Priced to Win
BMW of Peabody
Success Story
Dealer gets in sync with customers through MAX Digital
Price, price, price. That’s the mantra for selling preowned cars in today’s digital world, where shoppers can models and options — and dealerships — with a click.
“The most important thing today in preowned is pricing your cars to market,” says Todd Currie, preowned sales manager for BMW of Peabody in Peabody, Mass. “That has such a beneficial effect. It’s the only way you are going to get someone through the door.”
He says that with the information now available online, if shoppers come to his dealership looking for a specific car, they’ve done their research; “They’re here to buy, not just to take a test drive.”
Synched Software
Currie says that price validation is the first reason he’s a fan of MAX Digital’s suite of products. “Using the MAX product, I can see every car that’s out there for sale, comparing models and matching the exact options,” he says. “When you’re dealing with a customer, it provides the best leverage for why you’re pricing a car a certain way.”
BMW of Peabody sells 90-100 preowned cars a month — about 80 percent of those are BMW models. The dealership uses MAX Digital’s Inventory Management Platform for stocking, appraisal and pricing, as well as its Marketing and Sales Platform to pull together reviews and comparative model and pricing data.
The dealership switched to MAX Digital from a competing vendor not only because “we felt the MAX products were superior,” Currie says, but also because BMW of North America supports MAX Digital solutions corporate wide.
“We have found it’s so beneficial to be able to link our MAX products with our BMW dealer website,” he says. “Some of the MAX software integrates better with the BMW website. It’s great to have everything synced.”
Bar Code Power
Currie says the MAX Digital products are great tools when he’s stocking and pricing non-BMW models.“It’s also a benefit when our advisers are talking to customers about off-brand models they don’t know,” he says. “They don’t have to call up a salesperson; the MAX program gives you every factory option on every car. Instead of saying, ‘Let me go check on that,’ we can pull the information right then and there so the customer has the most relevant information on the car they’re considering.”
Scanning the bar code on a car that’s on the BMW of Peabody lot connects salespeople and customers directly with the vehicle information on the dealership website. “The salesperson can point, click and send the vehicle information directly to that customer in an email”, Currie says. “And the information is presented in an incredible display. That was one of the biggest sells for us.”
Customers can even do this themselves if they have a bar code reader app on their phone or tablet. “The customer can scan the code and immediately have all the information on that car,” he says. “They can email it to themselves or can keep it up on their phone screen. They don’t have to go back into a website and search through a feed of a hundred cars to find the one vehicle they’re looking at.”
Currie says he hopes to teach more customers how to help themselves to this data. “It’s a great feature for them to use,” he says.
BMW of Peabody has been successfully defending their prices and stopping the drop in their margins with MAX, learn how you can too.
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