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Joe:

I hear you on the snail mail tracking.  They only snail mail marketing campaigns I do are direct thru Honda and Acura and they give me fabulous reporting similar to what you are asking Reynolds for.  I agree with you that they should be able to track outside mail campaigns thru the list importing functionality but for whatever reason they can't.  They thing i don't like about list importing though is that it creates duplicates but they are only duplicates in CM but not ERA so it confuses the sales guys but F&I using ERA is fine.  That was a big cluster and we stopped that.  You really ought to talk to the guys at Managed Marketing Solutions Joe, they are on the ball and have a pretty darn good product.  They will do a lot of the stuff you are asking for and frees up your time to do other things.

The UI is nothing fancy but I've used fancy UI systems and all they are is a fancy UI.  Reynolds has been working on the UI and a dashboard feature for about two years now but they keep running into system slowness issues.  I think they've corrected a lot of the slowness issues they had before and i think they are reluctant to release anything new that would jeopardize that given what they went thru to correct the problem the first time.

CM is the same as ERA or any DMS or CRM for that fact.  Utilization is the number one issue.  They just did an analysis of our utilization and I think we were around 55% which they said is high.

I hear you on all the gripes but on balance the system works pretty well even though it doesn't have all the flash and dash of other systems.  At the end of the day its about managing your data and accountability, at least for me.  Before I used to think the CM wasn't getting it done for me.  After a brief hiatus, I discovered that it actually works pretty well.

I still think Reynolds should create and advertise a best practices forum for CM users because we stumble on more things then they do sometimes.