[USER=4677]@Steve Stauning[/USER] hope all is well! Every CRM was the 'hot' CRM at some point in history and they would all still be excited to get that label. I put off Drive for seven years, the first two due to job change but the last five due to they were more "hot" than ready for our stores. Switching a CRM without consistent sales process along with salesperson and manager accountability is just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. VinSolutions reporting is better, although painfully slow and glitchy this year, than DriveCentric's Standard and Advanced Reporting out-of-the-box. DriveCentric's Custom reporting, however, is extremely flexible and we've been able to replicate and surpass most of our go-to Vin reports. At the end of the day, I and other Variable leadership have to ask what we were actually doing with all the reports we had in Vin to begin with. We have arrived at basically two core reporting sets that we focus on in Drive. Both Custom reports with one focusing on Store performance and one focusing on Salesperson performance. Department managers and marketing have all the data they need in the store reporting and all managers, who each have 2 or 3 salesperson direct reports they meet weekly with, have the salesperson performance they need to do their weekly one-on-ones with those salespeople.
At the end of the day, most everyone on this forum including myself, have lost the ability to think like a salesperson on the showroom floor (or even a retail manager for that matter). Our minds run straight past the software programs we use in the showroom and into everything behind the curtain. I met with all 120+ of our Variable personnel and can tell you, through their lens they were EXCITED. Clarity of their opportunity, focused pipelines, simplified communication along with a great AI assist and app, had them engaged like I've never seen with DealerSocket, Elead, or Vin. Good UI and UX is just a way to eliminate friction on engaging with the tool out of the gate especially with the younger set of sales professionals we employ.
Yes, I'm sure there are dealers out there who are making CRM changes based on it being "hot" or because they liked the CRM sales person (I told Roessler "no" 3 times in 7 years lol). I'm sure you see dealers killing it and dealers who were failing but has it ever been solely because of the CRM? Of course not. Dealers who are struggling with process and accountability will meet the same issues upon a CRM switch. We were just at a point where accountability has been ramping up for the last couple years, processes are set, and we were just finding inefficiencies with CRM/AI/Video/Phone in our current set-up with Vin, Impel, and Snaplot. We are selling more cars because we aren't missing our opportunities beyond our showroom.
