Car dealers sometimes find it challenging to manage everything smoothly: sales process complexities, inventory management, customer experience and more. It’s like solving a tricky puzzle. If they can resolve the issue, they can increase their sales and generate additional revenue.
Salesforce offers a helping hand with omnichannel automotive retail experience.
Let’s examine how its capabilities address the most common challenges in the automotive industry.
Leads Landing From All Over The Place
In the digital age, leads can originate from multiple channels, including your website, social media, online advertisements, and walk-ins. What to do to keep an overview and use them effectively? How to manage them and eliminate errors?
Salesforce offers lead management tools that consolidate and organize leads from diverse sources, enabling dealerships to prioritize and follow up promptly. The effect? The conversion rates increase, and the sales boosts.
No Sale Without Quotes
Providing accurate and timely quotes is essential for closing deals in the automotive industry. However, generating quotes manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
LMS with integrated quoting capabilities automates the process by pulling relevant vehicle and pricing information from the system. The customers receive information regarding stock vehicles, configured vehicles, used vehicles, and trade-ins. Moreover, you can add more details about the car you want, like specific models, colors, and accessories.
Salesforce also offers additional capabilities such as:
- Opportunity management
- Discount management
- Approval procedures
- and automated workflows.
The quick response results in the potential car buyer receiving the right offer at the right time. Dealerships, on the other hand, make money by handling sales cycles quickly and effectively.
The Best Car Match For The Customer
From acquisition to sale, Salesforce offers capabilities to track inventory, monitor vehicle history, forecast demand, and streamline procurement processes.
It provides information about new car stocks, used car availability, and trade-in vehicles. Taking advantage of these features allows dealerships to make informed decisions and maximize their return on investment.
Customer Journey starts before Test Drives
Allowing customers to test vehicles is a standard practice in the automotive industry. However, coordinating test drives efficiently can be challenging without a proper system in place.
Salesforce can manage test drives. What are the key functionalities? It simplifies managing the fleet of test-drive cars to provide the customers with the car they are interested in. Here are some other functionalities:
- Test drives history
- Find free test drive slots
- Automated messages about reservations
- Information about the fuel level
- Kilometer limits.
After the test drive, you can get feedback from the lead through sending satisfaction surveys on their experiences. It is a useful automation which helps improve customer service.
Leasing Dominates New Car Sales
A comprehensive LMS should seamlessly support leasing operations. Starting with the creation and management of lease agreements to tracking lease terms and automating lease renewal processes. What are the benefits for dealerships? They can tap into the growing leasing market and drive revenue growth.
Integrating Salesforce with financial providers and banks for car financing provides customers with a helpful financing experience, for both private and commercial purchases.
Dealerships can offer various types of car financing options, including loans and leases. Managing financing requests optimizes the overall customer journey.
Documents Always In Place
Paperwork is an unavoidable aspect of automotive retail, from sales contracts to service agreements. Managing and organizing these documents manually consumes valuable time and increases the risk of errors and compliance issues.
The answer to these challenges is robust document management within your tech landscape. Dealerships benefit from a centralized hub for document storage and retrieval that includes:
- contracts,
- invoices,
- acceptance reports,
- consents,
- customer records, and others.
Salesforce provides the opportunity to create branded templates, which are particularly attractive when preparing an offer. Overall, a document management system enhances the internal functioning of dealers and improves the customer experience.
Scalability Over Time
As dealerships grow and evolve, their technology infrastructure needs to scale accordingly. Investing in a platform that can scale with the business is crucial to avoid disruptions and accommodate future expansion seamlessly.
Salesforce offers this kind of potential, and so much more. This adaptable solution is straightforward to implement and scale. It is tailored to meet the requirements at every stage of the dealership journey.
Salesforce Shapes The Future Of The Dealerships
The main problem in dealerships seems to be the lack of a reliable system that connects all dealer operations in one. As the Trends in Automotive report states:
[…] Only 46% of companies report having comprehensive data. Why is there a gap for the rest? In many cases, it’s because their customers’ profile data, transaction history, and customer service cases are siloed in different systems.
Salesforce is the perfect answer for this challenge. It stores the collected data in one place and helps dealerships use them to provide personalized experiences for every driver.
