By Timothy Lee, Regional Manager, Customer Success, Solera/DealerSocket

Have you checked out the health of your CRM lately? If you’re wondering how a CRM can be healthy or not, I’m referring specifically to the data in your CRM. In a healthy CRM, the data is clean, useful, and actionable. The only way this happens is with regular maintenance. Without regular maintenance, the data in your CRM becomes outdated and disorganized.

Unfortunately, less than 50 percent of data in the average dealership’s CRM database is useable. In most dealerships, a large portion of the data is either outdated or was never collected in the first place.

Is bad data costing you?

Outdated data can inhibit your ability to stay in touch with customers and generate new leads from repeat customers and lease turn-ins, as well as mine new opportunities from existing customers with equity in their vehicles. And when CRM rules aren’t maintained, leads can get funneled to the wrong place, causing delayed response times from your team and missed opportunities altogether.

Let’s do the math. With 1,000 potential leads per month, an average dealership with 45 percent outdated or missing data might achieve the following.

450 opportunities per month x 20% average close rate = 90 sold units

Let’s say this same dealership starts to collect more data, updates old data and maintains its CRM rules, keeping the data clean. More leads get worked, lead response time decreases and new opportunities are found in the database from existing customers. If 80 percent of your data is useable vs 45 percent, the new equation is as follows:

800 opportunities per month x 20% average close rate = 160 sold units per month

Do you think it’s worth the time to keep the data in your CRM updated and clean?

Benefits of a health check

The quality of CRM data directly contributes to the ability of your sales team to effectively do their jobs. Benefits of doing a periodic “health check” on your CRM data include:

—Enables metrics to be set based on historical performance instead of “guesstimates”
—Easier to hold teams accountable to their goals
—Improves reporting accuracy and decision-making
—Determines the most effective way to spend marketing dollars
—Increases lead volume and sales opportunities
—Builds better customer relationships

In every dealership, there is typically one staff member who is most responsible for managing CRM activities. This could be the sales or BDC manager, and is often referred to as the “CRM champion” or “CRM power user.” It is this person’s responsibility to create a checklist of activities to perform on a periodic basis, that will ensure your CRM data stays updated and clean.

A periodic health check list should include the following activities:

Annually

Update dealership contact information. Verify that the default contact information being sent out by each location is correct for that location. Too often the default contact setting is the dealer group’s primary location, which leads to missed inbound opportunities.

Quarterly and when employees are onboarded, offboarded or promoted

Update dealership users. Are users assigned to proper teams and roles? Do all users have email signatures and a DMS ID?
Are the lead/customer reassignment rules updated? Are opportunities being assigned to inactive or bucket users?
Are the right analytics/reports being automatically sent to the right individuals?
Lead source maintenance: Are all leads from third-party lead sources being routed to the correct individuals or teams? If auto-responders are active, are they accurate?
Are correct individuals set up to receive untouched web lead notifications? Are re-assignment rules based on a response timeframe?

Weekly

Merge lead and contact duplications. Are all leads being merged with deals? Are all sold deals reconciled? This is important to do weekly as employee pay plans are affected by having the correct leads associated with each deal.

As needed

Are all CRM integrations working? You should know quickly when an integration isn’t working correctly.

When it comes to setting goals for useable data, I recommend setting the bar high. If the goal is to get your CRM to 100 percent useful data, then you will likely reach and maintain 80-90 percent data accuracy. If the bar is set lower at 80 percent, you might just maintain a 60-70 percent data accuracy. So, aim high!

Your salespeople can only be as effective as the data they’re working with, so maintaining “healthy” CRM data for sales processes is critical.