How to Choose a Dealership CRM: 7 Questions to Ask

Does your equipment dealership currently use a customer relationship management (CRM) system? Does your current dealership CRM significantly improve your dealership’s bottom line? If you answered “no” to either of these questions, this article will help you understand the value of using a dealership CRM and provide some questions to ask to decide how to choose a CRM – and other workflow solutions – to increase efficiency, revenue, and customer satisfaction. The truth is that modern CRM solutions can produce real results, including up to 30% greater sales and up to 35% improvements in customer satisfaction.

A dealership CRM system is software designed to help equipment dealerships manage and enhance their interactions with current and potential customers. You can think of it as a digital toolbox that stores all customer information such as contact details, service history, and purchasing preferences in one centralized location. This allows your dealership staff to easily access and use this information to tailor their communications and offers, ensuring a more personalized and efficient service. 

Additionally, a dealer CRM can automate tasks such as scheduling follow-ups and sending out promotional emails, freeing up time for staff to focus on more hands-on aspects of customer service. By keeping all customer-related information easily accessible, a CRM system helps your dealership build stronger relationships with your clients, helping drive sales and improve relationships with your customers.

How can you achieve stellar results by using a CRM at your dealership? First, as a leader, you must break the status quo thinking that says, “This is how we’ve always done it,” and instead give employees useful tools for greater collaboration across departments. Improve productivity by automating many of the time-consuming, manual processes, freeing employees to focus on customers instead of paperwork. But that’s just the beginning.

Keep in mind the status of your own current operation as you answer these seven questions about customer and inventory management at dealerships.

Isolating vital information in siloed systems (or even worse, relying on clunky spreadsheets and notebooks) puts your staff at a disadvantage while interacting with customers. This limited perspective also means you are likely to miss critical opportunities to connect with your customer.

Without having a centralized view of your customer, your insight into the activities of your sales and customer service teams will also remain limited at best. Sales managers need a 360-degree perspective to set sales targets and implement strategies. Sales reps need to identify the different needs of all their customers to provide information on products that could best meet those needs. The best equipment dealer CRM will bring transparency to the day-to-day efforts of these and other dealership employees, helping them succeed in their roles and maintain accountability.

Analytics are valuable enough that companies are willing to expend large amounts of time and energy to manually create and recreate reports on an ongoing basis. But as all business owners know, time is money, and manually filling out reports is inefficient, which means you are losing money by using these archaic tools. A dealership CRM automatically does all that work for you whenever you need, allowing you to concentrate on interpreting the insights it reveals and translate them into productive actions.

Imagine starting every day with a progress-toward-goals report for your sales team and only having to click once to make it happen. That’s the power that using a CRM at your dealership can provide.

If customer follow-ups force you to scramble just to understand the call’s objective, then you clearly need a CRM for your dealership. Because every interaction with a customer or prospect is tracked, you never lose a detail, and you give yourself the best opportunity to close the sale.

Experiencing turnover in your sales team? A good CRM ensures continuity with your customers, making it easy for new or current employees to pick up right where the former rep left off.

Cloud-based CRM systems ensure that every user has access to the same information, no matter when or where they work. Reps on the road can instantly update records or log work requests, while service and settlement departments can access and act on the same information.

A CRM makes critical resources available to reps in the field, enabling them to close the deal immediately. Furthermore, it ensures that valuable information is collected and recorded for follow-up, settlement, and analysis.

Sending the same offers and messages to all your customers and prospects results in information overload, which means they’ll probably stop paying attention. Instead, command their attention with targeted messaging.

Ag, turf, forest, or construction? Hot lead or kicking the tires? Proximity to which store? A CRM gives you the ability to deliver offers crafted to each lead’s personal needs and interests. That’s a win-win for both dealership and customer.

If your dealership added two locations this year, could you absorb the extra work? What about six new locations? What about 15? Would that amount of volume break your business processes?

Growth is the reward for success – don’t let limited business systems keep you from enjoying it. The right dealership CRM grows, flexes, and evolves with your business needs, adjusting to scale and streamlining assimilation.

Anvil Pro’s cloud-based CRM and dealer inventory solutions within the Tractor Zoom solution suite are built using powerful Salesforce technology. Choose the dealership CRM with a proven track record for improving sales, customer satisfaction, productivity, and overall workflow.