Access: Strategy

Perhaps the biggest challenge dealers face every day relates to how “right” they bring cars into their inventory. There are many variables in play with every appraisal and a multitude of things that can, and do, go wrong.

Worst of all, dealers have traditionally lacked a way to manage and monitor appraisal decisions until long after the fact — often after a vehicle you thought you bought and priced right ages into a loss.

This Access: Innovation workshop reveals how data science can strengthen the consistency and effectiveness of your appraisers, helping them appraise, acquire and price vehicles for optimal retail outcomes that align with your strategic used vehicle objectives.

You’ll discover:

• How the appraisal system, and the data science behind it, can help you start every appraisal in any acquisition channel with a North Star target that fits your broader goal to achieve volume, gross or a balance of the two.
• Four principles to guide expectations for your appraiser team and set the stage for more accountability and ongoing performance improvement.
• How you can guide appraiser decisions in real time to avoid paying too much for the wrong car or letting the car — and customer — you really need slip away.
• New metrics that help you coach appraisers to better outcomes and ensure they’re working with the customers, cars and acquisition channels that best suit their skills and your objectives.
• An “active appraisal” framework to help your appraisers and your customers collaboratively arrive at a vehicle’s appraised value.
• How data science has expanded and improved the ability to ensure appraisers align every appraisal to its optimal retail pricing strategy.

Just like the U.S. Congress holds the power of the nation’s purse strings, the used vehicle managers at most dealerships control the pricing and profit potential of the used vehicle department.

Therein lies a persistent challenge for dealers. If you look, you’ll find cars that aren’t priced to sell or they’re priced to leave money on the table in almost every dealer’s inventory. It’s been this way for years, and today’s higher level of volatility in vehicle prices brings greater risk that your retail prices aren’t what or where they should be.

This Access: Innovation workshop offers a new way forward, revealing how data science-based pricing recommendations in ProfitTime^® GPS can ensure a higher share of your inventory is more consistently priced to where it’ll deliver the best outcome for your dealership.

You’ll discover:

• How data science derives pricing recommendations from a host of factors for every car — hidden variables managers often cannot see or account for on their own.
• How to identify and course correct beliefs and biases that manifest in pricing decisions and lead to less-than-optimal outcomes.
• New ways to know when pricing decisions align with each vehicle’s investment value and when they don’t.
• How pricing decisions can be used to help your dealership achieve volume and / or gross, depending on your priority and market conditions.
• Where you’re likely to encounter the most pushback from your teams, and the circumstances when it’s best to trust or override a recommendation for a vehicle.
• A rundown of results from dealers who strive to align at least 70% of their vehicles with data science-based recommendations and their best practices to help you achieve similar success.

If you look across the industry and identified dealers who have consistently grown their used vehicle gross and volume during the past year, they all have one thing in common: They proactively acquired a higher share of their inventories directly from customers.

It’s one of the many ways the pandemic has changed the used car business. This won’t be news to anyone at Access: Innovation. But the shift to multi-channel sourcing marks a turning point for dealers in the manner and means they use to manage buyers and appraisers in non-traditional channels.

The biggest difference? The data science that’s now available to establish acquisition objectives both overall and for distinct sourcing channels. Also, there’s a new system that taps the data science to guide your buyers and appraisers, so they’re consistently achieving your channel-specific objectives over time.

You’ll discover:

• Current key benchmarks for sourcing by vehicle volume, type and investment potential by channel.
• How to use a North Star appraising strategy to measure inventory strengths and weaknesses in / across each channel.
• Why efforts to source vehicles from service drives and other “store-based” channels often fail — and how you can avoid the same mistakes.
• How to identify individual performance improvement opportunities and deploy the right people to the right channels to acquire vehicles.
• Strategies to mine DMS, CRM and service drive technologies to spot early-bird acquisition opportunities before customers put their cars on the market.
• How to initiate, refine or restart multi-channel acquisitions at your dealership to eliminate missing sales opportunities because you don’t have the vehicles to sell.