It’s fair to say that our current market conditions have convinced most dealers that it’s very difficult to increase sales year over year. Grosses are still really high, so getting even close to 2021 sales levels is a big win.
But imagine increasing sales at your dealership by over 31.79% year over year. Grosses were just as high, with a 31.79% increase in sales. Your dealership is a printing press!
Could you believe that changing your strategy on just one platform could boost sales AND profits at your dealership? We’ve had a strategy in place to do just that with Swope Mitsubishi for just over two years and we’ve been rocking… but… As the market has changed, we’ve been able to change with it.
Here’s what happened
When we first spoke, Steve Warren, GM of Swope Mitsubishi wanted to get to 60 units. His dealership was averaging 40 units prior to working with Fountain Forward.
Swope Mitsubishi started with Fountain Forward in December of 2020 to help map out the dealership’s lead pipeline straight into his pocket book by implementing the Analytics Edge and running ads on Facebook.
You can read more about how our partnership started in this blog.
Problems Arise
During our time working with Swope Mitsubishi, they cut some third party lead providers because of the dirt-poor lead quality and seeing a dismal ROI month after month.
Swope banked that money for a little while, until Swope encountered a problem.
Steve’s sales team at Swope was not “deep enough” to handle the new opportunity coming from the great leads from Facebook.
The Analytics Edge analysis told us to NOT increase the marketing budget and instead… build up the sales team!
2022 Planning – Focusing on the Fundamentals
We discussed Swope’s sales objectives in a 2022 planning meeting during Q4 2021.
The Analytics Edge analysis showed Steve and his team that they did not have enough salespeople to get to the dealership’s objective of selling 60 units.
Swope knew they didn’t have enough sales people at the dealership in 2021 and could not effectively handle the amount of lead volume needed to reach their objective.
At Fountain Forward’s recommendation, the dealership committed to increase salespeople and they hired another sales person early in 2022.
Once Swope increased their sales team to 5 people, we increased their ad spend, which immediately led to an increase in lead volume, appointments, and sales.
The increase in ad spend came in a timely manner. Patrick Jennings, a new Sales Manager at Swope Mitsubishi wanted to tap into the subprime market.
Fountain Forward launched a subprime ad campaign for Swope in February 2022.
We added subprime leads into our Facebook ads rotation once the dealership was confident it could handle these types of leads with Mr. Jennings’ previous subprime experience.
Results
Swope Mitsubishi proceeded to hit their 2022 sales objective of selling 60+ units in February. All because of the fundamentals.
As we increased ad spend, CORE website lead volume increased by 58.14%. The sales team was prepared and increased appointment setting by 31.63%.
The dealership sold 60 units in February, 62 in March, and 77 units in April!
In the month of April, the dealership increased their appointment schedule rate to a record high of 46%.
They scheduled 154 appointments in April compared to 88 – their 12 month average. That month, they sold 56 cars from appointments.
Previously, their highest month ever was 42 sold appointments.
Since starting working with Fountain Forward, Swope Mitsubishi has seen consistent sales growth.
1. Monthly Average Before Fountain Forward – 2020: 40 units
2. Monthly Average With Fountain Forward – 2021: 49 units
3. Monthly Average With Fountain Forward – 2022: 58 units
These results for Swope Mitsubishi are similar to other dealerships around the country. If you’re curious to see if we can help grow your dealership in a similar way as Swope, click the button below!
