Why dealer test drives are the key metric in any dealership

As a data company, it has been asked why we started with a dealer test drive product as our first offering? The simple answer is that every dealership does test drives, but hardly any use the valuable data that is created.

Many Dealer Management Systems (DMS) do a poor job of offering a compelling test drive solution that is easy to use and connects the other data that is relevant to provide actionable insights into a dealerships business. As a consequence, many dealerships use the flawed metric of prospects to sales conversion. The biggest flaw with this metric is that as more focus is placed on this conversion, salespeople often pre-judge what a prospect ‘is’ and as a consequence less prospects are logged over time. Magically, improving their sales conversation to the industry norm of 33%. 

Unlike prospects, there is no grey area on what a test drive is and with an integrated system this data is easily compared to other data within the dealership. As a result, test drive to sales conversation is a much more robust, consistent and accurate metric to measure and compare a dealers business and the salespeople within.     

Whilst there is a handful of test drive applications available on the market today, they don’t offer an easy method to capture sales success and therefore many dealerships don’t consistently log the crucial data of sales conversion and subsequently don’t have an understanding how effective their sales team are performing. In addition, with an incentive to under-report prospects visiting the dealership, it is often the case that customer follow-up suffers as a result.

Test drives are great insight into what salespeople are confident with their product knowledge, who are proactively demonstrating the product range and when compared to sales, which salespeople are most effective in closing and getting a commitment from their clients.  

Our mission is to integrate test drive data with sales and other important data in a seamless manner, if it’s not seamless then salespeople wont fully embrace and use the feature and therefor data integrity is compromised.