Your customer relationship management (CRM) software is arguably your most important dealership tool. A good CRM software encompasses everything from marketing, lead nurturing, customer relationship building and more. It’s also an amazing tool for tracking your employee's performance and maintaining contact with both customers after a purchase and service customers. When a dealership is using its CRM software correctly, the data in it will reveal sales, service opportunities, leads on acquiring used inventory, and sales coaching insights that can lead to significant revenue increases. In this article, we’re going to go over 5 ways to maximize your CRM opportunities and minimize missed opportunities. 

1. Use CRM Data as Coaching Tools

If you’re using a good CRM software, it will have several reports and manager dashboards that are incredibly useful to track efficiency, productivity and profitability. Don’t overwhelm yourself by looking at every single report every day, stick to 3-5 and use those metrics to help coach and direct your team. 

Performance reports are especially important to use because they make seeing issues, concerns and successes easy to spot. You’ll be able to look at leads, closing ratios, open opportunities and much more for each individual salesperson. With this information, you can identify the problem or positive and work with your team member to either change what they’re doing or continue to drive success. 

During team or 1 on 1 meetings, make it a habit to acknowledge what's working when you review a call or read an email from your team. Put a positive spin on coaching by applauding employees who are killing it and utilise their wins as best practice examples. According to research, praise serves as a motivator just as effectively as financial rewards.

2. Use Reporting Tools to Evaluate Marketing Efforts

Another great feature of a CRM software is that it allows you to review the results of your marketing efforts. These metrics will let you quickly see which marketing campaigns are generating revenue and which are not. A CRM's basic reporting feature of tracking lead sources enables your staff to precisely record lead information.

Making proper CRM use a job requirement is the best practice when it comes to hiring and recruitment. Utilizing weekly spot checks on client records, you can monitor compliance. Lead source, whether an appointment was made, and the subsequent sale and/or service are important metrics to be tracking.

On the internal campaign side, you should figure out how many customers received an email blast, how many times the email was opened, and how many sales the campaign was responsible for. Although there are additional indicators produced by internal marketing that need to be examined, this type of evaluation is a great place to start. 

3. Encourage Your Team to Enrich CRM Data

Pretty much all CRM softwares have certain fields that need to be filled in in order for a customer record to be made. Typically these required fields include full name, phone number, address and email. Encouraging your team to go deeper than this basic information is a great way to improve your customer data. Your customers want to feel like you look at them as more than just a lead, therefore it’s important to use personalization in your communication with them. 

In order to ensure that all your interactions with customers are personal, encourage your team to include personal information about them in your CRM. Details like the amount of drivers in the family, whether they have a new baby on the way, the sports team they like and the type of vehicle they prefer are all great notes to include. These personal notes will become very useful if the customer works with a different member of your team. The new team member working with them will be able to quickly access the personal details of the customer and quickly build a rapport with them. 

4. Use CRM Data for More Targeted Marketing 

It’s very annoying to receive promotional emails that are not at all relevant to you. This is a mistake we see a lot of dealers make with their email marketing strategies. They come up with an email campaign and send it to all of their contacts, regardless of what the promotion is. Instead, leverage the information in your CRM to create targeted email to the people who are most likely to want to take advantage of the promotion. 

For example, using CRM data, you could pick vehicles that you know you can sell rapidly for the highest profit and then compile a list of clients who presently own those vehicles. A tried-and-true target marketing tactic is to send a brief email claiming that you want to buy their car at a premium price and trade it in for a newer model at a discount.

5. Establish Rules For Employees Who Use Personal Devices

Some dealerships have rules forbidding personal cellphones for communicating with customers. These rules stem from not being able to monitor dealer/customer interactions and the possibility of losing that customer's contact info if the salesperson leaves the dealership. Today, the amount of work you can do on your cellphone makes the idea of forbidding cellphone use for dealer communication seem silly. 

A better alternative would be to require your team to use their devices to log into your mobile CRM application, and all communications must occur there. To ensure that calls are logged and recorded, staff members ought to use the click-to-call feature in the mobile app. This way, if the employee leaves your dealership, all communications can be kept in the customer record that stays with the dealership.