Seat-of-the-pants decision-making just got tougher. Not that anyone’s intuition or gut-instincts have suddenly failed them, but because their competitors are utilizing better tools to make those same decisions. Smart dealers are utilizing analytics and data to make decisions based on reality rather than their perception of reality.
To be fair, these tools were not always available to dealers and experience and gut-instincts were extremely valuable to a dealer. They still are but they can now be based on information that was never available to dealers merely a decade ago.
Analytics is a presentation of data in a form that provides dealers with information about their customers, sales staff, inventory, marketplace, marketing initiatives, vendors, as well as sales and profits. This information allows dealers to apply their business experience to decision-making based on data intelligence rather than instinct.
However today, there is actually more data and analytics than a dealer can possibly assimilate and aggregate into a big picture in order to see the relationship between the various parts of their business and marketing and the end results of sales and profit.
New companies with new software innovations called Business Management Systems have stepped in to fill that need for dealers. They can input all the necessary information and data from a dealer’s own data and integrate it with marketplace data and data from OEMs and put it all together in a graphic format that easy to understand. Dealers can see the big picture at any given time.
Business Management Systems such as String Automotive’s new Dealer Positioning System grab information from web statistics, vendor data, registration data, demand data, and demographic data and combine it with dealer data. This creates an “intelligence platform” from which a dealer can draw educated conclusions about inventory, marketing, traffic, and sales.
Good business sense, experience, and gut-instincts are still valuable assets for a dealer, but they’re best used in conjunction with accurate business intelligence. Business Management Systems make smart dealers smarter through data.