Borusan Oto is the retail company of Borusan Otomotiv, the importer of BMW, MINI, Jaguar and Land Rover in Turkey. It operates 11 sales locations and 9 service locations, and started equipping its dealerships with TireStation in 2025. Eight sites are equipped today. Tire sales went from 4,000 units in 2023 to a planned 14,000 in 2026.
Can Çitlenbek, who leads retail business development at Borusan Oto, is careful to call that a combined success, and equally clear about the share that belongs to TireStation. Here is how they got there.
Where were you on tire sales before this project, and where are you now?
On my side, I started with tire sales. In 2023, before we did anything, we had 4,000 tire sales at Borusan Oto. Right now, we are planning to finish 2026 at 14,000, so more than three times.
It is a good result, but of course it is a combined success.
What did you change, beyond installing the scanners?
Several things at the same time. We decreased our prices by 15 percent: instead of buying tires from a dealer, we buy directly from the distributor. We started to manage stock planning and sales planning centrally, and we now keep two months of stock in our own inventory, so we are ready for every sales opportunity. Before that, we had been missing sales due to lack of inventory. We also changed our bonus system for service advisors.
But TireStation is what allowed us to actually measure the real opportunity, because before that we did not know what the opportunity was.
What does that measurement tell you?
Out of 100 customers coming into the service in a day, on average 25 percent of them have a low tire tread depth. That is our tire sales opportunity, and it turned out to be really close to our expectations.
Then it is about conversion. In our most successful dealership, we can convince a maximum of 60 percent of them to buy. Even when the price is right, even when we have available stocks, some customers are simply not convinced that day. In our second dealership, the ratio is 40 percent.
And what changed once TireStation was installed?
Before TireStation, even though we had tire sales advisors in these dealerships, they missed a lot of cars. They cannot measure every vehicle: some of them go directly to the mechanical workshop, some go directly to the body workshop. We were probably missing 50 percent of them, and I am talking about our big dealerships, where we take in more than 100 customers a day.
Since we do not have one single structured service entry point, we positioned TireStation at the entrance of the facility, and we installed a quadruple TireStation to absorb the flow.
Now the measurement happens automatically and the advisor gets a notification. They go and find the vehicle, and they measure the tread depth a second time with the customer.
"If you want to measure the effect of TireStation alone, we doubled our sales compared to last year."
Can Çitlenbek, Retail Business Development, Borusan Oto
How do your advisors use it day to day?
We integrated TireStation into our own system through your API. As soon as the aftersales service transaction is registered in our ERP, a notification is sent to the related service advisor. By this way, we eliminate the cars which come to our facility for something else than an aftersales service.
Once the service advisor sees the tire sales opportunity notification, the tire offer is readily available and can be presented to the customer at the very beginning of the service interaction. TireStation has increased service advisors' awareness of tire sales opportunities, enabling them to proactively identify and pursue those opportunities.
Has it changed anything for the customer?
Some service advisors show the customer the screen with the notification: "We measured your tires when you came in, and your tread depth is low." Some customers are impressed. They ask when we measured the tires, and then they accept the offer immediately.
The timing matters. Because we have the notification and we have the inventory, we can make the offer while the customer is still sitting in the chair, even if they came in for something else. If you miss customers before they leave that chair, the sales opportunity is gone.
Does TireStation work the same way in every dealership?
No, and I want to be honest about that. TireStation works very well in our bigger facilities, and that is where we have proven it. In our smaller facilities, we do not have the same level of success, but it is not because of TireStation: the concentration of customers is lower, and keeping stock is much harder. With BMW you are not selling one tire size, we have to keep around 40 different sizes in stock.
What is the next step for you?
We are collecting the TireStation data in our system. At the end of this year, I want to combine it with service registration data and mileage to forecast the next tire change. If I measured your tires at 5 millimetres during the year, we can estimate that you will need new tires in six or nine months, and I can notify the customers even if they are not due for maintenance. We are not doing it yet, but that is where we are going.
Finally, how would you describe the collaboration with ProovStation?
To be honest, ProovStation does not have an importer or a distributor here in Turkey, so for me it was quite a risky move. I had to be involved all the time and to have a responsible person to talk to.
In the end, I think it was totally worth it. We increased our tire sales more than three times, especially in our biggest facility, and I am quite happy that we signed with ProovStation. I would like to thank ProovStation for collaborating with us even though they do not have a distributor in Turkey.
Key figures
- 4,000 tires sold in 2023, 14,000 planned for 2026 across Borusan Oto
- Tire sales doubled year on year, attributed to TireStation alone
- Tire sales quadrupled at İstinye and Avcılar, the two largest sites, since the start
- 25 percent of vehicles entering the workshop show a low tread depth
- Up to 60 percent of detected opportunities converted at the best performing dealership
- More than 100 customers a day handled at the largest facilities
