Weekly monologue (host: Tane Jillings) aimed at Canadian franchise car dealers explaining how the company helps dealers holistically — positioning export services as a tool to increase new-car sales and backend profit. Includes brief market-trend metrics (index down 0.46% last week; US down 2.7% over four weeks), anecdotally higher auction no-sale rates and inventory accumulation, and a product initiative (internal name: Project Goldmine) describing a two-week turnaround marketing campaign that produced above-average opens/clicks and generated appointments leading to exportable wholesale vehicles and new-car deals.
Questions this video answers
Down 0.46% over the past week.
Down 2.7% over the past four weeks.
Project Goldmine (internal name).
About two weeks.
Chapters
Three things I want to talk about this week. How we help dealers holistically. I'm trying to paint every week a little bit of the picture on, on what signal does. We'll touch on market trends again and then something that we call Project Gold Mine internally. So how we help dealers holistically when we work with franchise dealers in Canada, yes, export is helpful to drive more wholesale profit for a dealer. But the way that I think about export is it should be a tool for dealers to drive more new car sales. One of the thoughts that I have with dealers and when we're speaking with Canadian franchises and dealer groups is with an export department in a box, which is what we provide. A Canadian dealer should not lose a new car deal because of the value they put on a trade in. Right. Typically, the US Market is going to be worth more than the Canadian market for the types of vehicles that we see get exported. And on those vehicles, there's no reason that a dealer should let a customer walk out of the showroom because they didn't put a strong enough number on that that consumers trade in. And so what we're doing, not only are they making more money, the dealer's just making more money on, on that trade in itself, more profit on the wholesale side. But they're getting the new car deal, they're getting any of the back end, the F and I. And so really when we, when we look at what we do, we're trying to help dealers holistically, not just with, not just with export. Touching on the market trends, our index is down 0.46% over the past week, and that brings US to down 2.7% over the past four weeks. So the, we're seeing the price drop slowing down, but I think part of the story that doesn't get captured in our data or anyone else's data is the vehicles that are not selling. Right. And so I don't have hard numbers on this, but anecdotally looking at the no sale rate at auctions across the country, you're seeing more no sales than you'd see in a typical time of year. And we are seeing auctions accumulating inventory and filling up with space. So this is, you know, something to keep an eye on in the market. I expect more of the same until the new year when the market does pick back up for dealers that we work with, you know, we're always here to try and provide guidance and a helping hand. So when in doubt about what the market's doing or what the value of a Vehicle is we're, we're happy to provide that, that concierge service to, to dealers. I guess the main story for today is trying to think about how we operate our business and what similarities there might be for either dealership or tech companies or whatever else have you. And the theme today is being nimble and customer driven. And so recently we kicked off a product initiative called Project Goldmine. This is an internal name, this is not the product name. We don't have a product name for it yet. But we had a, a dealer that wanted to use some of our pricing tools to engage with their customers in a marketing campaign. And so the premise was dealer wanted to create a subset of their customers based on their targeting parameters. Email those customers with a US export based offer for their vehicle. If the customer likes the offer, they come into the dealership, dealer buys the car, and then the dealer has an opportunity to put that customer into a, into a new car. So this is an interesting story for two reasons. First, we had a dealer that looked at us as a partner and came with us, came to us with ideas on how we could help their business. Right. So we're not a vendor, we're a partner. Right. And I love that viewpoint. And I often refer to our dealers as partners and not as customers. Right. Because this is a collaboration. And then internally we were able to move really quickly on the idea and deliver the functionality to the dealer. So I think it took about two weeks from when the dealer called me on the phone and pitched his idea to when the first campaign was ready to go live. And what's exciting is the first campaign was a big success. Open rates and Clifford rates way above the dealer's average for marketing campaigns they had set historically. And then the clicks resulted in appointments, door swings, and those door swings resulted in vehicles that the dealer could export as well as new car sales. And so we're still getting the final tally on what the, the revenue impact was for the dealer. But I'm really excited to turn that into a case study. And again, I just, I love that we were able to help this dealer out. We were able to move quickly on it. And, and especially in the current environment where AI is so disruptive and businesses are moving at blinding speed, I think it's really important to stay nimble and continue to be customer driven. So that's my little business case study for the day. Have a great weekend, talk to you later.
