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Is Cloud Based Software Green Software?
Cloud based, or web based software, has quickly became the best way to deliver software to users. All new software products are now cloud based and there are virtually no limitations to web browser based software these days. Being that cloud based software doesn't require buying servers, that got me thinking... is it "green" software?
There are numerous advantages to cloud based software:
1. Better cross platform support - Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android... Just need a web browser
2. Painless upgrades - Always updated to the latest version of the software
3. Easy access and deployment - No servers or software to install. Just open your web browser and go.
4. Data is safer - Better security, redundancy and backups at data centers
5. Dealer groups - A centralized system allows better reporting than trying to run reports across many servers
Beyond these advantages did you ever think of cloud based or web based software as being "green"?
If 2,000 dealers buy a server based automotive CRM system they would have to buy 2,000 servers.
If 2,000 dealers buy a cloud based automotive CRM system, the vendor can host all of those dealers on less than 20 servers!
A cloud based system can easily host 100 dealers for every 1 server. That means a lot less servers have to purchased, supported, and backed up. That ultimately leads to lower costs and saves dealers "green". Fewer servers means much less electricity is used and fewer server end up in the trash, which is also a good "green" initiative.
If you buy 1 server for your dealership, you don't have any redundancy if the server fails, which it will do. Vendors who provide cloud based software automatically build redundancy in to their systems. To have redundancy it would take twice as many servers, which would be 4,000 servers, to do what 20 can do.
Vendors who provide web based software also continually upgrade their server hardware so you don't have to worry about buying new servers every few years or the speed of the system. Those of you who have a 10 year old CRM or DMS server that takes forever to run a report know what I am talking about. Vendors will also have servers that are much more powerful than what you would buy for your dealership. So the software will be even faster.
Going "green" usually takes more "green" to do. But for car dealers who are thinking about buying a web based CRM system, it can actually save them real "green". You can save a lot of money by not buying servers. You also don't have to worry about having an IT staff to manage them.
Cloud based software can save you "green" and be good for the environment by using less servers.
Matt Watson
Chief Technology Officer
VinSolutions
@mattwatson81
VinSolutions
VinSolutions Selected as Double Finalist for Driving Sales Innovation Cup
VinSolutions is excited to be a double finalist for the 2010 Driving Sales Innovation Cup. Our website dashboard and the industry changing VinLens were both selected as finalists. Below is some more information about these great innovations.
Website dashboard
VinSolutions created the industry's first website dashboard that combines website analytics (google analytics type reporting), call tracking stats, chat leads, website leads, and CRM conversion stats for appointments and sales. Most dealers can't even get all of these stats together, or they spend hours trying to accomplish it manually. From a single dashboard you can now evaluate the performance of your website.
VinLens
VinLens is an industry changing technology that allows dealers to understand the behavior of all the customers on their website. From your CRM you can now see what your customers are doing on your website at all times. Some great examples of how VinLens is a game changer:
- Reactivate lost and bad leads in your CRM when the customer re-engages you by visiting your website again
- Monitor in real time what your customers are doing on your website
- Text message or email sales people when they visit your website
- Review customer activity on your website as part of the sales process to understand their behavior online and tailor your conversations
- Provide dynamic web content on your website based on the customer's sales and service history
- Indentify original website traffic source for walk-in and phone leads
- Plus much more
We hope you join us at Driving Sales Executive Summit for the Innovation Cup!
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Increasing Email Conversion with Vehicle Details
Dealers send thousands of emails a month and have no way to track if customers are acting on those emails. I recently worked on a project to implement click tracking on the emails and wanted to share some of the results I have found.
Over 70% of the links clicked in emails were links to view more details about a specific vehicle. Links to view photos, videos, vehicle details, incentives, window stickers, etc.
These links drive the customer back to the dealer's website. This makes me believe that dealers who can embed vehicle details and links back to their website in emails will have higher closing ratios. Dealers need a CRM that allows them to email vehicle details with hyperlinks back to their website for the customer to view more information.
In future posts I will share more information and stats about how customers are interacting. VinSolutions unique CRM and website integration and our new VinLens product is providing some very interesting insight and statistics.
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Streamlining the Sales Process
Dealers use a variety of software applications as part of their sales process. Using too many software applications requires a lot of duplicate data entry and jumping through different tools. This can create errors and slow down the process.
Here is a scenario of how customer information flows through a typical deal:
- Customers submits a lead on the internet
- Lead transfers to Internet lead management tool which is used to set an appointment
- Customer comes to showroom and is entered manually in the CRM
- Customer is manually entered in to software for trade appraisal
- Customer is also manually entered in to desking software to create a proposal
- Customer is manually entered in to credit app and submitted to banks
- Sales documents must be printed via software or filled out by hand
- Customer is manually entered in DMS to do finance contract
There can be a lot of inefficiencies in this process. Dealers need to leverage technology that combines or integrates as many of these steps as possible to streamline the sales process.
Suggestions for improving the process:
- Never use more than one CRM system. For example, do not use a separate system for internet and showroom leads.
- Make sure all leads from all internet and phone lead sources get put in to your CRM electronically so they aren't manually entered
- Use a trade appraisal tool that is integrated with your CRM. Some CRMs have these functions built in or integrate with vAuto, AAX, Firstlook, etc.
- Use the desking module built in to your CRM since it is preloaded with all the customer and lead information
- Transfer from your CRM or desking system directly to DealerTrack or Route One, and/or pull credit reports via your CRM
- Use your CRM or desking tool to print sales documents like buyers orders, we owes, etc.
- Transfer the deal electronically from your desking tool directly to your DMS so F&I can finalize the deal
Automotive CRM applications can provide the functionality to complete most of these steps. Review your current processes and check with your CRM provider to see if there are ways to streamline your process.
Matt Watson
Chief Technology Officer
VinSolutions
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I ran across this blog post by Dr. Harish Kotadia and felt it was such a good read about Social CRM and wanted to share it. The original post can be found here: http://hkotadia.com/archives/2157
In one of my earlier post, I defined Social CRM as follows:
Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty. Loyalty is defined as attitude towards a brand that inclines a customer to repurchase it and/or recommend it to others. Social CRM and Social Media are more about building trust and managing loyalty with customers than about managing relationships or transactions, which are focus areas of “traditional” CRM.
I received a lot of great feedback on this definition and want to elaborate further on it to answer some of the questions raised by readers of this blog.
Let’s break-down the definition to its individual components:
1) Social CRM is the business strategy: It is not technology, tools or platform. Fundamentally, Social CRM is a business strategy. It is widely accepted by Social CRM practitioners and SMEs that Social CRM is a business strategy.
2) Engaging Customers through Social Media: Engagement through Social Media is the most important aspect of my definition. Any CRM related activity through existing channels like the telephone, email, snail mail etc.. will continue to be part of “traditional” CRM and will not be replaced by Social CRM (unless the Customer prefers to use Social Media instead of “traditional” channels).
Thus, Social CRM will augment “traditional” CRM, but will not replace it. And for some industries like health care or financial services, emphasis will continue to be more on “traditional” channels and not on Social ones for privacy related issues (who would want to tweet about their bank account or health condition). Traditional CRM channels will offer more private communication as compared to “public” Social CRM channels.
Having said Social CRM will augment traditional CRM and not replace it – let me add that Social CRM will be well integrated into overall CRM platform and systems with a 360 degree view of the Customer with feeds from all major Social channels. Customer will have a choice on what channels to use and organizations will reach out to the Customer based on that choice.
3) with goal of building trust and brand loyalty: Ultimate goal of Customer Engagement through Social Media is to build (a) Trust and (b) Brand Loyalty. I have used the word “Trust” before “Loyalty” for a reason because Social Media has introduced the “trust” dimension to marketing equation.
Before the Social Media age, Trust in marketing relationship was limited to face-to-face interactions (like friendly neighbourhood coffee shop or grocery shop). What Social Media has done is to make it possible for any one to have the same sort of one-to-one relationship irrespective of geography. This kind of one-to-one relationships based on mutual “trust” are not possible through “traditional” CRM channels like phone, mail or emails.
While “traditional” CRM helped manage Customer Relationships on a massive scale, it did not help in building mutual trust between buyers and sellers as it is impossible to build “trust” with thousands of customers over phone or mail. For building Trust, you need to know your partner well and not just be limited to mere “transactions” as was the case with “traditional” CRM. Social Media provides the opportunity to marketers to become “personal”, interact with thousands of customers spread across geography on one-to-one basis so that marketer and the customer get to know each other so well as to trust each other – the essence of a true relationship.
Second most important goal of Social CRM is to build Customer Loyalty – the ultimate goal of any business! Some have interpreted my definition as not being “customer focused” or “customer centric” or being “Social Media Centric”. This is not correct. The very fact that goal of Social CRM in my definition is to build Customer Loyalty implies that it is “Customer Centric” – as you cannot build loyalty without having a customer focus.
Hope this clarifies many questions that were raised regarding my definition of Social CRM. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Written by Dr. Harish Kotadia The original post can be found here: http://hkotadia.com/archives/2157
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After playing with Windows 7 for the last 48 hours, my first reaction is this is what Vista should have been! Overall, it isn't that much different than Windows Vista. If you have used Vista before, you will quickly be at home with Windows 7. Most of the changes are very subtle.
I was able to get my hands on the final Windows 7 release early because VinSolutions is a Microsoft Partner, so of course we get all the cool toys early. Windows 7 will be widely available October 22nd, 2009.
Windows 7 was designed to run on the netbooks that are all the rage these days. So it has been tweaked to be faster and use less RAM. It is noticeably snappier on my laptop and it comes out of hibernation much faster. The system requirements from Microsoft only say 1GB of RAM and a 1ghz processor. These are actually the same requirements Vista had, but Windows 7 should run a little faster than Vista did.
If the software you currently use works fine with Vista, you should be OK with upgrading to Windows 7. However, if you have Windows XP now and have never used Vista, you may still have a bumpy road ahead of you with making sure all of your applications will run on Windows 7. Be sure to check with your vendors before you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.
The biggest concern with switching to Windows 7 will be the new Internet Explorer 8. Windows 7 comes with Internet Explorer 8 and a lot of web applications that are used by dealerships still don't support Internet Explorer 8 or other browsers. These vendors need to get in gear and upgrade their sites to work with Internet Explorer 8. In a couple months dealerships will have a hard time buying a computer that doesn’t come with Windows 7.
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Matt Watson
VinSolutions (Co-Founder, Chief Technical Officer)
Automotive CRM Software, Inventory Management & Custom Dealer Website solutions provider
Twitter @mattwatson81 @VinSolutions @Automotive_CRM
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If you want to get better at something, you first have to know how well you're doing, right? How do you know how well you are doing? You have to be able to quantify it. Once you can quanity how you are doing, you can more effectively manage it.
CRM software is a great tool to monitor and measure the activity going on within your dealership. If you pull a showroom activity report and it says you are closing 90% of your ups, that doesn't mean you are doing a great job. It means your salespeople aren't using the system. Are they following up with the people that didn't buy that day? Could you sell more cars if they were?
If you want to improve how your store is performing, you have to get everyone using the CRM and use it's reporting to measure and track your success. Track your response times, closing ratios, appointment statistics and much more.
How can you manage what you can't measure? The problem is you don't know what you don't know.
Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Chief Technical Officer
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