OEC plays many different roles for many different people in the automotive industry – we want to take a moment to share our story: 

Back in 2000, OEMs faced a huge hurdle selling parts into dealerships, mechanical shops, and collision shops. Every transaction was handled manually, by phone or fax, creating a real need for an efficient way to do business. This is where OEC entered the market. Several major auto industry players, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Bell & Howell, formed OEConnection (OEC as we’re known today) to help facilitate part sales between dealers and repair facilities.  

Like the automotive industry itself, growth was not inevitable but essential for keeping pace with customer needs within an evolving market. OEC continued to develop and acquire key software solutions to better manage every aspect of maintenance and repair. By strategically growing the business, the OEC customer network expanded to include aftermarket parts suppliers, MSOs, fleets, insurers and, of course, dealers, collision & mechanical repairers, and manufacturers.  

Now customers throughout the industry and around globe use OEC technology and data services to connect with each other and get vehicles back on the road safely. From our early focus on parts to our now expanded solutions and customers, OEC connects those involved in the vehicle parts and repair ecosystem so they finally have an easier way to get their job done. 

There’s a story about a parts manager who one day noticed a once-reliable customer stopped ordering parts. Confused, the parts manager called to see why. “You stopped ordering,” the parts manager said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” The shop owner replied: “I’ve been telling you for months.” The parts manager returned to his books, spreadsheets, and POs. He noticed the shop had slowly but surely reduced order volume over time, and eventually stopped ordering entirely. The parts team never saw the trend because it happened gradually and, like most customers, the shop didn’t just say: “I’m buying from someone else!”

Here are 3 ways business intelligence (BI) helps parts managers access customer trends and growth opportunities through insights into their wholesale parts business:

1. Understand the message behind customer data

There’s no doubt most parts departments know their customers well, with most completing hundreds of transactions with these shops. However, if the data is inaccessible, then much of the critical information is an untold story. When parts managers adopt business intelligence tools, like PSXLink, they can easily access sales trends, specific segments of their wholesale performance, and customer behaviors (like when a customer reduces parts spending). By unlocking and presenting data using interactive dashboards, parts teams can easily identify changing trends, both abrupt & incremental, and get a clear look at what customers are telling them.

2. Strengthen your customer relationships

It’s easy to think of these tools as numbers, spreadsheets, and long arrows that go up and to the right (great) or the opposite (time to act). But what’s at the core of business intelligence tools (beyond the ability to track behaviors, trends, & performance) is the ability to foster customer relationships. This depth of analysis provides hard data and objective information required for real, productive customer conversations. For example, if a parts manager can see a shop’s trends and think, “Woah, he’s spending less and less,” it’s clear that it’s time to pick up the phone or swing by for a visit.

3. Identify strategies & growth opportunities

BI tools do more than serve as preventative solutions to guard against lost sales. The analytics allow parts managers to easily monitor all aspects of their wholesale business – providing actionable insights for growth strategies. When you are able to monitor the segments of your business you deem most important, the sales team easily identifies customers presenting growth potential. This allows the parts manager to pinpoint opportunities, make informed decisions, track sales activity, and view follow-up progress. All of which can be managed though an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Take control of your parts business

Missing growth opportunities and losing sales is never good for any business and will quickly impact a parts department. With enhanced access to customer data, you can see what customer behaviors and trends tell you. BI tools, like PSXLink, are designed specifically for wholesale parts and provide insights that help accelerate growth. Customers are always conveying a message to your parts department – even when they’re not “saying it” out loud – and now, more than ever, you need to make sure you’re receiving the message clearly.

The current availability of parts and repair data for collision repairers and parts dealers seems unlimited and easily accessible. That said, not all data is the same. Much of the parts and repair data currently available to repair customers comes from ambiguous or unofficial sources, including third-party suppliers. These data sources often lack quality assurances and affect parts accuracy, repair quality, and even pricing information.

When accessing parts data, it’s critical that the parts buyers and sellers consider the source of the data. Having information is good, of course. But when it’s unclear where the information is coming from (or if it’s reliable), it creates adverse, downstream effects, including inaccurate parts numbers & orders, outdated pricing, and unnecessary returns & delays.

For parts & repair information, OEM data is the clear source of truth. This is why the OEC solutions, supported by data direct from the OEM, deliver high-quality parts and repair information that is reliably accurate and consistently up to date. The OEC solutions, including CollisionLink & Trax, provide shops and dealers with the ability to:

• Validate each OEM part number to increase order accuracy by confirming (at the VIN level) whether a part is correct, incorrect, or if additional parts may be required. This level of accuracy streamlines the ordering process and promotes a stronger customer experience starting at the beginning of the process.
• Access an OEM parts catalog to identify and order the right parts – and all necessary parts – the first time, reducing the hassle of returns and the need to order additional parts that, with accurate data, could have been identified and procured at the beginning of the repair process.
• Receive recall notifications when the VIN on the order has an open recall, creating an opportunity for the shop and the dealer to promote proper vehicle repair and demonstrate expert awareness of vehicle safety for the customer.
• Access full option codes for visibility into vehicle options to ensure accurate parts orders for the shop based on the specific vehicle’s model and features. This is a significant advantage given the complexity and variation in vehicles on the road.
• View OEM price tapes that feature accurate parts numbers for up-to-date pricing, including current promotions, parts programs, and opportunities to price match, allowing for the creation of accurate estimates and invoices.

When shops and dealers take advantage of solutions that leverage OEM data, daily tasks are easier and performed with greater efficiency. Simply put, shops and dealers can:

• Work together effectively & productively
• Promote proper parts ordering & vehicle repair
• Experience streamlined workflows
• Increase profits & reduce costs
• Return the vehicle to the customer in a timely manner

More than that, though: the real value of leveraging OEM-sourced data is keeping the customer safe by ensuring the right parts go into the right vehicle for the right repair. This is why leveraging solutions, like the OEC platforms that feature OEM data, ensure customers always have accurate, up-to-date parts and repair information. When the repairer and dealer can trust the data, they can make – or guide – the correct part choice for the proper repair and deliver safe, efficient results for the vehicle owner.

Unfortunately, when your parts solutions don’t work together, your team loses time on admin work instead of focusing on parts sales and customer service. A quick example: The average estimate contains 40 lines, but if your systems don’t communicate with each other, it’s 40 lines of manual reentry that could otherwise be handled with one click. That’s just one scenario but demonstrates why it’s best to leverage solutions that make your behind-the-scenes processes smoother.

Here are three benefits to enabling your parts department platforms to work together:

1. Efficiency
   We’ve all heard “time is money” (many times), right? Despite how often we hear the saying, it’s not as easy to calculate time savings as it is with other types of ROI. But having more time presents its own type of ROI: the ability to get more done. So, when your dealership’s systems work together, it eliminates tasks that slow your team down. This means you can save time, grow your sales, and, most importantly, provide better support for your customers. Products that allow your DMS to communicate with parts department solutions, like collision and mechanical parts management solutions or supply chain and backorder fulfillment tools, add efficiencies to your day by:

• • Simply saving the parts team time
  • Eliminating the need to verify customer selling prices
  • Reducing errors caused by manual order re-entry

2. Accuracy
   When you eliminate frustrating administrative processes, like manually checking prices & re-entering orders in your DMS, you also improve order accuracy. That’s a bonus and solves two issues: In addition to streamlining your parts operations, connecting systems within your parts department improves the overall quality of the information that you provide to customers. By reducing the error-prone manual tasks through system integration, your parts team can:

• • Provide real-time information
  • Display accurate inventory
  • Develop a reputation for dependability

3. Profitability
   Efficiency and accuracy gains allow your team to focus on more meaningful tasks, like increasing sales. This is where you see the more expected type of ROI: healthier profits and growth. Solutions that create connections between your systems allow you to put your people in position to leverage their expertise and insights to support customers. When your parts management platforms communicate directly with your DMS system, you can experience a streamlined, accurate process to support your bottom-line by:

• • Avoiding pricing mistakes
  • Minimizing costly returns
  • Improving customer satisfaction

Too many tools, too little time
Your parts team likely uses many systems throughout the day. With so many tools and processes, it’s easy to get bogged down. When the team can zero in on customer-focused work, it benefits your shops & your parts business. This makes it worth your time to find new ways to streamline admin tasks, improve the customer experience, optimize your parts department.

For many parts departments, the idea of customer retention marketing is met with: “we don’t have time… we’re too busy!” With many struggling to find enough hours in a day to manage orders and inventory, it’s understandable that marketing doesn’t fall at the top of the to-do list. This creates the challenge parts departments often encounter: the need to meet parts revenue goals with limited resources.

By understanding which customers offer the most value to your bottom line, you can position your parts department for success by using deliberate, targeted, and cost-effective customer retention strategies. This approach is backed by data – part sales data shows that engaging existing customers offers the strongest returns while requiring fewer resources.

Customer retention by the numbers

According to 2023 OEC eCommerce data, a loyal shop spends an average of $34.6K annually – that’s 5.2 times more than a new customer. The numbers speak for themselves, but the underlying point needs to drive parts department marketing strategies. $28K in potential sales is a sizeable number – the difference in annual spend between existing and new customers – that can be the difference between hitting your goals or falling short.

Cost of new customer acquisition

With part sales growth strategies, your instincts likely lead you to focus on new customers. Targeting new business seems intuitive, but a closer look reveals a different story. It costs five times more to acquire a customer than to reengage an existing shop. When you add up the cost of acquisition, you see how many resources go toward new shops that may never order parts. The math is clear: it is more cost effective & profitable to engage existing customers and promote loyalty.

Be strategic & deliberate

While data shows customer retention provides the most upside, this does not mean new customer development should stop. It just demonstrates that you want to allocate resources to your strongest opportunities. Customer retention efforts are proven to be more successful and require fewer resources. Why? Because you know your existing customers. You have a relationship. You have sold them parts before. There is a level of familiarity with each other. Engaging this audience requires less from your team and a little nudge or friendly reminder can yield solid results. Simply put, customer retention gets more bang for the buck.

The value of shop retention, a recap:

• Existing customers spend an average of 5x more on parts annually at $34.6K
• New customers spend $6.9K on parts annually ($28K less per year on average than existing shop customers)
• New customer acquisition is 5x more expensive than customer retention OEC recently launched

OEC eMarketing, an efficient, turnkey solution designed to support dealerships with targeted marketing campaigns that retain shop customers. To learn more about the power of shop retention here.

Most parts departments have their go-to parts ordering tools – one for collision, one for mechanical, and even more – that the team uses to receive, process, and fulfill orders. In theory, it’s simple: orders come in, the team responds quickly, and the parts go out. There are, however, times when things don’t run so smoothly and not because the parts team made a mistake. As most know, managing parts orders can quickly become a time-consuming hassle, especially when you factor in a frustrating parts payment process, having too many systems that don’t work together, a lack of visibility into business trends and customer behaviors, or worse, customer retention issues and limited resources to address the matter. These are just a few areas where your parts department could benefit from a little optimization – and that means becoming more efficient, productive, and profitable.

Here are a few tips for dealership optimization that make a big impact on your operations & your customers’ experience:

Streamlining parts transactions

A seemingly endless amount of complexity is built into automotive parts and components. Even the supply chain that moves each part is impressively sophisticated. In the end, you would think that paying for the parts – the actual transaction between shop and dealer – would be, well, the easy part. Not so fast. The payment process for parts ordering (as shops and dealers agree) is anything but simple. Inefficient and outdated payment processing practices are still the prevailing method for many shops and dealers. Whether this means having a delivery guy sit at the shop and wait for cash or issuing and mailing paper invoices (not known for their efficiency), it shows a clear need for process improvements. When your dealership is equipped to handle parts transactions quickly, you make the process easier for your shops and your team, giving everyone more time to work and deliver better results.

New parts payment processing solutions offer secure, streamlined approaches that are both user friendly and cost effective. Just think, what could the team do if they weren’t bogged down by manual transaction processing? How much time could you put back in your day if you could automate the ordering, payment, and reconciliation process? Just the increase in efficiency from reduced cycle times on receivables would go a long way. When your dealership is equipped to handle parts transactions quickly, you make the process much easier for your shops and your team.

Leveraging business intelligence

A simple way to say this is: know your numbers and know your customers. Business intelligence (BI) tools provide insights that are otherwise unavailable or require you to comb through DMS data. Plus, BI solutions do more than show you sales numbers; BI helps your team monitor customer behaviors and trends, track customer interactions, and stay aware of key data points that highlight the health of your parts business.

It doesn’t take long to get caught up in the workday, making it easy to overlook trends that impact your sales, especially if you need to dig for the data. If one of your once-reliable customers starts to reduce order volume gradually, would you know? Customers speak with their wallets and it’s not always obvious until it’s too late. This is where BI makes a difference. By offering a clear look at your wholesale performance, the leading solutions provide the information you need in interactive dashboards and shareable reports. It simply boils down to having tools to help you make proactive, informed decisions, giving you the confidence of knowing your business.

Engaging in customer retention marketing

You may be thinking, “okay, great, I know my numbers and know which areas and which customers need attention.” But you’re also thinking, “I can’ t reach out to everyone or stop by all my shops with a box of doughnuts and coffee.” True, but turnkey marketing solutions can do the work for you, especially for customer re-engagement campaigns. It gets better, too! Customer marketing solutions that are designed to target your existing customers not only create new touchpoints with dormant customers, they also support cost-effective sales growth. Data shows that re-engaging current customers is the most effective way to grow your parts business through marketing campaigns.

Why? Your existing customers, on average, spend significantly more on parts annually than newly acquired customers. To go along with that, it’s also more cost effective to engage existing customers than to add new ones. It takes more resources and manhours to attract new business – that may not payoff down the line – than to work with customers familiar with your parts department.

New solutions are available within the market that use your current ecommerce data to target your existing customers through automated, professionally crafted email campaigns. These communications can include “We miss you” re-engagement campaigns or themed promotional messages that can drive business back to your dealership. Just think: When’s the last time you reached out to a significant number of your current shops? It’s not that you don’t want to, it’s just not practical. That’s why turnkey marketing solutions are becoming critical to parts department growth: you can reach out directly to your customers and strategically grow your business without over-leveraging your time, budget, or staff.

Connecting your current systems

Sometimes it can feel like technology is both the solution and the problem or, at the very least, a roadblock. You have several systems for managing parts orders and some don’t ‘speak to each other’ or integrate, creating manual work you hoped technology would eliminate. That’s the downside. The upside is that the industry’s technology providers are aware of the issue and developed solutions to address system connectivity. When systems are integrated, your parts department can move faster, work with greater accuracy, and limit mistakes that create holdups. Current solutions are designed to connect ecommerce part sales solutions with DMS platforms. This creates the connectivity you need to:

• Quickly (or even automatically) build quotes for parts orders
• Offer an accurate reflection of your inventory
• Reduce the likelihood of human error (like typos from re-entering orders)
• Limit the number of returns to process

Enhanced connectivity limits mistakes – obviously, that’s great! – but the efficiency gains allow your team to focus on more meaningful tasks, like increasing sales. These tools put your people in a position to leverage their parts expertise and insights to support their customers.

Optimization is about filling gaps & clearing obstacles

Parts department optimization is not necessarily about finding and making sweeping changes. Optimization is about taking what you’re good at, strengthening those areas, and removing obstacles. Can your team sell parts and manage customer relationships? Sure! Does the payment process always go smoothly? No. But that doesn’t mean you scrap everything. However, it’s probably time to identify ways to optimize the process. As we said above, this is an area of need that both shops and dealers cite (routinely) as creating complications. As noted, there are many examples where certain processes have small gaps that, when corrected, create a positive outcome for the business. Dealership optimization is about filling those gaps and clearing obstacles, allowing your team to do what they do best: sell parts and provide expert service to shop customers efficiently and professionally.

Online parts selling tools, when properly set up and utilized, can perform like a counter person that only costs about $3/hr, but the key to getting the most out of these platforms is to effectively integrate them into the parts department. Whether your dealership already adopted an online solution or you’re in the initial phases of finding and implementing the right platform, here are a few tips to help your team successfully launch an online parts sales solution and to make sure you’re using it to its fullest potential.

Put effort into the setup to enjoy the output

As a member of the parts team behind the sales counter, especially if you’re the parts manager, you know you wear a lot of hats and have a ton of responsibilities. There’s always a lot to do and there are only so many hours in the day. In fact, it’s not uncommon for parts managers to say, “I don’t have time to set this up” or something like that… when talking about online solutions. However, it’s important to understand that if your team puts the time into the setup and implementation process for the online (known as eCommerce) tool, it will be well worth it, and you’ll likely recover all that time – and then some – over the long haul.
Think about it, when you hire a new counter person, you need to take the time to train them, get them up to speed, show them the ins and outs of the parts department, and so on. Whether you’re selling collision parts, mechanical parts, or both, getting your parts sales solution up and running isn’t much different (it’s likely going to be much quicker and easier) and it averages out to only a couple bucks an hour. This is especially helpful for smaller dealers with fewer people on the staff.
When you’re tight on resources, especially people power, the right online parts ordering tools, once launched, can really reduce the stress on the team by:

• Limiting non-revenue generating phone calls
• Allowing shops to be more self-serving
• Condensing orders, reducing the necessary processing
• Driving greater efficiency and helping your team multitask
• Lowering costs

The key, though, is getting the solution up and running properly. The work you put into the platform upfront will come back to benefit you in the end and the benefits will drastically outweigh the initial effort.

Interested in how shops and dealers connect using online tools? Check out this video!

Take advantage of the available resources

While it’s critical to take the time and put in the effort to launch your online parts sales solution, it’s also important to understand that you don’t have to go at it alone. Managing a parts department and processing customer orders is a lot of work, so take advantage of the resources that are available to you for setting up your department’s eCommerce tools and helping your team use the platform effectively.
If you’re looking to start using online parts sales tools, it is important to consider what resources are available to your dealership to help you succeed. If you’re in the research phase of your decision-making process, check on the support and training opportunities that are available with the different solutions. If you’ve already launched your solution, consider looking into the training programs or supplementary materials that may be available to your team.
More often than not, your parts sales solutions will provide a few, if not all, of the following options to help you get up and running. See if your team can take advantage of:

• Training Opportunities – Customer support teams are typically available to guide you along the adoption process and offer support after any initial training
• Online Knowledgebase – Self-service, online resource libraries are an excellent way to get the info you need quickly and are often driven by common questions other users have asked when using the tools
• Free Webinars – Learn tips & tricks that will help your team use online platforms more effectively and accomplish your ultimate goal: selling more parts
• Marketing Materials – Sales collateral and other useful resources are typically available for free and are designed to help your team connect with shops to encourage them to order parts online from the dealership

Dealership Performance Coaching Solutions are also available. Interested? Learn more here!

Take action using the available insights

Want to know one of the key benefits of establishing your online parts ordering solution and getting it up and running? The customer insights! Once you’ve put in the work – with the help of eCommerce experts – to launch your online parts sales tool and utilized the available resources designed to make you an online parts sales whiz, you get the added advantage of using the insights you get into your customers and their behaviors.

One of the more interesting pieces of information that you can access with these tools is a look at which customers are using the platform to browse – or even start a cart – but not moving along to the actual purchasing phase of the transaction. With this insight, you can reach out to the customer and encourage them to complete the process to ensure they’re getting the full benefits from the program.

By communicating with more precision to your shop customers, you can remind them of the advantages that these online platforms provide, including:

• Being cost-effective with many available for free to shops
• Saving time by providing a self-service option (reducing phone calls and time spent on hold)
• Condensing orders by helping shops get the parts they need in fewer orders
• Increasing accuracy and ordering the right part the first time

A side note: If you notice shops are reviewing parts or starting but then abandoning carts, they may be encountering something that you weren’t aware of, and then you know to make adjustments, maybe to the pricing formula, to encourage or correct the online experience for your buyers.
Ultimately, the online tools and the available insights allow you to access more information on customers, provide buyers with the knowledge they need to buy parts from your dealership and have fewer but more specific customer conversations. Online parts sales doesn’t mean you’re never going to speak with your customers – parts sales is still a relationship business, but with the right tools, the conversations you have with customers can be more targeted, direct, and productive.

If your parts department is really into business analytics, business intelligence tools are available that provide extensive, in-depth customer and sales data. The leading parts sales platforms, however, do provide basic insights, (mentioned above) that allow you to get a feel for business and customer data analytics and how they can help your sales performance.

Understand the available integrations

When your dealership adopts an online parts sales solution, it’s important to understand the integrations (the other products it works well with) that the solution includes and are available to help your dealership. Integrations are designed to make the job of the parts team easier, but there are some common misconceptions about how products work together. These integrations are important to understand, since they are often misunderstood and, while many people believe that their current tools don’t work together, the truth is actually the opposite: not only do many online dealership tools work together, but they’re also easy to integrate, making your job easier. These integrations include:

• Estimating systems – The leading online parts selling platforms work well with existing estimating platforms and they’re really easy to integrate (just a few clicks of a button)

• Delivery solutions – On-demand delivery solutions are commonly underutilized but are integrated into a few parts sourcing platforms and, especially in a time of tight resources (meaning parts department employees), having a parts delivery option available is huge

Online parts sales & setting yourself up for success

Online parts sales tools are designed to help your parts department – and customers – work more efficiently, provide better insights and training, and, ultimately, grow your bottom line. It is important, however, to set expectations with your team and know what needs to be done to be set up for success. Also, understand the resources available to help your parts department maximize the platform. Right now, resources are tight, especially trained employees and time. The leading parts sales platforms take the burden off your team (in a cost-effective way) and allow you to use your time behind the parts counter more productively while also helping shops serve themselves online – a win-win for everyone.

If you have any questions about online part sales or would like to know which tools would be best for your team, let us know and an eCommerce expert will be in touch.

Balance is a good thing. In your parts department, having a balanced approach to parts sales and management allows your team to expand its sales opportunities and grow customer relationships while avoiding an over-dependence on one source of business or a singular sales strategy. This means using different tools to achieve diverse goals that help your department reach its ultimate objective: healthy parts sales and happy customers. It starts by understanding your options for growing revenue streams and identifying the right solutions to help you capitalize on these opportunities.

Take a look at these three common phases (or opportunities) in a dealership’s parts business and how different tools can help contribute to sales and strengthen the department:

Parts Wholesale

The wholesale parts business is likely your parts department’s bread and butter service: the actual selling of collision and mechanical parts to shops and buyers. Parts go out the door and money comes back in. But it’s not just as simple as receiving a call from a shop, taking the order, and getting the part out the door and to the customer. These days, it’s about implementing the right tools to efficiently process online orders while also helping your team generate revenue. Here are a few things to consider when researching and selecting an online system to drive your wholesale program:

• Collision – Manufacturers are big believers in online collision parts sales with many implementing aggressive pricing programs that reimburse dealers for selling select Manufacturer parts, allowing the dealer to compete with the aftermarket and provide an improved experience for the buying shop. The benefits go beyond the dealership, too. The buyer, in turn, is less likely to return properly fitting, high-quality Manufacturer parts and the vehicle owner receives a quality repair and a safe vehicle that’s returned to its original condition.
• Mechanical – Providing similar benefits to collision programs, the leading Manufacturer mechanical parts programs provide a complete network of shops and dealerships, creating a large, robust parts wholesale ecosystem that connects buyers to sellers. This means the dealership not only provides a better experience for its existing customers but also expands its territory to more buyers who are already using the online marketplace.
• Retail – Selling directly to the end customer is an additional line of revenue that can create repeat business and loyal buyers at the consumer level. There are different retail solutions available for dealerships: some platforms allow your parts team to sell directly to the online buyers and others facilitate parts sales through the eBay marketplace.

Important note: While parts sales platforms do require your dealership to make an investment, the best collision
and mechanical parts sourcing solutions produce a strong return on that investment, meaning the anticipated uptick in parts sales covers the cost of the solution AND produces profits on the other side! Plus, if your Manufacturer offers a parts program that provides reimbursements on select Manufacturer parts sales, it’s an added consideration when selecting an online parts solution.

Optimization & Strategy

The keyword is right there: optimization. It’s not something the pros pass up. Why? Because it’s essentially a way to run a stronger, more strategic business. So, if you’re in the “Yes, I do want to discover new ways to improve” category, then consider adopting tools that help optimize your workflow, provide insights into how you can improve parts sales, and identify ways you can enhance your customer relationships. Here are a few types of tools and services that you can explore when you’re looking to evolve your strategy and improve performance:

• Business Intelligence – The best business intelligence (BI) platforms provide access to business insights and help improve customer relationships by allowing dealerships to proactively monitor business trends, customer behaviors, and the overall health of the parts department. These platforms give you an opportunity to adjust sales strategies based on your department’s strengths and opportunities while also functioning as a customer relationship management tool – or CRM – that allows you to work closely with your buyers to ensure their parts sourcing needs are being met by your dealership.
• Training – Professional “coaches” or parts sales experts are often available through parts sourcing programs for in-person or virtual training and can help your team implement a parts sales solution or hone existing skills with new strategies. If you bring in a wholesale expert, you can make sure everyone on your team understands the department’s tools and strategies and get everyone rowing in the same direction.
• Parts Delivery – Most dealerships have some form of parts delivery, but reliability and timeliness are often followed by a question mark. Obviously, that’s not good for business. On-demand parts delivery services are now being integrated into parts sourcing solutions, making it much easier to get parts to buyers and to provide a complete – and improved – customer experience.

Inventory

Parts managers are busy. There are parts sales to focus on. There’s inventory to maintain. There’s the parts team to oversee. On a good day, there’s time to eat lunch while sitting down (what a luxury!) and chug a whole pot of coffee – on a good day. However, the savviest parts managers add solutions to make all their tasks more manageable and the workday more efficient. The right inventory programs can lead to increased sales and a more strategic and efficient parts department. Here are a few tools to check out:

• Inventory Management – Managing a parts inventory is not easy, especially since it’s only one of the many hats a parts manager wears daily. Many parts managers add strategic solutions to their toolbox that optimize their inventory AND help achieve sales goals. The best tools for managing inventory allow your team to work more productively, identify popular parts that sell, eliminate obsolete stock, and improve turn rates.
• Supply Chain – The leading supply chain solutions allow parts departments to make inventory available to a larger dealership network and expand the sales territory. Additionally, when your parts department is part of a larger network, it can locate parts for customers while also selling to dealerships looking for specific Manufacturer parts. When you see the logic written out in plain English, it almost makes too much sense: buying and selling parts to network dealers who will also buy from you and sell parts to you.
• Idle Reduction – Idle parts are a waste of time, money, and space. They take up much-needed resources and when you do try to move them, they take up even more resources because the buyer pool is smaller. Many parts managers offload the task to a parts broker who can help match sellers with buyers in order to get those idle parts out the door, freeing up space for parts that move (i.e., the money makers).

When considering your options for growing parts sales and increasing revenue streams, take a step back and think of it this way: you’re looking for balance, meaning you’re not being overly reliant on one business segment or, as the saying goes, putting all your eggs in one basket. Not to get in the weeds or move away from the topic at hand, but consider this common refrain when it comes to investing: diversify! You want to have a wholesale tool for your collision and mechanical parts. You want to have optimization tools to grow customer relationships. Lastly, you want to have supply chain or inventory solutions in an effort to run a smarter department. When you operate a balanced parts department, you’re working to safeguard yourself (and your team) against inevitable bumps in the road or unforeseen challenges, providing a level of stability you might not have had otherwise. Plus, in normal times, all three phases work toward the greater good of the dealership and, more specifically, to the benefit of your parts department.

When you think about data as insights into your customers based on past interactions, you become aware of how much data you have available just from conducting day-to-day business at your dealership. The next step, though, is understanding the significant impact this data can have when you leverage those insights to better serve your customers and, ultimately, grow your parts business. In fact, dealerships that are exceptionally good at processing and analyzing customer data consistently provide high-level customer experiences that result in an improved sales performance.

While understanding and acting on customer data can have a wide range of benefits, both large and small, here are a few of the key areas that see the greatest impact when you use data to serve your customers and inform your business:

Retention

If you have a lot of customer data, it’s probably a sign that your team provides strong customer service. So, great work! The next step, however, is using that data to enhance your parts department and benefit your customers. Sounds great, right? The problem is that data can quickly become overwhelming and difficult to wrap your brain around. That’s why many parts departments implement business intelligence tools (known as BI tools).

BI tools help high-performing dealerships develop proactive relationships with customers and offer responsive, data-driven service by tracking buyer trends. BI tools create easy-to-access data and provide information that allows the parts department to strategically engage customers. This allows the parts manager to understand buying trends while also giving parts personnel an ability to be proactive when there is an unusual change in those trends. Did a customer stop buying or reduce their typical purchase amount? If so, a parts department rep can reach out and see how they can help.

Have you ever had a customer, someone you’ve done business with several times, just sort of vanish and stop ordering parts from your dealership? In hindsight, did they maybe give you subtle hints that they weren’t happy or were maybe going somewhere else for parts? Reduced their orders over a period of time? BI tools powered by your sales data can help you pick up on these subtle (or not so subtle) trends and your team can reach out to fix or reestablish the relationship.

Relationships

No one knows your customers like you do. In fact, you’ve probably worked with many of them for years. But accessible data takes customer knowledge to a new level. When data is organized, parts departments know what and when their customers are buying parts, and, more importantly, when they’re not buying. Parts department personnel likely know these things… even if they don’t know they know them. That said, having clear and accurate data to support – or remind – your team of this information is a whole different ball game, allowing the business to be adaptive rather than reactive.

Business intelligence solutions can (or should) function as a data analytics tool and a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), unlocking customer insights and helping your team manage customer accounts, like monitoring communications, tracking notes, and assigning responsibilities. Parts sales, as you know, are often about relationships, right? But it’s hard to maintain a relationship when there’s minimal or no communication.

The competition is notorious for reaching out to their customers, developing relationships, and, in the end, growing their sales. The dealership side of the business? Well, it has some room to grow in order to better maintain regular contact with customers. That being said, understanding your data and closely monitoring customer relationships is a great way to get up to speed with the competition. Having a BI tool and CRM that are powered by data allows parts personnel to take responsibility for customer relationships, such as scheduling check-ins or calls, which will likely have a positive impact in the sales column.

Revenue

If you’ve seen a sales spreadsheet, you know the numbers get large (which is good!). They can also get hard to read and difficult to process, especially if you’re wearing several hats around the parts department and developing the sales strategy is only one of your responsibilities. This makes business development difficult and it means you can miss critical information. Maybe you’ve heard this before, but data – a word often associated with numbers – actually tells a story when you’re able to analyze it easily and productively.

Data can tell you where you have the most opportunities, where you don’t, what’s working, what’s not, and so on. Understanding this can help you target your leads and customer interactions in a smarter, more planned out way. No one likes wasting time, certainly not when you’re busy, and the data analysis that’s made possible by BI tools allows you to allocate your time in the most productive way.

When you use a BI tool to process sales information, you get greater access to the “story” behind the data, which allows you to grow the business and improve customer relationships. Dealerships that are already using BI tools typically see significant, game-changing increases in sales revenue and gross profit. However, this is only possible when the parts department can access refined, holistic data (i.e., the story).

Quick recap

The benefits to analyzing data, specifically with a BI tool, are the following:

• Know when to talk to your customers – This isn’t about cold calling; it’s about understanding when there’s a shift in buyer trends (up or down) and the parts department needs to engage. This helps retain customers, grow stronger relationships, and increase sales.
• This is a relationships business – BI allows your team to track communications and schedule follow-up check ins, keeping your customers connected while not overburdening them with touchpoints. The parts sales business, as you know, is one that’s heavily influenced by solid relationships and having a CRM gives you one more way to establish, and maintain, strong working relationships.
• What story are you being told – Yes, the numbers tell a story and it’s probably a story that your team is familiar with, but until it’s spelled out in an easy-to-process way, it may be hard to grasp or act on. What are your strengths and where are your opportunities? Knowing that information can provide a massive boost to your business.

It’s All in the Data

Whether you know it or not (you probably know it, though), you likely have a ton of data on your hands. But, and here’s the kicker, organizing data in a presentable way that provides the greatest benefit to the dealership? That’s more challenging. It’s not a simple task to make sense of rows and columns of data while also trying to perform your other responsibilities, like selling parts. This is why many parts departments implement a BI tool that produces easy-to-process information that the parts team can act on (you know, the stuff your team needs to grow your business) that leads to strategic customer interactions that improve the parts sourcing experience.

As a last note, parts managers want to make sure their department is a consistent source of revenue for the dealership. The impact a BI tool makes on customer retention, relationship development, and sales can all lead to making the parts department one of the cornerstones of the business. It’s not a secret that in nearly any business or industry, high performers often get better resources – because they’ve earned them! – so it’s critical that the parts department and parts personnel have the tools they need to get the job done. It’s a benefit that can be seen around the dealership and one that extends all the way down to the vehicle owner.