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Thoughts on your CRM ???

dE members I Need help......I'm looking for a CRM for our dealership. What CRM's are out there and what do you think of the opertations,support and price/value of your CRM ? please help.

Thanks Gary Abrahams

Tags: crm

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Permalink Reply by Hunter Swift on December 7, 2011 at 3:28pm

Maryann,

There is probably no greater advice to a prospective CRM buyer to have strong management buy in. You are dead on!

You may not have been aware, but we recently rolled out an upgraded User Interface with the goal to make navigation and daily activities easier. We have received great feedback from our dealer body. This was done about 2-3 months ago.

Hunter

Maryann Washington said:

I used Dealer Socket at my last dealership. I am not a fan of DealerSocket. They do have great support and our Dealer Rep was awesome. It's the actual program that I found to be not very user friendly. Especially at a dealership with not very computer-saavy salespeople! I have also used Car-Research and found that to be a much more user friendly system. Their support and Dealer Reps were great too. Yes, DealerSocket could do more, but again, not user friendly. Ultimately, no CRM will work without very strong management support. I believe a CRM can make a huge difference on your bottom line for the better, but without management support and accountability, it's not worth the expense.

Maryann Washington

Dennis Jonsson Motor Products.

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Permalink Reply by CarSeller on December 16, 2011 at 4:36pm

I agree with Linn Boyd that all the CRM's I've seen fall short in terms of usability and technology.

We're new and different, please take 3 mins to watch our video. http://www.getcarseller.com/

Sorry for the blatant self promotion :-)

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Permalink Reply by Lou Weisenbacher on January 5, 2012 at 11:29am

I would like to add-in... I will definitely agree about the ADP and R&R systems are not worth looking at and now after close to a year with VinSolutions they are a big NO! They put on the greatest demo and had everyone on board but soon after launch the problems started and the majority never fixed. Their desking tool is worthless at best. Their support has gotten worse since AutoTrader bought them even thought they try to tell you nothing has changed.

We are now shopping around for a new inventory manager, desking tool and CRM since we are leaving Vin and will be doing some heavy research. Being that we are a Mercedes dealer they have a pretty short list of approved vendors (you can only have you MB internet leads integrated with your CRM if it is an approved one) so we are limited as to we can go with. Thankfully the list includes companies like E-Lead CRM, Autobase, Dealer Socket, Car Research XRM, UDC Momentum which all seem to be pretty well respected out there. They also have Advent Resources which I have never heard of.

I really wanted to believe in VinSolutions as they have an amazing package of products but they really let us down.

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Permalink Reply by David Blassingame on January 5, 2012 at 12:04pm

We are shopping for a CRM at this time, too. A good source of information has been the web site drivingsales.com. They have a "Rate your vendor" section with lots of vendor ratings and comments. I'm learning more as I read what's posted on Dealer Elite.