Tracking Acquisition Sources
We believe in the management philosophy “Measure what you want to manage” at VAN. Knowing what we are acquiring private seller vehicles for, and having an understanding of what our strategy for acquiring these vehicles is, requires the ability to measure what we are paying for private seller cars compared to other acquisition channels.
Understanding what your average cost to market price, market days supply, average investment and reconditioning costs are crucial to making sound decisions. Not only with VAN private seller vehicles, but also your wholesaler, auctions, lease returns and trade-ins. This will enable you to find the best-fit strategy for each acquisition channel.
Tracking these factors will uncover the unknowns. Tracking and monitoring acquisitions creates a vision and direction that may have never develop without having a process in place for measuring these key performance indicators. Performing these types of calculations manually is a daunting task. Fortunately, there are inventory management solutions that perform these calculations. These systems are an investment many dealers are happy to make.
The solution that we recommend, and most dealerships are utilizing, is vAuto. Selecting custom source comparisons and generating reports for those comparisons on specific vehicles is an automated task. Building and delivering the report is also automated. These reports can be exported to Excel or sent through email for further examination or sharing for wider analysis.
Similar reports are available for market days supply and historic sales from your inventory. Furthermore, you’re able to develop customized reports such as tracking days to sale by acquisition manager, front and back gross as well as reconditioning expense and other merchandising factors. This allows a company to scrutinize details that can affect sales, such as photography and point of sale merchandising.
As an alternative - or an addition to improved tracking - you can customize stock numbers. Develop a code with letters denoting where a car originated from. It can be as simple as A for Auction, W for Wholesale, P for private buyers and so on. This simple change can make gleaning information from reports easier, giving you a better understanding of what's selling - and what's not.
For dealerships who choose to pair that change with the investment of a DMS, reports can be run to further analyze the data.