A few years back, I got a call from TC Motors.
They are a car dealership in the Baltics, headquartered in Riga. They sell Subaru, Jeep, and RAM. Twenty five people on staff. A fixture in the community, the kind of place locals know by name.
The call was friendly. The situation, less so.
They were moving cars. They had customers. They had service records somewhere. But if you asked them a simple question, who owns our cars right now, they could not give a clean answer.
The Challenge
When we walked through the office, the picture was clear. Everything lived in Excel.
Customer list. One sheet. Vehicle inventory. Another sheet. Who bought what. A third sheet, wired to the first two with VLOOKUP. Quotes. Hand built, formatted in Word, emailed out as PDFs.
The spreadsheets were doing serious work. More than a hundred fields on vehicles alone, some of them tied together with nested formulas that had survived many hardware cycles. Nobody wanted to touch them. Everybody depended on them.
Here is the part that hurt. Management wanted answers:
- How many Subarus did we sell this quarter?
- What is the margin on used Jeeps compared to new ones?
- Which salesperson is closing the most deals this month?
- When was the last time we talked to the customer who bought a RAM a few years back?
Every question produced a conversation. Every conversation produced a fresh spreadsheet. Every spreadsheet disagreed with the last one.
The Real Core Issue
The original brief was “set up Salesforce, migrate the data, switch us over.” A clean swap.
I pushed back.
The team had never used a CRM. They had never worked with structured data in anything other than Excel cells. If we dropped a full Salesforce instance on them in a month, they would revolt. The spreadsheets would come right back, quietly, under desks. The project would die.
So we slowed down.
We started with the two simplest objects Salesforce has: Leads and Opportunities. That was it. Nothing else.
The goal was adoption first, features second. We wanted the sales team to form a habit of opening Salesforce every morning before they opened anything else. Once the habit held, we could add weight.
We watched how they used it. We adjusted. We added a field here, removed a required one there. We trained. We retrained. We sat with people while they worked.
It took longer than anyone would have preferred. That was the point.
The Vehicle Database
Once Leads and Opportunities were sticky, we went for the hard part. The spreadsheet.
We built a custom Vehicle object inside Salesforce and migrated the full set of fields, all hundred plus of them. VIN, make, model, year, trim, engine, registration status, service history, ownership history, warranty status, insurance status, delivery date, plate number, everything.
Every formula in the old sheet became a workflow rule or a flow. Every lookup became a relationship. Every manual status update became a button.
A lot of the hardest work was invisible. We spent weeks talking through each field with the people who actually filled them in. Some were leftovers from years back that nobody used. Some were critical and named something unintuitive. We kept what mattered, renamed what was confusing, and killed what was dead.
The Quoting Engine
The next move surprised the team.
They expected us to bring in Salesforce CPQ. Extra licenses, extra implementation, extra training, the full stack. We went another way.
We took the standard Quote object that ships with Sales Cloud and bent it, hard. We pushed it with Flow and Process Builder until it behaved like CPQ for their specific case: pick a vehicle, pick options, pick financing terms, get a quote out the door.
No extra licenses. No custom code. Just native tools, used aggressively.
For the documents themselves, we installed Hic DocsMade Easy, a free plugin for Salesforce. The sales rep clicks a button, the quote comes out as a formatted PDF, ready to send to the customer.
From the rep’s seat, quoting went from an afternoon of copying numbers between Excel and Word to a two minute task inside one system.
The Outcome
A few months after go live, the difference showed up in meetings.
Management stopped asking for a spreadsheet when they wanted an answer. They opened a report. Sales by vehicle type, by rep, by month, by margin. Forecasts built on open opportunities and historical close rates. Activity reports showing which reps were calling customers and which ones were coasting.
Vehicle delivery was tracked. Margins were tracked. Forecasts were tracked. Top performing reps surfaced automatically. Low performers, too.
The spreadsheets did not come back.
The Revelation
What made this one work was the restraint at the start.
We could have shown up, run a six month implementation, handed over a polished Salesforce org full of features nobody asked for, and walked away. It would have looked impressive in a case study. It would have been ignored inside the dealership within a quarter.
We led with the two objects the team could absorb. We earned the right to build the hard stuff by proving the easy stuff first. Only then did we go near the spreadsheet.
And the most valuable piece of work we did for TC Motors turned out to be the quoting. Customers care how fast you get them a clean number with the options they actually want. We obsessed over that flow, and it moved the business more than any dashboard.
The Lasting Advantage
TC Motors now runs on structured data. Every car sold, every customer contact, every quote is logged against a record that survives staff changes, computer crashes, and memory lapses.
The team can answer questions they could not answer before. Margins by model. Top salesperson of the month. Which customers are due for service. Which are driving a car that is coming off warranty. Which quote is sitting idle and needs a follow up call.
The reports they pull today would have been a week of Excel surgery a year earlier.
The Conclusion
If you take one thing from this one, take this. When a team has never touched a CRM, the fastest path to adoption is the narrowest possible starting surface. Two objects. A clear daily habit. A patient pilot.
Once the habit is there, the rest is craft work.
Thanks for reading this far. If you are running a dealership or any business sitting on a pile of Excel files nobody wants to migrate, check out the form below.
– Jeff.