Does anyone use Salesforce?

[Alex Snyder]

old thread from 2010. Glad to see you back!

Since my last post, 7 years ago, I've had just a little bit of time to think about this one some more. Non-auto-focused website companies are ones you'd think could easily cross into our industry, but they don't. I do not have the exact reasons for each company, but I have an over-arching theory that support for automotive is vastly more expensive. It boils down to inventory. Outside of the car & real estate business most industries do not have unique inventory. Samsung makes hundreds of thousands of the same TV model. It comes in one color and the specs are always identical. A single car model can come in how many colors, trims, transmissions, with different wheels, tires, fuel types, etc. And then throw a used designation on top of that and the technical inventory maintenance, for a vendor, gets nuts. Don't even get me started on compliance.

Take it a bit further and a website company needs to employ a technical support department just to handle all those one-off inventory issues that pop up daily. Of course, there's also an "account management" type of customer support that is there to handle the overall client relationship.

This can also answer anyone's question as to why most automotive websites solutions are so technology stale while non-automotive solutions look so damn cool? There are many other parts to this question, but I think a lot of it stems from the incredible difference in where costs have to be applied by the vendor.

And then there is CRM.

CRM isn't just plagued by the insanity surrounding inventory management, it is wrecked by every state's/city's/county's different way of handling sales taxes within the desking tool. Once a desking tool is built much of the ongoing development is spent on handling the calculations inside it; not developing new features for a better desking experience.

Industry knowledge is absolutely critical when building or growing an automotive CRM solution. There are not many people in our industry who are capable of translating their knowledge to the developers who are building the tool. And it takes a special engineering team to decipher the psychology of a car salesman, what motivates a sales manager, and how a customer changes into an unpredictable emotional beast when it comes time to buy a car; only tamed by a likewise insane car guy. To a rational developer this is incomprehensible ....it is also the reason why OEMs are so lost in the car dealer world. People buy cars from people and technology needs to support that.

So, today, we are an industry where the newest CRM offering was coded in the early 2000s and most of the original architects have moved on. I struggle to see how any of the major offerings will ever be able to deliver the future of CRM to us. I struggle more on coming up with any way a SalesForce or Microsoft-type company will bring it either.

But I believe we are reliving a period in the 1990s when the viable technology solutions were owned by large corporations. Out of that came many different solutions that evolved our industry into what it is today. The bigger players of that time are now owned by the big automotive technology corporations. Outliers like DealerInspire are just the first that will be coming. I believe this will be more obvious in 2020. And I believe the 2020s are going to provide a lot more options to dealers. I'm excited! It is periods like this that I live for!!!

 

[Alexander Lau]

SalesForce does not really care about Automotive, they do fine with large companies. They are also very expensive compared to the ones that are already built for the car business!

Well, Salesforce is obviously huge and they have the resources and support team that could easily create an auto-centric offering. They could easily create a model for dealerships that's affordable and profitable for them. Win-win. It vexes me. Who knows... they must have analyzed it at some point and felt it wasn't worth it.

 

[craigh]

Well, Salesforce is obviously huge and they have the resources and support team that could easily create an auto-centric offering. They could easily create a model for dealerships that's affordable and profitable for them.

Nah. It's not that easy.
Everything is very different.

Customizing SalesForce often turns it into a nightmare to use.
Automotive, in my opinion, takes an entirely different approach to the sales cycle and therefore doesn't fit well into Salesforce.
Automotive also has many unique traits like owning a single product at a time (majority), servicing that product, trading that product in, etc.

I'm still waiting for the CRM that does it properly.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Nah. It's not that easy.
Everything is very different.

Customizing SalesForce often turns it into a nightmare to use.
Automotive, in my opinion, takes an entirely different approach to the sales cycle and therefore doesn't fit well into Salesforce.
Automotive also has many unique traits like owning a single product at a time (majority), servicing that product, trading that product in, etc.

I'm still waiting for the CRM that does it properly.

Right, I'm not saying it's easy, but they have the resources and the reach to do it (it's just surprising they don't make a go of it). Like you said, they probably looked at the granular requirements and had thunk to themselves, "forget it, it's not worth it."

 

[craigh]

Right, I'm not saying it's easy, but they have the resources and the reach to do it (it's just surprising they don't make a go of it). Like you said, they probably looked at the granular requirements and had thunk to themselves, "forget it, it's not worth it."

I think there are easier gains for them for less investment.
ie: new countries, acquiring competitors, etc.
Entering into an established market and trying to unseat the old players is an uphill battle.

I don't disagree with the premise though - someone will bring us the CRM we've been waiting for and will change the way dealers see CRM entirely. Personally, I think it's going to be built on a foundation of consumer cycles and "owning" that customer cycle from the time they walk into the dealership until the time their kids/friends/spouse come in to buy their next car.