Salesforce dealer management system. How we built one with Salesforce

How we missed the lead

The story started in late February this year (2021). TC Motors’ (Subaru car dealer located in Latvia) general manager left his contact details on our website and guess what has happened? No one from our team has contacted him. Somehow contacts landed into our CRM when everyone in the group was busy with other projects. One of my colleagues, by mistake, has marked the lead as contacted and left it there untouched.

At the beginning of the summer, I was doing a CRM data audit. I noticed a very familiar name in the list of contacts. TC Motors is widely recognized in the local market because its dealership is located on a very traffic-intensive road in Riga city. I’ve immediately picked up the phone and got in touch with the manager, whose name is Dimitry.

From excel to Salesforce

The project started with a discovery session. During the session, we noticed how well TC Motors organized the process via excel. However, even the best excel spreadsheets have their limits. Data in the file was not always appropriately structured and represented only post-factum data. Such data included the number of vehicles sold over the period and financial data for each deal.

The company loved their spreadsheet, but everyone understood that they were missing some critical parts of the process. For instance, the company tracked most leads in developed in-house CRM, which did not provide transparency and reporting over sales rep activities. Moreover, there were no detailed data on the pipeline. Last but not least, the existing setup did not allow preparation and sending of customized offers to the customer.

After we’ve collected all the requirements, we’ve rolled up our sleeves and jumped into structuring excel file and translating it to the architecture of the system. In simple terms, we had to convert an excel file with over a hundred columns into objects and fields in CRM.

Today TC Motors has a fully-pledget Salesforce dealer management system in place and can track their sales, sales rep activity, vehicle lifecycle, and more. But first things first, so let’s jump into more detail.

Lead management

As with every Sales Cloud implementation, we’ve started with studying how the company manages its leads. It turned out their Leads were landing from all over the place. These sources were both offline, like convention center expositions. And online. Like TC Motors website, Subaru homepage, and social media.

Did I mention we used the Professional edition? What you need to know is that the SFDC Professional edition doesn’t have API. At first, the customer was ok to manually add leads to CRM because, at that point, the project was an experiment. But what I love about Salesforce is how many workarounds there are. We used the email-to-lead function, which enabled us to connect the most traffic-intensive sources of leads. Thankfully their website is built on WordPress (just like the website you are reading right now). We were able to use premium yet pre-built plugins to manage an integration.

Opportunity management

Opportunities are the most important and most exciting part of this project. Some call them deals, and in most automotive CRM’s they are called deals. We decided to leave them as Opportunities. That way, we left some space for scaling the system to other departments of the company. For instance, we plan to build a car service CRM automobile.

Our company managed to build full-cycle tracking for test drives, leasing inquiry tracking and management, quotes, and more. Everything was made with Professional edition at no extra add-on purchasing from Salesforce.

Test drive management

As every car dealership, TC Motors offers their customers to test a car before buying it. We created a custom object in Salesforce called Test Drive where all new test drives with the customer land. This object is synced with calendar integration. Every time the sales rep negotiates a test drive with a client, it automatically gets synced with the calendar.

Another cool feature of the system is that the sales rep has to sign a test drive agreement with the customer when a customer arrives on-site. In the past, the sales rep had to use word templates. Now, the system automatically generates documents with customer data and vehicle information merged into the PDF. Automation saves tons of time and brings a more seamless experience to the customer.

Leasing inquiries

I guess it’s no secret that most of the new cars are sold via leasing. TC Motors care about the privacy of their client. During the project planning stage, they mentioned they need a private area available to leasing managers. A remote location in the Salesforce dealer management system means a custom object storing all leasing inquiries. Once the inquiry is processed, the leasing manager can delete all data. That way, sensitive financial data is not stored in the system. Oh, and the customer doesn’t have to share sensitive data with a sales rep because he will be working with a leasing specialist, and no data is revealed to the sales rep. As a result, GDPR best practices were implemented.

Quotes

There is no single deal without a quote. Some companies prefer to send quotes via text via email. Some even use WhatsApp to let their customers know about the best offer. In this project, we have pushed Salesforce quotes to the max. We’ve used the standard functionality of Salesforce quoting and linked it to vehicles.

Every time a sales rep produces a quote to a customer, he can choose if he wasn’t to offer one of the cars available on stock or build a custom configuration of the car tailored to customer needs. As I mentioned before, we made this project with Salesforce Professional Edition, and access to customization and automation tools was limited. We would go with Salesforce CPQ for such scenarios in other cases, but that would not be a challenge.

Now here is the most exciting part of the quoting process. Once a sales rep is happy with the pricing and setup of the quote (vehicle plus accessories, extra options, etc.), they generation a multi-page PDF and send’s it to the customer. We have worked together with the client to rebuild existing PDF quotes so they match Salesforce functionality.