Published On: December 13, 2011

Picture this: it’s a busy Friday morning during car shopping season, and you’re flustered with calls, emails and customers visiting your showroom. On the one hand your sales team is working toward success, and on the other hand you have sales leads with varying levels of urgency coming from different sources. When you’re juggling between managing your team and keeping track of leads, it’s easy to get distracted and lose balance. That’s why many auto dealers turn to an in-house CRM system to help monitor their leads.

But simply having a CRM isn’t enough. You have to be careful and conscious about keeping your leads organized within the CRM. Think about it like your computer: your desktop PC helps you store and organize information, but if you have a lot of disorganized files and folders, it’ll be hard to find anything or do work efficiently. Just as your desktop can get cluttered and messy, so can your CRM. Here are 5 simple tips you can follow to help manage and organize your in-house CRM.

1: Create and Use Precise Categories
Listing leads in categories not only helps you organize them, but also gives your sales team the information they need to convert them into sales. Leads from telephone calls are different from internet inquiries, and it helps to know what kind of leads you’re working with. You can also categorize leads based on when you receive the request, so your sales people can work on the more urgent leads that require a quick response.

2: Assign Leads for Accountability
Many dealers already assign leads to team members, but we’re including it as a reminder because it’s crucial to measure accountability. Good CRM services provide a feature that lets you track your assigned leads. It’s basic practice to hold your sales people accountable for the leads they’re given, but as you get more leads and as your sales men and women interact with customers over the phone, online or on the showroom floor, the process gets messy. Use the CRM to make sure that your sales team is staying on top of their responsibilities.

3: Determine What to Do with Each Lead
Not all requests are the same, and you can use your CRM to assign actions your team needs to take for each lead. Assigning actions for each lead is another basic yet significant way to ensure that your team is being active with every opportunity the dealership gets.

4: Minimize Duplication
The same customer may submit an inquiry to your dealership through an online form and then place a call to ask another question. Keep your CRM organized by having only one profile per customer to avoid duplicating contact information in the system.

5: Track Lead Progress
Leads aren’t free, so they should never go to waste. Leads begin their journey by entering your in-house CRM, where you can then organize and take action with them, butut it doesn’t end there. Leads have value for future marketing and advertising campaigns. With an advanced CRM, you can track the progress of your requests, and measure data like conversion percentage per lead type, cost of lead conversion, and the time it took your team to turn a lead into a sale. From start to finish, a lead can give you lasting value if it’s properly digested through your CRM. Your auto dealership’s in-house CRM is a powerful tool that can provide a variety of both immediate and long-term benefits. Its basic function is for organization, but it has a deeper potential to help you understand information about your customers, your advertising campaigns, and your own sales team.