My philosophy is that you will not get very far by trying to force a customer to come to your dealership in order to get a price or a trade-in value. I therefore try to give them as much information as I can during the initial and follow-up phone calls. While this does occassionally backfire, it works surprisingly well.
Trade-in evaluations need to be done on the phone. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers, otherwise you are just shooting blind.
I use kelly blue book for trade evaluations. One nice thing is that we have a link to kbb on our website, so the customer can follow along if he is near his computer.
My script goes like this:
"Mr. Customer, I can do an interactive trade-in evaluation over the phone, or you can bring the vehicle in to our dealership. Which would you prefer?"
Believe it or not, more than half of our customers will choose to bring the vehicle on our lot. Don't ask me why... they may feel that they can get a better number if we can see how nice their trade is.
I then start walking them through the kelly blue book site. Asking questions about miles, equipment, etc.
It is critical to have customers evaluate condition. Most of them will of course, say that their vehicle is in "excellent" condition. At this point you need to qualify "excellent." Using the kbb to define excellent, good, and poor-- and remind the customers that this is an absolute rating, not "excellent for a 1977 Granada." Rust and damage bring the vehicle down to a fair or lower rating, no matter how nice the customer believes his vehicle to be.
"Mr. Customer, the value I am going to give you is a "cash value" number-- it is the price that our used car manager is going to write a check for. Many dealerships might give you a total allowance which would include both the cash value and a discount from the vehicle you are buying. Because I have already discounted our vehicle, the number I will be giving you will be the cash value of our vehicle. If you want to calculate the total allowance, simply add this number to the discount that I provided you with earlier."
"Mr. Customer, based on the information you have provided me, your vehicle has a cash value of X, less any reconditioning that may need to be done to prepare this vehicle for sale."
Depending on how they react to this news will dictate how you proceed, but the bottom line is to set an appointment to bring them in. If you are too light, it is easy to suggest that you might be able to get more for the vehicle if we can visually inspect it. Likewise, if you think that kbb is higher than what your used car manager will allow, it is easy to qualify your appraisal based on exact condition, regional market conditions, etc.
A lot of used car managers don't like this method of appraisal (it makes it harder to try to steal a trade), but I have found it to be accurate and fair. Keep in mind though that if the customer comes in and you need to write the trade lower than what you quoted, you need to have logical reasons to justify the lower number.
Mark Rouleau
Internet Sales Coordinator
www.marinadodge.com