Recently, Gregg at Park Avenue BMW asked a great question on the DealerRefresh forums:  “Do you protect your Internet Sales Staff from the floor?“  The conversation has been very valuable as it talks about many different scenarios.

How do you structure your Internet Department?

• Sales agents who handle leads
• BDC
• Internet Sales Managers
• Internet Sales Coordinators
• Appointment Setters
• Out-sourced

There are a great number of ways to do it, but before we talk about the nuts and bolts there are quite a few of us who owe our jobs to our traditional sales staff.

The ideal scenario is for a customer, who submits an Internet lead, to work with the same sales agent they are going to buy their car from.  If that’s ideal, why do we even have an “Internet Department”?  You can take a look at an older article about Why We Suck or you can agree with me that for the majority of sales staffs there is a predominate culture of “I’ll wait for a customer to show up before I ever try to generate my own customer.”

Because the majority of sales agents don’t want to answer a ringing phone, don’t want to call a customer back, and certainly don’t want to respond to someone’s Internet quote request we end up with an “Internet Department”.

I have heard all sorts of theories on personalities and even more excuses directly from sales agents themselves, but at the end of the day I have learned I will lose the battle of trying to force a sales staff to “get it”.  So why not play to their strength:  working a customer in person.  It is what they want to do anyway.  You do this by staffing a BDC with appointment setters who are solely there to put customers in front of our sales agents – win win!  And then the Internet folks get to thank their sales agents’ for not wanting to fully do their job because they’ve provided us with a fantastic career!  The loser is the dealer principle.

How do we play to everyone’s strengths and make the dealer principle a winner again?

It is done through CRM.  With a CRM that allows a customer to work with multiple dealership employees you can now create process that plays to each person’s strengths.  The dealership’s CRM architect is a coach with a playbook who is going to write plays for your offensive and defensive lines.  This person knows what motivates both the Internet Department and the traditional sales floor.  This person may even know how to incorporate your special teams into the mix (service, parts, bodyshop).  The goal is to win a customer….for life.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a CRM architect is the sniper rifle you shoot your silver bullets through.

Your CRM architect can program your dealership process to make long passes or multiple hand-offs depending on the direction a customer goes.  This person is part of the dealership staff because your process needs to be fluid and ever-evolving.  Of course, this person is going to want a say in how your Internet Department is setup, but I bet this person is going to want something that allows a lot of fluidity and a team effort with your sales floor.  Through this person, all the nuts and bolts come together.

Am I speaking Greek right now?  If so, please let me know because I am more than happy to answer your questions.  This is a very long and big topic that spawns all sorts of considerations.  But, doing CRM right could be the single greatest thing you do for your dealership this year.  And a key element to that is finding a CRM architect who “gets it” and owns it.

My last question:  Do you have a CRM Architect?

P.S.  Bet this isn’t the ending you were expecting when you started reading this article.

All of my DealerRefresh articles are inspired by something I have come across recently. This one is certainly no exception.  As most dealership employees whose job focuses around “the Internet” I too wear quite a few hats. One of those hats screams I am the CRM Dude at my dealer group. It is actually one of my favorite responsibilities because it is a never-ending cycle of developing better process, and I find that fun! In my travels from store to store, I come across the same question from frustrated sales people again and again:

Why hasn’t this CRM stuff helped me sell any more cars?

Many of the conversations we get on the DealerRefresh forums are about dealership CRM choices and practices.  With all the different conversations cycling around this topic, I have to assume that many dealers are changing or signing up with a new CRM company.  I’m very glad to see the industry taking this extremely important technology more seriously, but I wonder if we might overlook some things during a change.

When changing CRM or ILM companies, you have to change your Internet lead address.  It is a seriously major pain in the ass if you have a lot of lead providers (OEM’s, third-party, freebies, classified sites, your own site, etc.).  If you’ve made a change, did you forget a lead provider?  Did you remember to inform CarFax, Vast, Google Base, or one of those other sites that you don’t pay directly for leads?

I have a suggestion that will make this change only take 5 minutes and open up many more opportunities for your leads:

A list of affordable Internet Lead Manager tools

Here is a question I get a lot…

“Do you have a few Lead Management Tools that you can provide
to me off the top of your head?”

or

“My dealer currently doesn’t have a full CRM but I need an ILM to work my Internet leads. Do you know of any affordable ($200-400.00 a month) Internet Lead Management tool available?”

Maybe I’m lost but I too have to ask “where are all the affordable ILM tools“? For many Internet sales representative having an affordable ILM tool is vital. Believe it or not, there are a lot of dealers that still do not have a full fledge Customer Relation Manager (CRM) tool and as you know, many of the CRM’s have ILM features but are more of an after thought and lack what you really need.

Most of us have used or are still using either AVV Webcontrol or Cobalts LMCC. These 2 ILM tools used to be the only options available for dealers. Then after the initial offering from AVV and Cobalt, a few more ILM tools that cropped up.

iMagiclabs (then known as icarconnect) had a top shelf ILM tool that I believe eventually evolved into their full CRM. eLead also had an Internet lead management system that was quit robust but this too turned into a full CRM. Both of these vendors I believe still offer their ILM product as an a la carte but I’m not 100% sure anymore.

Since I get this question a lot, AND since I too have sort of lost touch with all the different ILM tools available, lets get a list going. I’ll start off with the ones that I know..

1. Cobalt LMCC
2. AVV Webcontrol
3. iMagicLab ILM
4. MLM Dealer Sight
5. Dealerpeak E-Lead Manager
6. Dealer.com LeadMachine
7. AutoJocky Lead Manager
8. NetTrack Lead Management
9. VinSolutions MotoSnap ILM
10. CAR-Research

If you know of or are using an Internet Lead Management program that’s affordable and a good fit for dealers looking for a lead management tool for a 1 person or small Internet sales department, SPEAK UP!! Let us know what you think and what you’re paying.

If you’re a vendor and you offer an ILM solution…let us know what you offer. Feel free to include your features and pricing. I’ll be sure to add your link to this post.

One of the toughest jobs these days is picking the right technology for the job, so we’re going to take a different approach with something called the “Blueprint Series”.  The idea behind this series of articles is to tell our vendors what we want.  Hopefully they’ll take our ideas and put them into a product we can buy!

For the first Blueprint Series we’re focusing on automotive CRM solutions.  ADP, Reynolds & Reynolds, AutoBase, HigherGear, iMagicLabs, DealerSocket, eLeads, and all other CRM vendors please pay attention…but please do not come in here with comments saying “we do that”, “I am the solution for you”, etc.  WE DO NOT WANT VENDOR SPAMMING IN THIS THREAD.  If you have a selling message, please email Alex Snyder:  axsnyder@checkeredflag.com and he will point you in the right direction.

Dealer Refresh crowd – here’s your chance to put all your wishes on the table!  Please use the comments link to add your thoughts.

Starting with Alex’s first CRM wish:  Coming from a dealer group with competing franchises all on the same stretch of road we are prone for duplicate leads.  I’d like to have a single customer base, inside our CRM solution, that allows for a separate salesperson, salesmanager, BDC agent, service writer, service manager, etc to be attached to a single customer record for each store.  I’d also like vehicles of interest and vehicles owned to be unlimited for each customer record.

My Honda and Toyota stores are less than a mile apart, so I’d like to have a customer be able to have an interest in the Accord and the Camry….and have a different salesperson for each car.  I’d like to be able to send marketing messages on both the Camry and the Accord to that customer.

Yes, I understand this could get messy in the database, so we’ll have to figure out a way to clean things up.  However, I’d rather have my CRM cater to the real world than have to make the real world cater to the CRM.