Hey wait a second a CRM solution suppose to make me money and keep my business organized and productive, how can it cost me money other than the monthly subscription fees. Plus I pay already a hefty amount per month to begin with for our system, it is suppose to be working well. If you are the general manager for your dealership, and what I just described above is something that just ran through your head then you should really, I mean really look into your current CRM solution and verify its usefulness.

CRM is acronyms for Customer Relationship Management, it is suppose to be a system that keeps your dealership running efficiently and help you organize your tasks, customers, appointments and inventory. But poorly designed or developed software can cost you business and money in real life. To design and develop an automotive CRM takes time and talent, with good understanding of the business. There are many providers out there claiming they are in business since the early 80s and they have the best system in the market (which is true back in the 80s, and their software has not progressed for almost 20 years). Don’t be sold into another useless solution again, you don’t have to pay $2000-$5000 per month to use some outdated, unintuitive, poorly designed and developed system, that in actuality can cause you money and business. You don’t get a better system because you are paying for a bigger price tag.  Read more...

Well let’s begin with the good since it is the first on the list, there are many CRM solution vendors out there. One good feature that every one seems to share is the incoming 1-800 phone tracking capabilities, any respectable CRM solution will offer this feature of recorded phone call from their targeted 1-800 numbers for advertising tracking purposes. The CRM solution providers often are partnered with a voice over IP solution provider to offer their clients this service. Voice over IP call tracking got to be one of the biggest improvements found in today’s CRM or DMS systems for dealers. Another good feature is sales reporting and performance tracking, almost all of the CRM solution vendors offers some sort of way to track their advertising spending, or sales performance. This can go as far as the best selling model for the month, even export to Excel file format. The last good feature of today’s CRM we are going to discuss here is the ability to manage, transfer lead from sales person to sales person. With different security access levels, a manager can access sales person’s lead and manage and transfer them at his will. This level of sophistication is light years ahead of the older systems.  Read more...

Today’s business intelligence is not only about your competitors, it is also a reflection of yourself in the business world. Knowing what your competitor’s strength and weaknesses are not enough, but what about your own performances? Are you spending the right amount for advertising that is the most effective? Are you sending valuable leads to a bad sales person? Most of all are you losing out on business opportunities? All these mind boggling questions can be found in a well formed and developed CRM solution. Because after all it is all about good data mining and data manipulation techniques that can offer you the answer. With the help of a good automotive CRM solution you can truly maximize your business potential.

Let’s take for advertising spending for example. By asking your online customers the right question at the right moment, you can categorize your incoming traffic with the labels such as radio ad, Google, flyer drops, newspaper…etc. With good data integrity build into the CRM, your solution will be able to tell you which advertising avenue is generating the most amount of interest. Therefore you should increase your spending on Google, and drop your spending on newspaper ads. This data can be further sorted and viewed as a comparison chart on a monthly basis or yearly basis. Moving on to the next topic of are you giving leads to the right sales person? This is a crucial part of your daily operation, because a wasted lead can literally translate to wasted resources. After you spend thousands of dollars attracting your potential customer, the last thing you want to do is to waste that lead to a bad sales person.  Read more...

Wait a second, a CRM solution for my dealership supposes to help me make more profit, easy to use and help me to organize files better. How can it work against me? Well you are in for a treat for some of the hidden problems your CRM solution vendor wouldn’t tell you. Let’s put aside about the outrageous price tag for a moment, just focus on the tools, features and programming logic. Most of today’s automotive CRM solution are all web based, worse yet they are designed by the ex-car sales manager who has absolutely no training or education in computer science or programming languages. The product is usually produced by developers or application programmers who have no clue of automotive business. This gap in knowledge and experience can result in some poorly developed web portals that can be counter productive and outright backwards. Because most of the CRM solutions today are web based, there is the first issue of system performance. Although a web based system is cheaper to develop and easier to maintain, but it is vulnerable to hackers and attacks compare to a full blown desktop application. Imagine every data field and text input has to be processed by some PHP script on the server, you will have to wait for server response on every page load. How much time do you think that system will waste compare to a desktop application? If used incorrectly the CRM will add unnecessary complexity to a very simple situation of selling cars. But because most of the sales manager are impressed by the I.T business overall, they love to know if the portal has the latest capabilities or integrations without knowing the long term effect it can cause the dealership, or in another word the “big picture”.  Read more...

So for the past 15 years you have been managing your inventory through paper and pen, and for the last 2 years you have moved to an Excel spread sheet to do the same job. Now you are ready for a full blown CRM solution that can update your inventory instantaneously to your website, and get instant traffic and sales calls. But you are not sure which CRM solution to go with? If you have thought about this transition, you have probably realized you have out grown your spread sheet. Now you are ready for more, more than just recording the year, make and model of your inventory, more than just selling price and how many days this car has been in stock. Generally speaking if you have more than 3 sales people employed for your company, you should have some kind of customer relationship management software specifically build for the automotive industry to help you run your business. Why? Because you can track their sales performances, inventory turn over ratio, tracking 1-800 phone calls, and above all effectively manage your inventory that is tightly integrated with your web site.  Read more...