Planning around festive buying periods in vehicle sales

A festive buying period fills the showroom with people who have already decided on the day they want to take delivery, and it fills it for a short time. So plan three things before the peak. Which vehicles will you actually have in the yard? How many deliveries can your team hand over on each auspicious day? Who answers the phone when enquiries arrive in a burst? Advertising comes last. A dealer who gets the first three wrong spends the festival apologising.

Why does a festive peak break a normal showroom?

On an ordinary day a showroom gets a steady trickle, and one salesperson can follow up everyone before the evening. In a festive fortnight the same showroom gets a large share of its month's walk-ins in a handful of days, and many of them want the vehicle on one particular morning.

For example, an invented two-wheeler dealer in Thrissur expects a rush around Onam. In a normal week, three salespeople take about the same number of calls each, and callbacks happen the same day. In the festival week the calls triple. The registration clerk can process only so many files in a day. The colour everyone asks for is the one with two units in stock. Enquiries from day two are still unanswered on day five, and by then the buyer has booked elsewhere.

The dealer's first reaction is to buy more advertising. That would add calls to a desk that cannot answer the ones it has. The next Onam the dealer does three other things: writes down the booking list before ordering stock, fixes the handovers for each auspicious morning at what the inspection bay can clear, and names one person to receive and log every enquiry without selling. It costs something. Capping handovers means turning away a few buyers who wanted the same morning, and the logging person is a salary not selling that week. The fault was capacity, and capacity is what got repaired.

What should you count before the peak?

Count four things on paper, a few weeks ahead, using last year's sales book and your own judgement.

Do the sums in plain numbers. Suppose, for illustration, that your inspection bay can clear six vehicles on a morning and you have booked ten. Four buyers will be disappointed or the work will be rushed. Better to know it now, and to offer those four a different slot when they book.

How do you plan stock for the day buyers want?

Order what your last season's book says people asked for, not what the manufacturer or distributor pushes. Put the booking list ahead of the stock list: if you take advance bookings with a token amount, you know the colours before the vehicles arrive.

Be careful about promising a date you do not control. A buyer told "delivery on the day" who then waits three days for allotment remembers it. A line such as "your vehicle is confirmed once allotment arrives, and we will tell you the same day it does" is less exciting and loses fewer people. Check your dealership terms on advance payments, offers and price display before you print anything.

Who answers, and by when?

Decide before the first festive day who handles each kind of enquiry, because during the peak nobody has time to decide.

• One person only receives new enquiries, logs them on a shared sheet and assigns them. They do not sell.
• Each salesperson has a daily call quota written on a card, set from the capacity figure above, and anything over it goes to a named back-up.
• The owner or showroom manager reviews the "not yet called" list at a fixed hour each day, not only at closing time.
• Callbacks to people who walked in that day happen that evening, before another showroom speaks to them.

Hire or borrow help only if the sums show you need it. A showroom with more staff than enquiries during the peak has simply paid for people to stand around.

What about advertising during the festival?

Run it last and keep it narrow. Advertise the models you have stock of, with a visit-or-call action that your team can handle, and switch off any advertisement for a model that has sold out. If your calls already go unreturned on an ordinary Monday, do not add to them. The timing of the booking window is in advertising during the festive season.

Skip festive advertising altogether if your yard has little to sell, your registration queue is already behind, or the only thing you can offer is the same terms as the dealer next door. Then a short message to people who enquired earlier, from your own list, will do more than an advertisement to strangers.

After the day: what to do with the leftover enquiries

Within days of the festival, sort the sheet into three: delivered, booked for a later date, and gone quiet. Call the second group first to confirm a date. For the third, send one message that gives them something new to respond to, such as the next stock arrival, and then stop. The buyers who set their heart on the festival day have either bought or moved on, and the rest were never festive buyers at all.

Write down what went wrong while it is fresh: the colour you ran out of, the slot that overran, the day nobody answered the phone. That page is next season's plan.

Sums to do before you book anything

Sit down with last festive period's sales book and your handover capacity, and work out whether the showroom can deliver what it can already sell. Only then decide how much advertising the numbers can carry. Start with one number: how many handovers your bay can clear on the busiest morning. Everything else is set around it. Festive and seasonal advertising is the service for the advertising once that is settled, and the same planning suits any automotive dealer. For help with the plan, tell us what you need.