One mail piece, two cars, and one of them went to a buyer no internet lead would ever have tagged as subprime.
That kind of moment happens every day at Don Bulluck Chevrolet in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It almost didn’t happen at all.
The customer most stores never reach
In more than 40 years in the dealership business, I’ve watched the same thing happen over and over. A shopper with a 520-credit score applies for an auto loan. Their credit gets pulled. Then they wait to see whether anyone will call them back.
Most of the time, nobody does. Or the call comes from a store that runs them through the same lender that just turned them down, and they leave feeling exactly how they walked in.
These aren’t bad customers. They’re people who need a car to get to work, take their kids to school and keep their lives moving. When a dealership finally treats them with respect, they tend to remember it. They come back, and they send their family and friends, sometimes the same day.
The question isn’t whether these buyers exist. Experian’s latest report shows subprime auto originations up 24% year over year, so there are more of them shopping right now than there have been in years. The question is who gets to them first.
What Don Bulluck did differently
Instead of buying the same internet leads every other store in town was chasing, Don Bulluck Chevrolet tried something else. Every day, we identify Subprime Shoppers in their market whose credit was just pulled for an auto loan, people scoring between 450 and 619. Within days, those shoppers get the EasyDrive Card in their mailbox, while they’re still deciding where to buy.
Their market is exclusive. We don’t mail those Subprime Shoppers for any other dealer.
The store started with a $4,100 test in its first month. It reported more than $22,000 in gross profit.
Since June, 4,502 Subprime Shoppers have been mailed and 236 have responded: 109 by phone and 127 online. That’s a 5.24% response rate so far this year, with August reaching 6.96%. Results vary from store to store, and that’s my point. The mail opens the door. What happens next depends on who’s standing there.
The mail doesn’t sell the car. Oshae does.
This is the part most dealers miss.
You can send a store the best leads in the country, and if nobody calls them back within the hour, they’re gone. If the person who answers the phone treats a 520-credit score like a waste of time, they’re gone. If the desk has only one lender for special finance, most of them are gone.
At Don Bulluck, the leads go to Oshae. He calls them fast, he works every one of the leads, and he keeps looking until he finds the lender who’ll say yes. With Ryan Wood, the GSM, backing the program, the whole store treats these shoppers as buyers, not problems.
I’ve written before about the 70/70/70/70 rule: contact 70% of your leads, get 70% of those in the door, get 70% of those approved, and close 70% of those. Do that, and every 100 Subprime leads turn into about 24 sales. Don Bulluck didn’t get its result through luck. It got it by having the right person in the right seat.
Now think bigger
For some stores, $4,100 is a rounding error and $22,000 in gross is one good weekend. I get it. But $4,100 was only a test, a small slice of one market.
The program scales with your store. We size every market by ZIP code and radius, from a single independent lot to multi-store groups. Some of our dealers have been with us for 13 years. If one store can turn a $4,100 test into more than $22,000 in gross, imagine what a full market looks like for you.
Why this matters for your store
Every month, Subprime Shoppers in your market apply for credit and wait for someone to call. The ones who shopped last month already made their choice, and most didn’t get the help they needed. The ones who will shop next month haven’t chosen yet.
You can be the store that reaches them first. Or you can be the store that never finds out they were there.
Your special finance manager is already the most important person in your dealership. Give them shoppers who are ready to buy, and let them do what they do best.
If you’d like to see how many Subprime Shoppers are in your market, message me and I’ll run a free Subprime Market Analysis. It shows the shopper count, the math and the package options for your store, big or small.
Denny Long, President, Subprime Marketing Group
