Here’s a truth bomb: You can have the best products and services in the auto industry, but if you fail to offer a great customer experience, you won’t close as many sales.
The solution? Build excellent relationships with your customers and manage them efficiently through a reliable automotive CRM system.
An automotive CRM can help your company organize and automate your marketing, customer service, and sales processes to sell more cars ultimately.
By the end of this guide, you should know what an automotive CRM is and why adopting one is critical for your small business operations.
What is an automotive CRM?
An automotive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or system is a sales, marketing, and customer service platform. It is created specifically for companies in the auto industry to guide customers through their buyer’s journey.
Most automotive software allows you to integrate CRM into your business through your existing Dealer Management System (DMS) to prevent duplicating your data entry.
Essentially, an automotive CRM can help you and your team with:
- Lead management. A CRM can help you efficiently track your sales leads from all your sales and marketing channels, such as from your website, on the phone, walk-ins, and third parties.
- Communication. CRMs allow you to keep track of all your customer touchpoints and offer features allowing seamless conversations between your sales reps and customers and across your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
- Reporting and transparency. CRM software can help you stay on top of every deal from start to end to know where and how you’re succeeding (or failing).
It lets you view and document each sales conversation, determine your Return on Investment (ROI), track your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and measure returns from your marketing channels.
An automotive CRM systematizes and streamlines your marketing, sales, and customer service processes and, in turn, improves your customer relationships and boosts your revenue.
What to look for in an automotive CRM?
Finding the right CRM is crucial. After all, every business is unique with specific needs. For example, if you’re running a car dealership, you’ll need to do your research to find an automotive CRM that best suits your dealership type.
Consider the following software features when choosing from some of the best CRMs for the auto industry.
- Ease of onboarding and training. Choose a CRM software with an intuitive, modern, and easy-to-use interface and comprehensive training and onboarding.
Some of the best CRMs provide reference libraries, help guides, and even technical support to walk you through setting up your software for your business. This can lead to a lower learning curve, allowing your teams to get your CRM up and running quickly.
- DMS integration. DMS systems are designed for accounting, inventory management, and desking tasks, while CRMs generally help track your sales processes and opportunities.
Your teams need to work with your CRM and DMS, making it crucial to ensure your CRM allows seamless integration. This can eliminate manual tasks such as moving your CRM data to your DMS for accounting purposes.
- Text and voice management. An efficient sales process is crucial for a one-person operation, a small business, or a large enterprise.
Find a CRM with in-platform text and voice messaging features to streamline your phone call recording for quality assessment and training, designate follow-up tasks, automate call routing to your sales reps, and facilitate seamless communication with customers.
In a nutshell, choose a CRM system that helps your sales, marketing, and customer service teams manage client relationships efficiently.
With the right CRM, your teams have access to all the necessary tools and information to do their jobs well, maintain seamless workflows, and ultimately increase your sales.
4 Benefits of using automotive CRM
Let’s dive deeper into the undeniable advantages of CRM software and how integrating one can supercharge your business processes.
Act quickly on new leads
Data shows that 78% of customers buy from companies that respond to their queries first.
CRMs with auto-reply features allow you to respond to leads as soon as they contact you, so you avoid missing opportunities to capture and nurture prospects.
The quicker you answer and act on new leads, the higher your chances of engaging them and convincing them to purchase from you.
Establish a system and order to manage your contacts and leads
Without a CRM, you’d be hard-pressed to efficiently handle all your leads from multiple channels such as your online and offline ads, website forms, and even your walk-in clients.
You’ll end up with an inefficient and ineffective lead management process, which can seriously impact your service delivery’s quality.
CRMs provide a solution by letting you store all your leads and opportunities in a central location and track their sources. This helps you manage your leads better and monitor your lead sources to assess which channels produce the best results and which ones need improvement.
Through a CRM, you can track client conversations over days, weeks, months to gain valuable insights that help improve your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
Systematize your sales team
CRMs gather, store, and organize the data you need to generate reports to optimize your sales team processes.
You’ll get relevant information, such as the number of cars you sell over a specific period and the reps who generate those sales. This can help your team with tracking performance, setting quotas, and sales forecasting.
Optimize marketing spend
To ensure you make every advertising and marketing dollar count, track and assess the channels that bring you the best returns.
Use a reliable CRM to understand your high and low-performing marketing and advertising channels, so you don’t waste your resources while ensuring you get optimum ROI.
You can use CRM data to generate ad and marketing spend reports to evaluate their effectiveness and make the right adjustments to your efforts to help optimize your spending.
Wrapping up why you need automotive CRM for your business
Every big or small business in the auto industry can benefit from using a CRM to streamline business operations and, in turn, bring in more sales.
CRMs can do so much more than provide a platform to store your lead and current customer information.
When implemented correctly, the CRM that best fits your small business can help you automate critical customer relationship management workflows, systemize your sales process, and improve your strategies to skyrocket your sales.
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