Every channel claims the sale. Which one actually sold the car?
Across Perrys' 40-plus forecourts and eleven franchises — from Ford and Vauxhall to newer arrivals like OMODA and JAECOO — the data tells a dozen different stories. Auto Trader claims the sale. Paid search claims it. The salesperson logs a walk-in. Unspin™ removes the spin and shows the Perrys leadership team what genuinely moves metal, where the next units come from, and where the marketing budget is working hardest.
Add up what every source claims and you've sold each car two or three times over. That's the spin. Unspin™ resolves it to one trusted view of what really earned the order.
You don't have a reporting problem. You have a confidence problem.
Perrys sells new, used, vans, Motability and aftersales across eleven franchises and 40-plus sites — so the group is never short of data. Every manufacturer portal has a dashboard. Every marketplace has a league table. Every agency has a deck. GA4 says one thing, the DMS says another, and the showroom has a gut feel that contradicts both.
So when the question is "which spend do we scale across the network, and which do we pull?", the honest answer is too often a judgement call dressed up as a number. Most car sales never trace cleanly back to a single source — buyers research for weeks across channels, then walk into a Perrys forecourt or pick up the phone. The result is over-credited channels, undervalued ones, and budget set by whoever argues hardest.
If the answer isn't immediate and evidence-backed, the budget is being set on assumption.
Where do the next £1m of gross profit come from?
Not units at any cost — profit. Could you say, with confidence:
- Which franchise and which forecourt has the real headroom?
- New, used, finance penetration or aftersales?
- Which channels deserve more spend — and why?
- What return the leadership team should expect?
If you cut marketing 20% tomorrow, what would you protect?
Across the whole group, would you know:
- What you could lose without losing a single sale?
- Which spend protects enquiry volume and stock turn?
- What's genuinely driving reservations vs just clicks?
- How much gross profit each cut would actually risk?
For most groups, the honest answer is "not with certainty." That's exactly why Unspin™ exists.
2026 is squeezing margin from every direction. Guesswork is the one cost you can cut today.
The pressures stacking up on automotive retail this year all land in the same place for Perrys: every marketing pound and every stock decision has to work harder, and has to be defensible to the board. A franchise mix that now spans established names and newer arrivals like OMODA and JAECOO only widens the range of decisions the leadership team has to get right.
Tougher EV registration targets and heavy manufacturer discounting are compressing new-car profit. Volume bonuses are harder to hit, and the margin has to be recovered elsewhere — used, finance and aftersales.
Oversupply of ex-fleet EVs is pressuring residuals while many dealers worry about sourcing the right used stock at all. Days in stock and the channels that source and shift it matter more than ever.
Service, MOT and parts retention is increasingly where the resilient profit sits. Knowing which marketing actually feeds the workshop — not just the showroom — protects the most dependable income the group has.
Marketplace, portal and media costs keep climbing while attribution gets less reliable. Spending more to sell the same car erodes profit per unit quietly — unless you can see which channels truly convert.
No new platform. No re-tagging. Just the data you already export, read properly.
Unspin™ is ClickThrough's Growth Intelligence Framework — marketing effectiveness principles, data science and commercial analysis applied to the exports Perrys already runs across its sites.
Export what you already have
Sales and units from the DMS, enquiries from the CRM, spend from media and marketplaces, GA4 and manufacturer reports.
Hand over simple files
Excel, CSV or platform exports across your franchises and sites. No complex implementation, no IT project.
Connect activity to outcome
We model the real relationships between marketing activity, demand, enquiry, reservation, units and gross profit.
Find the true drivers
Which channels, franchises and forecourts genuinely earn the order — separated from the ones simply taking the credit.
Prioritise the next pound
Where to invest more, where to pull back, and what to protect — modelled against a 20% budget-cut scenario.
Decide in a strategic workshop
Findings and recommendations walked through with your team, ready to defend to the board and the CFO.
The objective isn't to prove the current plan right. It's to test it.
Marketplaces under-credited. Auto Trader and portals influence far more sales than last-touch reporting gives them.
Brand and upper funnel undervalued. The activity that fills the forecourt rarely gets the last click.
Paid search over-credited. Often capturing demand that other activity already created.
Used demand driven by sourcing, not media — the constraint sits in stock, not spend.
Aftersales marketing underfunded relative to the resilient profit it protects.
Spend uneven across the group — strong forecourts starved, weak ones over-supported.
The result is a single trusted view. No channel bias. No competing versions. Just evidence to invest behind.
The price of misreading the numbers far exceeds the cost of understanding them.
Pour budget into a channel that only takes the credit, and the real driver quietly starves.
Cut the spend that fills the forecourt, and enquiry dries up three months later — with no obvious culprit.
Back the wrong franchise or forecourt mix, and growth stalls where the headroom actually was.
Defend the budget on a confident story rather than evidence, and lose the room when the CFO pushes back.
Unspin™ exists to reduce that risk. Not by adding another dashboard — by turning the data you already have into decisions you can stand behind.
See the spin removed from a real example — then picture it on Perrys' numbers.
A practical 20-minute walkthrough showing exactly how Unspin™ turns standard exports into growth-driver insight, investment priorities and budget-cut scenarios — in the commercial language of automotive retail. Perrys has been selling cars since 1908; this is about where the profitable growth comes from next.
- How Unspin™ works, end to end
- A real-world example analysis
- Growth-driver insight by channel
- Investment prioritisation opportunities
- A 20% budget-reduction scenario
- What a full engagement looks like