12 cars of Christmas

10 / 12 Cars of Christmas

A combination of style, ‘coolness’, driving pleasure and sheer personal preference. If you have a better list or just one model you want to add the list, let me know.

Audi ur-Quattro. 10/12 of our Cars for Christmas. A real world car that could be driven fast no matter how bad the weather. Do you have a better car.

The top four cars are pretty much inter-changeable all of them could have got first place. It would depend upon the day, the journey I had to make and . . . . . well lots of things. In this case, it might be that the weather was bad or it was raining.

Audi ur-Quattro.

The cold, wet forests or Keilder and North Yorkshire, bright lights lancing through the trees behind you as you desperately ran along the gravel track to the next ‘even better’ vantage point. Somewhere else to get showered with grit at 2am in the morning.

Another popping, fire breathing, rally car that ended up arriving in the retailer showrooms in the 1980’s. Pick 10 valve or 20 valve performance, in road trim there was little difference between them – although the 20v seemed to rev harder. It had a 2.1litre turbo charged 5 cylinder engine. Even the talking dashboard version was cool, even if most owners did turn the feature off.

Starting life as a military 4 wheel drive system, shoe horned into a pretty Audi coupe, the gearbox also had locking differentials, so you could turn the car into a virtual tractor if you needed to.

Once I got my driving licence, I only wanted two cars. The Porsche 911, already covered here, and the Audi Quattro (in red or grey). Neither, I could afford at the time.

Audi did have a 2.2 litre un-turbocharged coupe, using the same engine and body. It was slate grey, It wasn’t the real thing, but it was close. So I had one of those instead.

But the proper version, it had useable performance, almost available to ’every man’, that was more focused on the 50mph to 130mph window. It remains the second fastest – cross country – real world car I ever drove (after the Lancia Delta Integrale, but that was way too unreliable and rust prone to appear here unfortunately).

The list is the personal preference of our Director, Guy Winter. A car fanatic since the 1960’s, he eats’, sleeps and dreams everything Motor Trade. For the past 25 years he has worked for Cymark providing digital and telephone marketing support for individual retailers, groups and manufacturers alike.

If you want to stay on top of the latest Motor Trade chat either subscribe to this blog or find Guy on Linkedin.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Had quite a sobering reminder this week.

Like most companies we send out email updates, newsletters etc to former customers / collegues etc.  We aren’t a retail business, instead a business consultancy within the Motor Trade so my own subscriber list is thousands not millions.

By accident, our admin team sent out this weeks “Have a good September 1st” email, but instead of using the latest subscriber list they picked my own list from Spring 2020.

People looking for work and companies hiring.

58% of my former colleagues and contacts are no longer there. Some 4,500 senior managers in the Motor Trade.

A lot of statistics will tell you that people move every 4-5 years, we have had a pandemic, blah blah.  But mainly that is to sell the “updated industry list” they are trying to push.

I know people change jobs, but the Motor Trade is quite a family – sometimes a pretty dysfunctional family -, you might move jobs, but often with the same retailer, or certainly within the same group. You have just moved branch. Or quite commonly, returned to a group you were with originally.

So 58% gone, seeing it in one go is quite sobering.  I hadn’t noticed it as we update our database and subscriber lists on a rolling basis, happily we have the telesales staff that can call the bounced emails to update the current managers details each week.

If you’re marketing cars and vans to local business and fleet buyers then your database probably went through the same changes as mine and need to have a chat with our data team to see how we can help.  They have been making B2B marketing and research calls for over 25 years, and know how to do it.

I know every time they update my database they generate new opportunities for me to call and introduce the marketing services of Cymark.  If we can be of help, drop me an email or DM.

#B2B, #telemarketing, #teleresearch