If you run a small-time car dealership but are interested in moving into the big leagues, it can be tricky to know where to look. After all, some dealerships have a virtual monopoly on specific geographic regions, making it much more difficult for smaller operations to remain competitive. Even so, there are some strategies you can use to improve your standing and ultimately grow your business.
If you’re a mom and pop shop, chances are you aren’t using technology to its fullest. One major area that small businesses generally neglect to think about is customer service. However, when you think about it, customer service is everything, especially in sales-focused businesses like the automotive industry. Being able to organize, remember, and field customer support requests and questions is a major part of delivering quality customer service. When it comes to providing that type of responsiveness, having the right call center software solution can go a long way.
Powerful tools from companies like Bright Pattern allow you to engage with customers through a variety of communication methods. Bright Pattern’s software also offers Zendesk call center integration so that you can harness even more data in your company’s CRM system for better customer engagement. This helps keep your dealership up-to-date with modern technological advances, as well as consumer preferences. In effect, by using the same sorts of systems that bigger dealerships rely on, you can stay competitive from a customer service standpoint.
Another item to examine when you’re focusing on how to grow your auto dealership is the way that you transport vehicles to and from your showroom. Often, smaller businesses wind up spending more money than they need to because they aren’t able to think about the different ways that they can mitigate transportation expenses. Location, time of year, shipping route, size, and make of vehicle all affect the cost of transporting a vehicle from one place to another.
However, if you have a better estimate from the get-go about what it will cost to transport a car, you can make a much more informed decision about which makes and models to bring to your dealership.
Thankfully, the Internet makes it easy to get a quote on how much shipping a car will cost you. By leveraging these sorts of online services, like Easy Car Shipping, you can better understand the costs associated with every vehicle you bring to your lot, which in turn can help you increase your profit margins.
The final piece of advice to help grow your business and get to the next level involves knowing which areas of your business make the most sense to outsource to a consultant or third party service. Marketing and publicity are one such area.
Often, to fully take advantage of all of the various marketing channels available to you, having an agency with decades of experience on your side is much better than trying to follow a couple of how-to articles online. Social media marketing and display advertising alone are two separate branches of marketing that could easily support multiple full-time positions within such an agency.
Rather than wasting your time and energy trying to market your business all on your own, it may make more sense to spend the money to leave this kind of work to a trusted expert. While it can be difficult to make room in your budget for such a line item, once you have given it a spot in your budget, the return on investment will likely speak for itself.
In the end, growing your business comes down to your philosophy as a business owner. If you are not the competitive type, you likely won’t make the hard decisions and aggressive choices necessary to truly grow your business. That being said, if you come to the table with the right mindset and follow the three tips above, you may be surprised at how quickly and efficiently your dealership can scale up.
