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).