ACCUMULATING ever more market information causes dealers to drown in data while overlooking the guaranteed profit source of existing records, according to data experts ADS (Auto Data Solutions).
As 2025 comes to a close, ADS has identified a culture among British dealers, compared to American counterparts, involving over-emphasis on new sales while neglecting the revenues that can be generated from existing customers.
While dealers navigated a bumpy UK market in 2025, ADS found a widening gap between British and American motor retail practices which saw up to 45% uplift in gross profit overlooked due to an addiction to new customer marketing, while allowing existing records to fall out of date and become commercially useless.
The scale of business missed by dealers through mismanagement of customer records was dramatically highlighted this year when ADS revealed that 3.25 million vehicles recalled between 2018 and 2023 were never seen, due to lost contact with the customer.
Real-world analysis by ADS therefore suggests that dealers missed almost £1 billion in revenue over that period, based on an average £300 customer spend for each successfully booked workshop appointment.
Following a year of consultation across the industry – here and in the US – ADS says that overlooking the revenue available from existing customers is a cultural, rather than a technical problem.
ADS says that relentless focus on the novelty of winning new sales goes hand in hand with mistakenly seeing customer data as an administrative overhead rather than a revenue-driving tool.
The problem is nothing to do with the intelligence, skills or abilities of British dealers, who are among the most sophisticated in the world.
It is a cultural issue, and it will result in a two-track motor retail market. Those dealers who don't change their mindset will be left behind by those who are faster in adopting the American practices of equal focus on customer retention enabled by focused management of existing data.
The necessary cultural shift for British dealers is from seeing existing customer data as an administrative overhead to recognising it as the basis of business growth
ADS’s research into US best practice reveals that dealers there place equal emphasis on marketing for new sales or conquest business and maintaining relationships with existing customers so that marketing energy is evenly divided between both.
The guiding principle in the US is that servicing and other workshop business are fundamental to growth, so ADS is now deploying an ‘SMR iQ’ tool to help UK dealers to develop a similar culture. Based on fully up-to-date customer data, SMR iQ creates a seamless, low-friction consumer-friendly online service experience.
We see dealers constantly seeking fresh information to help them navigate today's less predictable market conditions, but they end up drowning in ever more data while allowing their existing customer records to lapse into irrelevance.
Now it’s clear that those who refocus on existing customers will best navigate next year’s market pressures by refining and intelligently using the data they already hold, rather than constantly seeking new marketing-focused data.
We already see signs in the UK that dealers who emulate the American approach to customer data and also centre workshop business as a source of growth are already pulling ahead of the pack, proving the value of that cultural shift.
ADS returns to NADA in Las Vegas in February to gather further intelligence, enabling the business to continue developing homegrown versions of US data-led service practices to bring advantage to early-adopting UK dealers.