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...

You have probably heard of the term CRM recently if you are in the automotive industry. It is heating up to be the hot topic for all the dealer principles and general managers. But if you were to ask few general managers how to define their CRM solution you will probably get different answers from all of them. So let’s take some time and really define the term CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management software, it is not new as matter of fact these types of software have been developed for many different industries under many different names in the past. The most popular CRM software in the world is the Microsoft Outlook; in essence the emailing program keeps track of incoming emails, filters spam, organizes your contact information, and has a little calendar to remind you what is coming up in your life. In a nut shell that is a great CRM to use on a personal level. So why do these car dealerships need a quality CRM solution? Well the answer is really simple, without a proper CRM solution, how would a dealership keep track of its incoming leads from the web? Your dealership CRM supposes to capture your incoming lead, organize them in a timely fashion, and develop these leads into a sale in real life. Without it, how would your potential customers get in touch with you if they are interested in a particular vehicle? By email?  Read more...

Depending on the model and year of your vehicle, repair expenses will vary. Current emission standards and advanced technology is an integral part of the automotive world. With advanced technology comes higher costs, especially if you rely on someone else to do the work for you.

There are solutions that will save you some headaches and put cash back in your pocket. If you had the same insider information as your dealership or private garage the ball would be in your court when checking over a repair bill and the honesty of your mechanic.

If you are a weekend mechanic or just a concerned car owner, the value of knowing insider information about your vehicle is extremely valuable. This will give you the ammunition you need to dispute a repair bill and keep an eye on particulars such as the cost of parts and labor.

Once you gain this knowledge your confidence level will grow along with your automotive language that will put any service department advisor on guard. He or she will realize that you are not a pushover and they will tend to be more efficient when it comes to quotes and final costs on your vehicle.

Not to say that every repair shop or mechanic is trying to rip you off, there are times when honest mistakes are made. Any shop worth a grain of salt will have qualified technicians, free estimates and should always show you the old parts that came from your vehicle.  Read more...