Industry
Automotive Sales
Challenge
Boost sales with a new, smaller team in a highly competitive metro market in city with a lot of credit challenged customers.
Results
Sales increased with a increase in efficiency and average grosses improved.
Key Product
Website + Showroom Digital Retail
We're seeing our grosses increasing, not decreasing. And most of our customers are going through the transaction in less than an hour and a half as opposed to three hours.
Nissan of Stockton
Operates in the competitive Northern California metro area and uniquely serves a demographic where 60% to 70% of showroom walk-ins present challenged credit. New management doubled monthly sales YoY by overhauling operations including switching to digital showroom process.The Challenge
No way around it Nissan of Stockton was struggling. New GM Brandon Gonsalvez and GSM Steve Moroz needed to find a way for Nissan of Stockton to stand out in the crowded Northern California market and to maximize sales opportunities within the community of Stockton, CA. Approximately 60% to 70% of walk-in customers lived in a 520 to 580 credit score range, and up to 45% of the total monthly showroom business was subprime. Frequently, salespeople would spend hours walking a customer around the lot and selling them on a $30,000 car, only for the desk to realize hours later that the buyer's credit could only support a $20,000 vehicle. This late-deal "vehicle switch" caused massive customer letdown, embarrassment, and frequently led to buyers walking out in frustration.
Additionally, the general manager recognized a massive gap in customer buying preferences. Customers had shifted their buying habits, heavily researching, configuring payments, and building deals late into the night online. Yet, once these buyers stepped onto the physical showroom floor, the dealership lacked a seamless mechanism to pick up where the customer left off online. Instead, salespeople would start the process over on paper, manually typing customer data multiple times into disconnected CRM, credit, and trade-in platforms. This contrasted severely with the customer experience promised by heavy advertising originating from Carvana purchasing a new car franchise dealership close by in Sacramento and a CarMax location a stone's throw away down the street.
Thankfully, the store found some success in the previous year with hosting event sales with mailers that succeeded in bringing a lot of potential customers into the dealership, but could not efficiently process pencils for all the showroom ups. The managers felt they were missing out on sales. Operationally, the sales desk was severely bottlenecked by a redundant, slow desking process that involved jumping between tools on their computer to provide a pencil.
"Burn the boats and make it the only option."
The Solution
In May, Nissan of Stockton’s leadership team made the uncompromising decision to eliminate their legacy, paper-based desking systems and fully digitize their showroom operations using the WebBuy sales platform. Rather than just keeping the digital platform as a passive website widget, the GM Brandon Gonsalvez decided to fully commit, "Let's burn the boats and make it the only option." The dealership canceled their separate redundant desking software and integrated their entire sales workflow into a single, cohesive platform. WebBuy seamlessly consolidated credit applications, trade appraisals, bank submissions, and payment calculations into one application.
To physically support this change, Nissan of Stockton transformed their showroom environment by installing interactive touchscreen monitors directly onto the salespeople's desks. This design completely altered the physical and psychological dynamics of the car negotiation. Instead of a salesperson shuttling back and forth to the sales desk with the customer waiting, the desk-mounted touchscreen allowed the salesperson and customer to sit side-by-side, collaboratively structuring terms and facing the realities of trade value and financing rates for their particular credit situation.
"I was worried about control of the car deal and losing control of the gross...without having management interaction at every turn"
Steve Moroz admits that his largest initial concern when evaluating a customer-facing sales tool was the fear of losing command over the deal's margins. "I was worried about control of the car deal being able to manipulate down and rate and term and all those things that I've been doing for 30 years on the desk," Moroz shares. "I thought that this tool that's customer-facing wouldn't be able to allow me to do all of that and I would lose control of the gross... without having management interaction at every turn".
The Results
The quantitative and qualitative results of Nissan of Stockton’s digital showroom transition are staggering, illustrating a monumental shift in dealership performance, profitability, and operational efficiency:
1. 2x Sales Volume and Closing Ratios
Following the May transition, Nissan of Stockton achieved a 37% showroom closing ratio on WebBuy leads—roughly double the national closing average of ~18%. This performance is particularly impressive given that 45% of the store's business is subprime, and 60% of those deals require multiple co-signers, necessitating extensive desking work. The store hit a blistering sales pace, breaking records for the store. The store hit a blistering sales pace, breaking records for the store. Sales increased 40% even with a smaller sales team from earlier in the year and 2x year-over-year monthly volume.
2. Significant Gross Profit Enhancements
The fear that a transparent, customer-facing screen would destroy gross profit was completely put to rest. According to the latest dealership analysis, Nissan of Stockton saw dramatic gross profit improvements:
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⬆️$462 Avg New Car Gross: Driven by putting buyers on the right car from the start and utilizing WebBuy’s intelligent deal-penciling calculations.
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⬆️$405 Avg F&I Gross: WebBuy's pre-qualification process and seamless protection product menu credited a massive F&I gross jump. As Steve Moroz explains, the screen allows the salesperson to get the customer comfortable with a monthly payment window first. If a customer initially removes F&I products, the sales team can easily address that by selling the product directly with the help of the images, copy, videos, and brochures right there in the menu.
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⬆️$307 Avg Sold Trade Gross: Accomplished by utilizing WebBuy's integrated, highly reliable trade module. This eliminated the slow, multi-system manual appraising process of V-Auto, KBB, or Trade Pending, and established a fast, trustworthy starting number that customers accepted on the spot.
3. Unprecedented Operational Throughput and Time Savings
Showroom transaction speed proved to be the ultimate closing engine. By consolidating multiple software programs, Nissan of Stockton reduced their average deal time from over three hours to less than an hour and a half. Steve Moroz notes that this speed directly translates to a higher close rate because it captures customers while they are highly engaged: "The faster I can get to a yes, the higher my closing percentage is, and WebBuy gets you to yes faster than any other tool out there".
"The faster I can get to a yes, the higher my closing percentage is."
This efficiency expanded physical desk capacity. On a single Saturday, desk managers Nick and Fred worked in concert, bouncing bank options and structuring multiple pencils to handle 61 ups and close 13 complex, multi-cosigner deals in a single day—a volume Steve Moroz states would have been physically impossible under their previous traditional, manual desking process.
4. Meaningful Cost Reductions
By shifting their showroom from doing hard credit pulls (~$6–$7) to 700Credit soft pulls (~$3–$3.50) 75% to 80% of the time, the dealership achieved significant cost savings of approx. $2,500 per month.
Conclusion
By "burning the boats" and committing to a fully integrated sales platform, Nissan of Stockton has not only captured massive local market share from regional competitors, but they have also proven that a transparent, highly efficient, and digital buying experience is a real asset to a franchise new dealership.
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