For Bryant Henrie, the DealerSocket CRM solution is a lot more than just another fancy piece of technology. It’s a new way of doing business.
Henrie is senior vice president of operations at Larry H. Miller Group. Based in Salt Lake City, the privately held company owns and operates 41 retail stores in six states. Aggregate sales exceed 85,000 new and used vehicles annually.
“We wanted to give all of our customer facing personnel the tools they would need to succeed in a high-volume environment,” said 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.”
With the DealerSocket CRM solution now installed in over 90% of its stores, the company can manage its customers and its sales staff from a single technology platform.
“DealerSocket has become our common process for monitoring and managing the sales staff,” said Henrie. “With DealerSocket, 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.”
Managing complex customer relationships
DealerSocket also enables 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, DealerSocket automatically triggers a series of follow up actions. It even creates 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 and that each service advisors is properly following up and communicating with customers.
“DealerSocket opens a door for managers so they can see how well their people are performing and hold them accountable,” said Henrie. “When people are held accountable for their work, they do a better job and they earn more.”
Some managers recently began conducting “exit interviews” with salespeople as they ended their workday to see if any sales opportunities had been missed or dropped. The DealerSocket solution made it easy for the managers to capture the knowledge they collected from the salespeople, and to put it to good use on the following day.
Customer intelligence, lower marketing costs
Thanks to its robust database, the DealerSocket CRM solution generates a steady stream of actionable customer intelligence and analytics that managers can use to allocate marketing resources more cost-effectively.
“The customer database is a true asset,” said Henrie. “Every time we add a new piece of information, the database becomes more valuable to us.”
The DealerSocket CRM solution also makes it easier for the company to develop targeted marketing campaigns that 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.”
Better training, less staff turnover
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 created 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 provided by DealerSocket,” said Henrie. “This is a tool that helps us hold people accountable, improve their performance, streamline our processes, reduce our costs and create a database that we can use forever.”
