Profitability is possible with online retailing, but you have to take an omnichannel approach. In this session, Amit Chandarana from Roadster and Joel Bassam from Easterns Automotive Group will breakdown the process changes you need to consider in order to compete with new-dealer model threats like Carvana, Vroom, Shift etc. Bassam will also share his story of radical changes across culture, process and people strategy that significantly cut costs and reduced transaction time.

Takeaways:

• Identifying champions in your store who can affect change & ensure success
• Building consumer trust in your omnichannel sales model
• Launching fast and showing efficiency gains early

In this session, learn what kind of shoppers are visiting your website, what activities they are performing and where they are coming from. Through proprietary event tracking technology, we have uncovered a world of invisible shoppers who are not showing up in your CRM systems, but are 4x more likely to buy a vehicle from you. We will discuss how to identify these invisible shoppers, how lead closing ratios may differ drastically based on their behaviors and how you can better weight these ROI inputs for sales sourced to your website. Attendees will walk away with a clearer understanding of how the delicate digital car shopping eco-system works together and how to manipulate that eco-system in your favor.

Takeaways

Through in-depth research and data science, we have uncovered a world of invisible online car shoppers:

• We intend to share data from this original research as well as a breakdown of different dealer website shopper profiles to better understand who’s on dealers’ websites, how they’re getting there and what actions they’re taking once they arrive.
• We will also break out used-car shoppers specifically to show the differences between behaviors of used and new shoppers.

The automotive industry looks much different than it once did. Margins are compressing. Resources are thinning, and wholesale demand is at a high, and yet there are still the same number of hours in the day. In this engaging workshop, Doug Hadden, VP, ACV Auctions, will outline how you can increase your bottom line and spend less of your valuable time sourcing wholesale by utilizing technology without compromising trust, transparency or efficiency. Doug will talk about how tech innovations can provide real-time capability, expand your reach, lower your expected reconditioning costs and give you the ability to provide quality vehicles for your customers.

Takeaways:

• How you can leverage online wholesale channels effectively to save time so you can be available to make more deals on the lot
• How to increase your market opportunities without increasing cost or exposure to mistakes or arbitrations
• The best practices to increase your bottom line using wholesale efficiency tracking

Warning: This presentation isn’t about margin compression, digital retailing, artificial intelligence or other buzzwords. Learn how to deal with the 85% of customers that will never become a lead.

Takeaways:

• Consumers’ path to purchase is not linear.
• Market data is key to sharing and leveraging information with the consumer.
• Dealers’ top priority should be investing in and reinforcing their brand.

As retail demand shifts to used cars, e-commerce and omnichannel models are slowly but steadily challenging the benefits of market-based incumbency for retailers as they see Carvana delivering next day in 100+ markets and CarMax lay plans to go omnichannel this year.  The heretofore advantages of location, location, location for local retailers are under assault as respected automotive analysts like McKinsey & Company predict that by the year 2030, as much as 50% of used car sales will be conducted online. This session will show how expanding certified marketing and CPO vehicle sales offer a way for dealers to retain in-market buyers and conquest out of market buyers.

Takeaways:

• Why maximizing the used sales opportunity is critical in this changing environment
• What product features and marketing elements drive the used vehicle buyer in today’s market
• How to organize a go-to-market strategy which cuts through the clutter and differentiates your inventory to the used car shopper today

Easy ways to retain more used car gross and bring buyers to your dealership from your internet vehicle detail page.

• How to build value in each used vehicle listed on the internet  and retain more vehicle gross profit
• Why you should focus on your internet site and the vehicle detail page
• What the best dealers are doing with their internet sites

Takata Corp. put defective, potentially deadly airbags in seventy million vehicles in the United States before it went bankrupt and left consumers and industry to clean up the mess. Learn about the OEMs’ next wave of recalls and their uneven progress in completing repairs. Sellers should understand their responsibilities and potential liabilities, moral and legal, and what new requirements regulators and legislators in Washington may feel compelled to impose to reduce the expected toll in deaths and injuries, which already adds up to more than 300 people killed or maimed by their own safety equipment.

Takeaways:

1. Why will a couple thousand car buyers get blasted?
2. How did dealers get stuck holding the (air)bag?
3. What can dealers do to protect their customers – and themselves?

Takata Corp.  put defective, potentially deadly airbags in seventy million vehicles in the United States before it went bankrupt and left consumers and industry to clean up the mess.  Learn about the OEMs’ next wave of recalls and their uneven progress in completing repairs.  Sellers should understand their responsibilities and potential liabilities, moral and legal, and what new requirements regulators and legislators in Washington may feel compelled to impose to reduce the expected toll in deaths and injuries, which already adds up to more than 300 people killed or maimed by their own safety equipment.

Takeaways:

1. Why will a couple thousand car buyers get blasted
2. How did dealers get stuck holding the (air)bag?
3. What can dealers do to protect their customers – and themselves?

You will walk away from this session with real world best practices to run a profitable Used Car Department. We will cover the complete process – from acquiring inventory, through the reconditioning process, to pricing and listing your inventory online – as well as, how to manage aging inventory and minimizing wholesale loss. No nonsense. No BS. No blowing up the budget! We will teach you how to do it through a simple process with proven formula guidelines that are easy to understand and follow.

Takeaways:

• You will learn how and where to obtain your highest performing inventory.
• You will understand the pitfalls of market pricing. And, how to price you vehicles for a quick turn time while maintaining your profit margins.
• You will learn the best technique for managing your aging process to minimize wholesale losses.

Whether you are part of an OEM or working in a dealership, you are spending money, time and effort trying to find the next best thing to drive your CPO business. A key lies in being able to maintain CPO processes and performance through turnover at the OEM and retail level. We have found the solutions are very simple and often obvious once your hear them and will change your perception just as it has changed ours. Stop existing on an island, partner with other stakeholders at your OEM or dealership to multiply your efforts and drive performance.

As an industry, we rely on price reductions, usually at schedule milestones, to drive sales. We will show you why this margin killing strategy doesn’t work. This workshop will identify proactive inventory sales strategies that will increase profitability, increase turn and manage risk —  on even the most stubborn units. Learn to relieve your dealership’s margin compression by avoiding price markdowns and instead, utilize market data to identify the most profitable price point for every unit. Reconsider the promotional efforts that are driving demand, and begin making more informed and strategic inventory decisions without sacrificing well-deserved profit.

The session will benefit any decision maker within an automotive dealership that has a role in and/or benefits from marketing promotion and vehicle sales.

Takeaways:

• Identify the specific factors contributing to a vehicle’s slow movement.
• Monitor market and dealership metrics to assess the health of your inventory.
• Make the most profitable promotion choices for a vehicle without resorting to markdowns.

Consumers appreciate Amazon because Amazon listens and delivers. The auto industry, however, ignores the experience today’s car buyers want. We offer a challenging and confusing trade-in process. We reskin old processes instead of implementing new processes that make customers happy. We generate leads instead of creating an exceptional customer experience. Yes, adaptation is challenging when you interact with consumers every five or six years, but it has never been more important. It’s time to evolve or get left behind. Automotive customers want a transparent, connected, and consistent process. There’s a new expectation in town. It’s time to deliver.

Takeaways:

• How to implement three simple and actionable strategies to give consumers the experience they really want.  It’s easier than you think!
• How to leverage technology the right way to create happy, loyal, engaged customers who are the biggest advocates for your dealership – technology that’s used as a robust communications channel instead of a basic lead driver.
• How to avoid grinding through consumer interactions to pencil a deal and how to stop letting other businesses eat your lunch by delivering the experience your customers want.

Top dealerships that are able to make gross and volume say 60-70% of their sales come from zero- to 30-day-old cars. So, if dealers can manage that, it has a huge trickle-down effect on other things that need to be managed to accomplish this. It affects stocking the right cars, getting through service fast enough, getting photo’d and online faster, not having aged inventory and pricing better from day one.

This presentation will share why vehicle dealers are in the best position to profit from the ‘on-demand’ transportation industry. Dealers already have the infrastructure and resources to serve this industry best while earning revenue from vehicle rentals, sales and service opportunities. The rideshare and goods delivery transportation industry is still in its infancy and the vast majority of dealers are not participating. The presentation will share the What, Why and How a dealer can earn incremental revenue for every profit center with no capital investment.

Takeaways:

• How dealers can participate in the ‘on-demand’ vehicle industry with no capital investment
• Educate dealers on the opportunities to increase revenue, manage retired loaner, and lower aged-inventory expenses.
• Dealers will understand how they can leverage existing resources to insulate them from economic headwinds with incremental and recurring revenue with on-demand vehicle opportunities.

Coming into a new-vehicle sales downturn, historically dealers focusing on the growth of used-car sales and fixed operations revenues survived and prospered. Today however, by actively pursuing the temporary and then-permanent sales and service needs of the gig economy and ride-share drivers, dealers today are already experiencing explosive sales and service-dollar growth ahead of the pack — and ahead of the downturn. This workshop will show you how to latch onto this rocket-for-revenues by giving you real-life examples of those dealers who are grabbing this market share today.

• Outline the latest projected explosive growth forecast in revenue, market capitalization and new-vehicle sales and service requirements that ride sharing and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) providers are expected to achieve over the next five years.
• Identify and give examples of how dealerships, today, are recession proofing their businesses by leveraging and latching onto these gig economy ride-share drivers, multiplying used-vehicle sales and fixed operations dollars.
• Provide an easy, step-by-step business case and plan of action for creating and being identified as an industry leading full-service provider for all shared mobility needs.
• See how catering to the low hanging fruit of supplying temporary vehicles to ride-share drivers with a path-to-ownership not only grows used-vehicle and sales and service, but provides the knowledge base and tools for a dealer to profitably create their own used-vehicle subscription business customized to their own geographic area and clientele.

The used market looks dramatically different today than it did a few years ago, and between record lease returns, to the widening gap in new- and used-vehicle prices, today’s environment has never been more favorable for CPO vehicle sales. But consumers are facing a steep learning curve, so there’s a significant opportunity for dealers to better understand this shifting landscape and address customer pain points. Leveraging real transaction data and insights, this session takes a deeper dive into the figures and trends that will help inform a win-win scenario for you and your shoppers in today’s used-car market.

Takeaways:

• A record 4.3 million lessees are returning to the market this year, thanks to record leasing in 2016. These lease returns are helping shift the change in the used car landscape.
• The gap between new- and used-vehicle costs is increasingly widening, and this is creating a fantastic opportunity for used-car shoppers, used-car sellers, and certified pre-owned vehicles (CPO). As great as these opportunities are, used-vehicle costs are still at an all-time high, with the average transaction price of a used car surpassing $20,000 in 2019.
• CPO represent sa growing percentage of franchise used sales, but the opportunity to offer CPO vehicles to buyers priced out of the new-vehicle market will be important to dealers as well as automakers. While consumer interest in CPO programs is mounting, consumers face a learning curve on the benefits and drawbacks of certified vehicles.

This session will address the different elements of the shifting used -ar landscape, and highlight new shoppers who are entering the used-car market. For example, people who’ve traditionally leased or bought new. Our experts will be able to share price comparison examples, direct feedback from shoppers on what they’re specifically looking for in the used market that dealers might not be aware of, and other useful data including how quickly leads are closing on used cars. Attendees will walk away from this session with a roadmap to success on how to engage and retain returning lessees and educate fellow staff and new customers on the value of CPO programs.

Clay Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done work is particularly valuable in automotive today in understanding the “jobs” your customers are hiring you for in today’s transparent market. We’ll share the core customer jobs in the car buying process that we found conducting thousands of interviews and live purchase experiments with car shoppers using this framework for innovation. We’ll also share the five specific changes you should be making to ensure your dealership is doing those jobs better than your competitors. Hint: Carvana is doing four of these.

Takeaways: 

• Gain an understanding of the “Jobs to Be Done” framework
• Learn the core jobs your customer is completing
• Understand how you can adjust your approach to be hired more often, sell more cars today, and build a better relationship for tomorrow

More dealers than ever are using digital tools to buy wholesale inventory, as these channels are packed with time- and money-saving efficiencies. However, some dealers are still timid about buying used vehicles without kicking the tires. The good news for these dealers is that today’s digital channels offers numerous tools and protections, from advanced imaging and disclosures to a range of purchase protection options that can help them buy vehicles more confidently. In this workshop, dealers will learn about the latest enhancements in digital wholesale channels and gain an in-depth understanding of the differences between the myriad of post-sale protection solutions.

Takeaways:

• Identify digital advancements in the wholesale landscape that can help dealers increase their margins by making smarter buying decisions
• Educate dealers on ways they can add a layer of protection to purchasing vehicles sight unseen
• Empower dealers to transact with greater speed and efficiency through more
• informed acquisition strategies

To connect with today’s digital consumer, dealers must merge the online and offline experiences. This session will share consumer insights on the preferences of today’s digital consumer and identify some specific opportunities for dealers to create a seamless retail process.

Takeaways:

• The common myths about dealer marketing messages and how to create marketing messages that address consumer pain points and key information gaps
• How a focus on online consumer experience can build trust, improve efficiency, and grow your bottom line
• How dealers can win more trades with the “why”