How to Sell Your Used Car

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Why choose car dealing?

Or as I prefer to call it, the motor trade, why indeed. Having had experience in more than one industry, I feel more than well qualified to answer this one.

We only need to look out of our windows to see the volume of traffic in even the quietest locations has gone up significantly in recent years as more and more people own cars and more families have two or more cars in the driveway. It is true the world of big business has a fair old grip on the market with their big marketing machines and mass advertising campaigns, but, and it is a big but, the market is positively huge and fast moving.
From a sales point of view, there is something important you should be aware of regarding assets such as cars. First of all, because they are so expensive, you do not need to sell millions of them to break even (assuming you don’t’ have the overheads of General Motors of course) secondly, when you are selling used vehicles, each one is to some extent, unique. This may not seem important at first, but believe me it is, because you can apply something called USPs to each and every vehicle. USPs are ‘Unique Selling Points’. If you are selling new cars, then one dealer’s Ford Focus is very much like the next dealers, so it is hard, if not impossible to justify any price differential. If a consumer can perceive the car he is buying from you is a better prospect for XYZ reason (eg. One careful lady owner), then you can justify a better price in a sales situation. I will mention this USP business again in a later chapter.

Another consideration is the big franchised dealers have an insatiable desire to shift large volumes of new stock with a bewildering array of special offers and discounts. This has the inevitable ‘k...

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...ated in the introductory disclaimer, I make no warranty that you will make a profit at all. However, to illustrate the actual potential, I notice that a local car sales business located on a small very rural industrial estate, miles from anywhere and off a main road etc. etc., is up for sale for £100,000 plus stock at value. I don’t know how long this business has been trading but I didn’t even know it was there until about a year ago. The ‘For Sale’ advert states that the net profit for the business is not far short of £100,000 either. The business does not to my knowledge deal in anything out of the ordinary. It is fair to say that exactly how much you will earn will also depend on how quickly you can turn over your stock, the funding available to you (how much stock you can afford to carry), how well that you conduct your business and your chosen route to market.

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