Disclosure - I develop software which in part - in our Sales 360 Showroom System/CRM - help dealers to sell cars more efficiently and profitably.
However, I'm also a consumer too. I buy a reasonable number of cars.
I buy cars for myself.
My partner.
The company cars for my team
Cars for family (apparently I'm the go-to man when it comes to car buying)
This allows me to convert my direct consumer experience into improving our software
By giving me the opportunity all the time to mystery shop different dealers, most of which are not customers.
This gives me a customer view of their process and systems - it also allows me to indirectly compare our solutions with others.
Anyone who follows me will know that I'm not impressed with standalone or partially integrated CRM and Showroom systems. The systems themselves are generally excellent, but I find that they are often poorly used and the lack of integration looses a lot.
Some examples of what I mean :-
My mother-in-law (I'm not married but you know who I mean!) is a long term Volvo customer - always buying and servicing from the same local Volvo dealer. She got a written invite to a VIP day.
I went with her to the session.
The Sales Exec had no idea who she was at the outset, and didn't have any of her details in his sales system (which ran separately to his DMS).
He had no details on her Part exchange, when she said "I bought it from you, and you serviced it last month). No idea on it's service history etc.
This really made the sales process awkward. My mother-in-law felt very disconnected from the dealership that she had been a loyal customer of for years. It slowed the process, as all her details needed re-entering from scratch.
It significantly slowed the process.
Fortunately for the dealer, my mother-in-law is old-school loyal and bought anyway. I have to say my advice was to walk. The dealer gave no comfort that they valued her as a customer and she was treated in much the same way as a new walk in.
This is an interesting one.
It comes by the way the Sales system links to the main DMS system and the way the digital advertising works.
The key problem was that the vehicle stock is generally "managed" in the DMS and any automated stock feeds eg to the dealer's web site, come from this. The Sales system is also fed from this stock list.
However, for many, Sales Orders are processed in the Sales System and then manually keyed back into the DMS - often a day or more later.
Worse, there are often separate copies of the stock in sales systems at each branch - so a car can be sold in one branch but still show in stock at others... until the day after it's entered into the DMS which may then be 2-3 days after the sale was made!
The end result is that the stock on the Web site (and on Autotrader etc) can be out of date by a few days.
This happens to me so often when I'm buying it's crazy. I can list at least 5 times this has occurred to me in the past 12 months!
I count every time I watch my details being entered by a Sales Exec into a system. For me, this is dead-time - it's wasting Sales Time, Customer time and disconnecting the Sales Exec from the Customer at critical times.
So, on one car I bought, my details were entered :-
This was all done in a single visit. With a two-fingered sales exec, each time takes a few minutes. Worse, I spotted typing mistakes all the time (which I verbally corrected as he went along).
This isn't an integration issue between the Sales System and the DMS, but Sales System with a third party SMS sending system. It seems that most systems (historically ours included) can send texts but can't receive.
I received a text from a Porsche dealer recently which came from "PORSCHE" (so I can't reply) and said "Hi Simon, was just wondering if you were still interested in the Taycan? Give me a call on nnnn. [saleman name]"
This is a regular experience. I didn't call, as I know from experience that getting hold of the Sales Exec is hard (he's a busy guy as am I.
I wanted to just reply and say "Thanks very much for your time, and whilst I loved the Test Drive of the Taycan, it's not the car for me".
We talk about working with the customer in the way they want to work, so in future, if you're going to text, you need to be able to receive the reply. That reply needs to be visabile in the Sales System - I found a dealer who had a CRM system but the sales team were emailing from outlook directly. This meant that they couldn't see the email trail when they looked at my enquiry in the sales system!
I sat down last year and made a bullet point list of items that I wanted to change in our own Sales 360 CRM.
Fortunately, it's fully integral to our Navigator DMS already, so many of the above don't apply anyway so...
I made a list of features that I wanted, which included:-
My aim was simple. Make life easy for the Sales Exec. This makes life so much easier for the customer.
No more waiting whilst a sales exec re-keys your details into yet another system
No more "tell me about the car you bought from me 3 years ago"
No "I'm sorry that car shows on our web site still, it was sold yesterday"
and definitely (and yes this happened to me!) "Sorry, that car I sold you yesterday was actually sold at our other branch earlier in the day"
I'm looking forward to launching our new Sales 360 with it's updates which achieve much of the above!
It's still a works in progress - we are continuing to integrate more and more of the sales process (I still have a to do list!!) and there will be several more updates this year.
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