Why dealership test drive apps might be ruining your finance penetration

Every dealer knows that the business manager is one of the most important positions within a sales team, not only because of their ability to generate significant income but also as a link between the sale of the vehicle and other important areas such as aftermarket and pre-delivery.

To be as effective as possible, a business manager is best placed if they are intimately involved in the sale of vehicles and imbedded into the showroom processes. An important trend over the past decade has been for savvy dealerships to get their business manager introduced to the prospective client as early in the sales process as possible. Once such technique is to have the business manager process test drives, this is especially handy if there is a trade-in involved.

When processing the test drive, business managers have an informal opportunity to ask qualified questions relating to the financing and insurance of their current vehicle, encumbrance queries, invoice requirements and finance options with their prospective car. In addition, if the client does progress with the sale, the client is likely to be much more comfortable and open to personal questions when sensitive finance related questions need answering.    

However, dealer test drive applications are making this more and more difficult as they are often designed specifically for salesperson tracking and require the user to be the assigned salesperson.

That is why drivible has endeavoured to be as flexible as possible around many dealers’ sales processes and road to sale.

The first feature of drivible that allows this is the ability for a specific user (Business Manager) to assign the client or test drive to another user (Salesperson). The client accepts the terms and conditions on their own smartphone (not the salesperson) so anyone in the dealership can process the test drive.

While the business manager is best placed to process the test drive and explain the terms and conditions, they are not the best resource to have accompanying the client on the test drive. With many test drive applications, this is not possible because the application forces the user to track the test drive through a native smart phone application. Some vendors, encourage the salesperson to hand over their personal device to the business manager for processing, but this ignores that someone’s phone is often a personal possession of the user and this recommendation rarely is acted upon. The drivible test drive application works on any browser both on PC’s and smartphones and doesn’t require the user to use their own personal device.  

The second feature that encourages the business manager as the focal point, is the ability to upload a dealerships existing test drive form into drivible for cataloguing, search and reports. Many dealers have been using physical test drive forms forever and in many cases there isn’t any need to ditch them for a restricted test drive application. With drivible, there is no reason why your business manager can’t continue processing the test drive forms and they simply upload them securely for all the dealership reporting.

And finally, the third feature is the ability to automatically track if the business manager has had contact or an introduction to the prospective client. In drivible, the business manager has a special login which records every time they view, edit or process a client in the system. This then is used in many reports which can represent which clients are being seen and introduced to the business manager. Many other CRM applications, require a physical box ticking by the business manager, whereas in drivible it is automated.

Drivible is the only test drive application and CRM that encourages finance performance.