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Top Dealer Improves Sales and CSI With CRM
Dealer Marketing Magazine | May 2008 |
 Selecting the right customer relationship
management system can improve every
aspect of your business. Providing the right
tools for your employees can not only make
a difference, but can produce fantastic results
across every dealership department, such as
retaining employees, increasing productivity,
streamlining processes, and increasing profit.
Selecting the right technology, however, is
crucial to expanding your business.
Bryant Henrie is senior vice president of
operations at the Larry H. Miller Group.
Based in Salt Lake City, the privately-held
company owns and operates 41 retail stores
in six states and their aggregate sales exceed
85,000 new and used vehicles annually.
Selecting the right CRM based on the specific
needs of the dealership offered the perfect
solution for fine-tuning his overall business.
“We wanted to give our customer facing personnel
the tools they would need to succeed
in a high-volume environment,” says Henrie.
“When you sell and service as many cars as
we do, you simply can’t keep track of customers
by writing their names on the back
of business cards.” Having the same CRM in
all of our stores has allowed the company to
manage its customers and its sales staff from
a single technology platform.
Their CRM has become a common process
for monitoring and managing the sales staff.
“We can watch individual performances.
When you understand precisely how an
individual performs, you can provide positive
coaching and training that is genuinely
helpful, instead of merely generic. That really
has an impact on the overall performance of
the staff, the managers, the GSM’s, and the
General Managers…all the way up the ladder,”he continues. “Plus the system opens a
door for managers so they can see how
well their people are performing and
hold them accountable.” Henrie explains,
“When employees are held accountable for
their work, they do a better job and they earn
more. Managers also use the CRM to conduct
‘exit interviews’ with salespeople as they end
their workday to see if any sales opportunities
were missed or dropped.”
Your CRM system should have the tools to
effectively manage complex customer relationships.
It must also enable the company to keep
track of customers through all of the sales and
service cycles. After a customer’s information
is entered into the platform, it needs to automatically
trigger a series of follow-up actions.
It should even create daily, individualized
work plans for the staff to ensure that each
salesperson makes the follow-up calls that are
so necessary for closing deals and increasing
profits. It should make sure that each service
advisor is properly following up and communicating
with customers. “The customer
database is a true asset,” says Henrie. “Every
time we add a new piece of information, the
database becomes more valuable to us.”
Henrie says having one CRM solution for
all departments also makes it easier for the
company to develop targeted marketing campaigns
to drive higher sales. “The knowledge
we acquire and enter into our database helps
us to communicate with our customers much
more effectively than in the past. We can send
the right messages at the right time—when
the customer is ready to make a purchase,”
he says.
In addition to reducing marketing costs and
streamlining the sales process, the solution
has helped the dealer group lower the turnover
rate of its sales force. By providing better
and more focused training for its sales team,
the company creates an effective employee
retention strategy as well. With the cost of
new hires climbing, the lower turnover rate
has helped the company save money over the
long term.
“As a manager I’m absolutely satisfied with
the tangible benefits,” says Henrie. “Our
decision to go with one CRM solution for all
our needs has introduced us to tools that help
us hold people accountable, improve their
performance, streamline our processes,
reduce our costs, and create a database that
we can use forever.”
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