As the price of vehicles continue to rise, subscription models are emerging. Are subscriptions a viable alternative to a purchase?

We spoke with Russell Lemmer about what a dealership needs to think about when considering a subscription model.

What do you think? Is your store considering a subscription model? Do you see a future in subscriptions?

Volvo XC40 selected as Best New Model in annual prestigious awards

IRVINE, Calif., November 12, 2018 – Following head-to-head testing and evaluation of 2019 model-year vehicles, the experts at Kelley Blue Book today announce the 2019 Best Buy Award winners. Kelley Blue Book’s Best Buy Awards honor the top new model-year vehicles available in the U.S. market in 14 major categories, along with a brand-new category for 2019 – Best New Model – with the Volvo XC40 taking home this top honor.  

To aid new-car buyers in their quest, Kelley Blue Book curated the Best Buy Awards to help shoppers narrow down their new-car consideration list and purchase their next vehicle with confidence, by identifying the best of all available 2019 models, with a special emphasis on value-per-dollar in both purchase and ownership experience.

“Shopping for a new car can be a daunting task, and with hundreds of options to choose from, it is hard to identify what vehicles earn top marks in pricing, ownership costs, expert evaluation, consumer opinion and more,” said Karl Brauer, executive publisher for Kelley Blue Book. “The Best Buy Awards were designed to help consumers shop with confidence by doing the heavy lifting for them and providing clear guidance on which specific car, truck, minivan and SUV models they should be prioritizing and considering for their next new-car purchase.”

Starting with the more than 300 new models available for 2019, Kelley Blue Book’s annual Best Buy Awards are based on a year-long regimen of expert vehicle evaluation and testing of nearly every new vehicle available in America, along with analysis of a broad array of vehicle-related data, including vehicle pricing, 5-Year Cost to Own data (which includes depreciation, insurance, maintenance, financing, fuel, fees and taxes for new cars), consumer reviews and ratings and vehicle sales information. To be considered for Kelley Blue Book’s newest award, Best New Model, the vehicle must be an all-new or redesigned vehicle and offer a strong value proposition to consumers based on pricing, innovation, and available standard technology and safety features.

2019 Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Award Winners

Best New Model: Volvo XC40

Positioned in one of the hottest segments, the XC40, which starts at about $34,000, offers plenty of usable passenger and cargo space on a compact footprint. The XC40 effectively combines modern styling inside and out (we particularly like the two-tone paint scheme treatment) and cutting-edge technology on both the infotainment and safety front, the latter a traditional Volvo talking point.

Compact Car: Honda Civic

With fuel-efficient 4-cylinder engines, an affordable sticker price, and a history of trouble-free service, the Honda Civic continues to serve up 5-Year Cost to Own numbers that are impressive. All-in-all, its combination of low running costs, competitive pricing and great retained value makes a solid case for the 2019 Honda Civic as the Kelley Blue Book Best Buy among Compact Cars.

Midsize Car: Honda Accord

We said last year the Accord “isn’t just the finest midsize sedan money can buy, it’s the most sophisticated, most advanced and most impressive automobile not wearing a luxury badge.” We stand by that statement and the Accord’s return to the winner’s circle is clear proof of that judgment.

Subcompact SUV: Hyundai Kona

The new Hyundai Kona has won us over with its entertaining driving manners and lively style, not to mention its superb controls, abundant high-tech safety equipment and impressive warranty, highlighted of course by its 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain protection, the best in the business.

Compact SUV: Honda CR-V

Whether you’re looking for a safe, practical, easy-to-drive and easy-to-own car for a younger driver or a leather-laden mainstream SUV that could give some luxury vehicles a run for their money, there’s a CR-V to fit your needs.

Midsize SUV: Honda Pilot

When you buy a Honda Pilot, you get a lot of useful features for the money. As you own the Pilot, you’ll enjoy the comfortable ride – one of many reasons this is a terrific road-trip car -- and the family-friendly attention to detail throughout. The Honda Pilot, the Midsize SUV Best Buy of 2019, offers many forms of value from day one, and little to no compromise in the process.

Full-Size SUV: Ford Expedition

The 2019 Ford Expedition has moved away from the ideas of the traditional full-size SUV, advancing the segment in the process. Like the Ford F-150, the Expedition leverages a generous amount of high-strength aluminum in the body and high-strength steel in the frame, innovations that caused the underpinnings and sheetmetal to weigh less.

Minivan: Honda Odyssey

What makes the Odyssey so good? It all starts with the minivan essentials: a solid chassis, seats for eight, a pair of sliding side doors, a spacious cargo area and cupholders galore. And of course, the 2019 Honda Odyssey is loaded with safety features.

Subcompact Luxury SUV: Volvo XC40

The Volvo XC40 is an all-new vehicle, and it has wasted no time shaking up not just the Swedish automaker’s lineup, but also the burgeoning segment of subcompact luxury SUVs. In shape, style and attitude, the all-new 2019 XC40 goes its own way.

Compact Luxury SUV: Audi Q5

Shoppers have embraced the second-generation Q5, pushing it to where it sits today — at the top of the luxury compact SUV sales chart. Its success in the showroom, and its aptitude to recurrently capture awards, demonstrates its well-rounded balance of interior space, utility, driving dynamics, technology, safety, and luxury.

Midsize Luxury SUV: Audi Q7

Today’s choices in the midsize luxury SUV market abound, but only the 2019 Audi Q7 has risen to the top and earned the distinction of being named KBB.com’s Midsize Luxury SUV Best Buy of 2019. At once attractive, practical and modern, the Q7 exudes luxury through subtle sophistication.

Pickup Truck: Ford F-150

The 2019 Ford F-150, our Pickup Truck Best Buy for the fifth year in a row, continues to offer the features and the capability serious truck buyers need, while providing the creature comforts and modern-day tech everyday commuters want.

Performance Car: Hyundai Veloster N

Three laps around the short course at Willow Springs Raceway and the huge-hearted Veloster N had seduced us, even after mixing it up with the best under-$40,000 sports cars every automaker had to offer. To say the Veloster N held its own is an understatement -- it didn't just change our minds about what a Hyundai was, it completely rewrote our expectations about how much fun a $30,000 performance car could be.

Electric/Hybrid Car: Honda Clarity Plug-in Hybrid

Starting at just over $34,000, the newest Clarity serves as one car that could please electric-car fans and old-school long-distance road-trippers alike. Best of all, the 2019 Clarity is pure Honda. Imagine your favorite Honda sedan, Accord or Civic for instance, and rest assured the Clarity driving experience is just as rewarding.

Luxury Car: Lexus ES

Completely redesigned from the ground up, the seventh-generation ES sedan is built on the company’s Global Architecture-K platform. Compared to its predecessor, the 2019 Lexus ES is longer, lower, and wider, which translates to a more comfortable and stable ride and a more spacious interior.

For full coverage of the 2019 Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Awards, including full editorial comments about each model, pricing details, videos and more, visit https://www.kbb.com/car-news/all-the-latest/best-buy-awards/2100000577/.

To discuss this topic, or any other automotive-related information, with a Kelley Blue Book analyst on-camera via the company’s on-site studio, please contact a member of the Public Relations team to schedule an interview.

For more information and news from Kelley Blue Book’s KBB.com, visit www.kbb.com/media/, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/kelleybluebook (or @kelleybluebook), like our page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kbb, follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kbb_com/ (or @kbb_com), and get updates on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/+kbb.

About Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com)

Founded in 1926, Kelley Blue Book, The Trusted Resource®, is the vehicle valuation and information source trusted and relied upon by both consumers and the automotive industry. Each week, the company provides market-reflective values on its top-rated website KBB.com, including its famous Blue Book® Trade-In Values and Kelley Blue Book® Price Advisor tool, which provides a range for what consumers can reasonably expect to pay for a vehicle in their area. Car owners looking to sell immediately can also get a redeemable, transaction-ready offer with Kelley Blue BookSMInstant Cash Offer. The company also provides vehicle pricing and values through various products and services available to car dealers, auto manufacturers, finance and insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Kelley Blue Book launched its first international consumer-facing site in 2017. Kelley Blue Book is a Cox Automotive brand.

About Cox Automotive

Cox Automotive Inc. makes buying, selling and owning cars easier for everyone, while also enabling mobility services. The global company's 34,000-plus team members and family of brands, including Autotrader®, Clutch Technologies, Dealer.com®, Dealertrack®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, NextGear Capital®, VinSolutions®, vAuto® and Xtime®, are passionate about helping millions of car shoppers, 40,000 auto dealer clients across five continents and many others throughout the automotive industry thrive for generations to come. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately-owned, Atlanta-based company with revenues exceeding $20 billion. www.coxautoinc.com

Asking the proper questions is essential to identifying the right candidate for your dealership. Often, we ask templated questions that are easy to game. In this clip, we discuss an important tip to make sure you can interview for the competencies you need.

In this video, we look at different learning styles and how addressing them can help you with your walkaround.

In this video we discuss following up with an unsold guest and give you some tips to professionally follow up without being a pest.

This is a guest post from Brian Finkelmeyer, Senior Director of Business Development of vAuto.  He'll be speaking at the 2018 DrivingSales Executive Summit on Winning the Zero Sum Game in New Cars.

Today’s retail new car business is beginning to look more like a game of poker than the actual car business.

In 2016, Automotive News reported that the collective annual sales objectives for every manufacture in the US was 21M, but the actual SAAR was only 17.5M.  I once heard the annual sales objective-setting process referred to as “smoking the drapes” inside the corporate office.

I don’t entirely blame the car companies; their job is to impress shareholders by growing market share. They accomplish this by enticing their Dealer body to stretch for higher and higher sales volumes.

The problem is, often these objectives are calculated in a financial fantasy world and not based on the realities of the marketplace.

Over the last five years, New Car Dealers have become increasingly reliant upon manufactures for their financial success.  According to NADA this year, 90 percent of the income captured in the Net Adds account on a Dealer’s financial statement is factory bonus money.  To win this pot of gold, Dealers have no choice but to literally “go for broke” to achieve their aggressive monthly sales targets.

Polk data highlights that on average, approximately 40 percent of a Dealer’s monthly sales comes from their owner base, which means the other 60 percent is generated with conquest sales. 

In my workshop at the DrivingSales Executive Summit, Dealers will learn key conquesting tactics for attracting customers from outside their local market area.  A Dealer’s ability to effectively conquest will have a very strong correlation to the number of “Pots and Size of the Pots” they win.  This will remain true, as long as the new car game is being played out like the World Series of Poker.

This is a guest post from Russ Daniels, the Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Homenet. We're excited to have Russ presenting at the DrivingSales Executive Summit.  

Effective merchandising drives deeper interest from car shoppers, however, dealerships today do not know to differentiate their online inventory. 

In our dealer research, we found that 83% of dealers believe they can increase margin and reduce days to sell by improving online merchandising, yet just 12.0% feel their online presence was highly differentiated from their competitors. 

To begin understanding how to stand out, you need to understand how to measure several aspects of your merchandising. Below are three areas that I believe can provide the most insight into the impact of your current merchandising processes. 

Measure Merchandising Performance

Measuring the overall effectiveness of your online listings starts with tracking search result page and vehicle detail page views. Having an idea of the online engagement your inventory receives allows you see the impact your merchandising has on attracting shoppers.

For a deeper understanding of online engagement, track views for specific aspects of merchandising, such as videos, photos and 360 spins. 

In many conversations I have with experts across the industry, 125 VDP clicks per vehicle acts as a starting benchmark of measuring merchandising success.

Measure Time-to-Market

Used cars can take up to 11 days to be fully merchandised and online, but high performing dealers can accomplish this within three days. Use smart automation and technology to streamline this process as much as possible to save time and effort. 

Remember fully merchandised vehicles are going to drive consumer engagement. Listings with real photos get 349% more vehicle details page views than those with stock photos and vehicles with descriptions receive 27% more views than those without. 

Merchandising that Boosts Search Rankings

Industry leading classified sites like Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Cars.com and Cargurus are using merchandising completeness to drive which vehicles display at the top of the search results page. Now vehicles with real photo sets, video, descriptions etc. will be showing higher on the results page. This shift is aimed to drive a better shopping experience.  This also validates the need to measure the time it takes to merchandise your inventory and track engagement.

If vehicles are underperforming – it’s important to investigate where merchandising processes can be improved to maximize return on your advertising spend. For example, photos and thorough descriptions can be easily overlooked. By expanding the detail of your comments and taking more photos, you can give car shoppers more information to make a purchasing decision.

ATLANTA, October 2, 2018 — Contact At Once!, the automotive division of LivePerson, Inc. (NASDAQ: LPSN) today announced its customers are now able to use Apple Business Chat, a new way for users to communicate directly with businesses using the Messages app on iPhone and iPad.

“We are proud to support Apple Business Chat, which offers a powerful, engaging new way for businesses to connect with their customers where they are, and when they want, using the Messages app on iOS,” says Denise Chudy, Contact At Once! General Manager.  “Automotive businesses can easily sign up with Contact At Once! to try Apple Business Chat beta.”  Contact At Once! customers who are launching Apple Business Chat today include Hendrick Automotive Group, Lithia Motors, Inc. and Robins & Day.

Contact At Once! customers can use Apple Business Chat to connect with auto shoppers through their Messages app, share rich media such as photos and video, schedule appointments and more. With Business Chat, customers can always reach a live person and are always in control of whether they share any contact information with a business.

To start an Apple Business Chat, customers can click the ‘Chat with Messages’ button on a customer’s website or in their iOS app. A conversation with the brand’s agents will open instantly in the Messages app, and users can take their time responding when it’s convenient.

Apple Business Chat is now available to users and businesses in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, UK and US, and is built into iOS 11.3 and higher. For more information visit: apple.com/ios/business-chat.

ABOUT CONTACT AT ONCE!

Contact At Once!, a LivePerson Company, helps create satisfying connections and build relationships between auto shoppers and dealers by making it easier for consumers to ask questions and get information in the micro-moments when they shop—whether on a brand or retailer site, via online advertising, on social media and more. Contact At Once! is the industry’s leading provider of messaging platforms with over 17,000 businesses using our solutions to build relationships with online, mobile shoppers. For more information, visit www.contactatonce.com.

ABOUT LIVEPERSON, INC.

LivePerson makes life easier by transforming how people communicate with brands. Our 18,000 customers, including leading brands like Citibank, HSBC, Orange, and The Home Depot, use our conversational commerce solutions to orchestrate humans and AI, at scale, and create a convenient, deeply personal relationship — a conversational relationship — with their millions of consumers. For more information about LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN), please visit www.liveperson.com.

MEDIA CONTACT

Allison Franzese

LivePerson

afranzese@liveperson.com

212-609-4224

This is a guest blog by Carla Fitzgerald, Chief Marketing Officer of Spireon.

Carla is speaking at DSES in a breakout titled, Next Generation Automotive Customer Lifecycle: How Connectivity is Transforming the Buying Experience for Consumers and Dealers Alike.

Connectivity is a central part of the human experience in 2018. Many of us keep tabs on family and friends through text messages and location sharing apps, as well as follow our favorite celebrities and athletes through Twitter and Instagram. Imagine trying to pick up someone from the airport without first tracking his or her flight status, checking real-time traffic to the airport, and — maybe most importantly — using texts to know exactly when he or she is ready and by which landmark to meet. (Unfortunately, some of us lived through that era, and we’re still traumatized.)

The point is, connectivity is ubiquitous. It’s grown beyond the novelty of arbitrarily knowing where someone is on a map; in business specifically, it enables efficiencies we never before thought possible.

Creating Loyal Customers

In auto sales, customer lifecycle is king. A great buying experience leads into a long service relationship, which leads into the next car purchase, and so on. After years of building trust and solidifying ties, you may have yourself a lifelong customer who is faithful to you and your brand. This is the customer who turns down overtures from your competitors, both in sales and service, because he or she trusts you. This customer spends all of his or her car budget with you.

Sounds good, right? Well, with the latest technology on your side, you can cultivate legions of lifelong customers. The key lies in connectivity.

Connected cars are not new, but their utilization by auto dealers to improve the customer lifecycle is. Connected car technology leads to invaluable data — data that can be analyzed to uncover dealer and consumer blind spots throughout the customer lifecycle. Data analytics can identify factors at the dealership that affect what consumers set out to buy and what they ultimately end up buying. Data analytics can show you how to best manage your inventory to make the greatest impact on sales. And with customer connectivity data as your guide, you can align dealer operations to improve consumer engagement and loyalty.

Giant Data

We hear a lot about the data revolution. It’s a big concept that one might look at as some fairytale giant sleeping in the woods of some far off fantasy land (or Silicon Valley). Well look out folks — that big data giant is awake and approaching all the dealer lots in the land! As he approaches yours, you’ll need the tools to train him to be manageable and articulate, and before you know it, he’ll begin sharing the trends and critical insights to help you turn every customer experience into a golden goose.

Come join me at Innovating on Customer Experience, the mightiest breakout session in all DSES 2018, on Monday, Oct. 22, at 11:15 a.m. I’ll introduce you to how connectivity and vehicle intelligence is transforming the customer lifecycle for the next generation.

Carla Fitzgerald is chief marketing officer at Spireon, provider of Kahu vehicle intelligence built for dealers, and an industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience in mobile and wireless technologies. Outside of work, she enjoys dog walks by the beach, great meals with family, and tracking her son’s vehicle trip history and speed alerts with Kahu.

"How do I validate my trade number?" is a question we often hear. If you factor in how many deals have trades and how many customers have negative equity, it's easy to understand why this is asked so often.

Jason Volny presents some ways in which you can make sure the customer understands how you came up with the trade number.