Automative Industry- Car dealership:

The owner of a 3-location car dealership has seen sales dwindle, and employee morale plummet. He accepted what was happening was part of the recession. After trying a number of failed promotions, he was at the verge of closing two of his three lots.

After contacting Businessways, he agreed to implement a Customer Relationship Management tool, and asked Businessways to design and execute a targeted marketing campaign.

After examining the dealership business model, its relationship with customers and suppliers, fixed and variable operating cost, and market conditions, we came to the conclusion that the dealership can not only survive, but prosper.

The dealership had 6300 customer contacts in various forms; rolodex cards, spreadsheets, and a database. The contact list was only used for sending “birthday” notes, and occasionally, an offer for “free oil change”. These occasional marketing campaigns were conducted by an outside marketing agency, and due to the cost, the dealership conducted these campaigns infrequently and irregularly.

The key to successful marketing is consistency and regularity. Consumers may require 6-8 touch points before they make purchasing decisions. Typically, businesses make 2-3 attempts, and then cease to contact the customer. As a result, the customer eventually makes the purchasing decision, but often from another vendor, who just happened to contact the customer at the right time.

After installing Sugar CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, a campaign was designed to offer existing customers a trade-up on their vehicles. The offer was designed in such a way that the trade-up difference is about $2500, which is the reported consumer tolerance limit for durable goods spending. As an example, an owner of a 98 Hondas was offered a 2000 Honda, or Acura with lower mileage or better equipment for the difference of $2500 or less.

The campaign was conducted using US mail primarily, but included a financial incentive, and a mechanism to pre-qualify, if they went to the dealers’ website. At this time, emails and phone numbers were collected for future campaigns.

Utilizing the CRM software as a tool, and the campaign as both a tactical and strategic move, the dealer was able to sell 1300+ vehicles, as well as extended warranty, and numerous repairs and updates.

The CRM tool, the system, the processes, and the training that went along with it allowed the dealer to realize the following benefits:

1- Immediately generate sales, and service revenue
2- Save 4 jobs, as they were slated for a lay-off
3- Collect several thousand email for future, low-cost, marketing campaigns
4- Improve customer service and response time by using the CRM software to create an interactive customer service portal
5- Management visibility into the sales pipeline, so that they will not be blind-sided by slow months, or future drop in service and/or sales revenue
6- More accurate sales monitoring and support for individual sales representatives
7- Reducing the burden on administrative and clerical staff, since much of the information that customers called about, including service scheduling, is now available on the customer service portal. This also allowed one of the administrative staff resource to be dedicated to marketing.