Vehicle Valuation Is Becoming More Specialised: Shouldn't Your Software Be, Too?

By Author: Dealer solution
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It's a long time since we opened up a printed Kelly Blue Blook and made an educated guess about the value of every vehicle on the lot. And that's not a bad thing: vehicle valuation is getting much more sophisticated. Your dealership management system needs to keep up if you want to stay ahead of the competition, so is your car sales software doing all it should?

Vehicle Valuation: Is Your Car Sales Software Performing?
Your pricing structure is everything. If everything is priced right, you can get rid of old inventory, know what's moving well so you can get your hands on more, please your customers, make your sales people's lives a whole lot happier, and outperform the competition. But that's all more easily said than done.

The market changes in flash and customer preferences can change almost as quickly. Plus, it's no longer enough to just compare your inventory to past sales data. You need to be able to compare it in real-time with what the competition is doing today. Here are just a few things you should be seeing in your software:

Live Market View
Does your dealership management system ...
... allow you to keep an eye on the market at the moment, so you can make instant changes to ensure your stock is showing favourably to customers?

Having a live market view means you can continuously optimise your pricing strategy and never fall behind. It also gives you the information (and thus power) you need as you get new vehicles in or make decisions about trade-in offers.

Multiple Filters for Analysis
Your software should be allowing you to compare your inventory against the competition, but in meaningful ways that you can tweak according to the filters and parameters that matter to you. You should be able to compare by age, advertised price, time in the yard, general condition, kilometres, and more.

Powered by the Best
Is your valuation software powered by the professionals at Kelly Blue Book, the acknowledged leader in vehicle valuation? If not, it's time to look elsewhere. You need to be able to absolutely trust the numbers you're getting.

Comprehensive View
Your dealership management system needs to be looking everywhere, including private sales, trade-in values, advertising prices, and auctions, and it needs to be doing that for every state.

Easy to Use
Whatever software you're using now: is it keeping up with the times? The modern car yard will have people who need to access this data using every conceivable device. Can you get what you need on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones? Does the system work seamlessly among the various platforms? If not, it's time to upgrade.

Actionable Insights
Technology has come so far. Older tech just gives us numbers: the best, specialised tech gives us actual insights to work from, and it shouldn't matter which advertising platform it's looking at. There should be something useful no matter what view or which platform you use.

If your car sales system isn't delivering the kind of value you expect in 2021, it might be time to look elsewhere. You don't want the software to be the one thing holding you back!