We just went live with VinSolutions as well. The training courses available online for your staff are excellent introductions to the software and very convenient. The trainers we got did an excellent job over our four days together. And it all would have failed without commitment from our management and the efforts of 2-3 people to deeply dive into the software leading up to installation and become subject matter experts ready to make the software work well for us and fit our needs. For those of you with big corporation background, you have to mimic the Change Management department because that function is required in some form with any major system installation.
Don't even think about putting in a CRM and relying on any vendor as your PRIMARY driver to make your implementation successful. The CRM companies probably wouldn't say it aloud, but 75% of failures are the dealer's fault. (I am a dealer and in hoc to CRM companies in no way) The only ways it is the vendor's fault is if they out and out lied about functionality and features of the CRM, the CRM company has almost no support to train you, or if the software is frequently down or frequently crashes when operating. Even then, you probably got what you paid for. We tried a very low end CRM and it failed for us. It was our fault. The software wasn't great, but it was very inexpensive, and we knew what we were buying and tried to get by with lesser software. It was in no way the CRM company's fault.
We put Vin through countless demos fully understanding the capabilities of the system and envisioning how it would work in our environment. We sent tens of questions into them about integration and features. And they didn't hesitate to provide any of the demos or research any of the answers. The other vendors also got heavy demo work and test environment examination. If the system doesn't work for you, then you probably didn't scope out the system and its capabilities well enough before you made the decision. A CRM company can't last duping large numbers of customers.
We looked at a few other CRMs, and one was very good and the other two were serviceable - and priced as such. We chose the software based on our needs and what we found was the most important set of features for us. Other vendors were better than Vin at some things, but in the end we chose the Vin because they were the best at things we cared most about.
I was nervous about some of Vin's ratings and review posts, but we have been pleased so far. And the software really has a lot of great features that others either are not doing or doing but in a way that is harder to use.
