It’s been a rollercoaster for the powersports industry since 2008.
The Great Recession, flat registration numbers, and an aging buyer base are a few of the more … challenging … situations we’ve faced as an industry – but, thankfully, we’ve been on the upswing for the past two years with steadily growing demand and strong sales numbers for many dealers.
But, both in our industry – and outside of it – there’s a sense of uncertainty as to where the economy is headed next. There’s nothing we can do to change what might be coming – but, we can take a page from the highs and lows of the last twelve years and make sure your dealership is prepared to handle whatever gets thrown your way.
How? We’ve got a few suggestions.
#1: Insert yourself further up the funnel
Before the rise of the Internet, dealerships were the single source of information for buyers. You worked with them – in person – as they made their purchase decision. Now, more of that pre-purchase research is happening online, but that doesn’t mean you’re left out of the process. Buyers are still using you to research – but instead of coming to your physical dealership first, they’re starting with your online presence.
Your challenge – and how you prepare your dealership for any economic environment – is to find a way to insert yourself back into the upper funnel.
How do you do this? Almost the same way you would do it on-site. You share the resources and tools your buyers need throughout their purchase lifecycle and capture their information at the same time.
You could think about adding live chat or texting to your website, offer demo rides or new rider courses on site, or let buyers value their trade. Another option would be adding a prequalification widget to your inventory detail pages. Having a prequalification widget, specifically, is useful because it gives your buyer a better understanding of their purchasing power, increasing their confidence, while also capturing their contact info and financial situation.
No matter which way you go – each of these tools puts your dealership higher in the buying process and captures buyer information for your team to use.
Pro Tip → Look for a prequalification widget that’s free and allows for soft pulls, so it doesn’t hurt the buyer’s credit. All of these strategies in this article focus on navigating any economic situation – and if you’re facing a slow market, being able to generate leads for free can be a great way to save costs.
#2: Prioritize agility and scalability in your sales funnel
Making sales is what drives your business forward – and while I hope our next ten years looks more like the top of this image, we all know it probably won’t. There’s nothing you can do to completely avoid the ‘hills and valleys’ – but you can build an adaptable lead generation strategy that works in any market.
Take the recent inventory shortage, for example. Demand has been outpacing supply – so you may have had more buyers than units to sell; and while this is a good problem to have (and it definitely is) – if your sales team can’t quickly identify the buyers that are most likely to convert, they could end up wasting time just sorting through your inbound leads.
On the flip side – when inventory eventually rebounds and supply potentially outpaces demand, your strategy needs to be more focused on lead generation to capture buyers in your market, and beyond, so your team has plenty of prospects to work.
While these are two very different sales environments, you need one process that works in both – and this is going to feel like an oxymoron, but hear me out.
What you’re looking for is a way to maintain a wide reach and a strong pipeline of leads, while also having enough buyer information to segment eliminate unqualified or unmotivated buyers quickly. Emails and phone numbers aren’t enough – to make this work, you need more meaningful context on each buyer.
Giving buyers the option to prequalify from your website, for instance, increases out of state applications by 184%, while also decreases the number of applications without a location by 40%. The reason a tool like this works in any market environment is because:
Pro Tip → Try to find tools that work with your current DMS. That way, you can keep all your lead information in one place for fast and easy sorting.
#3: Use your Lightspeed DMS to the fullest potential
In any environment, the tools in your dealership have a huge impact on your efficiency and customer experience. Lightspeed has partnered with Octane to save powersports dealers time on every deal by bringing prequalification and quick financing to your DMS.
Powersports dealers have two opportunities to bring your workflow to the next level:
There’s nothing you can do to stop whatever unexpected, crazy economic situation our industry might face next – but powersports dealers are nothing if not resilient. With the tools in place, and a strategic plan for keeping your dealership front and center – you’ll be fine no matter what comes.
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