Challenge
An Industry-Wide Challenge
While dealerships are very good at selling new customers, many struggle to maximize their sales and revenue from their existing base. Sure, there are select groups of customers that upgrade to the latest model every year, but the average dealer's customer retention rate is surprisingly low.
Key Areas To Remedy:
Outdated Dealership Sales & Marketing Approach
Identify Potential Sales Opportunities
A System To Properly Mine Customer Data
Improve Sales Strategy Based On New Data
Tailor New Offerings To Returning Customers
learn
What Is Data Mining?
Data mining analyzes large datasets to reveal patterns and insights for decision-making and strategy.
In automotive, data mining helps dealerships extract information from customer databases, sales records, website interactions, and social media engagement. By evaluating data points like purchase history, demographics, and online activity, dealerships can tailor their marketing efforts, improve customer experiences, and optimize inventory management.
- insights
- How Does Equity Mining Differ?
While data mining focuses on a broad base of behaviors and metrics, equity mining specifically identifies existing customers who have positive equity in their current vehicles. Dealerships can use these insights to create specialized programs and market them to these customer segments.
Strategy
An Opportunity
Equity mining is far from a new concept, but up until recently, it has been seen more as a stand-alone process. Its goal was simply data extraction and segmentation. DealerIQ wanted to take it to the next level by automatically mapping the criteria for these segments to existing inventory on dealer's lots. This step allowed dealers to quickly find opportunities to move current inventory, but now in a data-driven, fully automated, environment.
Being automotive SMEs, the DealerIQ team knew that dealerships would still struggle to properly market this program. They asked us to find a way to automate this and allow them to offer more than just a data solution. They were after an end-to-end solution from data-to-offer to ultimately win over dealerships.
- Solution - Goals
- Delivering Value With the Right Tech Partner
Meeting with the DealerIQ team, we understood the opportunity and paired their unique industry expertise with our technical and automotive SME teams. Together, we developed a vision for how a new platform could work and function, and what the experience could become.
- Setting The Right Goals
As part of our initial planning, we defined three key goals the platform had to meet:
Identify Current Customers With Positive Equity
Match Customer Equity With Current Inventory
Market And Sell Matched Inventory To Customers
Solution - Strategy
Architecting The Right Strategy
Working from the goals we'd established; we began to create the development strategy to deliver the product. Sure, the initial build is an MVP, but we felt that with the right approach, the initial build could operate like a more mature product, with a lightweight interface that would be perfected over time.
Our Initial Strategy Accounted For:
Infrastructure Management With Built-in Features
Smooth Integration Of Dealer Systems & Processes
Protecting Client Data In A Secure Environment
Reliable Automation Platform For Accurate Communication On Preferred Channels.
Ongoing Reporting For Process Visibility & Results
Market And Sell Matched Inventory To Customers
Solution - Highlight
Building The Right Foundation
With goals and strategy in hand, we architected a cloud-native application to give us the modern flexibility and resiliency we'd need and selected Azure as the cloud platform. Azure would give us a wide range of tools and security advantages while keeping costs down in the initial phases.
- The MVP Was Designed To Incorporate:
- A Lightweight CRM With a Dynamic Sales Dashboard
A SQL Database Of Customer Data Linked To Industry Sources Via API & SFTP
Matching Engine Rules To Sync Customer Profile With Inventory
Automated Customer Quotes To Present During Vehicle Service
Direct Sales Email With Automated Quotes
solution - Research
Selecting The Right Tech
If we were going to empower dealerships to move to data-driven decision-making (DDDM) and automation, the initial version needed to be stable with high data accuracy, or risk sending the wrong offers. This could lead to low confidence among dealerships, and word could spread fast.
TechFabric teams began by selecting and vetting the front-end Blazor framework to ensure it would meet the requirements while at the same time building the infrastructure and environments in Microsoft Azure. From there they rapidly developed the backend and .net codebase, created the UX and interface designs and coded them into the pre-existing framework.
Now that we had a functional system we could test, our QA teams started regression cycles to confirm the system and flag/fix any remaining bugs in the data flow.
- validate
- The First Test
The newly built platform was ready for its first test with a sample account. As with any MVP, we never go directly "into the wild" and release it without fully testing and vetting with a core partner account.
As we ran the initial programs with our test account, we were able to gain valuable user feedback on both the functionality and interface. Leveraging this information, we made a few basic tweaks and changes to the data model and workflows to maximize the dealer experience and ease of use.
With several successful test runs and end-user satisfaction, we were ready for official release.
Our Initial Strategy Accounted For:
Infrastructure Management With Built-in Features
Smooth Integration Of Dealer Systems & Processes
Protecting Client Data In A Secure Environment
Reliable Automation Platform For Accurate Communication On Preferred Channels.
- Ongoing Reporting For Process Visibility & Results
- Market And Sell Matched Inventory To Customers
Solution
Build features to match customers with inventory
Results
Improved sales prospects and increase in revenue
Let's build something great together.
Contact Us
Results
A Smarter Way To Sell More Cars
The launch of the DealerIQ cloud-native platform on Microsoft Azure, combined with vetted data-driven models, CRM & targeted marketing campaigns, empowered dealerships to identify valuable sales prospects, and tailor offerings to a customer base, which began to see immediate results
In the first official roll-out, our first tranche of dealer accounts onboarded got the desired effect. They sold more inventory gaining revenue of $1.4 million (new cars sold within 30 days of offer) and secondary revenue of $625K (trade-ins sold off within 60 days of new sale).
One example dealership sold 140 new cars to existing customers, a 13% revenue lift from the previous year, but they were also able to resell 68 of the trade-ins to gain another 4% revenue.
200+
Vehicles sold with primary & secondary sales
$1.4M+
In primary sales revenue
$625K+
In secondary sales revenue
What the client had to say about the project.
Vince Rubino
CEO
"It was exciting right out of the gate. The platform enabled us to get the full program off the ground and move the needle for dealerships within the first 30 days."
- key takeaway
- Looking Ahead
There are many ways to develop a new digital product, but there are three key areas in which businesses often stumble on their way to market. Avoiding them can mean the difference between success and failure:
- Lack Of Customer Feedback
Without ongoing feedback loops, the risk of building the wrong product or requiring significant process changes increases, potentially leading to failure.
- Rolling Out Without Fully Testing
Rushing from internal MVP to full market exposure poses high risks, including skipping valuable feedback and encountering performance issues that erode market confidence.
- Choosing The Wrong Technology Partner
Choosing a development company that overlooks risk mitigation and customer validation can hinder market success. Understand your partner's strengths and align your go-to-market plan accordingly.