Welcome to another installment of "Winning with ProfitTime," the video series designed to help you and your team get the most out of vAuto's one-of-a-kind used inventory management solution.

Today is all about Bronze vehicle investments — the units your ProfitTime system has marked as having the lowest possible profit potential and highest potential for risk.

We’ll discuss the nature of these vehicle investments, and their often misunderstood role in your retail strategy. We’ll also cover some best practices when appraising and pricing your Bronze vehicle investments, so you're always selling them to get the best possible value for your dealership.

So, let’s get started.

First off, it’s important to remember that ProfitTime is built to help you know the investment value of all your vehicles. Vehicles earn the Bronze investment designation because they have one or more of these three characteristics: a high cost to market, a high market days supply, and a low retail sales volume.

Combined, these characteristics produce vehicles with a low potential return on investment compared to Silver, Gold, or Platinum vehicle investments.

But a “low profit potential” vehicle is not the same as a “bad” vehicle or a “bad” investment. There is nothing wrong with having vehicles as Bronze investments in your inventory. In fact, it's common to have lots of vehicles with Bronze investment designations in your inventory — they are a fact of life in today’s used vehicle market.

Think about it — in any retail business, it is typical for dealerships to sell a mix of merchandise that represents a range of investment returns and profit potential. And it’s rare to sell only products that customers want to buy, that are hard to find, and that are guaranteed to deliver a high investment return.

ProfitTime’s ability to show you which vehicles are low-profit-potential Bronze investments at the moment of appraisal means you can plan ahead, and sell them in ways that get you the most value possible.

So, how do we sell Bronze vehicle investments properly using ProfitTime?

A big part of it is setting your retail asking price to where the vehicle will realistically sell quickly to maximize its return and minimize risk.

If you shoot for bigger gross profit on a Bronze vehicle investment and price it high, you’ll likely fail to sell it at that price, end up holding it for too long, and discounting prices until buyers take notice. This more hopeful pricing strategy for Bronze vehicle investments usually ends up producing a less desirable or negative gross profit return.

The cumulative effect of pricing Bronze vehicle investments this way is losses, and a ton of money left on the table.

Instead, set more realistic pricing across all your Bronze inventory. You should list Bronze vehicle investments right at, or even below, ProfitTime’s recommendation range. Always shoot for sales volume with Bronze investments, rather than gross profit.

Why? Because these cars aren’t getting better over time, especially in a depreciating market like we’re seeing now. Selling Bronze vehicle investments at lower prices right from the start ensures you’ll sell them quickly, avoid depreciation, and capture whatever profit potential they hold right now.

Let’s take a look at an example in ProfitTime.

Here, we see this dealership has 66 vehicles with Bronze desginations in their inventory — a pretty typical amount.

And if we look at our Pricing Alignment Box, we see the dealership has priced 14 of those Bronze vehicle investments above ProfitTime’s recommendation — an amount we’d probably say is too high. We’d strongly recommend lowering the asking price on a few of these units.

To do that, simply click on the “14” in the Alignment box. You’ll be taken to an inventory list view, where you’ll see all those Bronze investments that are priced higher than the ProfitTime range. From here, you can click on the listing, and bring up the Vehicle Workbook.

Rolling over our ProfitTime score, you’ll see a list of the factors that produced the Bronze investment score. Whether positive, negative, or neutral.

This Toyota Tacoma earned a Bronze Score of “3” because it has a very high cost to market, even though it has a positive indicator for market days supply.

In the “Pricing” area of this page, you’ll get even more information on why this vehicle is a Bronze investment. You can see the exact number of that high cost to market here — 96%. That means that the cost to own this vehicle is nearly 100% of the average retail price.

So even though this car is currently popular in our market (indicated by our low market day supply) we should still price it like a Bronze, low-profit-potential investment because it’s a very costly vehicle to own, and even more costly to hold too long.

So, let's drag our list price back within ProfitTime’s recommended range using the slider here.

But also remember, Bronze vehicle investments are scored anywhere from 1-3. So there are even different types of Bronze vehicles within the category—some are better than others.

Since this vehicle is scored at a 3, on the high-end of the Bronze scale, ProfitTime is telling us we can afford to set our list price on the higher end of its recommended range, and capture some extra profit.

If you price Bronze vehicle investments in this way, they probably won’t offer those exciting front-end gross opportunities we all love to see. However, if you consistently price them lower and treat them like volume units their Bronze designation signals, you will drive a ton of F&I gross, and increase your customer trade-in opportunities.

Now, most of what we talked about when pricing these vehicles carries over to appraising in ProfitTime.

You’ll want to enter in all your vehicle information on the appraisal page, hit “Go,” and set an appraisal value within ProfitTime’s recommended range.

You can manually edit this value to set a more precise amount within the range, depending on if your Bronze vehicle investment scores a 1, 2, or 3.

For these Bronze investments, you’ll probably see a less than ideal dollar amount in the “Profit” area. We know that can be hard to live with.

But remember, acquiring a Bronze vehicle investment with a low profit amount does not mean you are making a bad investment. It means you’re making a Bronze investment — one with low front-end gross potential due to the cost, market days supply and local volume factors we discussed earlier.

You shouldn’t run from these vehicles. You should embrace them as an important and necessary part of your retail strategy.

Bronze vehicle investments, when treated properly, are fantastic. They are volume cars. If you acquire them in ProfitTime’s recommended range, speed up the turn at retail, you’ll maximize the small amount of gross each one holds — and in turn — greatly increase your overall dealership gross.

That’s all for now. Thanks for taking a few minutes with us to discuss Bronze vehicle investments with us. Be sure to reach out to your vAuto performance manager with any additional questions.