Mobility Sales Solutions has announced a partnership with Canadian Black Book.

The arrangement will see Canadian Black Book power Mobility Sales Solution’s VIN-UP ‘in-lane’ service customer vehicle upgrade program, now available in Canada.

VIN-UP is a lead generation and vehicle acquisition tool designed for use in dealer service departments to help feed the sales pipeline.

It works by using a physical handheld scanner, the tool is able to scan the VIN of vehicles while in service and creates a coupon with a buy-back value, in combination with OEM and dealer incentives.

Canadian Black Book is the exclusive provider of valuation data to power the system as well as the sale arm for the tool in Canada.

“Fewer and fewer customers enter the dealership from the front door today. VIN-UP provides a very positive way to generate qualified leads from those customers entering from the service entrance,” said Bruno Lucarelli, President, Mobility Sales Solutions LLC. “The approach is less intrusive, whereby the service lane specialist or used car manager offers to buy a customer’s car versus a sales rep trying to sell them a car,” he adds.

By employing a soft-sell approach, the objective is to retain existing clients by transitioning them from the service department to the sales floor, while at the same time, avoiding the risk of losing them to competing dealers due to hard-sell showroom tactics.

“Canadian Black Book has come a long way from our days selling little black books to dealers. Today we are continuously looking for innovative ways to help dealer sell more cars using our data.  This is certainly a good example of that,” said Brad Rome, President, Canadian Black Book.

As part of the Canadian launch, VIN-UP was piloted over the past 2 months, at BMW Canbec in Montreal, part of the AutoCanada Dealer Group.  “We are forever looking for ways to produce new quality leads and VIN-UP has opened our eyes to a new friendly approach to generating leads from our own service area,” said Martin Taillandier, General Manager, BMW Canbec. “We will certainly be moving forward to deploy this tool on a full-time ongoing basis.”

The service is offered via a monthly subscription fee for the VIN-UP unit, with the dealership following up leads using its own BDC or the program offers lead follow-up services, provided by Suivitel, which only charges a fee per scheduled appointment.