Are your customer management, desking and lending processes helping or hurting your dealership? Year-end is not just about winterizing RV units. This is the perfect time to identify outdated tech or underutilized tools that may be slowing things down.
With the right systems, you can head into the new season ready for success. Evaluate your operations now to gain the insight and direction you need to make smarter decisions and stop leaving money on the table.
Sales Strategies
First, let’s talk about sales.
Consider whether your current processes and procedures enable you to:
Keep All Customer Info in One Place
Siloed departments increase the chances of losing or inputting conflicting customer information, duplicating data and causing organizational mayhem. Now is the time to leave behind using multiple spreadsheets, sticky notes and shared drives to manage your dealership’s data.
Modern dealer management system (DMS) platforms can consolidate every touchpoint into a single customer profile. Having a centralized hub makes it easy for any team member to pick up where another left off, ensuring a seamless, personalized experience for each buyer.
Track Customer Interactions and Preferences
With various lead sources and disconnected customer records across your dealership, tracking customer interactions becomes nearly impossible. When an online conversation turns into an in-person visit, your sales force has to be able to pick up where the customer left off.
Effective dealer management processes should provide insight into every customer interaction, from initial contact to service visits and beyond. With a fully integrated CRM in your DMS, you can maintain a 360-degree view of the customer journey. The overview keeps your employees aligned and improves customer engagement and satisfaction.
In addition, by inputting their preferences (budget, model, features), your system will automatically pull up the in-stock RVs that match their criteria. This speeds up the sales process and creates a smoother, more satisfying buyer experience.
Automate Responses and Alerts
Timely follow-up is critical in today’s increasingly competitive markets.
As the digital age advances, customers’ response-time expectations do, too. Leaving customer inquiries unanswered risks losing their interest altogether.
Automated email replies enable customers to continue through the sales funnel even outside business hours, saving your team time and effort. Automatic callback reminders and activity tracking keep your sales team ahead of the game.
Empower Sales With Customization and Flexibility
No two salespeople work the same way, but some tools and processes lack customization capabilities, forcing everyone to use an interface cluttered with unnecessary tabs and information.
Customizing and saving
DMS screen layouts will help you eliminate wasted clicks and information overload. Whether you are prioritizing the tabs used the most or modifying your quick links menu, effective platform navigation is essential for optimized customer service and employee productivity. Tailored views make daily tasks more intuitive and efficient, especially during peak sales periods.
In a mobile-first world, flexibility is essential. A mobile-compatible DMS lets your team access tasks, contacts and deal info from anywhere, whether working a weekend event, following up on leads from the road or adding new prospects to the system.
Add Multiple Units to a Single Deal
Deal structuring is pivotal in closing successfully and maximizing revenue potential.
A smooth process accelerates decisions and builds buyer confidence, while disjointed experiences cause hesitation.
If your team is unable to bundle RVs and accessories, you increase the risk of misquotes or missed charges. Then, employees are stuck manually adding or adjusting contracts later, resulting in excess paperwork and potential errors.
Your DMS should streamline the desking experience. With the ability to structure complex deals, including multi-unit sales, trade-ins and add-ons, your team can present compelling offers with minimal friction.
Analyze, Track, and Export Results With Custom Reports and Dashboards
If you can measure it, you can improve it, but why spend countless hours manually collecting data?
A DMS can generate prebuilt, tailored reports in a fraction of the time. Rather than assigning employees to tedious tasks, your team can focus on larger initiatives. Reports and real-time dashboards align managers and sales reps on goals by identifying trends or gaps needing attention.
Having this ability to generate on-demand reports is game-changing. With a few clicks in your DMS, you can export the information in a common format like Excel. This eliminates the need to transfer information to and from different platforms manually.
Seamlessly Communicate With Team Members
Whether you are on the sales floor or out on the lot, built-in DMS communication tools enable you to message directly within the platform. Internal messages ensure quick coordination between sales, F&I and management. Team members quickly review past correspondences and address follow-up tasks.
F&I Strategies
Now, we will cover F&I.
Consider whether your current processes and procedures enable you to:
Pull in Deal Information from Your DMS
The handoff between sales and F&I is one of the most critical moments in the deal. However, the handoff to F&I often leaves customers waiting while your team tracks down appropriate forms, reviews notes from sales and copies any customer information to begin the signing ceremony.
Automatically pulling deal information from your DMS into your documentation saves time, eliminates duplicate data entry and reduces errors. The F&I team can pick up where sales left off, with accurate buyer, RV and pricing info in place.
Include Aftermarket Products in the Deal
Offering aftermarket products such as extended service contracts, tire and wheel protection, or GAP coverage is a key profit center. You may struggle to present the options clearly and add the costs to the deal without consistent menu integrations.
Including provider pricing within your menu presentation enables you to quote consistently and confidently. This builds customer trust and supports higher product penetration through transparent, well-explained options.
Review Top Lenders and Requirements
Not all lenders are a match for every borrower or RV. Selecting the right lender typically requires your employees to submit separate applications to multiple lending sources, just to confirm their loan requirements.
Using a tool that clearly shows available lenders and whether the applicant meets the minimum credit score, total loan amount, RV type and other criteria avoids wasting time submitting deals to lenders that will not be approved. Instead, you can route deals to lenders who are most likely to say “yes,” speeding up approvals.
Gather Relevant Documents and Fees
From credit checks to titling and registration, documentation requirements and fees vary by municipality, county, state and lender. Your employees likely have to manually collect and print documentation, hoping they have the most updated version. When you do not have the right forms, you may need to re-contract, eat chargebacks or try to get customers to pay the remaining balance. None is an ideal situation for profitability or customer satisfaction.
Your lending system should automatically identify and gather the correct forms based on the buyer’s address and the selected lender. With the right forms, you are never missing a required document or miscalculating fees, enabling the deal to progress without unnecessary delays.
Electronically Review and Sign Documents
Lender, state and federal requirements for electronic signatures are complex and ever-evolving. Printing and mailing every form could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year in misprinted or unnecessary forms and mailings.
If you implement an eSigning tool, the legal standards for digital or wet-ink signatures for each document are automatically noted. You can present the correct forms, collect all signatures and store them in an auditable format. The process reduces compliance risk, cuts wasteful printing and mailing expenses and improves your customers’ signing experience.
Track Contract Funding Status
After submitting a contract, you might not know its status until you receive funding or return documentation. Every deal in transit adds up to financial risk and insecurity.
Visibility into contracts in transit and their funding status is essential. Real-time tracking shows whether a contract has been received, reviewed, approved or flagged for follow-up. Your team can proactively resolve issues and prevent deals from stalling in the final stretch.
Customize Email and Text Alerts for Lender Callbacks
If you implement all the other benefits listed above, your deals will hopefully close easily on the first try. If a deal is marked with a lender callback, how quickly do you know you need to rework the deal?
Setting up alerts for lender callbacks enables you to respond quickly to questions or missing information. Whether the request is for income verification or a signature correction, getting notified immediately keeps the deal moving, reduces funding delays, and keeps your customers engaged.
Set Up for Success
Even though we are a few months out from the new year, sales are already slowing down.
Soon, you will be winterizing your units. Take this time to “winterize” your sales and F&I processes to uncover gaps in profitability, compliance, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
By implementing processes and platforms that solve those gaps, you can set your dealership up for success.
Tyler Kelly is the manager of recreational dealer sales for AppOne, bringing over 15 years of experience in recreational lending and sales. Since joining the AppOne team in 2013, he has held key roles in dealer sales and corporate account management.
