A lead management software for your automotive business creates an ecosystem where salespeople can serve potential customers better. You get end-to-end funnel visibility, and the decision-making process is swifter.
But how exactly does a lead management system do that?
We will share how a lead management system impacts your teams, processes, and revenue by streamlining daily processes. This would not only impact the growth of your dealership but will also help in building an efficient workforce that spends more time on building relationships rather than doing mundane tasks.
This article will cover the daily workings of a lead management and then a bit more.
- You’ll understand what crucial role it plays for your dealership
- You’ll have a list of features that should be there in your software
- You’ll know how it’ll impact your business
- And you will have a bunch of lead management tools to choose from
Let’s get into what role it plays for your automotive dealership.
Role of Lead Management in Automotive Industry
Automotive lead management system helps you capture, manage, and nurture leads. It enables your salespeople to focus on meeting their quotas rather than doing manual, repetitive tasks that take almost 1/3rd of their time.
The auto lead management software will take care of the customer acquisition and nurturing aspect of the funnel. It will capture lead information, track conversations with salespeople, map activities and page visits to aid your sales agent to make the perfect pitch.
And for the ones that might not be ready to commit yet, the tool will automatically send out nurturing campaigns and notify sales when they are ready to buy.
A lead management system will take away these headaches –
- Leads leaking out of the funnel
- Missed follow-ups by sales
- Manual updates on lead stages
- Impersonal lead engagement
- Countless hours spent on creating reports
Does this sound like something you’d want to implement for your automotive business? Then let’s look at some of the key features a lead management system should have to maximize efficiency in running your dealership.
Key Features of an Effective Automotive Lead Management System
An effective auto lead management solution builds efficient processes for your sales and marketing teams. They need a system where chances of error and second-guessing is eliminated. We’ll look at how LeadSquared’s automotive lead management software features as an example.
1. Lead capture and tracking
Generating leads for your dealership is no easy task—you run campaigns on social media, visit trade shows, get walk-ins and phone calls, and have third-party vendors. You must ensure all necessary information is captured from the get-go.
A lead management software ensures leads from various sources are captured automatically. This means there is zero lead leakage, and you get a bang for your buck.
When we say lead capturing, we just don’t mean capturing basic information, it also means the system is tracking the interactions and activities of the lead. If your lead visits a particular car model page or is looking at financing options—you will know about it.
2. Automated follow-ups
A lead shows interest in making a purchase and fills out a form. Your dealership lead management system will capture the information and send out an automated follow-up acknowledgement. This means you’ve already initiated a conversation.
Now when your salesperson gives them a call, chances are they will answer. And if they don’t answer, they can still send out a sweet, personalized message or email on how they tried reaching out, and here’s a little something to help with their decision. (Because your auto lead management has already told you that they were looking at the newest Toyota sedan.)
3. Lead prioritization
Every lead can be bucketed under not sales-ready, just browsing, and serious buyers. Your automotive lead management tool should be able to identify and set priorities based on business logic.
It should be able to identify positive and negative cues of the vehicle buying journey. For example, downloading a brochure or asking for financing options are positive cues while having a non-verified number or being unresponsive over a period can be negative cues.
These quality scores will nudge your salespeople to prioritize high-quality first so they can meet their quotas faster.
4. Marketing automation and segmentation
There is a definite buyer journey for every lead. And not all leads are ready to buy a car just yet. The time is not right, or their family is growing, or they haven’t found the ‘right’ car.
You need to ensure that they think of you first when they are ready to take the plunge. But your salespeople have new leads to talk to, marketing is busy generating those leads, so how do you keep existing leads engaged?
Here’s where a robust dealership lead management platform comes to the fore. It takes care of nurturing leads, keeping them engaged, sending out birthday and anniversary wishes, so that when they are ready to buy—they set up the test drive with you.
5. Integration with other tools
A good lead management system seamlessly integrates with the other tools you use. From dealer management systems, third party listings, payment gateways, service desks, and others—integrating and building a communication channel between these is important.
An integrated suite means no information is amiss, you have updated information, and your sales team is able to work on one platform rather than logging into multiple systems and punching in information multiple times.
An integrated suite means no information is amiss, you have updated information, and your sales team is able to work on one platform rather than logging into multiple systems and punching in information multiple times.
6. Analytics and reporting
A manager spends an average of 8 hours/week on collating data, building reports, and preparing for meetings. Without a lead management software, these reports are built on trust, incomplete information (from various platforms—telephony, texts, etc), and inaccuracies due to human error.
Your automotive lead management system should be able to generate important reports like performance, revenue, lead source, and funnel reports automatically. All you need to do is create a dashboard, and voila! All the important numbers are there when you login.
Managers and department heads can spend time on building strategies and guiding salespeople that might need the extra push.
Now that you know which features to look for, let’s also understand the impact and benefits of having a lead management system for your dealership.
Benefits of using an Automotive Lead Management Software
Why should you invest in an automotive lead management software? Besides the obvious answer—it helps increase revenue, let’s look at how it impacts your business as well as help improve productivity of sales teams.
1. Increase in vehicle sales
The tool helps with getting in touch with quality leads. It engages them to think about buying from you first. And it aids salespeople to make a personalized pitch. This leads to increase in sales.
Here’s how an Indian car leasing company saw an impact on their sales using LeadSquared.
“We have made subscribing and buying a car simple and LeadSquared has matched that pace with us as a backend partner”
Aditya Chintawar, Product Manager, Zoomcar
2. Shorter sales cycle
With half the work getting automated, the team can focus better on the core job function and improve customer relationships to speed up the sales process.
An automotive re-seller improved customer experience and engagement after implementing LeadSquared.
“What we developed in a week would have taken us two months. The increase in developmental speed has helped us provide our customers with a great post-booking experience.”
Vaibhav Ghiya, Senior Product Manager, Bikes24
3. Improved visibility
An auto lead management system maps customer interactions and activities on a single platform. This enables all the stakeholders to have better visibility and take corrective action wherever necessary.
Another leasing company saw the benefits of driving and tracking communication on one platform and how it helped them make faster decisions.
“One-to-one emails & calls, bulk marketing campaigns, sending lease quotes & contracts are being effectively managed on LeadSquared.”
Anthony Lopez, Managing Partner, DSR Leasing
4. Faster scalability
Automotive business is a competitive market. If you snooze, you lose. A lead management software helps you manage high-volume of leads without breaking down systems and processes.
Striving to be better each day takes time and effort—a liberty we helped Zoomcar managers achieve as they saved time on building manual reports and run administrative tasks.
“Things that earlier took me 20 days now take me just 5-10 hours. This has helped us build our own product in a constructive manner.”
Aditya Chintawar, Product Manager, Zoomcar
All of this sounds promising, but how does one actually overcome the hiccups of making a lead sales-ready with a dealership lead management software?
5 Tips to Convert Leads into Sales
This section covers business-tested tips that automotive businesses have implemented using a lead management system.
- Make the system do the heavy lifting: As we mentioned earlier, not every lead is sales ready. Set up drip campaigns to nurture leads. Share action-oriented information like model comparisons, pricing differences, financing offers, etc.
- Reach customers at the right time: The tool is tracking every action that the lead takes. Program the system to automatically notify salespeople to call when the right action takes place.
- Make qualitative inferences: Data is your best friend. Utilize the quantitative information like conversion numbers, high-performing sources, best-selling models to understand what sticks and what doesn’t.
- Reduce the workload: Make relationship-building a priority for your salespeople. Don’t let them spend time on typing out the same messages or adding notes after every call. Make it easy through templates and quick forms to capture maximum information.
- Minimize distractions and human errors: Using multiple platforms to gather information can be distracting and time consuming. Enable your salespeople to have a one-shot view of the lead. The same applies for management, if you have a person compiling reports, it might not be accurate. Set up custom reports based on your business needs and create an error-free view of the business.
These tips can’t be implemented without having a dealership lead management software in place. Let us look at some of these tools that every dealership loves.
5 Best Automotive Lead Management Tool Recommendations
We’ve scoured the internet and carefully selected these top 5 software that an automotive dealership can implement. These recommendations are based on specific business needs, advantages they offer, and reviews.
1. LeadSquared Automotive CRM | Starting at $25 per user/month
Whether you deal in used cars or sell new ones, have one dealership or multiple locations, LeadSquared automotive CRM is a tool you can depend on—for your sales teams, to manage multiple showrooms, and deliver a superior buyer experience.
Top lead management features–multi-source automated lead capture, marketing automation, reporting capabilities
Why should you choose it-”LeadSquared reduces our time in reaching out to customers. It provides real time updates that can be tracked and thus helps resolve customer queries faster.”
Verified user on G2
2. Dealertrack DMS
For businesses looking to digitise contracts and leasing, Dealertrack is an excellent platform to use. It is used by small and mid-sized dealerships to run their financing and digital retailing business.
Top lead management features—reports, digital financing process
Why should you choose it-”Dealertrack is very resourceful and easy to use. The interface is straightforward after training.”
Verified user on G2
3. Autosoft DMS
If you are an automotive business with multiple franchises and partners to take care of your inventory needs, then Autosoft will provide a comprehensive platform to manage the daily interactions with these stakeholders.
Top lead management features—digital onboarding, complete transparency
Why should you choose it—”It is seamlessly integrable with other systems and the real-time view of insights is useful for dealers. The dashboard gives a clear picture of all the data across teams.”
Verified user on G2
4. Autoleap
Automotive businesses dealing with servicing and car detailing have found Autoleap to be the perfect platform. It is intuitive and helps streamline auto-detailing operations.
Top lead management features—quick appointment scheduling, fleet management
Why should you choose it—”AutoLeap has a much easier user interface. I love that our customers can now approve estimates through texts or emails.”
Verified user on G2
5. Neodove
Small businesses looking for a cost-effective solution to generating and managing leads, Neodove is the tool to look at. Manage customer conversations and engagement seamlessly.
Top lead management features—marketing campaigns, auto-diallers
Why should you choose it—”Standardising cold-calling operations under a single platform to ensure trackability on lead conversion is the key problem that NeoDove has helped in solving for our requirements.”
Verified user on G2
Whether you are full-fledged dealership with multiple partners, an auto-detailing shop with franchises, or a small business just starting out, we have recommended tools for all.
Wrapping up
Automotive lead management system helps a business deliver better customer experiences by enabling teams to understand their needs better. Robust automation and integration ensure every lead and interaction is captured and responded to.
If you are looking for a comprehensive automotive lead management solution, talk to our experts today!
FAQs
An automotive lead management system helps capture, manage, nurture, and track leads for your business. It helps automate repetitive tasks so your sales team can handle more volume of leads.
Besides optimizing outreach and marketing processes, implementing an automotive lead management software can help a business increase sales/conversion, shorten sales cycles, improve visibility, and scale faster.
Here are some must-have features of an automotive lead management tool –
1. Lead capture and tracking
2. Automated follow-up
3. Lead prioritization
4. Marketing automation
5. Reporting and analytics
The best automotive lead management system is LeadSquared. It helps streamline pre-sales, post-sales, and field sales processes. You can get access to a web application as well as a mobile app to seamlessly manage and track your teams and leads. It starts at $25/month.
