It’s an oddity of modern life that we all carry phones with lists of people on them and yet nobody can remember a phone number.
By extension, it’s an oddity of modern journalism that I no longer need to remember numbers, only people. That, apparently, is the benefit of social media.
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However, while a modern journalist can forget some numbers, others must be remembered: commission, percentiles, growth projections, hundreds, tens and units, and most of them next to the pound sign.
This month at Motor Finance, we aim to talk to the people behind those numbers, to put a name and an opinion next to the maths.
Also, being terribly stuck in London, we wanted to make sure we were getting out across the UK (at least by phone) as part of our ongoing push to reflect the industry by region as well as we do by car, brand, provider and product.
With the 62-plate change happening this month, Hannah Meltzer and Jared Fortune have surveyed 13 dealer groups representing over 200 locations and 35 brands. What they found was a surprisingly high background level of confidence in both sales and point of sale finance.
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By GlobalDataAs always, there are a healthy number of graphs to illustrate dealer thoughts on everything from the influence of finance to the effect of the looming 13-plate in March (which social media tells us should be a concern) but it’s the very real people who sell the metal and their very real concerns doing so, that we hope can bring a greater clarity to the situation in the showroom.
Likewise, this month’s broker feature turned up a spectrum of opinions in a market we thought, going by the numbers, was of a singular mind. It all began when Kurt Bradbury, a regular contributor to our magazine, moved from Jigsaw to DSG. Knowing a couple of moves among brokers were on the cards, we took out a map. Drawing on those we wanted to talk to, literally, we found we had ourselves a ‘broker triangle’ with Mann Island, Evolution and Jigsaw at its points. Between them you’ll find DSG, AUF, Concept, Car Loan 4U and Kennah.
So now, we thought, the feature is about the geography of the market. (We nearly called the piece Focus on the Brokers’ Locus.)
Unfortunately, two of the first things we learned were that there is no such thing as "the broker market," according to Richard Hoggart of DSG and that Evolution isn’t really based in the north west: "we’re an hour and a half’s drive away," explained Jeremy Levine.
Unperturbed, we drew two further lessons from the article: First, to address seriously Richard’s point, no two brokers are the same. They operate in different markets, they offer different specialities and they hold wildly different opinions.Secondly, brokers are becoming even less similar. The way they work with dealers and funders, the way they organise business and the way they utilise technology tells us brokers are on the hunt for something different.
And here’s a third and ironic lesson, with so many personnel moving, loads of our broker contacts listed by name in our phones now go through to different people at the same number.
Talking of numbers, I’d like to make a clarification: On page 13 of August’s edition of Motor Finance, a table accompanying the article "The key to customer retention and repurchase" contained an omission. While the table compared renewal rate for a group of dealers using Chrysalis-Solmotive’s Chrysalis renewal manager product against the rate for dealers not using the product, it did not mention that the product was launched at the start of 2012’s first quarter, meaning that the Chrysalis user group’s 18% Q4 2011 renewal rate was achieved without the use of the product.
fred.crawley@vrlfinancialnews.com
