HOUSTON -

CAR-Research XRM rolled out a new enhancement to its single-source CRM solution this week aimed at helping dealers unearth a potential “gold mine” of prospective vehicle buyers and capture more sales.

The company explained that “Prospecting the Household” contains scripts built right into the CRM that are designed to farm the database for repeats, referrals from family members and coworkers, service customers and orphans’ owners.

The solution is designed to find the 2 percent of customers that are in the market to buy a new or used vehicle this month.

CAR-Research XRM indicated the scripts prompt the salesperson to “prospect the household” with a word track that walks the salesperson through a professional, courteous conversation. The feature guides the salesperson to make an introduction as the point of contact at the dealership, find out if the customer still owns the vehicle they purchased and if they are in the market for a new one.  

Furthermore, officials noted the salesperson is also prompted to gather information about the household such as the number of drivers in the family, number of vehicles in the family, drivers’ names, if any are currently in the market for a vehicle, the type of vehicle they drive, monthly payment amount and estimated pay off.

Officials believe using CAR-Research XRM’s “Prospecting the Household” tool can create a customer out of that prospect and schedule follow-up if the customer is soon to be in the market.

CAR-Research XRM president and chief operating officer Patrick Kelly stressed process has proven highly effective in identifying potential buyers.

“Dealers talk about wishing that they had a business development center and what they don’t realize is that they have one right on the showroom floor,” Kelly pointed out.

“The average salesperson, according to NADA stats, only works one hour and 45 minutes of productive activity in a 9.5-hour day,” he shared. “Imagine if you could get 20 salespeople to work five productive hours per day. You would get 100 hours per day of business development activities out of your sales team.

“The problem is if you tell them to go to work, they don’t know what to do. If you tell them what to do, they don’t know what to say,” Kelly continued. “So, you’ve got to have a CRM tool that tells them what to do, and a CRM tool that tells them what to say.

“Our new ‘Prospecting the Household’ feature is helping to uncover a huge amount of very high quality leads and sales for our auto dealer customers that at were right in their data base all along,” he went on to say. “And let’s not forget that be-backs, repeats and referrals close on average at 60 percent versus 10 percent for fresh showroom ups and Internet leads.”

CAR-Research XRM reiterated that its singular solution can help a dealership run more effectively and proficiently. It is a Web-based, comprehensive CRM solution geared to increase revenue from sales and service, improve customer satisfaction index and service satisfaction index, and boost the dealership’s gross profit.

The company added a dealership can consolidate all its departments into a manageable solution that delivers value through proven processes at every stage of the customer life cycle.

The XRM platform offers more than 50 CRM and marketing applications, including Internet Lead Manager, Showroom Control, Desking with DMS push, Websites, Call Center, Integrated Telephony, Mobile XRM, Inventory Control Manager, Service Drive Control Manager and Social CRM.

“The XRM integration model allows dealers to eliminate redundant vendors and save money on their customer relationship efforts by bundling custom solutions for their store,” officials concluded.