http://www.dealersynergy.com
Sean V. Bradley is Training a HIGH LEVEL Automotive Internet Sales / BDC Director on "How to Identify LOST Opportunities" and how to EVOLVE her Employees
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In the early ‘90s an acquaintance received a new job assignment. He was to set up an outbound telemarketing department to sell off millions of dollars of off-lease computer equipment.
He assembled a team of “telemarketers” – accountants and administrative assistants from within the company. He sourced and obtained a prospect database. A sales and call management system – a CRM -- was evaluated and installed. In the meantime, caller phone-skills training got underway while he developed daily call goals and quarterly revenue quotas.
In the second year of its operation, this in-house effort generated $20 million for the company.
Do you see an application here to your business?
What’s your CRM doing for you?
Your CRM should be a money machine. A detailed plan for its use, operation, reporting and management is vital. Hold accountable every user in sales, service and F&I accountable for capturing customer data into it. Be sure these individuals use the CRM to stay in contact with their customers.
It should go without elaboration that daily CRM use for customer communication is important. However, to create a money machine from it put it in the hands of individuals capable of riding it hard.
Start your engines
The following steps are a guide to CRM profitability:
- Train internally or hire an individual to be your CRM specialist who likes speaking by phone. Their personality should project well to the listener.
- Establish specific calling goals and make them aggressive. Define specific calling objectives: mining customer data for equity-play customers; customers soon to come off lease; or, older vehicles you’d like returning to your service department.
- Ask your marketing person or agency to draft phone scripts. Scripts should detail key benefits and selling points for each call type. Train your specialist to use them to guide conversations.
- Include in these scripts a variation of the Road to the Sale. Craft the script so your specialist’s conversation brands your dealership.
- Determine your calling specifics. These include calling hours, call-out quotas and revenue expectations. Here’s a model: The number of dial-ups per day required to achieve X number of live calls X number of these calls that convert to X number of fruitful discussions = X number of sales opportunities. Decide to whom you will assign resulting live opportunities. This is the individual who will meet-and-greet the shopper when they come into the store.
- As management, track this activity to hold your specialist accountable for making the calls as required. Use these reports to monitor performance.
- Compensate based on the caller’s adherence to and meeting of the quotas and objectives. Add a spiff for every call resulting in an appointment set. Layer another spiff when the appointment shows (incentivizes proper appointment reinforcement efforts), and consider adding a percentage or flat commission when the appointment converts to sale.
These seven points provide a framework for turning your CRM into a true profit center. Truly, CRM application like this is a “numbers game,” which the right structure, the right objectives and the right specialist can turn into more “solds” on your lot and more ROs in your service department.
Source - Automotive Digital Marketing (RePost)
The Truth About CRMs…
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is always on a dealership’s agenda in our 20 Groups, and they almost always come up in every single workshop. And this is how it should be — it is one of the most important tools and resources that a dealership has in its arsenal for automotive Internet sales. Over the last 12 years, I’ve seen Internet lead management (ILM) and CRM technology companies evolve to have amazing offerings.
But over the years I still get the same question “What is the best CRM for dealerships?” The answer is complex, because there are different “flavors” of CRM, and what’s right for one dealership can be the wrong fit for another; we’ll get to that in a moment. The goal of a CRM package is to reduce redundancy by offering with multiple tools and consolidate to one centralized platform. That means if you have multiple tools / products that do the following:
• Digital or manual showroom control system (desk log)
• Service reminders
• Permission-based e-mail campaigns
• ILM tools
• Phone up tracking system
• Inventory management system
• Call tracking software
• Service appointment system
• Data mining
• BDC campaign management
• Special finance
• Reporting and analytics
With the right CRM, you don’t need a separate tool to perform all these functions. Theoretically, the right CRM lets you consolidate all of this with a single technology platform. The benefit here is multiple. It’s certainly cheaper to pay for one CRM tool than having to purchase numerous tools individually. While an individual tool will almost always be cheaper than a full CRM, if you add up all of individual tools out there, the total cost would be much more expensive than the average cost of a CRM.
One of the most powerful benefits of using a single CRM solution, however, is the fact that all information is on one centralized platform. For example, if you have a prospect that sends an Internet Purchase Request, the CRM will have that in its database. If that prospect decides to walk in the dealership and is “logged” into the dealership’s CRM as a showroom prospect, it will be recognized immediately that that prospect was originally an “Internet opportunity.” Furthermore, if that prospect was ever in the dealership’s service department or did any type of business with that dealership, it would show up in reports. Most CRMs will calculate the amount of profit made from each customer, and the dealership can see the whole picture of a customer or prospect. This is important because if the dealership has the full picture on a situation, it can make better business decisions.
Not all CRMs are perfect fits with all dealerships, though. CRMs can be designed to focus more on one area of sales than another. If your dealership also focuses on this area, it’s a good fit. If you don’t have a particularly strong Internet sales department, but your CRM specializes in Internet lead management, that can be a bad fit. You have to do your research before committing to a CRM solution.
The best advice I can give is to stop trying to shove a round peg into a square hole. Too many dealers out there buy one tool, and then try to make it do what it wasn’t designed to do. I’ll give you an example. I have a dealer client that purchased a tool that was 100-percent designed for special finance. It was designed for a “special finance” depart ment, and was designed by a “special finance” branded company. But the dealership uses this tool for its entire store, and they depend on it for their Internet sales department. The crazy thing about this situation is that the dealership doesn’t even have a “special finance” department. They bought this tool without researching the situation, and are now paying the price.
Here are some steps you can take before you buy a CRM:
• First, simply ask yourself “What do we want or need a CRM for —Internet, sales, service, BDC?” When you answer that question, find a CRM that specializes in that area of need.
• If, for example, you have an extreme need for Internet lead management, compair CRM tools that specialize in that area with each other. Find out why they feel they specialize in ILM, and find out what credentials they have for ILM.
• Get references, and then actually call other dealers using the tool. Ask for references who aren’t in their marketing, and speak to the actual department you are investigating. Don’t ask the dealer principle or GM about Internet lead management; ask the Internet or BDC director. Get their real opinion from a day-to-day operational level.
• Accept the fact that you might need to have more than one tool. For example, I have a lot of dealer clients who have multiple tools. They might have a full CRM and an ILM tool, as well. Yes, this goes against the myth that a CRM can do everything, you’ll be better off in the long run with the right tools for your dealership.
Look at it this way: You wouldn’t go to the ophthalmologist if you had trouble breathing. The ophthalmologist is a doctor, but that’s not his specialty. Use this same mindset when selecting your CRM.
Please e-mail or call me if you have any questions about CRM or if you would like a free strategy session/assessment on your current CRM solution.
Sean V. Bradley is the founder and CEO of Dealer Synergy, a nationally recognized training and consulting company in the automotive industry. He can be contacted at 866.648.7400, or by e-mail at sbradley@autosuccessonline.com.
Every day I am learning and growing with Dealer Synergy! My role here at Dealer Synergy is the Customer Relations Manager. I also do HR for most of our clients. As of today I have been with Dealer Synergy 1 Month, 18 days and 5 hours. I really like the family atmosphere I work in and how helpful my co-workers and Sean have been to me. So far I have been making huge progress to be a successful CRM Specialist. One of my many goals is to SYNERGIZE our clients so that they can also be successful!
Please feel free to ask me any questions. I am here to help you with any concerns or problems you may have!
Yours Truly,
Tishonda
There is endless chatter about social media in the dealer marketing world these days and why wouldn’t there be? Over 500 million people are using one of the “Big 4”—Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linked-In. In addition, of the two-thirds of Americans who now visit social networking sites, 43 percent visit them more than once a day. Significantly for the retail industry, and automotive dealers in particular, 68 percent have become a fan or friend of a product, service, company, or group on a social networking site. Without a doubt, dealers need to harness the power of social media. Most of the social media chatter and discussion, however, currently revolves around dealership Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, while almost none of it focuses on one of the most powerful tools in a dealership’s arsenal…the CRM/ILM system.
Yes, tapping social networking can be a little overwhelming and tricky, but if you utilize your CRM and ILM systems, along with some key best practices, you can eliminate much of the confusion and create a straightforward strategy. For example, knowing whether or not a customer belongs to a social site is helpful (and you can do that directly through your CRM/ILM system, with the right plug-ins); but seeing how many friends or contacts that customer has on each site gives you a powerful advantage. Based on the user privacy settings, you can actually go directly from the CRM tool to a customer’s social media page to gain even more information about that customer.
Imagine the selling opportunity with a customer that has over 200 contacts on Facebook alone. If this “influencer” has a good experience at your dealership, then recommends your dealership to his/her friends via a post on the wall, and those 200 contacts have their own friends, the customer’s experience becomes viral across all of those contacts. Your marketing efforts can grow exponentially by targeting just one prospect and then spreading the positive message by word of mouth or, in this case, “text of mouth”! And this is just one opportunity you can leverage combining the right CRM system and plug-ins, as well as the following simple best practices:
1. Enhance your CRM data to include social media information for each of your customers and prospects.
2. Use the enhanced data to create outbound CRM/ILM-based campaigns that target social network influencers in your database.
3. Target your social media campaigns. Don’t just email the same content asking everyone to be your friend, make the request relevant to the recipient.
4. Train your store to review the social media data (recent posts, friends, etc.), in addition to the customer’s history of interactions with your store, before they interact with the customer.
5. Measure, measure, measure!
Bottom line: just as you should never forget your CRM and ILM systems when planning your email and direct mail campaigns, be sure to include these critical systems as you map out your social media plan…it is a lot easier than you think, just try it!
Mike Martinez is chief marketing officer at izmocars.com. For more information about izmocars and iCRM social media plug-ins, go to www.izmocars.com/solutions/icrm.html.
