Sounds like all the ILM/CRM tools are just designed differently. They all have things they are good and bad at. It is hard to do everything perfectly.

Haha I think you're absolutely right. You aren't likely to find the perfect ILM tool... just one you can live with.

Wow...
Those things you spoke about would probably annoy the hell out of me. It looks like the schedules that are created by Dealer socket are all "results based schedules". In Reynolds CRM we can at least choose between a set schedule and a results based schedule. It looks like it's back to the drawing board for me. I'm looking into BZ/ADP's Buzztrak/Netrak today to see if their ILM may work well with ADP's CRM tool. I looks like when your looking at CRM/ILM tools your just trying to find the one that gives you the least amount of headache's.

Previously we used iMagicLab ( Webcontrol before that ). I did not love imagic.. but it was a heck of a lot better than DealerSocket.

DS is To-Do focused, which isn't a bad thing. The problem is that the system will often automatically create multiple to-do's ( sometimes 2, 3, or 4 ) per customer. For example, if you have an action plan set up to schedule calls on certain days.... if for some reason you miss a call, it will often ( not always ) schedule a duplicate call, with the previous call still hanging out. Just an extra step that's time-consuming when you're talking about lots of customers.

Also, another thing that I can't believe I forgot.. there are THREE ( 3! ) separate and different "views" for each customer record. Some functions are only accessible in certain views.. and each one is layed out quite differently. Insanely frustrating. I cannot recommend DS to anyone... until they make some major changes.

Rob,
Great insight on Dealersocket. What were you using before if I might ask? Currently we use Reynolds Contact Management which can be very slow at times along with server issues. Our text messages come through fine for emails and leads. What do you mean when you say "manual" cleaning up? There are many different areas that can cause this....From what I have heard Dealersocket may be staying the same or even going backwards from what we already have.
I hope someone else chimes in.

Alex,
I can't comment on ADP's CRM tool, but I will chime on re: DealerSocket. Our dealer group decided that all the stores needed to use the same CRM / ILM tool a few months back... and DealerSocket got the nod. Presentation was decent, so we signed on. I absolutely cannot stand it.... Site is very slow to load if you're on anything less than a very fast connection. I use Sprint Mobile Broadband most of the time.. so this matters to me.

It's very counter-intuitive for most tasks... and the system isn't nearly as "smart" as I think it should be.. lots of manual 'cleaning up' of things along the way. Also we've had *VERY* flaky text message alerts, with no resolution. To make matters worse, there are *NO* text alerts for emails received.. ONLY for new leads.

The broadcast email tool is theoretically very powerful... but EXTREMELY unfriendly to use. It's something you would have to see to understand.. but it's simply horrible from a user interface standpoint.

If they could clean up the interface drastically, and fix the text shortcomings ( inexcusable in 2009, seriously ), they would have a decent product. Until then, we'll suffer through using it.

Has anyone been with ADP's CRM tool in the last 6 months? I looked at it and I don't like the fact that it is not web-based. They claim that they have made so many changes in the last 6 months but I haven't seen anyone give them a ringing endorsement. I was considering possibly looking at pairing them with buzz trak. The best DEMO i have seen for a CRM/ILM tool is Imagiclab. However, I am concerned because of the negative press the CEO has received. Is this information true? I'm not trying to hammer the guy but I don't know what to believe.

I have also looked at Dealersocket which seems to be decent but I wasn't blown away by it. Anyone who has input let me know what you think. I would prefer a CRM that could do it all but wouldn't be oppossed to looking at a CRM/ILM combo.

Thanks.
Alex J.

ILM.. ecarlist.com

Depending on how familiar/comfortable you are with php, there are several FREE open source options. One is Sugar CRM Community Edition. You can fully customize it to do whatever you need it to. There is some initial set-up to be done, but once you have it going, it can do some good for you. Of course, there are extended versions that add-on certain features, but the Community Edition can do more than enough to manage leads effectively.

Hi Jeff,

We have emailed in the past but haven't managed to touch base on the phone. We currently are not targeting the US but I think we have a fastastic product that can really help dealers not only manage Internet leads but also drive organic traffic.

Our product is SmartDealer DMTS, our website www.dealer.ca

DMTS Features:

Online Marketing Center: Manage your entire online campaign and achieve market leading results.
The Online Marketing Center will provide all the resources and the reporting you will require
establishing and managing your internet strategy and sell more cars.

The DMTS Internet Lead Management System is a system that will ensure every potential sale has
received the attention needed. The salesperson can access inventory or complete and submit a credit
application, calculate monthly payments and more with just the click of a button, leaving more time to
focus on closing the deal. The DMTS ILM effectively manages the hot lead while submitting all other
leads to a process that will provide future sales opportunities.

Real-time Dashboard an all-encompassing overview tasks, appointments, e-mail and sales
performance in an intuitive and organized display.

PowerSERP diligently labors to build you websites presence in the Organic section of the SERPs for
hundreds even thousands of Keyword Phrases. Organic Results are the ultimate objective of any
online marketing campaign and are essential to reducing costs and building your dealerships Internet
Sales.

Smart Inventory, the imaginary sales rep becomes a reality as a customer relationship marketing
techniques is applied to today’s sophisticated automated-response technology. Using simple yet
comprehensively-designed tools, sales reps can create vehicle search requests based on their own
unique criteria. Sales reps can also create personalized search requests in response to phone-ups
and floor traffic. Any number of specifications, including: brand, price, features, monthly payments
and more can be entered. Immediately after this information is captured, Smart Inventory can scan
current stock and display vehicles that match or are similar to the visitor’s requests.

Finance and Insurance automatically transfers credit applications safely and securely to the
DealerAcess, Curomax and Route One. Use the smart book desking tool to find the right vehicle
for your customer while maximizing your profit!!

Reports Analyze sales, appointments and lead performance by dealer group, dealership, or by
individual salesperson

Multimedia emails add the “WOW” factor to correspondence with a complete audio and video
presentation that you can send to prospective customers. There are 18 types you can select from (10
dormant and 8 hot leads). Global Automotive Technology Solutions

DMS Integration: They are charged per DMS pull. There can be a few different types of pulls. DMS
only, Autotrader only or synchronized DPS trader pull. With the synchronized pull vehicle information
is pulled from the DMS and then picture and options are pulled from the Autotrader site.

We include unlimited phone/Internet support and our PowerSERP will get your inventory indexed organically by search engines for; geographical references,type, price, payment, body style, year, make, model...on the horizon will be behaviour reference, drop down geotargeting...imagine the power of thousands upon thousands of indexed pages...think of the PPC cost savings!

try a few examples...look for "inventory.dealershipurl.com"

ford freestar edmonton
toyota suv ontario
chevrolet minivan toronto

It's a bolt in product. We currently have Inventory integration every major DMS supplier in the US and Canada. We can scrape and match pictures if they are displayed online and have lead scripts for manufacturers and lead providers.

Shane Hambly
eDealer

Please add VinSolutions MotoSnap ILM/CRM to your list. We have an excellent product.

MotoSnap ILM Feature Highlight:

* Automatically catch and track duplicate leads. Save thousands of dollars from paying multiple vendors for the same lead.
* 100% Internet based. No software or other components to install.
* 100% email integration. Customer and internal emails in one place.
* Receive prospect emails in real time. No more 15-30 minute delays to simply receive leads and responses
* Easily email vehicle photos and details to the prospect via our seamless integrated inventory module
* Automated emailed brochures including similar vehicles
* Easily email videos to prospects
* Fully customizable sales processes
* System keeps track of all prospect history and communication.
* Mobile alerts notifiy your salespeople instantly when a new lead arrives
* Respond to customer emails on your smart phone for quicker response times
* DMS integration to pull sales data automatically (ADP, ERA, Arkona)
* Lead Source ROI reports
* Anti-skating and customer duplication
* Advanced HTML editor for email and templates
* Receive automated management email reports of daily activity
* Complete BDC department support
* Fully integrated with optional MotoSnap™ CRM

www.keepyourcustomer.com

This is the website for DealerSoft, LLC of Illinois (and their "Jeeves" C.R.M. program) which fully discloses the look and feel of their "Jeeves" Real-Time Prospect and Customer Follow-Up software program.

DealerSoft is a small midwestern based company. For $10 per day per roof (and a month to month agreement you can cancel at any time) you can't beat the price for a "full featured" C.R.M. software program.

For a couple of bucks more per day you can integrate their Internet Dept. E-Lead Capture and Automatic Processing Software module with the C.R.M. module.

Their "Jeeves" C.R.M. program was created by car people for car people so it make real sense to almost every salesperson and manager. In fact, their program is so easy to understand and logical, special training is almost unnecessary (the program is so easy to use even a caveman will understand it!).

Of course their program doesn't have all the "eye candy" and rarely used features the "big boys" include (and charge dearly for), but for a practical follow-up program that gets the job done, improves a dealers market share, sales and C.S.I. and maintains "cradle to grave contact" into the next millennium what more does a dealer really need? Here is a product at least worth checking out.

We have seven stores all on webcontrol and while it was a solid ILM, it was outdated, the reporting was lacking and there was little to no flexibility with the program. I moved half of our stores to Dealerpeak since they seemed to be open to change and working with us to make a better crm. To their credit, they made a LOT of major changes thanks to our suggestions. However, this created more bugs and i spent a TON of my time pointing out bugs and issues. I decided to move us back to webcontrol after they were sold by autobytel. I'm still often disappointed with webcontrol, BUT it is EASY to use and stable. Soo many of these crm companies like to focus on their bells and whistles instead of the basics like clean user interface. What good are all the tricks if you can't get your salespeople to use it properly.

For less than $20 a month you can have a very effective results oriented lead follow up system with iContact.com, aweber.com or constantcontact.com

I would like to introduce the best keep secret in the industry, Dealerpeak E-Lead Manager. We created E-Lead Manager in conjunction with our CRM Center inside of an auto group 8 years ago. We are the industries first completely integrated system that encompasses CRM,ILM, inventory management, desking, and websites all on one unified platform. E-lead manager also has our patent pending process monitoring system that will give you real time alerts when your process is not being followed. It will not only identify that the department is trending out of process, but the monitoring system will tell you who is falling out of process along with what they haven’t completed that is causing then to fall out of process and it all resides right on your dashboard. If used, there is no other system in the industry that can affect the bottom line as positively as Dealerpeak e-lead managers ILM process monitoring.

Below you will find some addtional features you get with e-lead manager.

Easy Start Interface
Automated Follow up
DMS Sales Integration (ADP, Reynolds, Arkona)
DMS Inventory Integration
DMS Service Integration (ADP, Reynolds, Arkona)
Multilocation Architecture
Send/Receive Email Tracking
No user limits
Customer Centric Structure
Flexible Permission Rules
Customizable Lead Status
Do Not Call Management
Extensive Reporting
3 rd party lead management
Inventory exports
Inbound call tracking
Dealer Web site Integration*
Unlimited Phone Support
Outbound call tracking
Complete Automated Sales Process
Campaign manager (Data Mining)
Multi-media emails
Track all in coming/outgoing emails
Unlimited Training & support
100% ASP
Major Benefits:
Increased Closing Ratios
Reduced Advertising Costs
Higher CSI Scores
Quick User Adoption
Consistent Measurement
Streamline Deal Processing
Manage Multiple Locations
Reinforces Sales Process
No Expensive Hardware

Cost: $795.00 per location/per month
Setup $995.00 (One Time)

We use Webcontrol AVV and yes it is old and a bit stale but the reporting is decent and it is an easy LMT for new user to pick up.

Most of the comments seem to focus on the aesthetics rather than functionality. Only the Sales guy from Dealer.com gave any specifics of what his CRM actually does. I have used Imagiclabs, Cobalts LMCC, AVV and the IZmocar tool which they bought from reckonup. All of them have similar features. Some try to emphasize some specific functionality over the other but over all, the user experience is similar.
As long as the tool provides accurate tracking and reporting, the sales team or person can interact efficiently with the customers, what else is needed? I do not recommend using your ILM tool as your email broadcast center. This invariably affects all your emails. Not necessarily but gradually.
The Izmo UI is good but it is lack in some basic functions. AVV is blah but it is efficient. Imagiclabs is basically AVV with a better look.
How about creating an ILM that has seamless integration with REynolds and ADP, Is fluid with email responses, can be set to send automated responses to some leads and not others, can be set to autodial for phone appointments. Automerges leads to the first one that was received and has a widget that can be built into the dealer website.
There is available technology to accomplish all of this and it also makes the ILM tool more interactive than just an outlook tool with tracking.

I'm using AVV now and I find it very old school. I have been looking at Vinsolutins( www.vinsolutions.com ) just the ILM! Anybody knows anything about it?

Thanks,

Ooops, i forgot to put in the URL if you want to check out NetTrack... it is www.LeadCRM.com

There are more decent, low cost ILM tools today than ever before... Heck, a lot of them are free if you are at a dealership of a particular brand. Ford dealers get SalesPoint, one of the first ILM's ever released at no charge to the dealership... Well, let's just say it's buried in something else any FLM dealer has to get anyways. Personally, over the last 4 years I have grown very fond of the various NetTrack/BuzzTrak variations from the company in Houston that started with NetTrack about 10 years ago. They have over 2,000 ISM's using their tool, and I personally used it for a couple of years while working at Courtesy Chevrolet and really was amazed at how easy it is to use, yet how powerful the automation and template builders can be. A lot of ADP dealers use NetTrack and they pay less than $500 for all the users in the dealership.

When it comes to Lead Management Tools (LMT), everyone has an opinion, and it is usually most influenced by whatever that person is most recently used to using. I was a big fan of AVV WebControl for many years, and managed a team of people that put it into 322 Mercedes-Benz dealerships as "StarLeads". WebControl is another oldie but goodie.

Yet, when I think of what it was like to manage over 5,000 leads a month coming in to a single-point Chevy dealership... I still like the way i could get a new ISS up and running in less than an hour with NetTrack, while at the same time myself and a couple of other people on the team were able to add to, and customize a lot of the automation tools based on the status changes of each lead so that we did not have to click and type as much every day, instead we focused on phones and let the NetTrack tool do a lot of what we probably should have been doing... Anyways, we went from selling about 1,200 cars a year to web and phone leads to selling just over 4,000 cars to web and phone leads in 2006 while using NetTrack to organize, control, manage and measure everything... Oh yeah, and the reporting functionaility is hard to beat with customized configurations any way you want to look at stuff, along with a drill down function that gets to the facts very quickly.

I used to like WebControl's reporting functionality the best and when i worked for Reynolds I was always showing webControl's reporting to the Contact Management CRM team to try and get the reporting in CM to be more useful... But, the reporting in netTrack is so easy to use it is deceptively simple until you want to open the hood... And then you can configure just about any time range, and set of comparison parameters you want to see.

Yes, i work for ADP and ADP bought NetTrack last year after i went to work for them... Pure coincidence? You figure it out!

for a personal crm for automotive, Joe Verde Personal Sales Assistant. It's perfect.

Microsoft outlook works well for one person. Drawback is you have to manually enter them in. But setting appointments and future to do lists are an easy setup.

As a programmer, I looked at a lot of different CRMS at NADA last year. They all seemed to have too much data. It has lead me to ask the question, what features are most important in a CRM? Is there a market for a personal CRM? I think it would give the high performance sales guy the ability to purchase leads for personal use and ensure they remain in his control. I know it is common practice in the real estate industry, but haven't seen it in the auto industry. Are there any personal CRMs out there?

Richard - I think your prices for iMagicLab are a lot on the high side. I think they're priced a bit better than that, but you can package things up to get to numbers like you quoted.

I started with AVV's Webcontrol before they were bought-out. It was a fantastic tool until support went down the tubes almost 4 years ago (haven't used it in years, so I can't say much about it today). It was Webcontrol's demise that got me looking around. Rafi Hamid (formerly of Napleton - now vAuto) introduced me to Keith Latman over 3 years ago, and I started using iMagicLab ILM at that time. I was so happy with the ILM that I eventually convinced our entire auto group to adopt their CRM platform earlier this year.

We also have Dealer.com's Lead Machine on the backside of our website and that is a very good tool as well. It doesn't have the advanced features iMagicLab has, but you can certainly get the job done with it. If I had to get rid of iMagicLab tomorrow, I'd use Lead Machine.

----About our CRM search in early 2008-----
Before switching to iMagicLab CRM (previously AutoTown (1997-01) > AutoBase (2001-06) > ADP CRM (2006-08)) we looked at DealerSocket and eLeads heavily. DealerSocket has a fantastic CRM and service piece, but are seriously lacking on the ILM (not nearly as bad as AutoBase is lacking though). We had a very rough time with ADP CRM, and also felt DealerSocket had a look and feel too similar to it, so buy-in would have been more difficult. eLeads is a good looking tool! At the time, we heard too many horror stories about downtime and ruled them out. eLeads is the current leader in third-party BDC calling paired with a CRM...and they have some good cookies!

One thing to keep in mind with all CRM/ILM vendors is that they all have problems. The automotive industry is very demanding of these vendors because we have so many departments that are structured completely different (Sales, Service, Parts, Accounting, Bodyshop, Rental, Inventory) and stale DMS systems that complicate absolutely everything. I can't wait till someone builds a modern DMS, and shows us that DMS is not central to dealership technology - it is just a vault for clean information. When we shed that old "DMS is King" propaganda, we'll be able to do some amazing technological things! Getting back on topic...CRM/ILM providers have to code things to work with so many other parts and that is where these problems stem from. Just be aware of it, ready for it, and not afraid to call support in a patient manner.

Richard beat me to the punch- but I was exposed to AUTOJOCKEY a couple of years back, and it is a highly functional CRM that has the power you need to manage leads, set appointments, etc., and it is very affordable. I am not sure what our rate was, but I believe it was under $500/mo. Check them out at www.autojockey.com- they also have some other tools that can bring you more sales. They are also pretty responsive whenever you have a problem.