Dealertrack broadens offering with Inventory+ suite of tools for dealerships
A NEW SUITE of software tools to help dealers better manage their inventory and used car operations is now available from Dealertrack Canada.
The newly-launched Inventory+ helps dealers quickly and accurately categorize, enrich and display their vehicle inventory to prospects and customers. It also provides a host of reporting and analysis tools to help dealers make smarter decisions.
Mark O’Brien
“Inventory+ is the marriage of three separate Dealertrack products into one powerful inventory management tool,” says Mark O’Brien, Senior Director, Sales and Marketing with Dealetrack Canada. “It’s empowering the dealer to increase unit profit per vehicle and also accelerate turns. When you put those two things together that’s a recipe for success for any used car operation.”
O’Brien says when the company develops new products, it tries to focus on helping dealers with the things they care most about. These include:
- Controlling and managing their fixed and variable operating costs;
- Customer acquisition and retention (loyalty);
- Revenue growth;
- Profitability; and
- Inventory turns and inventory management.
O’Brien says Inventory+ helps with all of those key areas for dealers. “There is some serious passion for this product internally — and there’s a great appetite for it externally,” he says. “There’s a lot of uniqueness to this product that dealers have not seen before.”
MAXIMIZE PROFIT-PER-DAY
The company also promotes a Profit-per-day (PPD) metric that the software generates for dealers as the “single most important measurement to manage the total profitability of your used vehicle operation.” This feature enables dealerships to objectively measure both turns and profit in a single reference point. This helps them determine the ROI on any given vehicle.
The number itself is derived from a simple calculation: Profit per day is total profit (sales proceeds minus inventory cost) divided by the number of days.
“Profit-per-day is the lynchpin of the system,” says O’Brien, adding that the company and the dealership team discuss how to set target PPD numbers to help guide their operations.
A simpler way to think of it, says O’Brien, is to figure out how much profit per day the dealership was able to make each day that a used vehicle sat in a parking spot on their lot waiting to be sold.
FACT-BASED DECISIONS
Inventory+ also connects to the dealership’s DMS, and provides fact-based information about the vehicles that the dealership has sold well previously to help them make informed purchasing decisions.
“The core of the product is that it’s using fact-based information to guide decisions,” says O’Brien. This helps dealerships make smarter decisions on which used vehicles to acquire. “It seeks out information that will help you make scientific decisions.”
If your used car operations aren’t performing well, the software tools in Inventory+ will make that immediately visible, and then it can be addressed. “We are providing science to guide decisions on appraising and acquiring vehicles, on trade in, on merchandising and on pricing,” says O’Brien.
POWERFUL MOBILE TOOLS
Dealers need to get their inventory online quickly and moved quickly for maximum profit, and the software’s tools help enable that. “The speed to market tools have been very appealing and eye-catching to dealers,” says O’Brien.
Using some of the software’s mobile capabilities, a vehicle listing can be up online very quickly by capturing and sharing real-time retail and wholesale data from an iPhone, Android or desktop using the TrueTarget app. This enables dealers to scan barcodes for quick decoding of VINs with a phone’s camera, and complete appraisals can be done in seconds.
SEO-RICH LISTINGS
O’Brien says Inventory+ also features other “game changers” for used car managers, including a new feature called “AutoInk.”
That tool automatically writes SEO-rich descriptions for specific vehicles that are acquired. Each of these descriptions will be unique, even on vehicles that are very similar. “That’s something that has been a ‘wow’ factor for dealers that have seen the product,” says O’Brien. “Writing descriptions for vehicles is more important now than it ever has been before. You need to know how to write descriptions that perform well in search engines.”
O’Brien says the company tries to make the tools it develops as intuitive and easy to operate as possible. “It’s been designed with simplicity in mind,” says O’Brien.
With any software product, however, training and followup are essential to ensure the dealership teams are using all the various features.
To help ensure customers take advantage of all the tools Inventory+ can deliver, Dealertrack assigns a Dealer Results Manager to every account. Their compensation is tied directly to the performance of the product in the dealership. “At no stage do we ever just leave the dealer to their own devices to use the product,” says O’Brien.
For more information on Inventory+ visit Dealertrack.ca.
