Introduction

BMW Group Australia has selected DataMotive (a division of Carsales Ltd) and Vital Software to implement a Customer Relationship Management solution at all BMW dealerships in Australia.

The aim of the project is to provide a simple, effective lead management tools for use by dealership sales people coupled with sophisticated marketing and management reporting.

BMW CRM is an application based extensively on Vital Software’s ContactTracker automotive CRM solution, and featuring tight, bi-directional integration with DataMotive’s Autogate lead management system.

Prospect Management

A key driver for the implementation of the system across BMW dealerships is the area of prospect management. BMW dealerships currently use a multitude of systems (lead management, DMS, paper based logs) to manage prospects. BMW Group Australia is seeking to improve the effectiveness of prospect follow up by providing a simple to use system for the dealer sales force. The system has been designed to ensure that, once a prospect is logged, the sales person is prompted along the road to a sale. And, that once a prospect is logged, they cannot get lost.

Prospect management starts when the prospective customer first arrives at the dealership – this may be through walking in to the dealership, phoning in or through the Internet. DataMotive’s parent company, Carsales Ltd, operates the www.carsales.com.au automotive sales website. When customers express interest in a vehicle, this lead is delivered to the dealer through DataMotive’s Autogate system. With BMW CRM, this lead is delivered all the way through to the individual salesperson – and is then able to be managed by them immediately. Salespeople manage their prospects using milestones on the “Road to a Sale” – such as Face-to-face meeting, Test drive, Appraisal and Sale. All of this is implemented in BMW CRM. Salespeople mark off these milestones as they occur, and set activities and appointments for future milestones, ensuring that a customer is never forgotten or ignored.

Sales Managers and Dealer Principals have full visibility across the entire sales process.

Marketing

BMW CRM allows marketing managers to create target groups of customers for communicating with. Typical targets groups include prospects that test drove a BMW vehicle, customers that have just received their vehicle, and customers that have just had a vehicle serviced. BMW CRM allows for considerably more complexity than these examples, however. In many cases BMW dealerships host launch events for new models and the target selection may include “customers that have purchased a similar model three or more years ago; AND prospects that have expressed interest in this particular model in the last 30 days; AND prospects that have expressed interest in this series of vehicle but not purchased in the last three years”.

BMW CRM supports marketing activities conducted by regular postal mail, electronic mail and SMS. For regular postal mail, address cleansing and bar-coding may be performed. For electronic mail, BMW CRM allows marketing managers to track whether emails have been delivered, whether they have been opened and whether any links in the emails have been clicked. Full reports are available on all of these activities.

BMW CRM features an in-built recurring marketing mechanism which allows letters, emails and SMSes to be created once and sent on a regular basis. This dramatically reduces the workload within each dealership – all the operator need do is print the letters and post them.

Management Reporting

BMW CRM provides a series of reporting options for sales staff, sales managers and BMW Group Australia.

All use the same basic reporting structure ensuring consistency and enabling benchmarking at a staff level in dealerships and at a dealership level for BMW Group Australia.

Examples of reports developed for the system include:

– Enquiry levels (walk in, phone, etc)
– Lead conversions (by sales person)
– Lead status (where on the road to a sale)
– Lost lead reporting
– Conversion time frames