In case you were wondering, Salesforce doesn't like us.

[Dan Sayer]

Quick backstory - I've used DealerSocket, ELead, and currently use VinSolutions in a retail environment. I've used Salesforce while on the vendor side as well as a number of others while working with dealers (helping them use their own CRM's SMH). Our industry OG CRM solutions lack some major items mainly tied to UX and flexibility with 3rd party integrations. In full disclosure, I like our Vin rep so that is keeping us with them but I would move to Drive Centric in a heartbeat if something gets sideways with Vin.

My owner asked that I look into Salesforce last year as a potential expense reduction so I started down that path (albiet lightly pursuing knowing the level of energy needed to make this a reality). He has a business relationship with a B2B company that has their own Salesforce dev so that was offered as an option. After a number of calls with the Salesforce account team, and then moving to their implementation teams as well as speaking to their upper leadership, they finally just told me, "we are not able to help you or a franchise dealer model at this time and B2C Automotive Retail is something that Salesforce is not pursuing". Good news for the OG's but bad news for our industry. We need more disruptors in our space to push the big providers.

Has anyone tried to piece together their own CRM or use Salesforce in their retail organization? The item I find a little ironic is VinSolutions uses Salesforce for their Support Knowledgebase. I would also bet that most all of them use Salesforce to manage us... Why is that?

 

[ChrisR]

When I was in Prescott, one of our IT people was a SF certified developer, and asked for a quote, to see about switching us over to SF as a campus CRM.

If memory serves, we were quoted $1,000/year per user for SF as a CRM. I am not sure exactly how the billing would work, however, with turnover, and the volume of employees we had, Vin was a much better option.

 

[Dan Sayer]

When I was in Prescott, one of our IT people was a SF certified developer, and asked for a quote, to see about switching us over to SF as a campus CRM.

If memory serves, we were quoted $1,000/year per user for SF as a CRM. I am not sure exactly how the billing would work, however, with turnover, and the volume of employees we had, Vin was a much better option.

Salesforce was quoting me rates right out the gate (and for us would have been a lower rate) but as it moved towards questions about inventory integrations, service RO's, etc, that's when it moved up the chain and Salesforce declined to even continue down the path.

 

[Alex Snyder]

Oh boy! This is a topic I can talk for days on... yes, I'm sick.

Salesforce couldn't interrupt the retail car business. They're crazy bloated. I have used Salesforce a few times and tried to recently make it work at FRIKINtech. To @ChrisR's point, it requires significant financial resources and time to make it work. And I'm sitting in a company with engineers who have built CRMs from scratch mixed with Product Managers who led CRMs and successfully implemented various solutions at different dealer groups. We hated Salesforce!

At DealerRefresh we have used Basecamp and now Agile CRM. Both have their limitations, but they're cheap. At FRIKINtech we now use HubSpot and are liking that quite a bit. It is easy for our engineers to build custom integrations and for our sales and support team to be on the same page. @jon.berna has been talking me into also using HubSpot's marketing hub. As a B2B vendor, HubSpot fits what we do best. Could I use it in a dealership - NO!

Automotive CRMs are incredibly inexpensive in comparison to the bigger name solutions outside of automotive retail. Yes, dealers $2,000 per month for a CRM system is cheap! Now, if you are not utilizing features that make your VinSolutions, DealerSocket, or eLead system comparable then my "cheap" statement becomes arguable. But I'd throw it back at you: why even pay for a CRM you aren't going to use?

In the technology world, there is a key thing called an object model. It is one of the main keys to whether data is going to work together to satiate a client's demands. B2B CRMs have a few more points on their object models than automotive CRMs. They have a company that has contacts connected to it. Companies are mostly eternal while contacts (customers) can move in and out. There are opportunities with leads. And there are deals. These are necessary components to create pipeline tracking and quarterly forecasting. They're important for organizations that can sell more than one product to a single company who may have differing contacts that count as different leads attached to varying opportunites who close on multiple deals. It is an elegant (but complex) data solution for B2B sales organizations with intertwined support teams who need to carry the relationship after the deal is "won."

Dealers don't need that level of sophistication and that's a big reason why their CRM systems are less expensive, don't require as much training time, and are more forgiving when the user doesn't update every field. In a Salesforce or HubSpot, a salesperson who doesn't use the tool becomes a glaring problem fast!

A dealership object model is more tuned to: Contact, Lead, Product. Contacts can have relationships, all leads are opportunities (so no need for the extra layers), and there is one product: a car that can have underlying transactions like services and F&I products, but traditional dealership CRMs are neither used by Service nor F&I.

I think the dealership object model is fine in most CRMs for the state of our industry. What's fucked up is that the databases start and end at the rooftop level. What automotive CRMs need is a larger tenant model.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Salesforce doesn't like us?!?!?!

 

[Dan Sayer]

@Alex Snyder You had me at "satiate".

The funny part about the journey with Salesforce was when explaining our model initially, the Ford franchise retail dealership, I was met with "Yeah we have numerous car dealers on our platform using it to communicate and manage customers." At that point I was a little excited that they had a model already running and working. I asked to speak with the dealers and the first example I was given was the "car dealer", Bombardier. Yes, as in "Bombardier, Inc" and how they use Salesforce to communicate with their customers, the Can-Am dealers... Obviously, the team I was speaking to wasn't able to grasp how a Ford dealer worked so as I moved my way up, greater understanding came at which point they waived me off of even trying.

 

[john.quinn]

I'd say the DealerShip Object Model maturation path is akin to Lead --> Customer --> Opportunity -- > Transaction (each of those entities is it's own Object). CRM's stop at Opportunity, bundle it all up and send it to another system for Transaction (the DMS).

One of these days, hopefully not too far off, the same platform will go from Soup to Nuts, Lead ------> Transaction, which then brings F&I, Service & Parts into the parallel Opportunity Object... Throw-in Inventory... and....

I mean, if you had to start over again, there's no way you'd build these separate, disparate systems to handle these Objects. And if the OG's stop buying up the innovators, maybe the industry will actually get to see something cool.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@Alex Snyder You had me at "satiate".

 

[Steve Roessler]

@Dan Sayer Thanks for the plug here. We will be here when you are ready to upgrade buddy.

 

[todd.smith]

SalesForce has almost zero interest in automotive since it is far too small of a marketplace with potentially less than 18K total clients. Couple that with the amount of integration work that would need to be completed, lack of APIs within the industry, and a host of outdated technology stacks I don't think it is worth it at all for them to pursue. Let's also all remember Microsoft trying to build a DMS twice in the auto industry with partners and failing. So I believe it's too small and to many headwinds to make it economically viable for them.