Problems with DealerSocket

[Clay Toporski]

I recently moved into a new position as Internet Sales Director for a large dealer group that uses DealerSocket. Having come from Higher Gear and Contact Manager as my previous CRMs, I have found DealerSocket to be incredibly complex, but at the same time, incredibly rigid in it's uses.

My first HUGE problem is that, apparently, there is no way for me to create a list of To Do's for internet sales or a BDC team on Day 0 of receiving a new lead. Basically, there is nothing I can do to "tell" the people that handle the leads through Socket what to do on the most important day of a lead's life: the first day. Does anyone have any workaround to this problem other than just expecting sales people and BDC reps to know what to do?

Second, there is apparently no way to auto assign BDC reps to leads. Instead, I have to have either a salesperson, sales manager or BDC manager assign BDC reps to leads manually which takes up time and resources. Does anyone have a comment or piece of advice in regards to this?

Other than that, I just find the whole business rule thing to be incredibly clunky. And, for all the apparent strength, I still can't do simple things like create my own customized names for top level marketing sources in my reports - instead I am forced to use whatever Socket has deemed appropriate and all encompassing.

Anyone else have these problems or potential solutions?

 

[skutchhenks]

I recently moved into a new position as Internet Sales Director for a large dealer group that uses DealerSocket. Having come from Higher Gear and Contact Manager as my previous CRMs, I have found DealerSocket to be incredibly complex, but at the same time, incredibly rigid in it's uses.

My first HUGE problem is that, apparently, there is no way for me to create a list of To Do's for internet sales or a BDC team on Day 0 of receiving a new lead. Basically, there is nothing I can do to "tell" the people that handle the leads through Socket what to do on the most important day of a lead's life: the first day. Does anyone have any workaround to this problem other than just expecting sales people and BDC reps to know what to do?

Second, there is apparently no way to auto assign BDC reps to leads. Instead, I have to have either a salesperson, sales manager or BDC manager assign BDC reps to leads manually which takes up time and resources. Does anyone have a comment or piece of advice in regards to this?

Other than that, I just find the whole business rule thing to be incredibly clunky. And, for all the apparent strength, I still can't do simple things like create my own customized names for top level marketing sources in my reports - instead I am forced to use whatever Socket has deemed appropriate and all encompassing.

Anyone else have these problems or potential solutions?

Hey Clay, welcome aboard! I would get in touch with your Dealer Socket manager and schedule some in-house 2 day, advanced training for you and your team. It's always good to get a fresh perspective on how a new software system works directly from the source. I'm sure you will get a lot of good advice from users here about Dealer Socket, but you're not going to get everything it has to offer until you get hands-on training.

 

[Chris Leslie]

"My first HUGE problem is that, apparently, there is no way for me to create a list of To Do's for internet sales or a BDC team on Day 0 of receiving a new lead. Basically, there is nothing I can do to "tell" the people that handle the leads through Socket what to do on the most important day of a lead's life: the first day. Does anyone have any workaround to this problem other than just expecting sales people and BDC reps to know what to do?

- What i did in this case was create a Day 0 template that is supposed to be used. My boss and I then will spot check internet leads to make sure that this is happening. In the template I created I leave room for them to add their own message to answer the question or to provide a quote. I agree that as a lead comes in it should trigger a campaign that creates todos. Other than the standard "New Web Lead" thing happening and completing the new web lead todo there isn't much more we can do. As far as I know of.​

Second, there is apparently no way to auto assign BDC reps to leads. Instead, I have to have either a salesperson, sales manager or BDC manager assign BDC reps to leads manually which takes up time and resources. Does anyone have a comment or piece of advice in regards to this?

- If you go in to admin tools -> email lead acct setup -> edit the emil address being used for your lead email address.In here you can change the routing of the leads. If you have a Power Team created you can route the leads to the power team and have it do a round robbin auto assign. We've found the best way to deal with this is to actually route the leads to the BDC Manager and then inside of the BDC managers user profile you can add additional "alert email" addresses. We will add the cell phone email address of our bdc reps so everyone gets notified of a new weblead. They will then go in the system and assign it to themselves as BDC assigned leaving the Primary assigned as the BDC Manager. If you dont want to do all that you can just have it round robin to your BDC Power Team​

Other than that, I just find the whole business rule thing to be incredibly clunky. And, for all the apparent strength, I still can't do simple things like create my own customized names for top level marketing sources in my reports - instead I am forced to use whatever Socket has deemed appropriate and all encompassing.

- I agree the business rules are a bit clunky. I've simplified how we use them and basically have the least amount of rules we need to have to get things in to campaigns. For example I have a business rules that runs at night looking for new unqualified internet leads and enrolls them in a campaign. The campaign runs through a few steps and then enrolls in another campaign. We've been able to add a couple of our own top level sources. We had to call them and plead with them somewhat to get it done though.​

I hope that helps. Message me if there is anything else I can answer for you.​

 

[Clay Toporski]

Chris! You are the man. Thank you!

I will look into these ideas today and see how I can get them implemented. I really appreciate the response. If I have more specific questions, I will definitely message you. Thanks again!