We’re approaching Halloween, so we’re surrounded by all things spooky: gory masks, creepy decorations and bone-chilling movies. But for many dealerships, the scariest thing of all has nothing to do with Halloween: There could be lost profit opportunities hiding in your CRM. EEK!
When used correctly, a CRM like VinSolutions Connect CRM will undoubtedly boost your efficiency, productivity and profitability. But many dealerships are haunted by inefficiencies that could be costing you customers.
Read on to learn what tricks might be hiding in your CRM and how you can turn them into treats.
Scary Data
Here’s a frightening fact: bad data costs the US economy more than $3 trillion a year. Your dealership is no exception. If collecting good data and maintaining a clean database isn’t a priority, your CRM is unlikely to work at its full potential. Bad customer data collection means your salespeople spend half their time calling wrong numbers and your marketing campaigns are being sent to bad email addresses. That won’t win you more sales.
To take your data from ghoulish to great, work data capture best practices into your employee onboarding and ongoing training program. When your employees are taught how clean data can increase their own sales opportunities, you’ll see much better results.
The Ghosts of Salespeople’s Texts
Much like you can sense a ghost without seeing it, you can tell when pieces of customer conversations are missing from your CRM’s history. All too frequently, salespeople are sending untraceable texts to customers using their own personal devices, which opens the door for countless accountability and compliance issues.
In salespeople’s defense, the motivation for using personal devices to communicate with customers is usually coming from the right place. Historically, it has been difficult to text photos and videos – a much requested task – using the CRM. But with new updates like the one to VinSolutions Connect Texting, salespeople can text photos and videos to customers using the CRM as easily as they could using their phone’s native texting platform.
So to get rid of the text ghosts, all you need to do is make sure your team keeps their mobile CRM app updated and is aware of new mobile features.
Zombie Processes
Many dealerships I talk with are cursed with zombie CRM processes: the tasks keep firing, but sales numbers don’t improve. This is often a symptom of one-size-fits-all or outdated CRM process designs. Your dealership, CRM and customers are always changing, and your processes should change with them.
To bring your zombie CRM processes back to life, there are a couple actions you can take. First, review your processes with management and get their buy-in on the changes you plan to make. Having support from the top will make rolling out the new processes to the entire team much smoother. Second, “secret shop” your sales process. Submitting a dummy lead and watching it go through the sales process is an important step in identifying problem areas. The CRM process that works best is the one that works for you, so keep improving your processes until you see the results you’re after.
Have a happy Halloween, and share your tricks and treats with us on Twitter and Facebook!
