MDS Brand Blog

A CRM system can provide to your sales team the information they need to close deals, your marketing team data to market more effectively and your customer service team with the tools they need to service customers better. And yet, many companies believe a CRM isn’t worth it or that now isn’t the right time to implement a new system.

It’s a digital age and keeping up with changes in customer needs can be one of the largest challenges boat dealers face. The rolodex worked well when there were two main methods of communication: phones and snail mail.

Today, customers can reach out via phone, text message, email, social media, instant messaging and more. Keeping track of where relationships stand and when it’s the right time to follow up can feel overwhelming without a system for tracking and automating the process.

CRMs allow business the ability to track a customer’s sales history and monitor your sales efforts from a single dashboard that is designed for increasing efficiency of your sales department. However, as the market continues to grow, a modern CRM system needs much more than a client and sales preview.

Customer relationship management software, or CRM as it is commonly known, is a staple in modern organizations. Not only are CRMs linked with successful contact management, sales management, organizational productivity, etc., they also serve to improve relationships with prospects and existing clients. A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your consumers, which is why Gartner predicts that by 2021, CRM will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software.

However, the current business landscape is completely different from when CRMs initially started gaining popularity in the early 2000s. From how you produce, to how you sell – everything has undergone drastic changes in the past decade. This has inevitably affected how CRMs optimize your productivity and sales.

Business telephones are key for all moments of the day, with incoming and outgoing calls moving off the hook. One matter to consider is the most frequent locations where all of those incoming calls come from, for sales, customer service and more. There are many services and apps that help to record and report customer demographics via all of the incoming calls to your company’s phone lines, including Google Voice among many others.

A client’s relationship is likened to a fertilized chicken egg. As the owner, you have two options: break it and make a delicious omelet or incubate it to give rise to a chick. The latter option, you will need dedication (time) and means to do so. In the end, your efforts will not be futile; you might sell the hen at a good price or get more eggs. This simple analogy emphasizes the need to foster your consumers’ trust in your business rather than break it after a sale.

Learning the top 5 methods to increase customer retention can be one of the smartest moves you make for your dealership. Customer retention is one of the pillars of any long-standing business and any successful dealership owner will tell you, repeat customers are the lifeblood of your organization.

 All sales dealerships go through down times, and boat dealerships are no exception. But that doesn’t mean that your sales team should be sitting at their desks waiting for their phones to ring. This is a great time to get plenty of other things done. 

How are you following up with your leads? Are you calling the new leads that come in immediately or even in the same day? It can be hard to get in contact with these leads due to a dealerships busy schedule. Let's say you do call the lead within the same day, how is your follow up process? Do you call them back the next day? Or maybe next week? This is the conundrum for most dealerships.