Dealer Groups

Scale is the easy half

Pinnacle’s clients range from some of the largest dealer groups in the country to smaller independent dealerships, and the work is nationwide — from California to the Carolinas. Running a multi-rooftop or multi-market campaign is a volume and logistics problem, and volume is the one variable that works in your favour: wholesale pricing on direct mail applies to the whole group rather than one store at a time.

Event capacity is the same story. Nationwide event staffing is what makes it possible to run a calendar across stores instead of one weekend at one rooftop, and hosted events scale to fit — a large multi-franchise group and a smaller independent store run the same format at different sizes.

The problem that actually costs you money

Across a group, the campaign is rarely what fails. What fails is that store three handles a lead differently from store seven, so the same mail piece produces wildly different results and nobody can say why. Two rooftops with the same traffic and different show rates is a process problem wearing a marketing problem’s clothes.

• Map the sales process — you cannot standardise what nobody has written down.
• Build an accountability culture and audit lead handling across stores, so the gap is visible before the campaign spends into it.
• Outsourced versus in-house BDC — the centralised-or-per-store question is the one most groups get asked at exactly the wrong moment, which is after a bad month.

Comparable numbers, or none of it means anything

A group needs its stores measured the same way, otherwise the monthly review is eleven different arguments. Measuring BDC ROI beyond appointment count is the case for not ranking stores on the one metric that is easiest to inflate, and tracking direct mail ROI accurately is how a drop gets attributed properly when several rooftops mail in the same window.

Call tracking matters more at group level than anywhere else, for the simple reason that it is the only way to tell which rooftop a phone lead actually belonged to.

Where to start

Most groups start with one rooftop rather than the whole estate — a single staffed event at the store with the worst month, run properly, is a cheaper way to find out whether this works than a group-wide commitment. The in-store assessment is the version that puts someone in the building; the virtual store assessment is the remote one, and it scales across stores more easily.

This is one of three on the who we serve index. Single rooftop? See franchise dealerships for the co-op arithmetic, or independent dealerships if there is no manufacturer behind you.