There is no such thing as car dealership insurance, but it should be one of the most important considerations for dealership owners. If you’re thinking of starting or your own car dealership, you must have several insurance policies, including property and casualty coverage on all your cars. Most importantly you should have fleet insurance, as it’s impossible for car dealers to insure each of their cars individually. However, the coverage isn’t car insurance, but it does cover your vehicles in case of an accident.

To protect your car's against theft, loss, vandalism and other damage you’ll also need car lot insurance. Keep in mind that no dealership can legally sell vehicles without lot insurance. However, the considerations for insuring your car dealership don’t stop there; you must also ask important questions, know the specifics of the types of insurance you need and learn ways to save on your insurance premiums.

Ask Important Questions

Asking questions is an essential part of purchasing any type of insurance. These questions will ensure you obtain the right kind and amount of coverage. Purchasing insurance for your dealership is much like purchasing insurance for your car, and requires the same types of questions. For example, some good question to ask are: What discounts are available? Do you specialize in insurance for dealerships? How much insurance does my dealership need? Can the policy be changed easily? What are the premium options?

These are all important questions that should be asked, but you may also bring other specific and personal questions to the table. This will ensure that all your bases are covered even before you obtain a quote. Each insurer’s answers to these questions should be used to help you learn more about the coverage you need, compare services and narrow down your options; much like with traditional auto insurance.

Learn the Specifics of Dealership Insurance

If you’re going to run a car dealership, knowing the specifics of the type of insurance you can obtain and need is of utmost importance. First you should know that individual vehicles in a fleet can’t be registered to a car dealer, so the dealership must purchase liability insurance. Secondly, and most importantly, all car dealerships should have property and casualty insurance. These two insurance types combined will provide the proper protection your cars need. Liability limits are set in this type of coverage, which ensures you’ll be paid if there’s an accident during a test drive and more. The coverage also insures your vehicles in case of a fire, weather damage, theft and pretty much anything else that could happen to them.

You’ll also need commercial car insurance coverage that’s unique to car dealers – dealership insurance. Dealership insurance is designed for the automotive industry, and covers areas that property and casualty coverage can’t. For example, it covers: any loaner vehicles you loan to customers, cars you’ve obtained, but haven’t completely purchased yet, customer cars you’re performing maintenance on, damage to a customer’s vehicle while being driven by an employee and accidents before or during a test drive (caused by customers or employees).

Learn Ways to Save on Your Insurance Premiums

Dealerships don’t qualify for traditional car insurance discounts, but there are some discounts specifically designed for them. First, you can save money on your insurance premium if you provide employee training. Many insurers even provide a list of training courses they offer discounts for or offer discounts for creating a new training program.

Next, insurers offer reduced rates to dealerships that routinely check a customer’s driving history before making a sale. They also provide discounts to dealerships that have security on their lot, such as overnight security officers, security systems and cameras. Unbelievably, insurance companies also offer discounts to dealerships whose cars are only test driven on a pre-determined route. Apparently, driving the same route every test drive reduces the risk of an accident.

Finally, if you conduct employee background checks, you also qualify for discounts on your insurance premium. For the insurance company, this ensures a dealership isn’t hiring criminals or individuals with questionable backgrounds.

Investing in a car dealership is a major venture that requires major considerations, including insurance coverage. If you don’t know how to protect yourself, your vehicles and your employees, you could be out of business before you’ve even started. Most importantly, you can’t legally sell cars from a car lot without some type of insurance. So, keep this in mind, and don’t skimp on learning all that you can about car insurance and insurance coverage for your dealership.

When a person decides to start a car dealership, insurance needs to be part of their planning. It is a requirement for a dealership to have vehicle insurance. It is to their benefit to have an insurance product designed to cover each of their vehicles as well as the business. A dealership having protection for their vehicles against potential accidents, theft as well as vandalism and more is essential.

Dealership Physical Damage Coverage

This is designed to provide a car dealership protection for trailers and any type of vehicle a dealership has in its possession to sell. It's possible to have such coverage extended to protect other types of land motor vehicles. This could include scooters, golf carts as well as construction equipment and more. Vehicles on a dealership lot that may be there for consignment as well as a floor plan may also be covered. The declaration section of the insurance policy will identify the classes of vehicles that will be provided coverage.

Garage Liability Insurance

This is insurance designed to cover the legal liability for car dealerships with claims of bodily injury. It can also provide protection against property damage that occurs during business operations. There are two parts to this type of insurance. A dealership must list in the policy who is insured. They must also choose a limit for the insurance. This will involve a provision in the policy to protect against any and all legal issues involving garage operations. It should include the maintenance, ownership as well as operation of the vehicles when in a dealership's garage and more.

False Pretense Coverage

The cheapest car insurance product can provide effective protection for a car dealership who loses a vehicle because of a scheme, trick or false pretense. This coverage is important because when a car dealership voluntary parts with a vehicle in this way; it is not considered a form of theft. In this situation, the dealership has voluntarily given a vehicle to a person for a false reason. This coverage often protects a car dealership when a person takes a vehicle for a test drive and does not return the vehicle. False Pretense Coverage can protect a car dealership in various scenarios.

Dealers Open Lot Coverage

This is often referred to as auto physical damage coverage. It is designed to provide coverage for any physical damage that occurs to vehicles owned by a car dealership. This type of insurance product acknowledges that car dealerships are a unique business. It is designed to cover the risks involved with a dealership having vehicles on an open lot. This coverage can be for passenger vehicles, RV units and more. It will cover used, new service as well as demonstrator vehicles. Most insurance companies will require a dealership to insure the entire value of their inventory.

Reporting Form

This requires an insured dealership to file a report with the insurance company showing their inventory values on a regular basis. Most insurance companies require it to be done within 15 days from the end of a reporting period. This can be once a month or once a quarter. A dealership could be penalized if it neglects to submit reports as required. A penalty could be payment of only 75 percent paid for a loss. It won't matter the limit shown on a policy's declaration page.

Non-Reporting Form

This requires a dealership to submit to the insurance company the maximum value of all vehicles located on their property at any one time during the term of the policy. If a dealership gives an insurance company a lower value than what is actually of their premises: they could be penalized.

A car dealership needs to purchase insurance specifically designed to provide protection for the risks associated with having a car lot. This is essential because these insurance policies are created to meet the unique needs of those in the auto dealership industry.

The Toughest Selling Points and How to Beat 'Em

Car dealers like to sell a lot of vehicle inventory. Sometimes it is hard to get cars off the lot quick enough for the next batch of new vehicles to come. Customers generally have to rely on lending to get nicer cars, so that is something that smart car dealers try to provide. Most people like to buy vehicles on credit. It is hard for a customer to buy vehicles if their credit rating is poor. Having flexible lending options available to customers is sometimes useful. Another option is having leasing available. This article has some ways that your dealership can increase sales for vehicles.  

Look At The Sale From The Customer's Perspective 

As a car buyer, the goal is to get a great deal for a low price. As a car dealer, the goal is to get a high price for every vehicle on the lot. Making those two goals match is the challenge of selling cars. If it is hard to lower the price, one neat way to increase sales is to make it a great deal. Customers like it if the vehicle is newer, low miles, clean interior, and a nice paint job. Dealerships who have a high price ceiling may want to consider prioritizing making the vehicle really nice to buy. The price of insurance is also often a factor. Bankrate emphasizes how small cheap cars that are bought by young people have higher insurance premiums. Cheap auto insurance quotes can help encourage sales.

Try Price Matching

Some retail stores do this. If a competitor is offering a low price on a particular vehicle, offer to price match. Many customers shop around before they make a decision on what car to buy. Running price matching deals can encourage more sales. Look at the financial revenue that you are taking in to see how much you can match the prices of competitors. It is hard to price match if expenses are too high. Trying to make expenses less can give your dealership flexibility to be more competitive.

Know The Popular Car Models 

Some cars just do not sell as well. Having a large inventory of vehicles that do sell well can encourage more revenue. Pickup trucks, despite their size, are one of the best selling vehicle types in the U.S. This is not true if you live in another country. Knowing the needs of your particular market can help increase sales. Markets on the East Coast will also probably not want pickup trucks as much as those in the U.S. South.

Measure Your Sales Staff Effectiveness

Some people are not as great at selling. Having a metric of how many vehicles each staff member helped sell can help with assigning employees to the job where they are succeeding. There are several qualities that make great salespeople. Checking sales staff to see if they line up with many of them can help vehicle inventory get sold quicker.

Show Information From Trusted Resources

Vehicle resources like the Kelley Blue Book and Fuelly give buyers an independent way to see how good a particular car is to buy. The Kelley Blue Book collects vehicle ratings by people who have owned a certain model of car. It also has expert reviews. If each vehicle on your lot has information from a third party factual resource, that can help customers make up their mind quicker.

Conclusion

Getting cars sold is sometimes challenging, particularly if a competing dealer next door is running great deals. These suggestions can help your dealership become more effective and good at getting cars sold. There are many other tips out there from pro car salesman.

Employee turnover can cost a dealership approximately $400,000 per year through lost sales, service offerings, new hire search, and training expenses even if the dealership only has 55 employees. As a result, dealerships must hire the best talent from the start and retain that talent for as long as possible. There are many avenues you can take in order to recruit the best talent for your dealership while keeping costs low.

Plan the Process

Many dealership managers only contact people they know for leads or put an ad in local classifieds and wait passively for job seekers to find them. It doesn't matter if you need to hire one new staff member or a dozen, the only way you can recruit the best talent is with a well-thought-out strategy for finding, engaging, interviewing and picking candidates. Beyond casting a wider search net, you should be as specific as possible when listing skills and qualifications to weed out unqualified job seekers. You should also consider how you plan to reduce a talent pool of potentially 50 applicants down to a handful and then to only one. For example, you might pay the last two candidates to work on-site for a day as a test to see who does best under the pressure.

Engage Talent Everywhere

The best talent uses online technologies more than ever before to find jobs. A successful recruitment campaign must involve multiple points of engagement. There's nothing wrong with posting job listings offline locally, but many businesses fail to utilize enough online strategies to attract the types of candidates that they need. For example, some employers don't use social media and online communities to find job seekers or develop talent pools or offer remote application options.

Promote Your Dealership

Top job seekers don't usually respond to job listings without researching first. Once tech-savvy job seekers find your offline or online listing, they're going to check out your dealership through at least your website and social media sites before reaching out to you with an inquiry, resume or application. Make certain that these platforms outline important business details beyond your dealership's location and history, including your goals, work culture and even non-profit contributions. Additionally, make certain that you maintain a positive reputation on dealership review and industry websites.

Offer Fantastic Incentives

Excellent workers choose employers who offer them the best incentives because they know their worth. Although many job seekers consider local discounts and gift cards as incentives, professionals who know their worth expect a lot more. For example, consider offering an hourly or salary income rather than a commission-based one. Instead of scheduling 60-hour work weeks, offer 40-hour weeks or longer shifts and four-day weeks. Additional options: Give employees extra paid time off, set up a wellness reimbursement program or pay for career development courses.

Hire Recruitment Help

If you're struggling to create a plan or your recruitment process still fails to find the best talent, invest in recruitment process outsourcing through a firm that can evaluate your existing process and offer guidance, tools and services to improve it. You will be able to find better candidates, handle your initial application screening calls and interview scheduling and/or train your hiring managers to recognize top talent easier during interviews. Also be sure to provide yourself with valuable tracking data that can clearly show your recruitment failures and successes.

As you can see, you must treat your recruitment process with the same serious consideration that you use for your marketing and sales efforts. By expanding on traditional talent search methods and replacing hiring shortcuts with proven strategies, you're guaranteed that your recruitment process will always find the best talent available.

As someone who owns a car dealership, you might always be looking for ways to help it grow and become more successful. Nowadays, in the digital age, it's important to look at things from a different perspective. These are some of the things that can help you grow your dealership in today's day and age.

Build the Perfect Website

In today's world, with so many people spend a lot of their time searching for information about cars online when they're in the market to buy a vehicle, having a great website for your dealership is critical. These are some of the things that you might want to add to your website:

• Information about your dealership, such as where it's located and how customers can get in contact with you

• An inventory of the vehicles that you have in stock, along with pricing information, so that potential buyers can start their shopping online

• A live chat feature so that customers can get answers to questions quickly

• Financing information, including a financing application

Use Social Media

If you aren't currently using social media as a means of promoting your dealership, you are really missing out. Nowadays, with so many people using Twitter, Facebook and other similar sites on a daily basis, this is a great way to connect with local individuals and get them excited about your cars. Build up your profiles, add plenty of pictures of your dealership and the cars that you have for sale and otherwise use social media to promote your dealership. If you do, you might be surprised by the results that you will see. Additionally, you can even try paid advertising on social media if you'd like to bring in even better results.

Focus on Tech Features in Vehicles

Sure, things like gas mileage and the look of a vehicle are very important to many consumers. However, now more than ever, many customers are looking for other things when buying cars, such as the newest and greatest tech features. Someone might want a car that has a rearview backup camera, Bluetooth connectivity or some other tech feature, so making sure that you are familiar with these features and that you advertise them properly can help you boost sales and encourage interest in the vehicles that you have on the lot.

Provide Internet Access for Customers

Right now, you probably have internet access in your dealership for yourself and your employees. However, you might have never focused on providing access for your customers. This might not have been important in the past, but it's pretty important in today's world. These are just some of the reasons why your customers might want to access the internet while at your dealership:

• While customers are waiting, such as while their car is being detailed or while they are waiting for someone in finance to work out a deal for financing, they might want to be able to keep themselves entertained. Ensuring that there is WiFi service available throughout the dealership can allow them to hook up with their devices and keep themselves entertained, which can help you avoid complaints about wait times and can increase customer satisfaction.

• Some customers might feel more confident if they are able to do a bit of research or comparison shopping from your dealership. For example, they might want to use their phones to pull up pricing or feature information about models that they might be looking at.

• In some cases, customers might be able to log on to their insurance companies' websites to secure auto insurance coverage for a car when buying it, ensuring that they are complying with lender requirements and local laws so that the sale can be made.

As you can see, there are a few steps that you can take that will help you grow your dealership in today's digital age. If you implement these tips, you might be surprised by what they can do for your business.

There are a lot of things that go into having a successful car dealership. Many owners and managers are so focused on what has worked in the past; they may be overlooking what could be done to make things better in the present and future. There are many things that can be done to improve how a car dealership approaches customer acquisition, online presence, customer engagement and more. There are at least three areas of operating a car dealership that can always improve.

1. Customer Acquisition

It's possible to increase the flow of customers without focusing so much on the price of a vehicle. It is very common for dealerships to emphasize their low prices, special incentives, rebates and more. It's also too common for car dealerships to not recoup the costs of advertising this to customers. The problem is that most car dealers advertise the same things. When this happens, customers can't tell if there is a difference between car dealerships. It may be time to focus on what a person or family needs and how a particular vehicle can meet these needs. The size, safety features as well as durability and more can attract more customers. A salesperson may not want to focus on the price until a customer realizes how much they need a particular vehicle. The focus should be in finding the needs of a customer and then finding a vehicle that will accommodate those particular needs. This also involves knowing the demographics of the customers who will visit the dealership. If the largest segment of customers in an area are parents who have children on their own, a plan can be created to attract these parents. This could involve letting these customers know how they could benefit from a smaller vehicle. The dealership should provide a special deal with large vehicle trade-ins as part of the plan.

2. Online Auctions And Websites

It's possible with many car dealerships that they don't realize the full potential for online auctions and how these auctions could benefit the dealership. When this is done correctly, a car dealership's customer base will quickly expand into other counties, states and sometimes other countries. A car dealership needs to develop an effective method of shipping or promptly delivering the vehicles that are purchased in this way. A car dealership will soon learn the costs involved with selling vehicles with an online auction or through a website is much less than using traditional advertising methods. When a vehicle is listed on a website or an online auction, it will be seen by much larger numbers of potential buyers. Once a car dealership learns the best keyword searches, they will be much easier for customers to find. Studies have shown that selling vehicles online in much less stressful for the buyer and the seller. A virtual bookkeeping company can also be a benefit in this situation. Dedicating resources to online selling will not require a lot of energy or effort to succeed. It is estimated the automotive industry in the United States will spend an average of over $7 billion for digital advertising. That is expected to increase to over $12 billion by 2019.

3. Engagement

It's important a car dealership attempt to discover new and different ways to stay engaged with customers. This could involve everything being able to project an image of a customer driving a car that has their interest onto their phone or provide a reward for a test drive and more. It's now possible for a salesperson from to have a face to face meeting with a potential customer using the internet. The customer could be in their home, office or a coffee shop and more. With smartphone technology, a salesperson can actually show a customer desired features of a vehicle without them being in the showroom. This is successful when the salesperson understands what events are impacting a customer's life. It's important to know if they're single, have a family are self-employed or work long hours. This information can be used to accommodate what a customer needs to happen for them to purchase a vehicle.

Generating enough sales is critical for any business to succeed. With an adequate amount of sales, a business will be making sufficient revenue to cover its expenses and become profitable. As a sales representative, you will be responsible for making sure that the company makes enough revenue to reach its goals. At times sales can be difficult, but there are ways in which you can reach your sales goals. You can also participate in activities that help improve your results as well. In order to get the most out of your sales experience, it will be important to contact your very best leads, emphasize customer needs and also explain to customers the benefits of your services. By doing these three things, your sales results will greatly improve.

Contact Your Best Leads First

The first thing you will want to do in order to improve your sales experience is to contact your very best leads. As a salesperson, there will be a number of customers who are more sincere than others. What this means is that there are prospective customers who are really looking to buy a car. As a result, it will be important to stay in contact with them on a regular basis. Since many people view buying a new car as a serious purchase decision you will want to talk with them frequently to ensure that they feel comfortable with their decision, and to build trust with your customer. By contacting your best leads, you will be in a position to make more sales on a consistent basis.

Emphasize the Customer’s Needs

Another way of improving your experience as a salesperson is to emphasize the customer’s needs. Whenever a person looks to buy a car, they are looking to fulfill a certain need. Whether they are looking for something that is more modern, faster, powerful or safer they will look to buy something that meets one of their preferences. As a salesperson, it is your objective to tell a customer that your cars will meet their needs. During this process, it will be important to tell them how your cars are safer, higher quality, and more productive. You will want to give them the impression that your car dealership will solve their problems. You will also want to look for needs that other dealerships may not help their customers with. After anyone purchases a car they will need to get it registered, obtain car insurance, and know where to go if they need any maintenance or repairs. As the customer sees you trying to help them with many different needs that come with buying a car they will have a better experience and will be more likely to return to you when they need another car. By going with this approach, you will be in good position to drastically improve your sales results.

Show That Your Dealership Actually Cares

When looking to improve your sales results, it will be vital that you explain the benefits of your using your dealership. By showing great customer service you are able to show the customer that you care about them as a person and not just as a dollar sign. A great way to show that you are care about more than just money is to show the customer the ways you are involved in the community. Showing this allows them to see that the money they spend will be used for good things.

Another great customer service tools is a follow up call, even if they don’t buy. People don’t always buy a car the moment they walk into the dealership; they like to shop around, but you can use that to your advantage. You calling the customer a day or two after they have come into your dealership shows that they matter, and you are dedicated to giving them the best option they can afford. If, they say they are going in a different direction don’t get upset. Be courteous and kind, and who knows your great customer service could be the reason why they choose you the next time they want to buy a car.

Conclusion

Following steps such as contacting the best leads will enable salespeople to sell to the most sincere customers. Emphasizing the customer needs is another great way to improve sales. This part of the process explains to the customer that the cars offered will allow them to get the results they want. Showing the customer that your dealership actually cares about them will give the customer a great impression of your dealership and give them another reason to buy from you.