The year-end holiday season may be a time of mirth and merriment for all, not so much however for the auto dealerships and their staff. Traditionally, auto sales in the US nosedive during the months of December, January and February. This is true for all types of vehicles except the sport-utility cars. However, the latter can hardly make up for the general plunge in sales.
This spells a number of difficulties for the dealerships. First, it becomes hard for them to meet the yearly quotas and goals (unless they have done exceedingly well for the rest of the year) and this, in turn, makes it a challenging task to move inventory off their premises and create room for next season’s new models.
Now that this should happen during the holiday season may appear somewhat baffling to many since the consumer spending sees a definite spike during the holiday weeks and since the level of auto sales is often seen as a prime index of overall consumer spending, one would normally expect that the level would go up rather than down in the holiday season.
However, the fact is that people mostly make use of their ‘disposable income’ during the holidays and you, after all, don’t buy your car with your disposable income, right?
How to Deal With the Challenge: Car Dealerships In Las Vegas
Despite these veritable difficulties, the numbers from the last quarter of 2018 show that most leading dealerships in Vegas were able to offset the trend to a good degree.
Now, it is nothing new for auto dealerships to offer some of the most lucrative deals during the holiday season and that trend continued. The offers actually originate from the end of the OEMs and then the dealerships do what they can to turn leads into sales.
Between Thanksgiving and the New Year, people normally stay in the buying mode and the challenge for the dealerships is to make the buyers visit their premises and then do what they can to make some good sales. Still, for the aforementioned reasons, it becomes difficult to make a large number of ‘big’ sales during this period.
So, dealerships mostly look to compensate this by way of ‘small’ sales largely with their existing sales and service customers. Sending greetings from the dealership along with some dealership cash coupons that the customers can use during the next 30 days is a good ploy to make them spend on servicing jobs or signing up for different types of contacts such as extended auto warranty, paint protection, auto-hazard warranties and the like.
And evidently, the Vegas dealerships were good enough in tapping into those opportunities as the numbers show that they had a decent enough holiday season in 2018 by common standards.
Here, we must also mention that the internet and social media have made it somewhat easier these days for dealerships to attract the attention of the buyers during the holiday season. Running daily holiday-themed contests on Facebook, Instagram or on their own websites and strategies of this nature have, in recent years, helped dealerships receive more footfalls during the holidays than was customary in the past. And the generally easygoing spirit of the Vegas town and its residents must have played its part as well.
Don Forman Las Vegas Nissan Steals the Accolades
Thanks to his many charitable works, Don Forman Nissan is a common enough name for the residents of Las Vegas and it is little surprise that his Las Vegas dealership facility, Don Forman Nissan, had performed better than most Las Vegas dealerships last holiday season. Apart from his positive image and appeal to the people of Las Vegas, one can safely assume that Don’s huge experience in the auto industry (he was already the general manager of Nissan West back in 1998—more than two decades ago, i.e.) and his keen business acumen had contributed towards staving off the holiday blues as far as his dealership was concerned.