Vehicle Appraisals are a big part of the car buying process, so it's no surprise that the Vehicle Appraisal Form is one of the more popular functions within the AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  This is particularly the case when it comes to the iPad/iPhone version of the app, which gives salespeople complete freedom to conduct Appraisals anywhere they carry their iPhone or iPad.

Manager Approval
It's also possible to set up your Appraisals so that only a designated manager can mark them as approved.  This does not stop any user from creating an Appraisal Form, however if the role is set up the Appraisal Manager will be prompted by notification and email to review and approve the Appraisal - giving the dealership more transparency over the Appraisal process throughout the sales team.

As we have mentioned in the PlayBook's recent issues the AutoPlay development team are busy rebuilding the Desktop Studio as a fully responsive HTML5 app - meaning users will be able to access the AutoPlay Studio via different browsers like Chrome, Firefox etc as well as via Android or Windows smartphones and tablets. 

We are now almost 10 weeks into our HTML5 rebuild and making decent progress.  To date the focus has been building the infrastructure - things like logins and security, navigation menus and account structures.  Although extremely necessary to the success of the project these are not the glamour screens we want to shout from the rooftops about.

We've recently completed the listings screen - a central pillar to the whole AutoPlay Studio.  The new listing screen will feature...

• Scrollable image gallery similar to current iOS App 
• Collapsible sections that can be collapsed to make scrolling up and down the screen easier
• Simplified menus - was 2 separate menus, now 1!
• Enhanced presentation of listings including graphical display of Fuel Saver

Check out the image gallery below to see our progress.  The project is massive so at this stage we are unable to provide an ETA of when this will be released (sorry!).  However, rest assured we are putting in as much resource as possible without sacrificing day-to-day business and we will keep you updated as we move closer to our goal.

It costs a lot to list your vehicles online.  When a new listing is received into stock by a dealership the first instinct is to get that listing online as soon as possible.  For a lot of dealerships this means getting the old Lumix out and getting those photographs onto Trade Me, Driven, Autotrader and the dealership website quick smart - even if the listing has yet to add any Features and Comments.

This isn't necessarily the wrong idea - the sooner the listing is online the sooner the leads can start rolling in right?  However recently AutoPlay has been growing into the Australian market and have noticed a definite trend that perhaps has some learnings for the kiwi market as well.

In NZ although some channels charge per lead, the majority of 3rd party sites charge a monthly subscription instead.  In Australia the model is quite different with Car Sales.com.au as their main source of online leads.  With Car Sales.com.au the dealerships are charged for each lead they receive.  Possibly because of this they are far more conscious than kiwi dealers of working their current "in market" leads before paying to list online - and with good reason.

Imagine you pay $50 per lead from an online portal.  For each listing you put on line you are generating an average of 5 leads over the listings lifetime (and this is a very conservative figure in the Aus market).  This will cost the dealership an average of $250 per listing that comes directly off their bottom line.

Instead what Australian dealerships have been focussing on is using all of the contacts in their pre-sale database (from captured leads) and retargeting these customers BEFORE they actually list the vehicle online.  If we look at the chart below we can see a lot of money spent on marketing from various sources which then ultimately converts down to about 40% of leads into Test Drives and 20% into Sales.  This leaves 80% which have made themselves known to the dealership as being "In Market".  A new Mazda 6 arrives in stock or is traded in?  Great, just identify all the customers that came in on a Mazda 6 or similar and call them.  If you make a sale you don't have to ever list the vehicle online and you've saved yourself days of waiting and at least $250.  If you don't make a sale then list the car online and all you've lost is a day or two and you still have a potential customer who will appreciate that you thought of them.  Easy right?

Where the breakdown sometimes occurs is that often it is difficult for the salesperson or manager to identify which potential customers might be interested in the new Mazda 6.   Australian dealerships have the same challenges as NZ dealers - in the vast majority of cases the sales team is only loading to the DMS the 20% that actually make it to a sale. 

Although early days in the Aus market for us, with AutoPlay Sales Pipeline we are finding that because of this differing approach we are finding some positive reception to what AutoPlay are doing.  Some of the Sales Pipelines main strengths are that it is incredibly easy to use, mobile friendly and digitises things like TD and Appraisal Forms  - all of which contributes to more customers being captured more accurately - we have seen in kiwi dealerships where as much as 9x more emails and customer info has been captured when using AutoPlay as opposed to using the DMS alone.

There are primarily 2 ways that dealerships can tap into their "in market" leads.  The first is on an individual basis.  The Sales Pipeline allows you to search on the Dashboard for whoever has enquired on certain models.  When you have access to a similar model it's super easy to find those that enquired previously - particularly so when they are often captured automatically for 3rd party sites.  Users can also canvas their "In Market" leads by accessing the Listing Summary screen from the Dashboard.

Before deleting the sold listing simply find it via the Listing Summary and you will be able to see a full list of who enquired on the listing, as well as what stage they got to in the road-to-a-sale and the salesperson looking after them - making recycling these leads into another similar vehicle a doddle!

Depending on the time available a similar (if less personal) result can be achieved by utilising the built in Live Leads function available to all Sales Pipeline users.  We have gone on at length about Live Leads in this PlayBook, but if you are not familiar with it you can read more here.  Live Leads enables dealerships to target based on their previously captured leads any customers that enquired on a particular Make/Model (among other criteria).  They can then send unique video emails to these recipients with a range of vehicle videos on them - designed to test whether the customer is still "in market".  If a recipient watches a video the Sales Pipeline can be set up to trigger an automatic calendar reminder to contact this customer - thus taking out a lot of the hard work required to gauge the temperature of customers who enquired but didn't purchase.

With the Dashboard, Listing Summary and Live Leads AutoPlay makes it very easy to retarget and recycle previous leads onto similar listings.  Although the main sources for electronic leads in NZ do not charge per lead there is still much that can be learnt from this process.  Whilst kiwi dealers should still aim to get their new listings online as soon as possible, they should also follow the discipline of checking their potential "in market" leads simultaneously to give themselves as much opportunity as possible.

March 2018 is now in the books and as expected we saw a reasonable  bounce back in the number of Leads, Test Drives and Sales recorded by the approx. 80% of franchise dealers that use AutoPlay Sales Pipeline to manage their leads.

Overall there was a 10.5% increase in the number of leads generated in March vs February.  Some of this can be attributed to February being a shorter month, however such an increase still reflects more leads being created each day in March compared to February.  Despite fewer leads generated in February, there were still 16.1% more Test Drives generated in March – highlighting that a significant portion of leads are test driven within the same month as being created.  In addition, Sales increased by 11.9% overall, making March a successful month for franchise dealers.

One of the biggest drivers for the increased number of leads was a significant increase in the amount of leads being generated from Dealer Websites (up 62.4%).  Over the last 6 months we’ve seen a sustained positive trend with lead, test drive and sales activity that can be directly attributed to dealer websites.  This latest increase indicates that ‘Web – Dealer’ is really firming as the best place to get your leads from.  Offsetting the increase in ‘Web – Dealer’ leads was a decrease 22.1% in ‘Brand’ leads and 4.1% in ‘Web – Classified’ leads. 

In March the ‘Web – Dealer’ source was again the number one source of Test Drives – up 9.5% from February 2018.  After decreasing 11.3% in February, the ‘Brand’ source bounced back with 33.9% more Test Drives recorded against the ‘Brand’ source in March than we saw in February.  The ‘Web – Classified’ source also performed well – jumping into the third position with 16.3% more Test Drives from this source in March than February.

The usual suspects occupied the top three sources of Sales in March with ‘Web – Dealer’, ‘Repeat’ and ‘Web – Classified’ occupying the top 3 spots.  However, after a down February where all 3 experienced a drop from the month prior, Sales increased across the board.  ‘Web – Dealer’ experienced a small increase of 1.6%, whilst ‘Repeat’ (up 12.2%) and ‘Web – Classified’ (up 9.5%) experienced larger increases.

Make sure to read the next issue of Autotalk to see what sources of leads were popular in April amongst kiwi dealerships.