Dealership CRM selection guide

Test daily work

Run internet leads, phone opportunities, walk-ins, duplicates, transfers, opt-outs, appointments, unsold follow-up and sold handoff end to end.

Verify managers can manage

Inspect task quality, exception queues, coaching, source reporting, mobile use, audit trails and the cost of keeping data accurate.

Plan migration

Define history, notes, activities, appointments, consent, templates, custom fields and acceptance tests before signing.

Watch a salesperson use it, on a phone

Most CRM evaluation happens in a conference room on a large screen with a presenter driving. Most CRM use happens standing on a lot on a phone between customers. Require that the core sequence, log an up, look up a customer, set an appointment, send a compliant message, complete a task, is performed on a phone by someone who does not work for the vendor, and count the taps.

• Log a walk-in and set the next action
• Find an existing customer and their service history
• Send a message that respects the opt-out state
• Complete and reassign a task while away from a desk

Decide what the CRM is the source of truth for

In most stacks the CRM, the DMS and one or more marketing systems all hold customer contact details and communication history, and each vendor's demo assumes theirs is authoritative. Decide the answer yourself, per field, and require both vendors to confirm the resulting write behaviour. Left undecided, this is settled by whichever integration ran most recently.

Price the work of keeping the data usable

A CRM's running cost includes the labour of deduplication, template maintenance, process changes, reporting definitions and the administrator who owns them. Ask who does this work, how many hours it takes, and whether it is included or billable. A platform that needs a half-time administrator is not more expensive than one that does not, but only if you know before signing.

• Deduplication and merge rules, and who runs them
• Template, process and task-rule ownership
• Report definition changes and who is permitted to make them
• Administrator training and the cost of losing that person

Migrate less than you think, and test what you migrate

Moving ten years of unusable history into a new system reproduces the problem it was supposed to solve. Decide what needs to arrive, active opportunities, consent state, service history, appointment history, and what can be archived and left. Then test a migrated sample against the source, field by field, and make acceptance of the migration a contractual milestone rather than an assumption.