Vehicle Sales Process: Challenging the Status Quo

In today’s fast-paced business environment, time is always of the essence, and as the saying goes, time is most certainly money. In fact, this old adage is particularly true when it comes to disposing of fleet vehicles. Let’s face it, your fleet vehicles represent a significant investment for your company and once they’re no longer needed, you want to liquidate these assets as quickly as possible to generate capital that can be funneled back into your business. During the automotive fleet sales process, you often have to choose between maximizing returns and minimizing time-to-sell. But what if you could do both?

Here’s how one organization embraced a holistic remarketing approach to simultaneously increase revenue and reduce days to sell.

Customer Challenge

Typically, selling fleet vehicles at the end of their useful lifecycle is a delicate balancing act of generating acceptable returns while also maintaining a reasonable time-to-sell. For example, a leading automotive finance company began to experience its vehicle proceeds dipping while the days to sell approached nearly three months. The disposal manager knew they had to find a better strategy to ensure their organization was able to maintain the liquidity it needed to efficiently conduct business. Before making any dramatic changes, the disposal manager engaged the Holman fleet remarketing team to discuss their challenges and explore opportunities to improve performance.

Deliver Solution

The finance company and Holman conducted a thorough evaluation of their current fleet vehicle sales process and determined that a series of minor changes would likely yield significant improvements. Together, we developed a comprehensive remarketing solution designed to:

• Streamline the titling process.
• Better leverage partnerships with key auction vendors to maximize vehicle exposure to preferred buyers.
• Ensure certified remarketing professionals would represent each unit, adjusting to market conditions in real time.

Business Results

With this holistic strategy in place, the finance company and Holman launched a three month pilot program to assess the impact of these changes. It took only six weeks for results to exceed all expectations.

Through their willingness to challenge the status quo, the finance company was able to establish a seamless commercial vehicle sales process that allowed them to recover more value from their vehicles and dramatically increase the speed of the entire process.

To learn more about embracing holistic fleet strategies throughout the entire lifecycle of your vehicles – buy, drive, service, and sell – to effectively manage your fleet as a strategic business asset, be sure to check out this video.