Posts Tagged ‘auto sales leads’

You always need to be very careful with your business. While all relationships should be handled with care and respect, you should handle the relationship between your business and you with utmost care. This is the most fragile one; one that can spell the difference between a good rich life and a poor one. It will define whether you will sleep under a roof or spend your entire life running away from mortgage companies. With special finance leads, you have a great deal of options. Auto sales leads come branded as exclusive or non exclusive. Picking out one that will be good for your business is entirely your call. This article examines the two types of leads.

Exclusive leads can be very good for your business but their price makes them a long shot for startups. While a startup may be a viable business, it is not strong enough to undertake the weight of heavy payouts. Exclusive leads come at a higher price; more than the $1 to $5 price of non exclusive leads. If you love your business and want it to grow, you can buy exclusive auto sales leads but you have to be careful especially when you are still fresh in the market.

While non exclusive auto sales leads come cheap, everyone has access to the same information as you. This spoils your chances of beating your competition. While exclusive leads allow you to have exclusive marketing to your prospects, non-exclusive leads gives you access but leave you to sell yourself with your marketing campaign. This may hurt your business if your competitors are a little bit more creative or have been in market for a longer time than you.

With this knowledge, you can make a better decision as you buy your leads today. Can’t you?

You would be surprised by the number of business owners, who by sheer ignorance, try so hard to drive up sales even when there are no clients. We know about certain businesses that will charge an extra dime for them to make it to the next day. If you are at start up stages and want your business to swim in the deep seas some day, you should know about auto sales leads. While we’ll be talking about auto leads, the information is also relevant to leads in other industries. Read the rest of this entry »

In my entire career, I don’t think I have ever seen that many lenders specifically focused on our target customer at one place and absolutely never have seen such a combined consensus of positive outlook on the immediate future of the subprime auto finance business.
–Tim Parker, CEO of DealerLink Inc.

After more than 40 years in the car business and in auto sales lead generation, I have been through multiple downturns in our industry. During the last quarter of 2010, I was able to estimate that the industry would begin to see a turn around during and presently, all indicators are certainly pointing in that direction.

A little over a month ago, I had the good fortune of having the opportunity to speak to a group of auto dealers from all over the country at a special finance conference in Indianapolis who were all there looking and hoping for signs that things were starting to turn around for our industry. Also present at this conference were almost all the lenders in the business who were also there to update auto dealers on the state of the industry. In my entire career, I don’t think I have ever seen that many lenders specifically focused on our industry’s target customer in one place and I absolutely never have seen such a combined consensus of positive outlook on the immediate future of the subprime auto finance business. Some highlights included all of the lenders removing the “looked to booked” penalties, revised underwriting guidelines and additionally an absolute total effort by the lenders to let auto dealers know that they had money available and were looking for ways to make deals.

I was asked by auto dealers to provide them with the top 3 strategies they could use to increase sales, lower advertising expenses and keep their cost of sales down.

The very first strategy at the top of the list was special finance leads (or subprime auto finance leads). Even though it’s been a very trying time for the last two and a half years, special finance leads still offer an incredible value for the money. A couple of things pointed out by the lenders at the conference that they were all seeing were: larger down payments, more money being financed and monthly payments increasing not only in dollar amount but in terms as well. It turns out those people with credit scores between 625 and 725 have taken about a 100 point drop in their bureau scores, putting them in unfamiliar territory when it comes to subprime auto finance. These same people still want to drive the nicer cars and are willing to come up with down payments and extend terms to get within budgets.

The second of the three strategies was auto sales leads, which can also fit within the special finance leads category except that because at DealerLink we generate the auto sales leads from over 500 consumer auto finance sites that are listed at the very top of the search engines, we are seeing a wide spectrum of credit scores, which is again a great value for the dealer.

Here are a couple of our most successful consumer auto finance websites:

• NationwideAutoLending.com – ranked #2 at Google for the term “auto loans”
• CapitalCarLoans.com – ranked #1 at Google for the term “car financing”
• AutoLoans.us – ranked #1 at Google for the term “bad credit car loan”
• DealerLink.us – ranked #1 at Google for the term “special finance leads”

Since they only asked me for the top 3 strategies that I would recommend, I had a hard time deciding whether to suggest automotive direct mail or automotive trigger leads. Ultimately, I chose to recommend automotive direct mail because more dealers have experience with auto dealer direct mail marketing albeit not always a good experience. I am unaware of any automotive direct mail marketing companies who are willing to guarantee an auto dealer even a 1% response rate, while DealerLink will guarantee a minimum of 2% on any of our direct mail programs. Additionally, with our one of a kind automotive credit card mailer, DealerLink will guarantee 100% of the dealer’s investment. In more direct terms, if an auto dealer chooses to participate in our automotive credit card mailer and spends $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 or more, we will guarantee enough sales to cover the dealer’s investment, period!

We are also having great success with bankruptcy mailers and other credit score-based direct mail programs that we offer.

There are an incredible number of dealers who have been waiting for good news and I’m proud to say this news has arrived. As an auto dealer, if you have been hesitant about getting back into the special finance leads business don’t miss this opportunity to do so! Pick up the phone today and call Tim Parker, President and CEO of DealerLink, at 704-544-9100 or toll-free at 800-890-8850 and I will help you personally. Try to call the other companies and see how many of the Presidents you can talk to!

Great news for special finance dealers! I wanted to get an update out on the exciting new guaranteed credit score special finance leads program. It doesn’t matter what you call it: special finance leads, auto sales leads, subprime auto finance leads or car sales leads, this program gets the job done.

We have received a huge number of responses from dealers all over the country telling us what a huge success the guaranteed credit score leads are having in their special finance and Internet departments. The feed back we are getting on the auto sales leads are showing results from 12 to 18% in conversions.

This is the most exciting special finance leads program to come along in the 9 years we have been doing this. It’s nice to see that dealers are selling cars again. What is a bit surprising is the fact that our platinum level with credit scores of 600 and above are actually scoring a lot higher than our research showed. The scores in March 09 were 75% were 675  and 60% were 700 and above.

We have found that dealers who do specialize in special finance should definitely be on the Gold program with credit scores between 530 and 599. If you have a true Internet department then you may want to consider the Platinum program as well but we would advise against it if you don’t have people skilled at working with the good credit customers because they do ask different questions and want to negotiate rates and pricing. The Gold tier does not. They are the absolute best special finance leads you have ever seen. Why not start selling cars again??

Give me a call at 1-800-890-8850 and I will help you get more customers on the lot who actually qualify to buy a car.

Tim Parker, President & Founder