Self-Service Pricing for Car Dealerships (rednumbat)
I saw an interesting story Thursday night on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. Joe Antley, the founder of Rednumbat, has created a B2C self-service pricing tool for car dealerships. The idea is based on the assumption that consumers want to get a price for cars quickly, from their website. Although most people would say this is already possible, what Joe’s system seems to do is take the base pricing and put it into a form that customer can actually use. Instead of waiting for the dealership’s internet sales team to respond with a proposal, a customer gets it emailed instantly and the sales team is also included in the email.
On the surface it sounds somewhat like EchoQuote. Both services’ primary goal is to drive new business for clients but they operate in 2 totally different sales environments. Rednumbat is designed for consumers (B2C) while EchoQuote is designed strictly for Business to Business (B2B).
Automatic versus Approval Based
The goal of rednumbat (as I understand it) is to get a final price to the customer as quickly as possible and evidently this is done automatically. I am not sure if there is any approval process involved to qualify the prospect.
EchoQuote, on the other hand, requires the sales team to approve each quote request before it is sent to the prospect. This connects potential buyers to the sales team in the process.
There are many other differences that make a B2C process impossible in a B2B environment. See obstacles to putting pricing on B2B websites for more samples.
I would like to hear from Dealerships that are using this system to find out what success they are having with it.
Dale,
You have gotten a good understanding of what we do at RedNumbat. We allow the customer to get a price from a dealership that they can actually buy the car for, rather than simply an invoice or MSRP price (or more commonly, no price at all.) The dealership can easily pre-set their prices, relative to invoice, and be assured that every internet request is handled quickly and accurately. The dealers need it, and their customers love it!
Joe Antley
COO RedNumbat