Mastering Acqusitions with ATUC

David Long's All Things Used Cars community knows that you gotta have cars to sell cars. So, last week they spent time discussing used inventory acquisitions. 

David Long opened the discussion by reminding us that what we don't know can't hurt us, like clinging on to what we think we do know. He compared an excellent acquisition strategy to a radio station. If you spend time listening to it daily, you stay caught up with the content, but if you skip a month, new things will appear and you'll need to catch up. Pick a channel and commit.

Brian Kramer continued his steadfast advocacy for both service-drive acquisitions and sight-unseen appraisals. He said service-drive acquisitions are the least expensive way to bring people into the showroom because they are already coming for service. Investing in fixed-ops marketing will bring cars in, and some will convert to acquisitions if you are ready. 

Taki Caranicolas said everybody has to peel back the onion and look at the whole story. He offered a few rapid-fire points to think on:

• Discipline checks. Put in place and stay committed to the building blocks of an acquisition culture across the management team. EG: Ensure your sales training calendar is being executed regularly. 
• Define acquisition. If you ask the team and they say different things, you know there is work to be done. To Taki, it means every single source that can bring cars into inventory is being used properly. Before you can have a strategy, you need an agreed-upon goal for each channel. 
• Look at right now. What percentage of your inventory came from what source? How many appraisals are you doing? What appraisal sources are converting? Set improvement goals and strategize toward them. 

Check out the rest of the replay on Clubhouse. Join the community every Friday morning for more idea-sharing from around the industry.