Watch VINCUE Accelerate Live: VBC Best Practices & Recommendations

Speaker: Danny Zaslavsky, Managing Partner at VINCUE & Dealer Principal for Country Hill Motors. 

Good morning, everybody. This is Danny with VINCUE and welcome to our very first VINCUE Accelerate!

I’m going to hang out here just for a few minutes so we can get some guests in the room and we’re going to be talking about all things best practices in a vehicle buying center. It looks like our room’s filling up, so this is very cool. Hey TJ, good morning.

Well, let’s get going. Welcome everybody to our first VINCUE Accelerate. Today we’re talking about all things best practices in a vehicle buying center. Again, if you have questions, put it into the comment section so we can talk, so I can make sure to answer those questions. And then at any time, if anybody wants to reach out, you can obviously reach out to your performance manager or get through to me [contact@dealercue.com 00:01:07], contact@dealercue.com. Perfect Robin. Thank you very much Jeremy. Loud and clear, I love that.

Let’s go ahead and jump into our very first thing. For those of you that have an established vehicle buying center at your dealership, one of the things that we learned at Country Hill Motors was to do an intake form. I’m going to share that with you guys now, and we have a bunch of onboarding docs that I’m going to be sharing with everybody here in a bit. But let me bring this over.

When a consumer comes out to Country Hill Motors and they want to sell their vehicle, the first thing that we ask them to do is fill out this intake form. We hand it over to the consumer, we ask them for obviously the year, make, model of their car, why they’re selling their vehicle today. The reason why we ask that why is for the motivator piece of it, because one thing we know is when we can help them solve the problem that they have, then we can better convert that consumer to a customer, whether it’s on the acquisition side or on the sales side.

And often we can learn a lot right here because they say they’re buying a new car, which is great. And if they’re buying a new car, maybe we have something that’s nearly new that we can offer them while they’re there. If not, then we can find out what they were offered on trade. This is a really good line. We put in here, “Do you live in Kansas or Missouri?” Because we’re in Kansas City and right down the street is Missouri, and the sales tax rules are different in Kansas. When they trade, they get a sales tax credit in Missouri, they have 30 days. And so if you are in a similar situation where you have a sales tax opportunity, that’s an opportunity to tell the consumer that they could be getting a sales tax credit if they would be trading their car in with us.

How many sets of keys do they have? Obviously, something that we’d like to know, could increase the value of the car. Have there been any accidents or damage? This is a cool moment to find out what the consumer really knows about their own car, because remember a vehicle history report is something that the consumer would have to pay for to get on their own. And so that’s actually currency for the consumer, meaning we can get that vehicle history and provide it to the customer, so that’s kind of cool. Any electrical components? Have there been any major mechanical repairs to the vehicle? That’s something that we like to know. Are you needing to replace this vehicle?

Again, you can see we put that question on here twice. And this is a really nice way to ask the consumer on this intake form. In the meantime, our vehicle buying center agent or the manager is test driving the car, right?

If so, do they want to look at any vehicles? Did they bring registration? Did they bring a vehicle title? Is there a payoff? If so, what do they think that payoff is? So by the time the consumer comes back, we are actually sitting down with them and reviewing this. And one of the questions that we like on here is, how much are you asking? And what’s the lowest you’re willing to take?

If you were to ask the consumer that just verbally, some can take offense to that, but on a piece of paper, it actually comes out kind of nice. And I’m going to share an exit interview that we do here in a minute and why that’s actually a valuable question to ask. All of these forms that I’m sharing today, you can get from us from your performance manager, or you can just email contact@dealercue.com and we’ll send them to you, and then you can put your dealership’s brand all over this and use this when you are doing those intake questionnaires.

After that, in the part of the intake process, we also have the ability to give you, and I’m going to bring this up here … All right, here it is, a payoff difference acknowledgement form. If you find out that there is a payoff on the vehicle, we like using this form because it keeps everybody honest, because we can certainly get a payoff, and depending on if we’re an indirect lender for that dealership … Excuse me, for that lender, sometimes we can get it easier, versus if we don’t have an indirect lending relationship, then we have to call. But here are some acknowledgements. The purpose of this form is to explain and acknowledge any vehicle payoff process. And we have the consumer initial these.

Acknowledgment number one is, we’re buying your vehicle. What is it? And for how much? Acknowledgement number two, your lender gave us a payoff amount of blank, and we put that there so that if there is equity and the consumer’s getting that equity from us in the form of a check, once we have the title, then we both agreed before the consumer leaves, how much we’re sending that check for. And they initial.

The next one is, the following difference will be paid once the lien release has been received. And so this is a point of conversation, because the consumer always wants to know, “How quickly am I getting a check?” Now, this is something that you want to work out with your titling office, but at Country Hill Motors the way we do it is, if there is no lien on the car, consumer comes in, we’ll give them a check within 30 minutes. We go through this process, we agree on the price, and then we write them a check.

Now, if there’s a payoff, then that can be 10 to 14 days is always what we say. And the reason is because the dealership needs a lien release, right? We need to guarantee clean and clear title.

Every once in a while, a consumer says, “Well, I’m going to go get that for you.” Sounds great. If they can provide us a notarized lien release, then we can write them a check on the spot. 99% of the time we give the consumer enough paperwork to make them feel really safe and this is one of those forms.

Acknowledgement number four, the payoff funds will reach your lender on or before the 10th day. You can set it to the 14th day if you want. Again, we can send you this form. Once the payoff is processed then you’ll be able to see a zero balance.

Number five, the bank will send you a payoff letter. We want to make sure that the consumer also knows that the bank’s going to be sending them some information, especially if there’s more than one person on the title, we want to make sure that all parties know what’s going on.

And then we give the consumer the ability to either come to us, or mail it to them. These are all little nuances that make a difference from a CSI perspective, from a customer service perspective, because if we’re going to mail it, we want to make sure we’re mailing it to the right address, not necessarily the address that’s on the title in case that’s old. And then if they want to come pick it up because it makes them feel better, then that’s no problem.

Again, if you guys have any questions, please, in the comments ask away, and then I’m going to put in the comments, “Contact@dealercue.com is the place to ask questions or get these docs.” And then obviously you can also get with your performance manager and then we can provide them.

Let’s keep going. Once we do the intake form with the consumer, in the meantime, again, they’re going to, sometimes their vehicle’s going to service so we can take a look at the vehicle and then come back. Others, if it’s a newer vehicle with lower miles, we don’t need to do that. Then when the consumer comes back, we’re having the conversation.

Something to note is, the consumer most of the time, depending on if they’re coming from an inbound sell-to page, they came from selltocountryhill.com or sell-to ABC Motors, they already know roughly the offer that they’re going to get for the car. And we’re trying to pre-negotiate and offer our highest and best on the car so that when it comes in, if there is an issue, we can talk about it. But if there’s not, it’s really quick, and consumers like that, what we call a quick-trip process, where you can get in and get out as quickly as possible.

All right, so something we’ll be talking about later, on another Accelerate, but if you guys need to skip ahead, because some of this information you already know, we do give you, and I’ll bring one up here so you can see it VBC manager job descriptions, VBC agent job descriptions, and pay plans. We have all that, that we can give you at any time so that you can use.

I’m going to go ahead and open VINCUE here for a second, and so we can look at the process within the inbound process. In the inbound process when you are making offers to the consumer, you can use VINCUE to look at the appraisal itself. And often there’s a lot of really good information in the appraisal that you can pull from. For instance, this consumer in 2019, this vehicle went through ADESA and left there for $20,700. And then we’re appraising it today for 17, so we can kind of gauge some information. We can see the need obviously there, but here is also where you can take any notes on the vehicle.

We like to take notes on our acquisitions so that if the vehicle comes back, if the consumer comes back in a month, we can see that at any point. And then we can also generate new offers. Some best practices, this is actually kind of a new feature alert, you can see this VBC offer exists here. You can now put the consumer’s information right here. You can alter any of the direct purchase stuff, whether it be the numbers on the direct purchase, the trade or the private party. And then you can save and send right here from the retail market value screen.

And then when you send it, we’re going to save that appraisal. And I’ll show you actually what that looks like in one of these others. Let’s actually pull up this one and open up this appraisal. So you can see what one looks like.

Here’s a consumer on a 2018 Subaru Outback, where we’ve made several offers to this consumer, and we can pull up an offer that we made on 8/5. And you can see that we’re also texting back and forth with the consumer here, because we have their email and telephone number. From a records perspective, from like a CRM perspective within VINCUE, you can manage all that. And that’s really nice because anybody can go back and see what the conversation was.

Let me go back. From best practices, once the consumer comes in, we’re working to get them in the mindset that we’re going to solve, whatever concerns they have, right? The consumer knows that our motivator is to buy the car, so we try not to focus on our motivators. We want to focus on their motivators. What are we doing to sell a car? And one of the concerns the consumer has from the very start, is that the dealer’s not going to give them enough.

An example is if I were to call a consumer and say, “Hey, this is Danny with Country Hill Motors, I want to buy your car.” What the consumer hears is, “Hey, this is Danny, and I want to give you wholesale for your car.” And that’s really not the case.

Some of the data that we like to use when we’re doing these appraisals, and let’s actually go back into VINCUE and we can look at one of these. … All right, for example, on this vehicle, if I’m going to be buying this vehicle for $25,500, often we ask the question of, “I understand you’re asking $28,000 for the car. Can you help us understand where that value came from?” And they’ll say, “Well, I was looking online and I see that’s what they’re going for.” Or, “KBB says it’s worth that much retail.” Or, “NADA, JD Power says it’s worth that much retail.”

One of the tabs that we like to use is the sales tab. And the reason is, is because these are vehicles that are leaving the market. And so once we start scrolling down and we can sort, this vehicle specifically has 24,000 miles, we can sort by the mileage, go down to those miles, and we can see what they’re actually leaving the internet for. And on top of that, these are vehicles that are leaving from a car dealership, and a car dealership obviously reconditions the vehicle, services the vehicle, and then needs to make a profit as well. So then we can start to bridge that gap and use data to our benefit.

On the left here, you’ll see there are printer icons. And so if you find inventory that you want to put on a comparison list, we often click those vehicles. We can click some of these cars that work to our benefit. And you can see, I’ve chosen three here. And then I can go up here and print and I can do what’s called a values report or a trade appraisal and voucher. And then when I click on that, the consumer’s information goes here. We can click the values that we want to be able to share. Here’s Kelley Blue Book fair-traded value of $26,000, if we’re offering $25,500, because maybe the car needs tires or something. And then you can see those sold vehicles fall right here. And then boom, there’s the offer. there’s the voucher that we’re printing right for the consumer.

And then if we want to put any information in here, for instance, we often ask, “Hey, do you have an extended warranty on that car?” Because if you do that’s cancelable and they can get money back to lower that that payoff, that’s money in their hand, and that’s something that they appreciate.

And then we also do any owner acknowledgements. Has the vehicle ever had salvage? Factory buyback? Emissions? And then they print that saying that that’s all good.

One of the things that we really like to use, and I’ll show you how once we make an agreement with the consumer and we are buying the vehicle, then we like to use this as an exit interview so, “Tell us about your car.” We can provide this for you as well, and you can put your logo up here, but your make, model, last six of VIN, and what did you love most about your car? And then please share a few fun facts about your vehicle for the next owner.

And so this is how we use this. When the consumer fills this out, we then give this to our inventory manager, and the inventory manager puts it into the vehicle comments once the vehicle goes online, as a note from the previous owner, which is super fun for the previous owner to read a note … Excuse me, the new owner to read a note from the previous owner.

We also then ask the person that’s selling the vehicle if they would make a little video with us. And then we come into the office and we do that. And so I want to share a couple now. And keep in mind the motivators that we were talking about, because those motivators are what we’re trying to hit in these videos.

Let me go into one here. Remember, one of the things that new customers that are considering selling their vehicle to us have a concern about is, are they getting enough money for the vehicle by selling it to us? Let’s hear what April had to say.

I sold you guys a 2015 Tesla Model-S, and Sydney was fantastic. She made things very simple and easy. She actually gave us more than what our baseline was, so she was fantastic. I would definitely come back again.

That’s part of the exit interview. You can see these if you just go to YouTube and type in, “Sell to Country Hill Motors.” And you’ll see a whole playlist here of testimonials from consumers who are selling us their car. We’re then using these to, with the consumer’s permission obviously, in email marketing campaigns, in social media campaigns to drive traffic to our sell to Country Hill Motors.

Now, here’s another one from Brandon.

I sold my 2013 NISMO Nissan 370Z. [Jonray 00:18:39] found me on Facebook Marketplace and she sent me an offer, and I thought it wasn’t going to be legit, so I was playing around for a week and I came in today and they got me taken care of in like 10 minutes or less. I’ll definitely be back to the future. Jonray was great.

All right, so let’s kind of talk about the differences between those two. In one, we had a consumer that was obviously concerned about price. And so we were able to talk her through that and acquire the vehicle. And then she gave us a compliment of, we actually gave her more than what her bottom amount was. And so we can use that and say, “Hey, Country Hill Motors pays more for your vehicle than other dealers.” And that’s actually one of our value props, is we say that we’ll beat CarMax, Carvana, Vroom and others up to $250 more on those acquisition offers.

Then with the other gentleman, Brandon, his concern was time. His value was time, so that was his motivator. He didn’t want to spend all his time trying to sell the vehicle. And if you heard him in the video testimonial, he said that he was in and out in 10 minutes. And if you also picked up, he said that he checked in with us, and then he ended up coming back and selling us a car a week later.

Some of our consumers come in and we do business the same day, but some take a little warming up, because depending on when the consumer put their car online, if they put it on and then we reached out the same day, they might want a few days to see if they can get more money on their own from the street. But we want to make sure to give our highest and best offer, talk them through it and say how easy we make it. And remember, there are other motivators that we as a dealership can offer the consumer, which is our money is good, we’re going to help them with any payoff and paperwork and any things like that, that they may not have immediate access to. And then hopefully make it easy and fast. Brandon ended up coming back to us and selling us his car, which was exciting.

We just have a few minutes left on today, but I want to cover a few best practices that we talked about. One of them was the intake form, right? The next one was a payoff difference acknowledgement form, which really helps us, because if you notice all this kind of builds in this acquisition process. And then the next piece of it was kind of the offer and the negotiation, and what data we’re using to share with the consumer.

And in the sales data is something that the consumer can’t get on their own. They can see comparables by going online and seeing what vehicles are being offered at, but they can’t see what they’re actually leaving the internet for. And they can’t see wholesale values, so taking some of those and creating a nice little report within VINCUE is a quick, fast, and easy way to give good information to a consumer so they can understand why your offer is what your offer is.

And then that exit interview. That exit interview is a powerful way to capture their experience and then use it on social media and email marketing campaigns to drive more consumers to sell their car to your car dealership. And we know that in-bounds convert at the highest rate, because those are consumers that are knocking on your door that want to sell you their vehicle, so that’s kind of fun.

That’s it for today, but I’m really excited that we got our first VINCUE Accelerate. I would love it if you guys continued joining us. We’re going to be talking about messages and what messages you should be sending out in your outbound messaging when you’re talking to consumers here in the next coming weeks. We’re going to be talking about how to acquire the right vehicles and how to use VINCUE to leverage making a target list, buy lists so we know what we’re going after, because the goal is, increased gross and increased churn, right? So how to go after those vehicles. And then diving deeper into filtering specific cars and using motivators to our advantage.

Thanks for being part of our very first VINCUE Accelerate. And we’re excited to see you next time. See you later.