Sales Process Automation for Car Dealer

Our client is one of the largest car dealers in Mexico, with a net of stores across the country. Today, they offer car models on-the-ground, at the stores, and online. The online sales channels include multiple websites, a Facebook page, and a live chat.

How Many Sales Reps to Sell a Car?

The company has perfected its sales to the point where it knows 100% what a prospect needs to hear, from whom, and when. Every single car sale requires a lot of effort from a well-coordinated team of sales reps.

We were surprised to learn that it could take up to five team members working with a prospect to make it rain. According to the client, an automotive dealership company, its customers could get communications from several of its employees. That caused confusion and sometimes repelled their prospects.

The Client’s Request

To coordinate its sales better, the car dealer has fine-tuned a foolproof framework of processes. To get a feel for the scale of things: the company has four follow-up routines, up to fifteen steps each.

At the same time, the company’s sales agents had to cooperate using all sorts of customer communication channels like WhatsApp and email. The auto sales staff was also to use an internal legacy CRM software, a spreadsheet in Google Drive, and Google Calendar.

The same held true for agents’ communications with prospects. On top of that, the sales reps relied on the manual distribution of leads.

No wonder the car dealing company was scouting around for a solution to streamline the process. They decided to bring all its auto dealer data into a single system and initiate the migration to a CRM that could provide insights.

This search for a CRM-panacea brought the company to Creatio — a CRM and a perfect sales process automation platform. Since Velvetech is a trusted Creatio implementation partner, our conversation with the client was only a matter of time.

Learn more: The Secrets of Acquiring Enterprise Software Solution

How We Did It

Working on large-scale projects is the same as eating an elephant — one bite at a time. So our first bite was to put together a Functional Design Specification (FDS). The document outlined the features of the required CRM software solution for the car dealer. We had to go through several discovery sessions and prepared a doc with software product requirements.

Pull Data from Landing Pages

The way lead generation was set up at the car dealer company was via email. Its sales staff gathered all data from the forms on eighteen landing pages via emails. The forms had various, non-uniform data fields, and it was quite common for customers to fill a form on one landing page and then do the same on another page.

We set out by combing through and unifying data fields on forms across all landing pages. Without overloading you with details, after some manipulations with Creatio, we gave the customer a code snippet for the pages.

Once the code snippet had been added to the web pages, all data from the auto dealer forms started flowing directly into the new CRM software. Here’s to the autonomous lead creation!

Migrate Data from a Legacy CRM to Creatio

The legacy CRM platform couldn’t incorporate all required workflows and didn’t integrate with the rest of the auto sales tools the company was using.

As with any CRM migration project, Velvetech worked hard on mapping the fields in both CRMs to carry over 100% of data into the new car dealer CRM platform. Being able to customize Creatio CRM to the client’s liking by adding, removing, or editing fields significantly speed up the process.

We also double-checked for duplicate records and data integrity once the migration had finished.

Learn more: Legacy System Modernization A-to-Z for Business Owners

Automate Leads Distribution and Processing

As mentioned earlier, sales agents had to rely on manual round-robin leads distribution. To avoid errors and to save time, the client and Velvetech have thought out a rigorous algorithm for assigning new leads to sales agents automatically.

To enhance leads processing even further, we have added in a CRM software all actions that the car dealer sales reps may take with the prospect before she or he becomes a client. If a record remains unattended for a set amount of time, automatic notifications fire up.

Integrate with Live Chat, Google Drive & Google Calendar

Gubagoo is a chatting platform for car dealers that enables instant messaging with customers as they browse an auto dealership website. Our team was able to integrate this instant messaging tool with Creatio to make sure all leads end up in the same place.

We also integrated CRM Creatio with Google Drive and Google Calendar systems to allow the automotive dealer company to continue using its products of choice.

Add Reports

One of the top-priority tasks for the customer was reports about the key performance metrics of the dealership. We implemented five types of reports in the Creatio CRM platform.

Now the company’s management team can access the reports in a CRM dashboard to get an overview of how their auto sales teams are performing.

Implementing Access Rights

Finally, Velvetech added user roles into the new CRM to allow users to see and modify only those records that had been assigned to them. Even though several users can view the same data, only team members with specific access rights can perform any actions with the lead.

Challenges

CRM Migration Drill

As with any CRM migration project, flawless data mapping is at the core of a successful project resolution. And this auto CRM software project was no exception. Besides, we always prefer to stay on the safe side by following our own CRM data migration checklist.

While we didn’t have to follow the checklist to the letter, we did start by aligning all stakeholders’ requirements. We then munched through all the stages including training sessions for the client’s team.

Multiple Teams

We often work on projects hand in hand with other teams, which also contribute to the development. This project was one of those, as there was another team in California responsible for the client’s landing pages.

Due to our experience and flexibility, we quickly found a solution: From the get-go we established a single point of contact in both teams.The outcome was a well-coordinated collaboration, with our team working fully in sync with the Californian team.

Outcome

Sales Process Automation

The customer has received a single home for all its leads — Creatio. The CRM automatically pulls lead data from all available resources and supports manual entry. Once inside Creatio, a customer record follows a predefined life cycle until it becomes a sale.

To make sure all leads are taken care of, the CRM software pushes notifications to the auto dealer sales reps or their managers when there is an action they need to take on a lead.

Transparency

The car dealer’s management team now has the information on their sales team performance readily available — right in the CRM dashboard. The sales reps will certainly like a shared log of communications with prospects.

Security

While all team members have access to leads, only managers or admins can delete or edit them. Besides, only assigned users can modify customer records.

Additionally, all company’s data is now protected with state-of-the-art technologies provided by Creatio: the CRM supports six layers of security. You can find more details on how Creatio secures your data in one of our blog posts.

What Now

How often do you find yourself in a situation when you start a project and let the dev team follow the Functional Design Specification through? Meaning there are no new features, no functionality that gets replaced or tweaked, etc. In our experience, it’s a rare case.

And this car dealer’s project is no exception. We have piled up a lot of feature requests since the start of the project. Fortunately, we know too well that doing everything at once is not always the best idea. Focusing on the functionality laid out in the FDS we were able to deliver the solution on time and within the specified budget.

Now is the perfect time to experiment and add new features as car dealer sales teams wrap their heads around the new CRM software solution and come up with more optimization ideas.