How do you evaluate a good CRM?

[Pedram]

Hey everyone! Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving!

We are constantly striving to get feedback as we build product. Considering the size and importance of CRM I thought I ask this community on some methods used to evaluate a good CRM. During my days as a GM I thought these basic KPI's (IRT, Connection Rate, Appt Set, Appt Shown and Close Rates) were good indicators. I know these metrics are also people and process driven, but curious beyond these old metrics if there are other ways you all evaluate a good CRM. Things like design, UI, etc are nice but tough to put a finger on the impact it makes. Appreciate the feedback and look forward to learning more!

 

[john.quinn]

Things like design, UI, etc are nice but tough to put a finger on the impact it makes.

The impact of design is utilization. One of the biggest problems with CRM is that staff doesn't use it. CRM companies want to blame the store for lack of management, lack of training, etc. But generally, the workflow is horrendous and users come to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

CRM is a tool -- if it's easy to use and provides a value to the users, it will be used. And a tool doing its job is generally valuable.

You can make the point that unless there is good utilization, not many of the other metrics matter.

 

[Alex Snyder]

#1 - if salespeople don't use it, it is a waste of money
#2 - make sure sales managers want to desk deals in it
#3 - nothing else matters

As a vendor who provides leads dealers work in their CRM, I should be biased towards reporting and the ability to attribute advertising sources better. With my old dealer hat on, reports are a different story, and I want to answer this from the dealer perspective.

#1 is UI and usability for salespeople without an overabundance of irrelevant follow-up tasks. If they can easily enter a customer into the system, do the paperwork, and feel like another salesperson isn't going to steal that customer later, they're good enough.

#2 requires a master of desking on your product team. You can't just hook up Market Scan and nail it. You must understand the ins, outs, and magic of a car deal.

 

[Pedram]

Great points on the UI. I think my comment of "Design / UI" were more a reference to the look and feel. But I can see both your points on the layout and focus.

What I am trying to understand better is how could someone build a product that might not be comfortable out the gate, but the performance results help users see the value- behavioral change. Sometimes building something so frictionless also leads to weak performance, users may love it but if its not performing then it defeats the purpose.

 

[Pedram]

The impact of design is utilization. One of the biggest problems with CRM is that staff doesn't use it. CRM companies want to blame the store for lack of management, lack of training, etc. But generally, the workflow is horrendous and users come to the conclusion that the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

CRM is a tool -- if it's easy to use and provides a value to the users, it will be used. And a tool doing its job is generally valuable.

You can make the point that unless there is good utilization, not many of the other metrics matter.

Good points John, although my assumption is that sales consultants today don't really have much a choice considering how much activity happens in the CRM. I know there are still dealers out there which the processes are broken...

What areas do you think sales consultants struggle the most with in CRM? Trying to better understand what happens after they use it, how do you separate a strong or weak CRM (assuming good adoption)? Great to chat with you on here btw!

 

[Pedram]

#1 - if salespeople don't use it, it is a waste of money
#2 - make sure sales managers want to desk deals in it
#3 - nothing else matters

As a vendor who provides leads dealers work in their CRM, I should be biased towards reporting and the ability to attribute advertising sources better. With my old dealer hat on, reports are a different story, and I want to answer this from the dealer perspective.

#1 is UI and usability for salespeople without an overabundance of irrelevant follow-up tasks. If they can easily enter a customer into the system, do the paperwork, and feel like another salesperson isn't going to steal that customer later, they're good enough.

#2 requires a master of desking on your product team. You can't just hook up Market Scan and nail it. You must understand the ins, outs, and magic of a car deal.

Great points Alex. What happens if the sales people use and the sales managers desk their deals in the system? Thanks for adding context on the points. I always thought the leads reporting was a must in CRM. With your dealer hat, how would you evaluate one CRM over another assuming they both achieved 1 and 2?

 

[Dan Sayer]

Pedram,

Long answer.

In 2016 I had DriveCentric, VinSolutions, and eLead (who was our provider at the time) present in-person at all our locations. I then sent out a survey to all salespeople and managers to vote on which CRM they wanted. Overwhelmingly, the Salespeople voted for DriveCentric because of the simple UX and appealing UI. All the managers voted for VinSolutions because of desking and reporting (which DriveCentric was lacking at that point), and no one voted to keep eLead. I ended up leaving the group for DealerInspire/Launch Digital a week after I sent that survey out, so I did not change the CRM for the group. Fast forward to NADA that next year, the dealer principal along with the COO and GMs switched to VinSolutions because of their use of DealerTrack DMS (that and eLead did something to piss them off at the show SMH).

While I was at DealerInpsire/Launch my teams worked with 450-500? dealers and I was given access to many stores' CRM accounts to read their own data and feed it back to them (I was the "dealer guy whisperer" at DI lol). Imagine a dealer principal, GM, GSM, or marketing director giving their CRM login to a 3rd party just to be able to figure out their own CRM. It was clear VinSolutions, DealerSocket, eLead, and other legacy systems were really the same tool, just with different paint and curtains. DriveCentric seemed to be the only solution what was paying attention to the core users, the salespeople. DriveCentric circa 2017/2018; Was their desking good. Not really. Was their reporting good? Nope. Did they have any decent enterprise function? Nah. BUT, if your salespeople actively use the CRM, that is a GAME-CHANGER!

After Cars Inc bought DealerInspire/Launch in 2018, Cars Inc's culture got a little cooler and DealerInspire's got a little more corporate so when my auto group asked me to come back, I did. I came back to a store 6 months into a VinSolutions change, and it was disappointing. It felt like we had made a lateral move from eLead to VinSolutions. It was, and is, overly complex and required heavy involvement from Vin reps and support who were good but always overworked. I am convinced the size of your support structure is related to how good or bad your tool is.

I'm not the guy who makes a major system change without giving the current a full swing and some of the items Drive was missing over the last 5 years like enterprise function and reporting was holding me back. That and we were all-in on the Cox landscape at the time so some of the integrations with other tools were beneficial. But as you know, with our change from DealerTrack to Tekion in the last year, the benefit of full DMS to CRM integration was gone. Green light on looking at Drive again and with their advancements in enterprise and reporting (still not fully there but close) it was clear we would be giving our salespeople the best tool to do their jobs. We are fully running on Drive at all stores as of a couple of weeks ago. NO ONE ON THE SALES TEAM COMPLAINED OR IMPLODED during the change. How many CRM launches can claim that? One hour of training for each person and they were running!

If I were Tekion, I would focus on taking care of my DMS/Service tools so well that any product I offer would be welcome with open arms. Fix support. I would also play so well with others (start with a killer API) and earn myself the right to get to know other 3rd parties systems so well that I model my tools after the best out there. For CRM, I'd model after DriveCentric, improve my current Tekion Desking solution (multiple deals, etc.), and borrow a page from VinSolutions (with a sprinkle of Drive's flexibility) for reporting. OR, for CRM I would start building my solution with Salesforce to be able to blow the integration potential wide-open outside of automotive's incestuous pool of players. Although, nothing is simple with Salesforce so that is probably a bad idea for CX.

AND stop creating solutions in the vacuum with product managers with little context of automotive retail and developers who build for how their minds work and not the end users. When I say "context of automotive retail" I don't mean some desk manager or GM who really wasn't a proficient user of the CRM when they were in Retail. I'm talking about the rare ones who were neck deep in the CRM (and every other system in the store) trying to get salespeople and other managers just to use the CRM correctly each day.

Simple answer. UX for sale people, desking for managers, reporting for all and some sort of integration relationship with other vendor's tools (DMS, Inventory, Marketing).

 

[Pedram]

Pedram,

Long answer.

In 2016 I had DriveCentric, VinSolutions, and eLead (who was our provider at the time) present in-person at all our locations. I then sent out a survey to all salespeople and managers to vote on which CRM they wanted. Overwhelmingly, the Salespeople voted for DriveCentric because of the simple UX and appealing UI. All the managers voted for VinSolutions because of desking and reporting (which DriveCentric was lacking at that point), and no one voted to keep eLead. I ended up leaving the group for DealerInspire/Launch Digital a week after I sent that survey out, so I did not change the CRM for the group. Fast forward to NADA that next year, the dealer principal along with the COO and GMs switched to VinSolutions because of their use of DealerTrack DMS (that and eLead did something to piss them off at the show SMH).

While I was at DealerInpsire/Launch my teams worked with 450-500? dealers and I was given access to many stores' CRM accounts to read their own data and feed it back to them (I was the "dealer guy whisperer" at DI lol). Imagine a dealer principal, GM, GSM, or marketing director giving their CRM login to a 3rd party just to be able to figure out their own CRM. It was clear VinSolutions, DealerSocket, eLead, and other legacy systems were really the same tool, just with different paint and curtains. DriveCentric seemed to be the only solution what was paying attention to the core users, the salespeople. DriveCentric circa 2017/2018; Was their desking good. Not really. Was their reporting good? Nope. Did they have any decent enterprise function? Nah. BUT, if your salespeople actively use the CRM, that is a GAME-CHANGER!

After Cars Inc bought DealerInspire/Launch in 2018, Cars Inc's culture got a little cooler and DealerInspire's got a little more corporate so when my auto group asked me to come back, I did. I came back to a store 6 months into a VinSolutions change, and it was disappointing. It felt like we had made a lateral move from eLead to VinSolutions. It was, and is, overly complex and required heavy involvement from Vin reps and support who were good but always overworked. I am convinced the size of your support structure is related to how good or bad your tool is.

I'm not the guy who makes a major system change without giving the current a full swing and some of the items Drive was missing over the last 5 years like enterprise function and reporting was holding me back. That and we were all-in on the Cox landscape at the time so some of the integrations with other tools were beneficial. But as you know, with our change from DealerTrack to Tekion in the last year, the benefit of full DMS to CRM integration was gone. Green light on looking at Drive again and with their advancements in enterprise and reporting (still not fully there but close) it was clear we would be giving our salespeople the best tool to do their jobs. We are fully running on Drive at all stores as of a couple of weeks ago. NO ONE ON THE SALES TEAM COMPLAINED OR IMPLODED during the change. How many CRM launches can claim that? One hour of training for each person and they were running!

If I were Tekion, I would focus on taking care of my DMS/Service tools so well that any product I offer would be welcome with open arms. Fix support. I would also play so well with others (start with a killer API) and earn myself the right to get to know other 3rd parties systems so well that I model my tools after the best out there. For CRM, I'd model after DriveCentric, improve my current Tekion Desking solution (multiple deals, etc.), and borrow a page from VinSolutions (with a sprinkle of Drive's flexibility) for reporting. OR, for CRM I would start building my solution with Salesforce to be able to blow the integration potential wide-open outside of automotive's incestuous pool of players. Although, nothing is simple with Salesforce so that is probably a bad idea for CX.

AND stop creating solutions in the vacuum with product managers with little context of automotive retail and developers who build for how their minds work and not the end users. When I say "context of automotive retail" I don't mean some desk manager or GM who really wasn't a proficient user of the CRM when they were in Retail. I'm talking about the rare ones who were neck deep in the CRM (and every other system in the store) trying to get salespeople and other managers just to use the CRM correctly each day.

Simple answer. UX for sale people, desking for managers, reporting for all and some sort of integration relationship with other vendor's tools (DMS, Inventory, Marketing).

Dan,

Thanks for taking the time to write this. Super helpful and lots of great information. I am going to reach out to schedule a call and dig into some of these points with you. We need more direct feedback and stories like this to help build a better product! Much appreciated!

 

[john.quinn]

Good points John, although my assumption is that sales consultants today don't really have much a choice considering how much activity happens in the CRM. I know there are still dealers out there which the processes are broken...

What areas do you think sales consultants struggle the most with in CRM? Trying to better understand what happens after they use it, how do you separate a strong or weak CRM (assuming good adoption)? Great to chat with you on here btw!

CRM IS used by salespeople... CRM has replaced the yellow pages.

I honestly can't do any better than Dan's most excellent post.

As a product manager in this space, I'd be developing (at least internal) KPI's to see and watch how/if my fancy features are being used like they were designed to be used. And when you learn they are not, the hardest question of all: Why?

As far as reporting/metrics/analytics... I've found that developing reports for Dealers has been a lose-lose proposition. No matter how fantastic a set of data you put together to tell the story, someone always wants another column, or something moved, or something re-labeled. Hard to win that way. I believe that if there is a sufficient focus on the data (which means that you cannot rely on users to be the stewards of good data), the key is to make that data available to Dealers (or support) to "visualize" or configure to preference.

 

[Steve Stauning]

Desking aside, U/I is important, but I would never trade a good U/I for a CRM with great U/I if that CRM made it difficult to customize processes, accurately track performance, find opportunities, and grow the business. Happy to have an offline conversation of the issues with the other CRMs in these areas (I have worked with dealers using virtually all of them), but VIN is the only CRM that provides all of these must-haves with a decent U/I.

Managing the customer relationship (the essence of what a CRM is supposed to help you do) isn't possible if you can't accurately track and measure the performance of your team and your vendors. For example, when I peel back the layers on the reporting with some CRMs (including the new "hot" CRMs dealers are falling in love with) I find inconsistencies, mysteries, and issues galore. Moreover, none of my clients who've switched from VIN to one of the new CRMs has sold a single incremental unit related to the U/I or bells/whistles the new tool adds - in fact, performance (overall) declines (more than you would see in the past when someone switched from Socket to eLead, for example).