A new auto dealership case study released by FrogData illustrates how unifying, aggregating and visualizing real-time and historical data can help auto dealers optimize their used vehicle strategies, particularly when it comes to tracking inventory trends, highlighting areas of opportunity and identifying used vehicle acquisition and sales improvements.
The strategies utilized by the dealership analyzed for the case study, Virginia’s First Team Automotive, focused on technology that was able to bring together data from across all dealership data sources and, through AI analytics, generate easy-to-understand reports. This enabled a “vehicle first” marketing strategy focused on analyzing and pinpointing the vehicles that provided the best overall resale gross and turn scenario to attract customers.
The reports, generated via the FrogData platform, helped identify which used vehicles made the most sense to pursue and showed First Team Automotive exactly what they needed to purchase, how many and which models/trims produced the best overall results. This gave First Team Automotive the ability to pay up for vehicles from existing customers by eliminating auction fees and controlling reconditioning costs.
As a result, First Team Automotive was able to increase:
- Used vehicle profits by 54%
- Franchise trade-in profits by nearly 70%
- Average gross profit on non-franchise-purchased used vehicles by 105%
“Data is only as good as your ability to use it. Over the years we’ve struggled to use our own data to understand how we sell cars, what kind of models we sell…and who is most likely to buy and trade-in valuable vehicles. It was so frustrating,” said Ashton Lewis Jr. First Team Automotive COO. “Now, with FrogData reports, we’re able to leverage our data to understand the nature of our business, find organic solutions and increase our sales results – even in a tough market.”
The reports proved of particular importance in the current market where trade-ins are way down and low inventory and margin pressure are significant challenges due to higher used vehicle acquisition costs. The results have broad implications for the many dealerships who are currently struggling to find the right used vehicle mix and volume. Says Lewis: “Trades are more valuable than ever. We can spot process breakdowns just by looking at the Trade-In Analysis report. It has been priceless to see how each store adjusts to pipeline selling and not losing trades.”
The case study notes that on average, thousands of dealership hours per day are wasted creating reports that no one can understand, equal to approximately 1 billion hours lost per year to useless reports based on confusing data. FrogData is able to automatically generate multiple reports and analytics for dealerships from data across every dealership platform, including the DMS, CRM, Google Analytics, IoT, social media, inventory management platforms and more, enabling dealerships to instantly visualize key areas of opportunity and/or concern.
The case study points out that good data platforms that aggregate data from all dealership sources can solve three important challenges:
- More accurate data = Better outcomes
- Timely and aggregated data = Greater efficiency and responsiveness
- Simple data visualization = Increased effectiveness of findings
Because the reports solved these challenges and put key insights at their fingertips, First Team Automotive dealerships were able to make precise decisions about what to buy and at what price – all based on specifics around sales history and model sales.
“I look at the homepage dashboard every day to see if something needs my attention,” continued Lewis. “Once I see something out of line, I’m able to dive into the reports and analytics to determine the root cause and put a game plan in place to improve our performance.”
FrogData Reports leveraged by First Team Automotive included:
- Used Vehicle by Source
- Used Vehicle Buying Optimizer
- Trade-In Analysis
- Labor Trend Report
- Contract to Cash
- Expense Analysis
To read the full case study and results, click here: https://www.frogdata.com/data-driven-dealership-case-study1-en-us.htm
