Vroom, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRM) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Reid: The quarterly unit commentary was very helpful, especially the monthly breakout. That’s what I was wondering if you guys could unpack the quarter-to-date trends in a bit more detail. And maybe give us a sense kind of as to how much of the sequential unit decline that you called out for October reflected some of the third-party issues you mentioned on the call versus your ongoing efforts to focus on profitability versus the macro? I guess what I’m trying to say is bucketing those 3 drivers there.

Thomas Shortt: Yes, it’s a fantastic question, and it’s something we actually work on, on a daily basis. It’s clear if we look at just the competitive environment and what others in the industry have reported, there is definitely a macroeconomic environment, component that’s happening to demand. It’s very hard for us to tease that out in our numbers because we have so many moving parts in our business that we’re trying to move as we try to transform this business. What I can tell you is — and we — I mentioned it earlier in my opening comments that we had this large sales force reduction and it was very large, and it happened in a single week. And if you look at the 4 weeks before and 4 weeks after that, we had a 32% reduction in contracts.

I’ll give you a couple of other metrics around that. Our contracts per sales rep. So that’s kind of a productivity metric for us. The week before versus the week after, they were basically flat, down 1%. So it was really a matter of having resources to help customers get through the sales transaction process. We have been ramping our sales force, one of the unknowns for us, we had a very experienced third-party partner that’s been with us for a long time that was — that had this reduction in sales force. And we’re realistic and that — it’s going to take us time to reap the benefit. As I mentioned, in our long-term roadmap, we expected to transition this selling cost internally over the long term, like it was not in our radar for this year because it just wasn’t one of our priorities.

So we had to quickly move on that. So that definitely had a material impact. And then, of course, we continue to test different levers around what the right mix of volume versus GPPU. So it’s very hard to tease out, but we wanted to acknowledge it, certainly some element of it is the macroeconomic environment. But when we initially looked at it like the drastic reduction in our sales force definitely had a significant impact. So I think for us, it’s such a fragmented market, and we have such a small share in the market. Our question as we go into next year is how much market share can we gain when we have a selling staff that can actually manage the inbound traffic that’s coming through. And we’re going to learn that as we go through 2023.

Richard Reid: No, that’s helpful color. And you basically answered my follow-up question. So maybe if I could just slip another one in here on a slightly different topic. Kind of what a healthy run rate per vehicle GPPU as some of the older vehicles that might not have been live on your site due to titling issues through — flow-through? It sounds like there’s going to be a sequential step down in GPPU, but any sense of the magnitude there in Q4 versus Q3?