It wasn’t long ago that auto dealership software was little more than a way to cut down on paperwork, but times have changed. These days, automotive customer relationship management (CRM) software is a comprehensive sales tool that can help drive your sales both right now and in the immediate future. By bringing together all of the data that your dealership needs to run smoothly and grow, CRM dealer software makes that data completely actionable, enabling you to draw valuable insight into your business that exceeds the wildest dreams of the dealerships one generation in the past.

Dealership Efficiency

Every hour your employees spend entering data into your system is an hour they’re not working on developing a lead. By streamlining every aspect of your dealership, from contracts to customer data, you minimize the time your staff has to spend performing the type of tedious tasks that can be automated. This comprehensive approach to customer data is also a valuable way to provide your sales staff with the information necessary to identify sales opportunities early, and help your customers find the perfect deal immediately. A CRM dealer will inform you about leads as they’re developed, auto-respond to potential leads through the phone or email, and prevent your competition from even having a chance to step in.

Employee Tracking

Maximizing the accountability of your staff can be the single most important step you can take towards improving employee productivity. CRM software can help you achieve that by carefully tracking the performance of all your employees, so you can determine who is exceeding expectations, who could use some additional training, and in what areas. Keeping metrics for all of their customer interactions, CRM can help ensure that your employees are always finding the right solutions.

Sales and Marketing

The greatest sales benefit of CRM software undoubtedly comes from its marketing capacities. First rate CRM suites enable you to generate leads online, follow up on those leads, track your competitors, deliver quick sales quotes, and track the status of every customer from first contact to their next service appointment. These days, nearly everyone on the market for a new car begins their search on the Internet. Automotive CRM is designed to help you glean insight into your potential customers, which enables you to prioritize leads that need urgent attention.

Web-to-lead forms, email marketing, and other types of marketing automation can help you find new leads that you would’ve otherwise never had the opportunity to reach. And by placing individuals into groups that show how leads are generated, and filtering those groups by interests, CRM enables you to create highly effective marketing campaigns by predicting customer needs and understanding individual preferences. This also allows you to improve your score in the customer experience index, improve customer loyalty, and ultimately improve the purchasing experience for every customer.

Sales Automation

The more data you have, the more informed your decisions can be. Because CRM allows you to connect customer information with service history, you’re able to get a clear picture of the status of all your current and prospective customers. This enables you to create a highly accurate forecast for your business, which isn’t only useful from a financial standpoint, but from a practical one as well. Being able to predict the ebb and flow of workloads allows you to better prepare for and allocate your resources to those tasks.

CRM and Sales

Not every CRM suite is the same. Where some software options are focused more on the sales end of business and others on marketing, CAR-Research XRM takes a different approach. By combining virtually every CRM tool on the market, from inventory management and automated call centers to showroom control and digital contract automation, XRM enables you to create a fully custom CRM solution for your dealership. And with the right tools and a little knowhow, those tools can help you make the fully informed decisions that will ultimately translate into more sales for your dealership.