Automotive Sales Software

For the purposes of this article and to enable a better qualification of the tools used, it is essential to split the process into two parts. This split is not followed by every organization, and the boundary between the two parts are not always precisely definable.

• Lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead qualification, and lead distribution – lead management; process part1: lead to qualified lead
• Sales initiation, test-drive, quotation, financing offer, trade-in, order, PDI (Pre Delivery Inspection), delivery – sales process; process part 2: qualified lead to order

The functions for part 1 are mainly call center software, marketing automation software, and lead management software whereas the marketing automation and lead management are usually parts of a CRM software suite, both generic CRM and specialized automotive CRMs. The employees operating these systems are mainly call-center agents and back-office personnel, who perform repetitive tasks and data entry. CRM application in this area on the level of a brand (all dealerships together with the importer) as well as single dealership level have generally proved successful and efficient. Agentic AI is entering this field with a number of emerging use cases to perform lead qualifications, automate follow ups, extend agents’ capabilities and offer efficiency and optimization.

Therefore, this article shall focus on the second part of the process: qualified lead to order and this shall be referred further on as “the car sales process”. A qualified lead for the purpose of this article is a lead where both the contact person and his/her interest are qualified, that is known and identifiable. Qualification rules on persons and interest types may vary. At minimum, the person’s name and at least one contact method (email or phone) must be known, together with the relevant brand, model family, or model.

The car sales process has several unique characteristics that need to be addressed (depending on the region and the local market conditions, their significance may vary):

These characteristics, combined with the large amount of information that salespeople must manage across spreadsheets, calendars, and other systems, create a strong need for an integrated digital sales tool to increase salespeople productivity and reduce the number of errors.

Having the above characteristics in mind, let us examine the software tools that are in place, starting with those that are mandatory:

In the most basic setup, the DMS may provide the minimum functionality required to execute a sale, that is the “minimum Automotive Sales Software” and there used to be / are dealerships that operate sales based on this. The functionality here is very basic and not salesperson friendly. Most of the salesperson’s tasks along the sales process must be performed manually in such a case.

The next group of tools we shall examine are sales assisting tools – their job is to perform calculations and support the salespeople taking part of the workload, so that salespeople can focus on the customer. Here we can observe a big family of tools that are dedicated to specific tasks of the sales process, among others:

The first digital sales workplaces that had appeared in the 90s in the US (dealer based) and in the mid-2000s in Europe and Asia (OEM/brand based) were attempts to collect as many of these tools in a single piece of software to support the salesperson taking over tasks and ensuring proper maintenance of the information (which would be a source of errors if left to the initiative of the salesperson…).

The quality of the “digital sales workplace” tools is measured by the scope (the coverage of everyday salespersons tasks), by its capacity to organize and schedule the salesperson’s work, by its integration (mainly to the DMS and other dealership systems) and of course by its ease of use and intuitive fitting to the habits and trends of car salespeople.

Two types of sales workplaces emerged:

These developments slowed down when OEMs started deploying CRMs on a global and national scale. Applying CRM on the lead management brought immediate results and led to the idea to use the very same CRM platform to implement the digital sales workplace functionality and have the totality of the sales process in one system.

The expectations to use CRM as a retail sales process engine, was driven by the need for data, and based on the successful application of CRM in the first part of the sales process.
These attempts to implement a digital sales workplace based on a CRM platform had limited success in many European projects due to a variety of reasons connected with the specifics of the automotive sales process and the fundamental differences between a CRM and a sales engine in terms of data lifetime, workflow, and flexibility to adapt to a constantly changing process. The mentality of the automotive salespeople is an additional factor that led to low adoption rates even when the projects reached deployment.

The insights from the experiences on “disruption through CRM as a sales engine” are presented here in short.

Data Lifetime: in CRM the long-term customer relationship and its history are in the focus, while in Sales engine the short transactional lifecycle, that is the bounded lifecycle of a specific vehicle purchase is in the center.

Dynamic factors: Constantly changing specifics like prices, incentives, commercial initiatives, financing, and taxation regulations creates a constant load to maintain integration with all the sources of the changing parameters in the broad and complicated platform of a generic CRM.

Workflow approach: A workflow approach is natural to a sales engine and relatively easy to maintain, whereas implementing and maintaining the same workflow in a generic CRM can require significant effort.

Integration with all the specific automotive tools is traditionally more natural for an automotive sales engine, since it faces similar tasks and has a common application history to these tools. This leads to compatible parameter sets that make integration easy and lower maintenance costs.

Integration with the DMS is natural to a sales engine due to heavily compatible parameter sets and needs less maintenance.

Salesperson mentality: Based on experience from many dealerships, salespeople prefer to click through a tool that supports the process rather than report/enter data to a CRM-system that can be perceived as a “spy of the management that only adds work”.

The experiences from the field and the significantly lengthy project times and high adaptation budgets, sometimes after two or even three attempts, led major OEMs and big dealer Groups to re-evaluate the ease of use, the natural flow and the directness of the sales workplace for the second part of the sales process.

So digital sales engines are coming back, but not as stand-alone solutions, and not as a CRM replacement. They are part of the new dealership and retail network sales software architecture: encapsulated automotive intelligence in a single user-friendly sales engine that is organically integrated with the DMS and the CRM. VSS is in the forefront of this approach with the VSS Digital Sales Workplace which is tightly integrated with the VSS DMS. In our experience, this architecture has provided a fast path to market while keeping maintenance effort low and achieving strong salesperson adoption.

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