We don’t need to tell you how many moving parts there are to running a successful dealership- you are living it every day. While most dealerships utilize one form of a dealership management software, such as ADP or Reynolds and Reynolds, to keep sales, inventory, and F&I in order, some of these software systems fall short in other areas leaving gaps in the overall efficiency of a dealership.
Luckily, there are several software solutions available to fill some of these gaps in order to fully digitize any dealership from inventory acquisition to marketing, and even inventory management.
To help cut down your research time, we have compiled a list of the top 5 software tools every dealership should consider adding.
Sales and Marketing
Hubspot
HubSpot offers a full stack of products for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management. Each product is powerful as a stand alone, and even better when used together.
Reaching prospects and making sales on a new or used car purchase often boils down to meeting individuals’ needs and budget. Nearly all vehicle purchases today start with some form of internet search. When done right, each search could yield a new customer to the dealership by providing the answers to customer searches. This idea of inbound marketing sprang from the idea of creating and publishing content that attracts visitors and converts them to leads as they continue down the sales funnel from awareness to comparison. This type of marketing is an exceptionally good fit for car dealerships because nearly all purchases begin with some form of Internet information search.
Hubspot allows to you to create and publish lead-generating content, measure where your visitors are coming from, and their new CRM allows you to track and target your leads when they convert on any of your lead forms.
Hootsuite
Getting the word out is the goal of any Dealership marketing team, and social media is an important channel. Hootsuite is an inexpensive software that helps focus social media efforts by tracking progress, engagement, and other metrics. It is useful to any business with any size marketing team, from large marketing teams to armies of one.
Hootsuite allows you to see a clear, concise snapshot of your key Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter activity to track trends and measure growth. It is easy to use and no setup is required.
You can also create customized analytics dashboards, or if pressed for time, you can use Hootsuite pre-built templates to learn more about how your followers engage with your content.
Export reports to prove your social ROI. Share your success with your team with one-click exports of your reports in Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV formats.
If you do a lot of communication via social media, and have multiple team members doing the communicating, Hootsuite allows you to measure team performance, track how long it takes your team to respond and resolve Tweets and Facebook posts, mentions, and comments assigned to them.
Hootsuite allows you to gain a deeper insight with a large collection of social analytics integrations and apps available. For a small monthly fee, you can really build a powerful analytics data set to help guide current and future content efforts.
Reconditioning and Inventory
ReconMonitor by AutoMobile Technologies
ReconMonitor is made for dealerships who need to wrangle all the moving parts of reconditioning pre-owned inventory and auction purchases. The auto dealer software tracks each vehicle, and the progress made on that vehicle during the reconditioning process. This visibility helps get vehicles frontline ready faster while saving time and money for the dealership.
Like a project manager in a box, ReconMonitor is a complete web-based and mobile software that gives any dealership stakeholder access to a complete dashboard of all in-process vehicles, stages of repair, and frontline deadlines. Imagine being able to get a real-time snapshot of all in-process vehicle reconditioning and deadlines from any device, at any time, allowing you to identify trouble spots and maximize productivity. ReconMonitor can make this a reality for your operation.
Dealership used car reconditioning software establishes an early warning system that keeps the repairs moving forward from initial acquisition to front line readiness. It identifies areas that are operating efficiently and uncovers areas contributing to delays. With ReconMonitor, you can track each vendor or employee task and manage what order those tasks are being performed. The result is better control and faster turn-arounds for your inventory.
Dealership Accounting and Sales
Executive eye 3.0
Executive eye from Dashboard Dealership proclaims itself as the auto industry’s premier data analytics and reporting product. Their car dealership software provides a comprehensive enterprise view of dealer group accounting and operational performance. Executive Eye enhances DMS capabilities by allowing dealers to track dealership performance side by side in one dashboard. Dealership managers can set up and track their own KPI’s and filter out the metrics are most important to them.
Dealership controllers can keep an eye on vendor creep by viewing a 12 month vendor spend report. Expense Creep, where extra costs continue to slip by unnoticed is a constant battle. Find out how much you are spending at both the enterprise and store level with each vendor over the last 12 months.
Managers can receive their own customized doc report. Get the doc you’ve always wanted for your group. Look at your dealer group as a whole, not just store by store. You can also export and email these reports. Executive eye delivers reports as often as you want, in the format you want, with the information you want.
Smaller dealership DMS alternative
EverLogic is a complete auto dealership management system that works with QuickBooks, making it a perfect fit for either single location or smaller dealership group. EverLogic software was actually built by Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks. The software is fully cloud based and has seven integrated modules that bring your sales, F&I, parts, service and administration departments together. EverLogic gets high marks for its customer support. Much like QuickBooks, EverLogic’s software is easy to set up, understand, and use. EverLogic also performs automated updates and backups to keep you current and secure.
Summary
If any of the prognosticators are correct, the two or three year tidal wave of new car sales has begun slowing down. When that happens, dealerships will start to scramble to find ways to boost sales and bolster profitability. The savvy dealer will stay ahead of these trends and will utilize software to its fullest. Hopefully our top picks list will help your dealership increase productivity and profitability.