What Is a Dealer CRM?
Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are software tools companies use to help them manage their customer relationships. These solutions also help them execute marketing strategies and foster relationships with both leads and customers.
In the case of auto dealership CRMs, they serve as particularly powerful hubs for collecting and guiding target car shoppers toward test drives and other conversations with sales reps. The ultimate goal is to help the customer along their car buying journey.
CRMs can house a ton of useful data to aid your sales process, but manually sifting through it all can be exhausting. Now equipped with AI and machine learning algorithms, today’s sales CRMs are able to better organize, interpret, and build practical action plans around dealership-specific data.
Ways AI Can Help a Car Dealership
Where traditional marketing methods once attempted to brute-force their way into a potential car buyer’s path, today’s AI-assisted methods are considerably more advanced. With AI CRM solutions, dealers can develop detailed profiles of prospective leads. Better profiles lead to more accurate targeting and relevant messaging, which in turn produce better customer experiences, shorter sales cycles, and more car sales.
With CRM software powering a dealership’s lead gen efforts, auto dealers can raise productivity and efficiency levels across virtually every department.
How AI Can Take Care of a Car Dealer CRM
AI can help car dealerships get the most from their CRMs and create automation processes to improve sales and lead quality. Here are a few ways AI directly improves CRM effectiveness for auto dealerships:
Writing
There’s more copy involved in a car dealership’s marketing than you may realize. Site pages, email outreach, video scripts, product descriptions and more can all be developed (or enhanced) by current AI writing tools. As much as we’d like customers to seek out specific dealerships by name, most of the time they’re entering “car dealership near me” into a search engine and skimming the top results.
When used appropriately, AI-assisted copy uses relevant keywords and search terms integrated into each landing page, boosting a dealership’s search ranking on the results page. And when your dealership shows up higher in search, you get more car shopper eyes on your inventory and your business.
Reporting
AI’s reporting capabilities are both comprehensive and actionable. By plugging a command into a CRM to pull monthly sales figures or YoY insurance costs, AI can simultaneously grab the relevant data and interpret any below-the-surface trends.
Presenting car sales data in its raw form alongside the factors most likely influencing its rise and fall over time spares car dealers from digging blindly through more granular reports to figure out why certain trends occur. Plus, there’s still the option to tinker with various filters within the CRM even after AI presents its findings.
Emails
Email outreach consists of more than targeted messaging. The best CRMs will also study the best times to send emails to certain personas, the optimal frequency to “bump” emails to encourage a reply, and when customers represent a particularly valuable opportunity for the BDC or sales team to take over.
Insights
Data is at the core of any good automotive marketing, but too much data can be unmanageable. If there’s one thing AI excels at, it’s finding patterns hidden deep within a lead management system’s sea of data.
Once identified, AI can supply insights to guide the sales team’s next steps. Perhaps certain customers demonstrate a tendency to respond to weekend phone calls or morning messages. If so, AI can find out which customer types these are, where current leads fit, and how best to nurture them based on what has worked historically.
Data Capture
AI keeps tabs on customer communications without the risk of human error. That means no incorrectly typed email addresses, misspelled names, or outdated phone numbers. Dealerships demonstrate an added measure of professionalism and confidence when they appear up-to-date on who a customer is and which information is most relevant to them.
Call Insights
Analyzing calls is like reviewing a game film; nothing exposes tendencies (good or bad) quicker than reviewing your sales efforts in action. Today’s AI software can take a call recording and tell you how soon you get to the topic of appointment setting, how long you get stuck in the weeds discussing some small aspect of financing, and even serve as a training tool for new hires looking for tips on navigating a certain concern or objection.
Data Cleansing
Anyone familiar with CRMs likely knows what a pain it can be to clear out duplicate contacts, update client information, and keep pipelines clear of outdated opportunities. Depending on your AI tool of choice, they can be set to flag, archive, or eliminate data clogging up your CRM to keep the wheels of your dealership’s sales process turning smoothly.
6 Best AI Car Dealer CRMs
There’s no shortage of options for CRMs available to auto dealers today. We pieced together a quick overview of six commonly used CRM tools, including their biggest benefits within the automotive space and a few key features dealers might be especially interested in.
HubSpot
What it does well: HubSpot CRM is a do-it-all AI tool best suited for lead management, market analysis, and targeted marketing campaigns.
How auto dealerships can benefit: It’s tough to sell a customer on a test drive if you aren’t in touch. HubSpot takes on the task of outbound car dealer communications, and it doesn’t hurt that with such a massive following it’s compatible with pretty much everything.
Key features: Easy to use, scalable, solid reputation for secure data storage
What it costs: CRM Suite starts at $30/month
Zoho – Zia
What it does well: Predict the future. Okay, maybe not with crystal-ball precision, but still — accurate demand forecasting is a useful tool in every car dealer’s belt. Designed with sales teams in mind, Zoho’s whole purpose is to streamline sales processes and give teams more time with in-person clients.
How auto dealerships can benefit: Zoho’s track record of fine-tuned predictive insights into customer behavior set it near the top of the CRM food chain.
Key features: Lead grades, real-time insights, spares you the hassle of data entry
What it costs: Zia CRM starts at $14/month
Salesforce – Einstein GPT
What it does well: Like most of Salesforce’s software tools, AI language model “Einstein” can be fully tailored to what you need it to do — so long as you can navigate the UI and have some coding chops.
How auto dealerships can benefit: Einstein actually features a set of proprietary models, each with a shared connection to ChatGPT, as a means of generating content more to the liking of whichever team happens to be using it (marketing, sales, or service).
Key features: Personalized messaging generation, optimized sales team actions, models built for segmented departments
What it costs: Variable (requires contact with customer support)
Pipedrive – Sales Assistant
What it does well: Emphasizes accurate forecasting, through (as the name suggests) top-flight pipeline creation and maintenance tools. It’ll also grade prospects for you so you don’t accidentally spend hours prepping for appointments that never show.
How auto dealerships can benefit: Even the best dealership CRM can’t do much to move the needle if nobody uses it. “Pipedrive Academy” is an invaluable resource for training teams on getting the most from their new CRM — even if they’re not sure what a CRM is or why they need it.
Key features: Training portal, pipeline cleanliness automation, nice UI for reports and tracking
What it costs: Starts at $12.50/month
Freshworks – Freddy Copilot
What it does well: Copilot will draft smart ticket summaries and responses for sales agents looking to cut down on time spent answering frequently asked questions, helping customers receive rapid replies (and preserving the sales agents’ sanity).
How auto dealerships can benefit: Freddy works best as a communication enhancer. It’s able to expand or rephrase customer service responses but allows users the final say before pressing “send” to maintain a human component between dealers and car buyers.
Key features: Email generator, response assist, conversation summarizer, OOO detector
What it costs: Starts at $15/month
Nutshell – Power AI
What it does well: Nutshell’s CRM fits any small-to-medium-sized business looking for some customizable sales team support in a neat UI-friendly package.
How auto dealerships can benefit: Ease of use ranks highly on the list of Nutshell CRM perks, as does access to unlimited data, leads, and contacts at the entry-level price point.
Key features: Email marketing tools, integrations, web form creator
What it costs: Starts at $16/month
What You Should Look For When Searching an AI Car Dealer CRM
Whatever your priorities might be when it comes to selecting the best CRM for your dealership, three core functionalities ought to be considered non-negotiables for any tool meant to assist service and sales reps:
Natural Language Processing
CRMs driven by AI software should be easy to communicate with and even easier to understand. Responses should always use clear and concise language.
Generative AI
Much of a CRM’s usefulness comes into play when messaging customers, either via email follow-ups or direct responses to questions and concerns. Generative AI is essential for preserving the time and attention of your sales reps.
Real-time Research and Data
Reporting is often cited as a perk of any CRM wanting your business, but accurate reporting based on recent figures is where the real advantage can be found. Be sure your chosen CRM bases its forecasts and reports on the most recent, accurate data available.
Podium’s AI BDC
Sold on your dealership’s need for AI in the days ahead? Podium’s best-in-class AI BDC answers customer questions instantly (even the complicated ones), steers more prospective buyers toward more test drives, and keeps sales agents on the floor doing what they do best.
Get a demo today!
