How Can You Go Mobile in Your Dealership?

One of the new keys to the success of your business is right there in the palm of your hand. It’s the thing most of us put in our pocket or handbag right after our wallet. It’s your smartphone — and it could be working a lot harder for you than it is now.

Dealers are using all sorts of mobile devices in their everyday operations. The capability of these devices is limitless. As the competition for quality used vehicles grows even tighter, the smart move is to use the power of your smartphone. You can operate your dealership on-the-go, making fast, informed decisions from acquisition to retail that will ultimately improve your bottom line.

Consider this example. At the auction, you and another competing dealer are eyeing the same unit in the lane. He pulls the vehicle value, history report and market pricing in seconds using his mobile device.

You anxiously flip through your trusty book and your phone stays useless in your pocket. Chances are he wins the bid or lets you overpay for a car he knows his customers may not want. Plus, he’s already busy putting the cars he acquired up online with new photos and pricing, all by using his mobile device. No matter what the scenario, competing with dealers who have already gone mobile is like entering the family sedan into a NASCAR race — you just can’t keep up.

More than 440,000 mobile sites and over 500,000 mobile apps exist today, including a growing number of auto-industry related apps. It may seem daunting to integrate this emerging technology into your business, but these tools are a must-have for both acquisition and retail. For many successful dealers mobile devices have made buying and selling cars simpler.

What Are "Mobile Apps" and How Do They Help Dealers?

To sum up this new technology, an app is a software application that helps people accomplish tasks faster. They are developed for mobile smartphones, such as iPhone, Droid and BlackBerry. Apps essentially make information actionable … or, applicable, if you will.

The applications for business operations are potentially limitless. Among other things, an app can use the hard drive of the mobile device to store data for faster recall and operation, perform calculations, access hardware features such as camera and GPS — all without an Internet connection. Talk about improving productivity.

So far, mobile apps have been downloaded more than 7 billion times from Apple alone. At its core, the Internet revolution was about how technology harnessed the power of information to generate efficiencies, and this is exactly the opportunity mobile apps offer to dealerships today, providing information on the go and the ability to tie it all together and take action.

How Can Mobile Apps Streamline Your Business?

Let’s take one of the most critical and complex dealership processes requiring multiple touch-points: inventory appraising, pricing, management and merchandising. In the old days, dealers had to lug around multiple books, such as KBB, Black Book, NADA guides, etc. Then, when the Internet came along, all this information transferred online and was made available in a single log-in creating huge efficiencies — along with additional layers of complexity as consumer eyeballs also shifted online.