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.

In this episode, we will discuss ProfitTime's Competitive Sets, which are critical to seeing how your pricing and appraising numbers stack up against other dealers in your market… and how you might sell vehicles more effectively against them.

It all starts here in Competitive Criteria, where you’ll select the various parameters that define the market for any given vehicle.

Of course, the system can’t accurately tell you how your vehicles compare against the competition until you define what the competition is. This makes the Competitive Criteria one of the most critical features in the ProfitTime software. So, let's dive in.

The first way to define your market is by distance. This will compare your vehicle to others of the same make and model, within a chosen mile radius around your dealership.

Auto Distance lets ProfitTime automatically select the smallest mile radius that contains enough cars and data to fill out a full competitive set. We recommend using auto distance.

Next, you’ll want to select active or recent listings. Choosing active will compare your vehicle to current listings only. Recent will compare your vehicle to both current listings, and ones that recently sold.

We recommend always choosing recent, as this gives you more market to play with, as opposed to only looking at active vehicles.

You’ll see that the rest of the Competitive Criteria area is made up of a list of highly specific vehicle features. These allow you to completely customize the exact kind of market you plan on selling in.

Think of these as “filters” that narrow or broaden the market you’re comparing yourself against.

As you click to select these different criteria, you’ll see the data in the pricing table change along with it.

This includes: total number of cars “like yours” in the area, your price percentage against the market, your overall price rank, your vRank, and your cost-to-market.

You’ll also see your ProfitTime score change along with how you set up your competitive sets.

It's incredibly important that each dealer thinks through their market carefully, and sets up a realistic picture of that market in the Competitive Criteria area.

Not doing this properly, or manipulating your market criteria until you see a certain ProfitTime score, will result in vehicles that are priced or appraised poorly — and ultimately — vehicles that perform poorly at retail.

You also don’t want to narrow down your market too much by selecting vehicle criteria that won’t truly impact demand.

Selecting too many of those highly specific filters results in extremely skewed data in the pricing table. Again, leading to misinformed pricing decisions.

Still, you want to avoid defining your market too broadly.

For example, when shopping for a 2021 Toyota Tundra, we know it does make a difference to customers whether this truck is a crew cab or not. And it does make a difference if it's rear wheel drive or 4-wheel drive.

In this instance, we’ll want to include those criteria in our set. Now, we have a truly accurate picture of the market this truck will be competing in.

Not sure which pieces of criteria matter most? ProfitTime can help you there.

When evaluating a vehicle, items in the Competitive Criteria list are automatically ordered top-down by how much they impact the price of that vehicle.

This allows you to quickly select the most relevant filters possible when appraising or pricing vehicles.

But again, simply selecting the top three filters isn’t a silver bullet to success.

Each dealer should think through and be honest about what their market is for a vehicle, then decide how they want to compete in it.

That’s all for now. We hope this has helped you understand the importance and application of ProfitTime’s Competitive Sets. As always, feel free to reach out to your vAuto performance manager with any questions.