The startup that hails from the Philippines is bringing the simplification of car buying procedure through their platform

Christopher Franks and Daniel Scott were both co-founders of Pinoy Auto Trader, an automotive marketplace startup when they realized that the e-car business in the Philippines was missing one important thing: a comparison feature.

This prompted them to build AutoDeal in 2014, making it a lead-generation approach automotive marketplace and focused on its development. “There was simply no online platform that allows customers to compare prices and vehicle specification at that time when I went online looking for it,” said Franks, who’s now also the co-founder of AutoDeal alongside Scott.

What’s in it for customers

Their tagline is Car Buying, Simplified. “Pretty much all that customer needs and can get in our platform is presented in the first page of our site,” said Scott.

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On their homepage, there is a clear division of each section, from new car promotions, newly launched series of car, available used cars, and cars comparison with breaks containing videos and reviews in between. Customers and auto dealers alike would be able to immediately find what they’re looking for, connect with a sales agent, decide on a dealer after finding the best prices, and make a transaction.

Championing customer’s convenience, AutoDeal takes upon them to be the overseer from the start to finish of a customer’s car buying journey. There are hosts of sales agents working with multiple car dealers -350 partner dealers- to be exact, that caters to the automotive needs of the customers through an easier transaction process.

“We partner with vehicle manufacturers, car dealers, and banks, providing them with the means to connect with customers on the platform. As a result, we currently have more than 1.7 million monthly visits,” explained the co-founders. The company also supports the decision making the process of customers by providing multiple quotations from multiple dealers simultaneously, helping customers to better compare their options.

Lead generation-based

There is a clear sales funnel setup that AutoDeal has committed to provide since day one. The lead management technology in an SaaS format is especially beneficial for the company’s partners that include sales agents, who can see where in the process customers tend to withdraw from closing the transaction, and for both manufacturers and dealers to get insight about their products and track their performance.

The company’s online-to-offline (O2O) conversion approach has been around since 2014, making one of the firsts to do a comprehensive and full-fledged sales automation for partners to better cater to their customers. In four years of operation, it claims to have already tracked billions of pesos worth of vehicle sales provided by 12 manufactures, more than 350 dealers in the Philippines, which makes up more than 50% auto market in the Philippines.

The data is collected from capturing people while they look at multiple vehicle brands on the site. Then, the data from the lead management platform is presented as marketing intelligence data, brand intelligence, and dealer performance data, all accessible through a mobile application.

Not only making sure the service providers and sales have the easiest experience in selling cars, but their platform also monitors simple but meaningful activities like the length of time a dealer take to respond to an inquiry. It allows AutoDeal to capture the quality of the interaction and give their ratings to dealers and sales agents for customer services purposes.

The company that’s just received $AUD AUD 3.1 million (US$ million) funding in 2017 from Frontier Digital Ventures -an Australia-based firm- has a partnership with local dealers as well as official dealers of Ford, Isuzu, Chevrolet, and many more.

Facilitating anybody to sell cars

Asked about what’s in store next, the co-founders shared about their vision to add capabilities for customers to sell cars instead of just buying in their platform. “Right now, it’s ‘car buying, simplified’, but we want to move forward to sales generation, not just lead-generation. We started off with key performance, metric records, without transitioning. Now, we move onto the sales generation,” explained Scott.

“Adding to that, we’ll be looking more on completing the buying cycles, such as car financing, car insurance, partnering with the providers,” Franks added.

To stay ahead, AutoDeal makes sure that the end of a transaction is the actual sales. Not only they help customers to find the best prices and deals through the comparison feature, but they also analyze what factors are being considered before visitors are ready to become buyers and try to close that gap.

“The deal value is manage to help the process but ultimately the real value is if we are able to generate a real-world sales transaction, track it, and provide the metric back to the users of the websites,” said Scott.

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Automation in car buying and selling is ultimately the future of automotive transaction everywhere. It seems like the future is already here.

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Image Credit: AutoDeal

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