Whitepapers

How to Kickstart Auto Sales After COVID-19 Disruptions It may seem counterintuitive to view the post-pandemic marketplace as an "opportunity," but that's what it will be for dealers who are prepared to serve customers in the new environment. Consumers still need cars. The sales cycle will restart – even if the sales experience looks a bit different after business disruptions due to COVID-19. Dealership leaders need to plan now for how they will structure staff and manage their operations once showroom floors can re-open. To compete and succeed in the coming months, dealers will need to: • Efficiently identify the high value leads • Engage leads with messaging relevant to their unique wants and needs • Ensure that customers' expectations are consistently met and exceeded, especially in areas where those expectations may have been changed by recent experiences Create Opportunity by Identifying Leads The single most important thing a dealership can do to position itself to compete for the opportunities in the post-pandemic marketplace is to be prepared to identify and engage with quality sales leads. While this concept is nothing new, the process of doing it effectively looks different now than ever before – and not just because of COVID-19. Take standalone equity mining, for example. As consumers hold on to their vehicles longer, this tried-and-true method has lost much of its inherent value. However, perhaps the largest change from traditional wisdom is that it's increasingly untrue that lead quality and lead quantity are mutually exclusive or inversely proportional. Instead, modern digital tools have largely automated the process of sifting through and identifying viable leads, while predictive marketing technology analyzes the data to determine which leads are the most likely to convert. To do this, dealers need both access to high-quality data from both public and proprietary sources including their DMS and the right tools to analyze the data. This modern approach empowers dealers to prioritize the most valuable opportunities first, driving incremental sales and revenue while lowering the costs of spending time and resources on the wrong prospects. CAR SALES MADE TO CUSTOMERS WITH NEGATIVE EQUITY: NEW 33% USED 26% Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2019

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