As the second-generation owner of Frankman Motor Company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Cole Frankman built his 60-person operation on being meticulous about processes. But he realized something was missing.
Driving the news: "I didn't know how many phone leads at my store were never entered into the system," Frankman explained during his recent appearance on Daily Dealer Live. "Because they weren't juicy enough. Maybe somebody was self-qualifying it."
Frankman is admittedly "a big data guy" who likes all the software tools available to dealers. So, when he spotted this gap between call tracking and lead management, he decided to do something about it. He worked with Call Review to build a tool that automatically exports call records into an XML file and sends them to his dealership’s CRM.
How it works: “If somebody calls my store and they say, ‘hey, do you have any black F-150s?’ [and we respond], ‘No, we don't. We have some white ones,’ or whatever the call may be, [the tool will] say, ‘my salesman Cole took this phone call, spoke with this customer,’” Frankman explained.
“If it has a name, it'll say ‘Steve, Sam, talked about F-150s, didn't have any black ones, got some white ones.’ And it will take the customer name, the summary of the call, a link to the call, and it will put in an XML lead, and it submits to the CRM, just like any other lead,” he added.
Notably, Frankman says he worked with Call Review for four months to get the initial version working, and his dealership and the platform are now several versions past that point. Still, they continue to make regular tweaks to the system to make it even better.
Another way to think about this, Frankman explains, is that leads are essentially compiled as if they were like a template of a CarGurus lead, giving dealerships centralized data about leads that might have previously fallen through the cracks.
“It's the same thing. It's just giving you a summary of the phone call—every phone call,” he said.
Why it matters: Using this tool, salespersons, service personnel, and inventory managers alike can catch every single call that comes through in the CRM without having to manually sift through them. This lets them offer more follow-ups, additional details on inventory and when certain models are arriving, and other pertinent information for holding onto those customer leads.
Bottom line: Effective call tracking and data centralization in the CRM aren’t just a means to get more customer leads, but they also play key roles in turning prospective customers, who might otherwise be missed, into buyers.
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