Olfin Car – How to increase sales by 760%
28. 4. 2023
Olfin Car is a Czech car dealership with over 10,000 happy customers in 20 years of activity. They are the market leader in the Czech Republic, providing additional services such as financing, car service, and insurance. They reached out to us to increase their revenue and profit margin by optimizing their marketing efforts.
The First Stage- Scoping
The first thing we did was Scoping. We wanted to have a complete picture of what is happening. We interviewed people from Marketing and sales departments to understand what the workflow is, where the bottlenecks are, and what are the things that cause frustration and slow them down. Once we had a clear understanding of what was happening from a business perspective, we started to dive deep into their architecture. Understand and define the data sources, get the logic for specific data flows, and link how certain processes are tied to business outcomes.
The Second Stage – Define the Actions
Based on the information we got in the first stage, we agreed with their Marketing and Sales Leadership that we should focus on implementing the following actions:
- Improve the accuracy of their advertising based on customer behavior.
- Implement a prediction model for user behavior.
- Implement advanced web analytics and web personalization.
- Develop a system to analyze the market and the competitors.
To make these things possible, it was mandatory to centralize data in a single place. This required us to find creative ways to integrate data from many different data sources, many of them non-standard. Once data was collected, we had to make sure, it was valid and had the same format so it could be used in reporting.
The Third Stage – Developing Specific Apps
1 Pricing app-
The business needed additional information to help them adjust their pricing and sell cars with a higher margin. To gather the information needed, we scrapped competitor’s websites, set up the reporting, developed a unified data modeling, and then pushed back the enriched data to their website and their marketing systems. Hence, the prices dynamically changed every few minutes.
The direct result of developing the pricing app and implementing dynamic pricing was an increase of 50% in the margin for each sale and an increase of 30% in conversion rate.
- Customer segmentation.
The biggest problem with customer segmentation is that marketers can’t set up their own segments and can’t do it interactively. We collected all the customer information in a single place and created a friendly UI where the business users can create their own rules and define their segments. On top of that, they could get back enriched data into their Marketing systems and use it for Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or other purposes.
The most significant benefit was that they had a 7X increase in returning business. In simple words, improved customer segmentation, paired with proper messaging, made people that at some point in the past bought a car come back and make a new purchase.
- Invoice automation
Manually taking data from invoices eats a lot of time in each finance department. So we set up an environment and trained a Python model to extract data from different types of files, such as CVS, XMLS, or PDFs, and push it to the accounting system. To make the app easy and secure, we designed a friendly UI where users can log in, drop their files and ensure they are processed correctly.
The result was that we automatized the data collection from 200,000 invoices per month, saving at least 1600 hours of manual labor inside their finance department.
In conclusion, this is how our efforts positively impacted Olfin’s Car activity across different departments:
Sales:
- By getting knowledge of competition, Olfin improved its bidding system, increasing its margin.
- Drastically reducing the time needed to publish a new car by 6X, combined with real-time pressing, led to a remarkable increase in their online sales.
- After analyzing their sales process and identifying the bottlenecks, we helped them shorten their sales cycle and increase their closing rate.
- They could target specific companies or professions using bespoken offers aligned with their prospect’s needs.
Marketing:
- Building an efficient way to track the customer journey from the visit allowed Olfin Car to display relevant information to each prospect.
- The customer segmentation application was the foundation of a modern and efficient advertising campaign, where each segment was targeted by specific messages.
- Their advertising campaigns got much higher Roas, with an improved conversion rate thanks to better calibration.
Management:
- Leadership was able to track in real-time the performance of each branch with employee-level granularity.
- Higher visibility allowed them to identify fast the most successful traders, replicating what worked for them to the other branches.
- The business got more predictable: By introducing specific predictive algorithms, we allowed them to forecast their future expenditure and revenue better.
- They were able to reduce costs across different departments:
- Purchasing: The pricing App allowed them to understand the correct price to offer for a new purchase.
- Marketing: The optimized strategies allowed them to decrease their costs while increasing their results.
- Sales: Improved processes allowed them to grow their business without hiring new employees.
- Finance: 200,000 Invoices are automatically imported into their Accounting App.
The new economic conditions force companies to find new ways to respond to tougher competition, increasing prices across the supply chain and very hard-to-find talent. It is a period where the ability to innovate and adapt makes the difference between bankruptcy and fantastic success. In our story, Olfin Car, successfully becomes a data-driven company, getting a $40.000.000 sales increase in the first year of collaboration with Marketing BI.
What makes this success even more significant is that Marketing BI needed only one month to implement the use cases that got the business forward. In these four weeks, we scoped their business and developed and deployed three different applications for them. We set the foundation for business where raw data it’s transformed into actionable insights and then used as a support for decision-making.
If you are curious about how we can replicate this successful recipe in your company, let’s talk!
