How Feldmann Imports More Than Doubled Service-Drive Conversion With VINCUE

For three decades, Mike Popp bought cars the way the business taught him to: at auction. He’d fly to Florida for the week, Acuras and Hondas in one lane, a Mercedes sale in West Palm Beach, a Nissan sale in Daytona, and it wasn’t unusual to come home having bought fifty cars. When he walked into his first VINCUE Unleashed conference, he sat at a roundtable and defended the auction model to the room.

Today, Popp is the Acquisition Manager at Feldmann Imports, the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Bloomington, Minnesota. Ask him about auctions now and he doesn’t hedge: “I don’t even look at it. I don’t even think about it anymore.”

What moved a thirty-year auction buyer off auctions wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was realizing the best inventory in the state was already driving into his service lane every morning, and that, with the right system, he could buy it before the customer ever left the building.

Feldmann had run with the same tool for years, and by Joe Feldmann’s account the trouble was the data underneath it. “The metrics were always based off of previous, you were never really working with information in real time,” says Feldmann, the store’s General Manager and President. “It was typically bad data, and everyone’s using the same data.”

That sameness bled into pricing. The old system boxed every car into a fixed tier, price it at 98% or 100% of market and hope it turned, and every dealer running the same tool priced the same way.

Meanwhile the richest vein of inventory in the building sat barely tapped: the service lane. Feldmann had tried standing up an acquisition department before, and it sputtered. “We had a guy back there with two salespeople,” Popp remembers. “We were producing seven, eight cars a month.” For a store whose average service customer now drives a nine-year-old Mercedes, a historic high, that was a lot of trade equity walking back out the door.

The move was to turn the service drive into a real acquisition channel, and give the team the speed to work it.

It starts the night before. Feldmann’s BDC sends every upcoming service customer a forecasted appraisal and lease options before they arrive. “We’re calling all our clients the night before,” says Feldmann. “Since you’re going to be here, would you like an appraisal?” The ACE report carries it: it shows the customer what their car is worth and lays out three paths, used, certified, or brand-new, with Carfax, JD Power, and KBB pulled into one view instead of six browser tabs.

When the customer pulls in, Tekion and VINCUE talk to each other, so the team knows they’ve arrived. Popp meets the car in the lane, scans the VIN with the VINCUE mobile app, photographs the condition, and the appraisal populates automatically on the sales desk inside, often before the customer has finished with their service advisor.

That desk isn’t an afterthought. Loyalty Manager Smail Hodzic sits at the single door between the service aisle and the showroom, the first face every service customer sees on the way in. His team offers a complimentary appraisal and a simple pitch: trade in, skip the service bill, and get into a newer car for not much more than you’re paying now, sometimes less. “It builds trust when you can show it on paper,” Hodzic says. “Reputable sources, all in one place.”

Then pricing changed. Where the last tool forced a fixed percentage of market, VINCUE prices to the actual content of the car against what’s really selling nearby. “We’re pricing our cars at 102%, sometimes 105%,” says Feldmann, “based on the content the system’s picking up compared to what’s out there.” Above market, and still turning.

For Popp, the shift is total. The man who once defended auctions now describes three auction lanes running straight through the store, the service drive, where every customer “will listen to your bid,” and where the return beats anything he found getting on a plane. His best month out of that lane: 56 cars. He’s convinced there’s more room, too, “ten percent is there,” he says of the store’s monthly RO count, naming it as the target he’s building toward, not a number they’ve hit yet.

For Feldmann, the ceiling isn’t the tool, it’s how fast they can staff to meet it. “You guys did exactly what we asked,” he says. “Now the accountability shifts over to us.”

Discover how VINCUE can turn your service drive into your best acquisition channel, capturing more trades, pricing to real-time market, and selling more of your own customers their next car. Schedule a demo to see the platform in action.