Customer relationship management has never just been about the one-on-one communication between a salesperson and a prospective buyer. Sure, those conversations are critical and establishing a clear line of communication can mean the difference between a sale and their decision to go elsewhere—especially today where so much is happening digitally.

Automotive sales involves a number of factors and a particularly complex behind-the-scenes process. Few other industries can place such a high level of importance on internal communications.

How Internal Communication Used to Work

Let’s imagine a world where the internal side of the sales process is handled over email. This isn’t some dystopian fantasy world either, just rewind the clock a few years.

A customer is interested in learning more about a vehicle, so they send you an email. Ten minutes go by, and you get back to them. The lead seems pretty hot. They reach out again and inform you they’ve had issues with credit in the past, wondering if that’d be a problem.

You think about it and decide to reach out to your F&I guy. The trouble is he doesn’t usually get back quickly via email, and you’re waiting four hours before you hear a response: “No problem, we work with people rebuilding credit all the time.”

You reach back out to the customer but the worst has happened: “Oh that’s great, but I actually decided to go in another direction.”

Had the dealership been leveraging DriveCentric’s CRM, the F&I manager would have received the message on all devices, could have responded quickly, and moved the sale along. The entire conversation would even take place in the same environment as the messaging chain with the prospective buyer.

Instant Messaging Flexibility Within a Holistic CRM

Tools like Slack, Teams, GChat, and others have transformed communications in ways we never could have imagined before. Especially today, where so much has to happen virtually, clear and rapid communication is essential.

Even if the COVID-19 pandemic vanished tomorrow, instant communication is here to stay. When salespeople and support staff in a dealership can communicate with each other along multiple channels, all within the same clean environment, sales can be made in whatever situation the team is presented with.

Schedule a Demo

Imagining a dealership that has been digitized such that the physical location is borderline irrelevant is difficult, to say the least. A completely digital sales environment isn’t necessarily what most dealerships or their customers are ready for either. Our tools are designed to usher in digital transformation while letting salespeople do what they do best: sell vehicles.

The beating heart of any successful dealership is the sales team that initially moves units off of the lot. Our job is to streamline that process by helping dealerships move seamlessly into the digital side of the industry.

We’re offering demonstrations of our tools that make it clear that thriving today isn’t just a far-flung possibility.

Request your demo today and let’s get started.