I appreciate the feedback Dan! We've never tracked our marketing spend per unit so that is a good nugget. It's also a bit humbling as I've been feeling like our turn is solid given our niche and the general structure of our dealership. We don't have fancy softwares to easily track recon times and turn ratio so it has to be done manually.
So our marketing time for last year was around 37 days on average from website to sold. But our purchase >> sold timeline is closer to 90 days on average for all the vehicles we sold. Our average time to get a vehicle through mechanical recon is around 25+ days. There are some glacial changes being made to improve that timeline though.
Well this is a constant battle. Our response times tend to be pretty good. Our follow up sales process can be lacking. We only have 2 full-time sales guys and 1 store manager that also does sales and then both of us in marketing are licensed as well but rarely handle sales.
Typically a good percentage of our monthly sales are from the low hanging fruit. Literally folks beating the door down to buy stuff. So once a lead goes cool after 5-7 days the follow up pattern is not what it should be.
I'll have to discuss this with the GM. Our pricing strategy is more for increased gross than turn. Part of that is as you can probably imagine our ability to process vehicles is not as fast as other dealers. With Euro/Imports and being independent we often have to wait a few days for parts from our suppliers. If I start pricing vehicles to sell fast, we'll end up with the accordion effect of selling a pile of vehicles and then dead period when our inventory drops and service has to catch up.
We simply do not have the capacity in service to get 40 units inspected and recon in a month. We would need at least another high level technician.
Much appreciated. We've got a guy on staff that takes a lot of pride in the photos (and I photo some too). Our marketing of our vehicles has always been done to the nth degree. Photos, descriptions, accuracy, etc. Our goal is that the buyer has already fallen in love and purchased the vehicle in their heart before they get here.
We don't use edmunds. We've got Cars and ATC along with Gurus, carfax and carsoup. Measuring the success between all the sources is a constant battle. I monitor GA4 and our sales guys do an OK job of asking for the sources. We just implemented a customer survey that gets completed after paperwork is signed and has some attribution questions. Unfortunately about 50% contradict either what the source in our CRM says from internet leads. And they have only a 50% rate of obtaining these "required" surveys. The agency is seems to be netting us around 3-4 fb sales per month and sends us tons of traffic to our website. I'm not sure it's worth it. They are very responsive and are constantly tweaking things to make improvements. Still not sure its worth the money though.
