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Desking Favorites

I use and Excel program that I made that compares 3 purchase terms with 3 cash down options (9 payment options) and for new vehicles also compares 1 lease term with 3 cash down options. We leave it to our Sales Managers to determine what lease term is going to be most attractive based on the residuals and money factors. But the layout we have looks nice and clean and presents well. The top has three boxes: 1) MSRP 2) Discounts/Rebates/Trade In 3) Cash Difference with the payment options below.

My biggest gripe with using this as our desking tool is there is no intergration with CRM or DMS and no real way to save where you left off (other than hoping the sales person saved the proposal form) so you can re-hash deals. Currently I am working on a solution for that... We are hoping to start the beginning of the month saving all of our proposals with the Deal # from our CRM as the file name in a shared folder that all the Sales Managers have on their desktops. Not ideal but at least gives us something to reference when we are doing unsold follow up or save a deals with the sales people.
 
Curious... how important is it that a desking tool is integrated with the DMS, CRM or other systems?

How about data? As in tax rates, lease residuals, etc? Should the tool "know" these things, or is manual input OK?

I've worked a couple of systems where EVERYTHING was a part of the tool. Maybe we were just spoiled...
 
Wanted to give this thread a quick bump.

Very curious to learn what our better users are using for desking/1st pencil tools -- and what they'd like to use.

Simple calculator? (manual data input?)
Printed Worksheet? Hand-written worksheet?
Integrated tool?

What's working well out there now?
 
Wanted to give this thread a quick bump.

Very curious to learn what our better users are using for desking/1st pencil tools -- and what they'd like to use.

Simple calculator? (manual data input?)
Printed Worksheet? Hand-written worksheet?
Integrated tool?

What's working well out there now?
JQuinn,
We use VinSolutions as our crm/ilm which has a pretty robust desking tool built in. It pushes to our dms (Arkona/DT), dealertrack and routeone and is integrated with AIS Rebates so we have factory incentives (except dealer cash) and leasing rates/residuals (except it doesn't have the allowable markup on factors built in). No deal gets desked without being put into the system first. It can calculate purchase/ lease/ balloon scenarios. You can also create multiple scenarios and compare them to each other on 1 worksheet with payment grids and everything. Although we aren't doing this yet, we'd like to get to where we present a purchase & lease comparison on every single new deal.

The only drawback with it, IMO, is that it's built on the silverlight platform.. Which can be slower and doesn't work on iPads. Plus Microsoft is pulling the plug I believe on it and moving to html5.
 
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We use a excel program that I made that compares 1 lease term and 3 purchase terms with 3 cash down options. We have our sales people create a deal # in our crm and then save the proposal with the deal # as the file name in a shared network folder so all the managers can access them to re-work the deal, ect. I have it set up so it calculates our front end gross and payable gross so we have it in front of us while we are working the deal. Customers have liked our presentation because the numbers are large and bold and its very simple looking with multiple payment senarios.

I am also in the middle of working on a proposal for cash out the door deals with also a 1 pay lease option.
Attached are a customer view example and a dealer view example as JPG files.Dealer View Proposal.jpgCustomer View Proposal.jpg
 
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We use a excel program that I made that compares 1 lease term and 3 purchase terms with 3 cash down options. We have our sales people create a deal # in our crm and then save the proposal with the deal # as the file name in a shared network folder so all the managers can access them to re-work the deal, ect. I have it set up so it calculates our front end gross and payable gross so we have it in front of us while we are working the deal. Customers have liked our presentation because the numbers are large and bold and its very simple looking with multiple payment senarios.

I am also in the middle of working on a proposal for cash out the door deals with also a 1 pay lease option.
Attached are a customer view example and a dealer view example as JPG files.View attachment 796View attachment 795

Very nice! Do you pre-load rates and terms, etc., or add them manually for each pencil?