As we approach the 1st anniversary of SERVICEiQ, we have learned a ton, but the biggest surprise just dropped on my lap.

In conversations with a few data-driven dealer groups, they believed 60% of their service business was to customers who did not buy that car from them. That meant they had the opportunity to conquest 60% of their service customers for sales! That’s a lot when you consider the average dealership closes 1,200 repair orders monthly. 60% of 1,200 = 720. Who wouldn’t want 720 sales opportunities a month?

We processed over 140,000 repair orders of dealerships with historical sales data to see what the data revealed. The main data connector between sales and service is the VIN. To put it simply: when the VIN matched deal data to a service RO. All 140,000 repair orders had been closed in the last 90 days of writing this article (8/17/2022).

Less than half the stores we looked at had previously sold 40% of their service customers. Most were far lower than that. There was one Mitsubishi store whose service drive contained 70.4% previously sold customers. On the flip side, an incredibly large Ford store had 6.8% previously sold customers using their service department but doing a massive amount of repair orders!

When we averaged the huge Toyota stores in Florida to a Kia store in Alaska, 19.1% of America’s service drives are servicing cars purchased at that store in the summer of 2022. There is an 80.9% conquesting opportunity in the service drives of the United States!!!