3 weeks ago
Motivation at this time of year is often hard to find – especially when the phone isn’t ringing.
I don’t know about your dealership, but come mid-November it felt like someone had changed our number and turned my emails off.
Our leads were nonexistent and it was hard to stay positive. We had 13 cars in stock at the Clever Car Collection at that point and were starting to panic.
Up until now, sales have been steady all year round. On average we’d been selling our cars in 17 days and despite only having under 10 cars advertised it was always pretty busy.
So, when it went dead, we found ourselves at a loss. We questioned everything and began doubting ourselves. Were our adverts badly written? Were the pictures actually pretty poor?
What I’ve found frustrating about selling used cars is you can actually do everything the same, follow the data when it comes to buying the right vehicles that are in high demand, and yet still the phone might not ring.
Short of standing outside the front of the dealership and shouting ‘Does anyone want to buy a Hyundai ix35?’ like a market stall holder, there’s really not much you can do. Or is there?
As I have a few times this year, in my hour of need I turned to AI, and asked ChatGPT for its ideas on what I could do in these quiet times.
It came up with a few suggestions – mostly marketing based ideas to give my presence a boost. Sometimes AI can be quite useful, but other times it just states the bleeding obvious.
I’ve been running my AI Car Dealership Project for nearly a year now and anyone fearing that AI was about to steal everyone’s jobs in the motor trade can think again. While it’s been helpful in some parts, sifting through data, writing copy and the like, it really has not been able to cut down on the time it takes me to do many tasks.
I followed its advice, though, to boost our social media a little and used some spare time to create some Reels for Instagram of the cars we have for sale.
I’ve found this great tool called Opus Clip, which cuts up longer form videos for Instagram into shareable shorts. It uses AI to find the best bits and edits the whole thing for you. It’s not very expensive and works well.
We’ve also spent a lot of this quiet time working on making the dealership look smarter. When we moved into the unit it was fine, but we always wanted to make it smarter and we’ve used this slower period to get it set up.
When we met Auto Trader for an account review recently they talked about the importance of making your photos stand out so we devised a grand plan to do just that.
We’ve spent the last two weeks building a photo backdrop to make our pictures pop and stop doom scrollers whizz past our adverts on the advertising platforms. Using old pallets and a trusty nail gun we’ve built a stunning (my opinion) background for the cars.
I’ve had to spend quite a bit on some studio lighting (good old Amazon) and have painted the floor with some resin paint and it’s made a huge difference.
In our latest video (above) you’ll see us battling away with getting the dealership ready and also see the tide finally turn on some car sales. I suppose it just proves that you need to stick to the process and use the down time you’re given to do something useful.
But, like I said, find the motivation to do just that is very hard indeed.
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The post Video: Finding the motivation to run a used car dealership can be very hard when it goes quiet appeared first on Car Dealer Magazine.
