Lack of traction in NSW, among fleets, is hurting Saab at the sales counter

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SAAB Australia director Parveen Batish has blamed dealer issues in Sydney and a lack of fleet sales nationwide as the primary reasons behind the Swedish brand’s poor sales performance this year.Saab sales volume is down across all model lines and a massive 28.9 per cent for the marque as a whole in the first half of 2008, following just 214 sales in June - down 36.3 per cent on the June 2007 tally.With just 806 new buyers and a 0.1 per cent market share this year, Saab could sell fewer than 1500 cars for the entire year, down from around 1850 in 2007.“We’re suffering in the Sydney market – we’re not getting the sales from that area as much as we should do,” Mr Batish told GoAuto last week. “We had a change of dealerships in Sydney and it always takes a while for dealers to understand a premium brand and to get going.“The second thing is that we’re getting good traction with retail customers but we haven’t got good traction with fleet. We expected to have more of an input from fleet in terms of our overall sales.“If you take those two in combination, when you’re only selling 100 to 150 cars a month, having your biggest market in the country (Sydney) not performing, it has a big impact.”Mr Batish was unequivocal in his belief that Saab’s slow sales were due to its retail performance rather than marketing and advertising activities or the product itself.“If I was to show you our leads and test-drive enquiries for this year compared to the last three or four years – they’re up. We know we’re getting more people interested. We know we’re getting more people interested in a test drive, and we still have a very good conversion rate… it’s just getting them there,” he said.“(The problem) mainly seems to be Sydney. We’re really pleased with the performance that we’re getting in Perth, in Adelaide, in Canberra, and in fact in Melbourne. We don’t have a very large network – we only have 25 (dealers) – and of those 14 are in metro areas.“If we could get every one of those 14 dealers up and running, that 25 to 27 per cent negative (sales) would be 25 to 27 per cent positive.