Business Development Centers

[SDAWSON]

I manage a department similar to a business development center I am curious to see what services are offered by development centers in other dealership and also how you expense the cost to the dealerships.

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Steve Dawson
Fred Beans Family of Dealerships
Service Marketing Manager

[mbowers]

Steve

Here's a list of common functions for the BDC:
1. Field phone ups
2. Prospect follow-up
3. Lease expiration calls
4. Contacts through a Web Site
5. Referrals from Internet bying services
6. Customer satisfaction surveys for sales and service
7. Service reminders - phone and letter
8. Centralized correspondence center

The cost of setting up a BDC and providing all those services can be substantial. Typically, the cost is allocated across all the stores in a group based on sales volume.

When the GMs in the stores see the expense on their financials, they invariably squawk and question the value of the BDC.

If cost becomes the focus of the BDC effort, you'll be on the defensive all the time. Sell the concept in terms of process improvement.

A company called Business Development Automotive Group in Florida provides an outsourced alternative to the conventional BDC at a substantially reduced cost.

[SDAWSON]

Thanks for your input. I am curious to see how many dealership are doing them in house and what size they are ie department cost and/or employee count.

I currently have an eight person staff doing many of the dues you listed some are still required to be done at the dealership level. I would like to expand my operation to grow the business even more.

In expanding my service my costs will also expand therefore I will need to justify that cost. Do you have any statisics as to how much it has increrased sales in both the sales and service departments for dealer groups that have a BDC?

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Steve Dawson
Fred Beans Family of Dealerships
Service Marketing Manager

[This message has been edited by SDAWSON (edited 08-24-99).]

[DFarmer]

I also run an Inhouse BDC, all of the duties that has been listed in previous post are things that we are doing in our BDC.

We also take all of the incoming sales calls for our dealership, I would be interested in finding out what kind of luck other dealers are getting by having The BDC take the incoming calls.

We are also outsorcing some of our owner base calls to BDAG (mentioned above).

2farmer@gte.net