going on right now.
