Unlike a decade ago, auto dealer software isn’t just a way to make your business paperless. These days, CRM software designed specifically for auto dealers can help you maximize your sales by streamlining many of your day to day operations, and organizing customer data in a way that helps you optimize both the generation and conversion of your leads. If your dealership is still stuck in the 20th century, it’s worth learning how auto dealer CRM can help fine tune every aspect of your dealership, and ultimately make a serious difference in your bottom line.

Auto Dealer CRM

Auto customer relationship management (CRM) software is designed to help dealerships organize customer data, enabling them to track both current and prospective customers. Rather than simply collecting data, auto dealer CRM specializes in organizing that data to give you detailed insight into the performance of your employees and the processes they use to service and sell vehicles.

This data also enables you to pro-actively improve on those sales practices by showing you what works and how well. In short, CRM aims to help you manage customers through every stage of the buying cycle, nurture leads to conversion, and ultimately sell and service more vehicles while improving customer satisfaction across the board.

Capturing Leads

These days, 95% of customers start their search for a new car on the Internet, and nearly all of them will submit lead information to a digital showroom before they head off to visit a real dealership. In the absence of the ability to manage these leads, your dealership will inevitably lose many of these prospective sales.

CRM prepares you to handle these digital leads, and to accommodate both customers who are ready to buy and customers who are just browsing equally well. More than just a means of collecting and organizing customer data, it can help you actively market your products, keep tabs on customer communications with your staff, and analyze this entire process for improvement in the future.

One thing that CRM is not is a replacement for your sales staff. On the contrary, it’s much more like a tool that your staff can use to better serve the needs of customers. Many dealerships have spent countless hours training their salespeople in how to behave when a customer is sitting at their desk. In many ways, the greatest contribution that CRM can offer is in getting customers to sit at that desk. Once the customer is there, CRM has already done 90% of its job.

CRM Software Suites

Modern CRM software is often integrated with smartphones, which are the device of choice for researching automotive products for as many as 35% of consumers. This integration enables your dealership to instantaneous SMS text or e-mail notifications your customers, whether you’re following up on a lead or sending a friendly reminder for service that’s due soon.

Many of the more sophisticated CRM suites, like Car-Research XRM, also come equipped with the ability to carry out highly targeted email campaigns that can be triggered by customers opening email messages. Automated responses can be scheduled to interact with consumers until they’re ready to make a purchase decision, keeping your dealership in the minds of your prospective customers through the entire process.

Your chances of converting a lead drop drastically the longer it takes for you to reply. If you want to capture as many sales as possible, it’s important to be proactive about identifying leads that need attention and pro-actively engaging them as soon as possible. CRM software allows dealerships to automatically prioritize leads in order of their importance, giving notifications to your salespeople that certain leads need immediate attention. This helps you minimize your lost sales opportunities in a way that simply can’t be done without the aid of digital automation.

CRM isn’t just a digital replacement for everything that goes on paper, or a neat worksheet generator to organize your data for you. While it does both of those things, more importantly, it takes your customer data and turns it into something that you can actively apply to the sales process. By enabling you to track and consolidate all of the interactions your dealership has with customers, intelligent use of CRM can help you improve the efficiency of nearly every aspect of your business.