General Manager Danny Zaslavsky discusses buying inventory from private sellers

Welcome to this week’s episode of Used Cars Weekly, the original CBT News show dedicated to bringing car dealers best practices and tips for the used car department, in-depth dealer interviews, hands-on dealership strategies, as well as vendor analysis. Today, host Jasen Rice, founder of Lotpop, chat with Danny Zaslavsky of VinCue and General Manager of County Hill Motors about private party acquisitions.

Zaslavsky says when you call their store or walk-in, the first thing they ask is are you here to buy a car or sell a car? In the buying process, customers are referred to a buying agent. He says the step they needed to learn was scaling internally with processes and people and then utilizing or creating technology, so they had a greater reach.

Zaslavsky says we get opportunities to buy cars from the public that we normally wouldn’t get at the auction. The first thing you should do is, make buying cars part of your message. Then, give that consumer a place to go and start the process. He says, he never had less than a 5-star review, when he buys someone’s car. What are all the ways we can buy from the public, Zaslavsky asks? The first way is inbound, which is people coming to you. The second way is third party, where leads come from partner sources. The next one is outbound, which is listed for sale by another site. There are other outlets, such as service drive, lease conversion, or private party to trade conversion. He says being able to manage all that in one acquisition management system is where scalability becomes reality. That’s the benefit of having a solution.

Consumers generally won’t sell to a dealer because they believe they won’t get ‘enough’ for their car. Zaslavsky says that’s not the truth anymore. He says they work to give meaningful offers to consumers and solve their problems.

One of Zaslavsky’s goals for 2022 is to do more wholesale. He says, if you have the opportunity to do business with the public and buy their car, please do it. If we as a dealer body don’t come together and take this seriously, those cars will get absorbed by online retailers. This is our way to lead our industry into the future.

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