Hello and welcome to another video in our series “Winning with ProfitTime”

Now that you’ve completed your personalized training, you can use these videos to refresh your knowledge, dive deeper into a topic, or teach others the basics of ProfitTime.

Understanding ProfitTime’s scoring system and metal classification is critical to your dealership’s success with the platform.

ProfitTime scores — built on a scale of 1 to 12 — are the platform’s indication of any given vehicle’s unique profit potential... to your specific dealership... under current conditions.

Notably, these scores do NOT designate “a good car” or “a bad car.” They are not a measure of vehicle quality.

Instead, each score is a predictor of the overall investment’s likelihood to deliver a low — or high — ROI.

Metal classifications are groupings of these scores from low to high — Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum — that give you a quick way to assess situations across your inventory.

As you can see, your ProfitTime dashboard uses these metal classifications to give you an at-a-glance understanding of many characteristics of that inventory.

And here, on the “Vehicle Inventory” list, you can see each unit’s score inside a dial colored with its corresponding metal classification.

But before we dive deeper into how to use the system, let’s discuss how ProfitTime arrives at the scores.

From a database of millions of used vehicle transactions over many years, vAuto data scientists were able to identify three factors of a vehicle investment that are highly correlated to — and predictive of — its ultimate ROI performance.

Those three factors are:
Adjusted Cost to Market: or how “right” you own it... that’s the vehicle’s cost as a percentage of the average market price.

“Like Mine” Market Days Supply: or how many days’ worth of similar vehicles are in the local market.

And lastly,
Local Market Retail Volume: which looks at recent sales history to gauge the level of popularity of any vehicle in your local market.

ProfitTime combines these factors and weights them differently depending on many other data points to give each vehicle investment a score from 1 to 12.

Lower scores represent investments with a lower ROI potential.
Higher scores represent investments with a higher ROI potential.

Scores are then grouped into the metal classifications to help dealers understand how to take action.

Platinum scores — 10 to 12 — offer the best opportunity to make gross. Following ProfitTime’s pricing guidance and giving these vehicles plenty of time will help you maximize this potential.

Gold scores — 7 to 9 — are good opportunities that typically deliver a sizable return on investment. You can price these slightly high and still expect them to sell.

Silver scores — 4 to 6 — indicate that while there is investment value in the vehicle, you should move faster and use pricing guidance to manage them carefully.

And Bronze scores — 1 to 3 — are lower-ROI investments that likely have a higher cost-to-market, a high market days supply, and/or a low sales volume.

Again, it’s important to remember: These vehicles are not “bad”... Bronze scores simply mean you should price them optimally to move them quickly.

Now let’s look at some examples in ProfitTime:

Starting with this 2020 Toyota Tacoma, a Bronze investment with a score of 3.

Rolling over the score, we can see a list of the factors that went into this designation. Whether positive, negative, or neutral.

Remember, scores look at factors in combination.

Even though this vehicle has a positive indication for market day supply and price fluctuation, it is Bronze because it has a very high adjusted-cost-to-market.

Now, let’s take a deeper look by clicking into this vehicle workbook.

First, it’s critical to carefully set up your Competitive Criteria to get the system to deliver the most accurate ProfitTime scores. This market radius is currently set to Auto, or 100 miles. But perhaps a larger market radius of 150 miles makes sense for your vehicle.

Here, adjusting the radius changes our ProfitTime score. For more on how to set up your Competitive Criteria for the most accuracy, see our Competitive Sets tutorial.

In the “Pricing” section of the page, we get more details on the positive and negative factors creating the Bronze classification on this vehicle.

We can see the exact number of our high cost to market here, at 96%. That means that the cost to own this vehicle is nearly at the full average retail price.

So even though this is a quality car that has a real popularity in the market (indicated by our low market day supply) we should still price it like a high-risk investment, because of that very high cost to market.

So, let's drag this list price within our recommended range using the slider in the “ProfitTime Ranges” graph.

Since this vehicle is scored at a 3, a higher-end Bronze, we’ll set our list price on the higher end of the recommended range, at about $37,000, to get that little extra profit.

But dealers are free to price it more aggressively. You can see that adjusting our list price automatically updates our “Profit” and “Adjusted Cost to Market” numbers.

Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum with a vehicle scored as a platinum investment.

Back on the “Vehicle Inventory” List page, we see this 2019 Chevrolet Colorado LT with a Platinum score of 11.

As with any vehicle, we can click in to see the details contributing to the score. And this one checks all three positive factors of a high ProfitTime score:
High Local Retail Market Sales Volume
Low “Like Mine” Market Days Supply of 56.
and Low Adjusted Cost-to-market at 85%.

All resulting in a Platinum classification, letting you know this is a vehicle you should price high and be patient with to maximize gross.

Thanks for spending just a few minutes getting to know this topic. As always you’re encouraged to reach out to your performance manager with any questions. Take care and happy hunting.