How cloud software can help African SME businesses grow and expand
The automotive market in Africa is growing fast, with more than 3 million new vehicles being sold each year on the continent, and tens of millions of used and imported vehicles yearly.
The new vehicle sale market will grow as fast as in some European countries, with for example Nigeria to have more than 8 million new vehicle sales per year in 2035. Currently, imported and used cars businesses are growing fast on the continent, across all nations.
There are four types of car sellers that Africar Group, the number one online automotive marketplaces in Sub Saharan Africa, covering 40 countries, have identified, being - the individual seller (any individual selling his old car to buy another one), the briefcase seller (selling from 1 to 10 cars a month, that they don’t own and taking a commission fee), the broker or agent (selling several cars a month, cars that they have purchased and selling at a higher price) and the professional car dealer (selling tens of cars per month, with their own physical location).
Africar Group has been working with those different types of sellers for the last years and have identified their biggest challenge, managing their business at scale and automating it.
All of these sellers, and specially the professional ones, that are sometimes handling tens of millions of dollars of revenues yearly, are managing their businesses with spreadsheets, paper forms, notebooks and extensive contact list. Africar Group is now starting to offer them a software as a service CRM solution to maximise their sales opportunities, being the first professional tool for car dealers in early stage emerging markets like Africa.
The CRM SaaS system articulates around some main features like lead management, lead generation, personalised sales dashboard, inventory management and marketing campaign management, combining it with the strength of its online automotive marketplaces, generating tens of thousands of leads monthly in Sub Saharan Africa.
Car dealers can now easily manage their leads, sort them, list them, contact them for new sales opportunities, reach them by different channels at scale like SMS, emails, messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber or WeChat, but also managing its own vendors schedules, calendars, follow up and appointments, and extracting data and metrics out of it, which is almost impossible manually. Vendors from the same dealers can then share their calendars, leads details and notes on the go thanks to the cloud, with live updates of the data.
Africar Group is the leading operator of automotive online marketplaces in Sub Saharan Africa, covering 40 countries for more than 900 million people, backed by Emerging Classifieds Ventures, an Australian company supporting marketplaces in emerging markets around the world, and backed by renowned international investors. Africar Group has raised several 6 digits undisclosed amounts since its inception in 2016.
