TORONTO -

Canadian certified pre-owned sales for the Honda brand in 2011 stayed fairly consistent with the prior year, narrowly missing the 20,000 unit mark; while the Honda Canada’s Acura brand saw its CPO sales soar 30 percent year-over-year.

And following such a strong certified year for the automaker, Rob Hodge told Auto Remarketing Canada this week he hopes to take Honda Canada “into the next level of CPO.”

That’s just one of the goals the company’s new senior manager of dealer development has for Honda Canada as he gets rolling in his new position.

Hodge — whose previous position was senior manager of Honda Financial Services’ dealer services group, where he headed up risk management, lease maturity and wholesale remarketing operations — has been in the auto industry for 23 years. He has also held leaderships positions at BMW Group Financial Services and Ford Canada.

Hodge began his new post on Jan. 9, and with a few weeks under his belt, he talked with Auto Remarketing Canada on Tuesday about his goals and responsibilities in the new role, while also talking about the relationships he hopes to build with dealers.

He hasn’t had much of a chance to interact with Honda’s dealer body yet, but he expects to be out and about more frequently and have more time to connect with these dealers.

“I have had very limited (time with dealers) at this point, but I have definite plans as we move forward with our business planning and new product development to spend a lot of time (with them)," Hodge said.

“My expectation in my new role is that I’ll spend a lot more time out interacting directly with dealers, and certainly we’re looking currently at how we can be leveraging the Auto Remarketing Canada conference to connect with our dealers around our used-car plans, as well,” he added, referring to the 2012 Auto Remarketing Canada conference presented by CarProof that will be held April 16–18 in Toronto.

As for his goal to continue and accelerate the CPO sales momentum, Hodge said engagement with the certified programs is already strong with the company’s dealer base. Now it’s a matter of boosting inventory sourcing.

“We’ve got a good engagement in our dealer body, so the next stage I see is to really assisting our dealers with inventory sourcing,” Hodge said. “Inventory sourcing is a critical component, especially as we see off-lease volumes are relatively flat.

“And at the same time, it’s embracing the new mediums in the marketplace, particularly from the consumer," he continued. "The evolving consumer not only has a different level of expectation and knowledge because of how they interact with the Web — with all the information available to them — we have a much more informed consumer with different needs showing up at our dealers and interacting with our dealers in new and different ways."

Overall, Hodge’s responsibility includes heading up four areas at Honda Canada: the dealer development, product development, sales/production planning and used-vehicle retail operations.

“I’m very pleased with the new role. It’s a new opportunity,” he said.

The used-car duties, of course, include overseeing CPO programs. Hodge said that, personally, this area “is very important because that’s an area of the business I’ve been involved in for some time.”

He added: “And it’s also timely in the sense that we’ve just come off not only a challenging year but a very successful year from our dealers’ perspective.

“It’s no secret that there were some production challenges during the year, but I think that all-in-all our dealers really did a very good job of embracing the used-car business,” he continued, noting that the Acura dealers saw their CPO sales increase 30 percent year-over-year, “which was phenomenal.”

“From where I sit, being involved in that part of the business and being able to continue to lead and support our dealer network for growth into the future is something I’m very excited about,” Hodge added.

On the product side of things, Hodge aims for Honda Canada to roll out “new and exciting” vehicles that are not only the “right products” but that it is the “right time.”

“With the dealer development side of things, (the goal) is to make sure that our dealer network moves alongside with the new products that we’ll be bringing into the market, especially on the Acura side,” Hodge stated. “We’ve got a number of new products coming over the next little while, so we want to make sure that our dealer network is in a good position to be able to deliver the sales and service that comes along with that.

“And at the same time, obviously, build on the momentum that we’ve created in that last couple of years on the used-car side of the business, maintaining our dealer-network engagement and performance,” he shared. “And evolve that into the next level of CPO.”