Product News & Updates
Check out the latest VinSolutions product news and updates to help you make the most of your products and help your dealership succeed.
September 2023
Quick Tip: Sourcing Inventory in Service Appointment Dash
Maximize Customer Lifetime Value with These Best Practices
Chase Abbott, Vice President of Sales for Dealer Software at Cox Automotive, sits down with Automotive News to talk about using data at scale to combat the challenges that dealers are currently facing.
All Customer Communication, All in One Place
The new Customer Inbox is available through Automotive Marketing Platform’s Opportunity List that was released earlier this year. The Customer Inbox combines all communication across phone, email, and text messaging into a single location.
Dealers can benefit from having everything in one spot, and quickly engage with customers through their preferred means of communication and reduce shuffling through screens
Keep Your Customer Communications in One Place with the New Customer Inbox
Tired of jumping around different tools to manage emails, texts, and phone calls with your customers? The new Customer Inbox, now available with Automotive Marketing Platform, consolidates all your customer communications into one place, making it easier to connect with your customers and see conversation history across multiple channels.
Prepare for Your Quarterly Meetings with New Enterprise Marketing Reports
Newly enhanced reporting for Automotive Marketing Platform now enables dealer groups with up to 20 stores to view rolled up marketing reports. This enterprise view helps you streamline the process of preparing group-wide reports, and enables you to quickly evaluate performance across all of your rooftops.
Quick Tip: Preserve Gross with Stronger Pencils
Trade-in valuation can be a sticking point, and many customers need to be reassured they are getting a square deal. Performance Manager Jon Miles shows how you can reduce trips to the sales desk with proactive objection handling.
Adopt the Strategies of Today’s Most Successful Dealers
Automotive Marketing Platform’s Opportunity List is a new feature designed to help dealership personnel find and engage customers as opportunities who have interacted with campaign messaging. These opportunities are defined by a predetermined set of criteria combined with their engagement activity and behavior.
This dynamic list of opportunities helps assigned personnel at dealerships like Business Development Reps or Salespeople focus their time and energy on your highest priority customers that have engaged with AMP campaigns and highlight which customers they need to personally connect with.
The Opportunity List is available to all dealers using Automotive Marketing Platform and Standalone Automotive Marketing Platform.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Automotive Marketing Platform Reporting Enhancements
- Service Direct Leads and Service Indirect Leads: Distinguish which consumers engaged with campaigns before they came into the dealership for service as well as consumers who requested service directly from an Automotive Marketing Platform campaign.
- Opportunities: Quickly get insights on the number of created, active, completed, and missed opportunities, so you can make sure that no opportunity is missed. Get even deeper insights by viewing when opportunities were completed as well as identifying which campaigns generated the opportunity.
Quick Tip: Self Help in Connect CRM
Looking for ways to boost your CRM activity? VinSolutions Performance Manager David Basil explains how to use the Team Performance Dashboard to assess your team’s inbound and outbound communications – and identify opportunities for improvement.
Adopt the Strategies of Today’s Most Successful Dealers
Automotive Marketing Platform’s Opportunity List is a new feature designed to help dealership personnel find and engage customers as opportunities who have interacted with campaign messaging. These opportunities are defined by a predetermined set of criteria combined with their engagement activity and behavior.
This dynamic list of opportunities helps assigned personnel at dealerships like Business Development Reps or Salespeople focus their time and energy on your highest priority customers that have engaged with AMP campaigns and highlight which customers they need to personally connect with.
The Opportunity List is available to all dealers using Automotive Marketing Platform and Standalone Automotive Marketing Platform.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Northtown Automotive Uses Connect Automotive Intelligence to Deliver Ultimate Car Buying Experience
Automotive Marketing Platform’s Opportunity List is a new feature designed to help dealership personnel find and engage customers as opportunities who have interacted with campaign messaging. These opportunities are defined by a predetermined set of criteria combined with their engagement activity and behavior.
This dynamic list of opportunities helps assigned personnel at dealerships like Business Development Reps or Salespeople focus their time and energy on your highest priority customers that have engaged with AMP campaigns and highlight which customers they need to personally connect with.
The Opportunity List is available to all dealers using Automotive Marketing Platform and Standalone Automotive Marketing Platform.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Quick Tip: Accelerate Your CRM Activity
Looking for ways to boost your CRM activity? VinSolutions Performance Manager David Basil explains how to use the Team Performance Dashboard to assess your team’s inbound and outbound communications – and identify opportunities for improvement.
Prioritize Customers in your Automotive Marketing Platform Campaigns with the New Opportunity List
Automotive Marketing Platform’s Opportunity List is a new feature designed to help dealership personnel find and engage customers as opportunities who have interacted with campaign messaging. These opportunities are defined by a predetermined set of criteria combined with their engagement activity and behavior.
This dynamic list of opportunities helps assigned personnel at dealerships like Business Development Reps or Salespeople focus their time and energy on your highest priority customers that have engaged with AMP campaigns and highlight which customers they need to personally connect with.
The Opportunity List is available to all dealers using Automotive Marketing Platform and Standalone Automotive Marketing Platform.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Quick Tip: Identify Missed Opportunities in the Dealer Dashboard
Get an instant view of all unanswered customer texts and emails within the Connect CRM Dealer Dashboard. Watch the video to see how this Unanswered Communications report can help you make more appointments, maximize engagement, and sell more cars.
Track Your Marketing Influence with New Sales Lead Reporting
See how many sales leads resulted from your Automotive Marketing Platform campaigns with new reporting. This increased visibility helps you evaluate Automotive Marketing Platform’s influence on your lead volumes and make more informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Keep Your Customer Communications in One Place with the New Customer Inbox
Tired of jumping around different tools to manage emails, texts, and phone calls with your customers? The new Customer Inbox, now available with Automotive Marketing Platform, consolidates all your customer communications into one place, making it easier to connect with your customers and see conversation history across multiple channels.
Prepare for Your Quarterly Meetings with New Enterprise Marketing Reports
Newly enhanced reporting for Automotive Marketing Platform now enables dealer groups with up to 20 stores to view rolled up marketing reports. This enterprise view helps you streamline the process of preparing group-wide reports, and enables you to quickly evaluate performance across all of your rooftops.
Quick Tip: Identify Vehicles of Interest with Connect Automotive Intelligence
VinSolutions Performance Manager David Basil explains how Connect Automotive Intelligence helps you accelerate the path to purchase with Buying Signals that show you relevant vehicle recommendations that lead customers to the right car, sooner.
Learn more ways Connect Automotive Intelligence delivers unmatched insights that can help your dealership uncover more leads and improve the customer experience below.
Quick Tip: Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions
Learn more about how Automotive Marketing Platform can enhance your CRM from VinSolutions Performance Manager David Basil.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Your dealership has dozens of service appointments every day. With today’s lack of used vehicle inventory, you’ve got to make every contact an opportunity. With Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions, you can connect with those customers 100 percent of the time, with a personalized message tailored to each customer.
Inventory issues continue to challenge your dealers seeking to find Certified Pre-owned vehicles. With Automotive Marketing Platform’s powerful data-driven workflows from exclusive consumer insights, combined with support from a dedicated Marketing Account Manager, your dealership can engage customers with personalized marketing that drives higher engagement.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
New Integration Enhancement for VinSolutions and Accelerate My Deal
VinSolutions dealers that also have Dealer.com Accelerate My Deal will now have better visibility into customer shopping activity to understand how they craft their deals in Accelerate My Deal. Starting this December, all shopper activity within Accelerate My Deal will sync back to VinSolutions in real-time prior to the customer submitting an offer or lead on a vehicle.
This enhancement will help dealers re-engage customers who have abandoned the Accelerate My Deal workflow and gain insights into the same deal they were working on to help further personalize engagement to get them re-engaged to close the deal.
In addition, this new enhancement will also add additional value to VinSolutions Automotive Intelligence by providing increased data on customer Buying Signals.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
VinSolutions and Kelley Blue Book have partnered to introduce a new Key Information Banner in Connect CRM when a consumer completes an Instant Cash Offer. The banner will display that the consumer has received an Instant Cash Offer. Clicking on it will load the full offer details, including price, vehicle history, condition, and other details. This enhancement gives visibility to what the consumer received as an Instant Cash Offer in the CRM. Historically this information was difficult to find consistently between lead notes and raw lead data. Users now have a single place to view the details of submitted Instant Cash Offers. To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details. |
FordDirect has recently agreed to allow the retrieval of consumer insights from dealerships’ websites using Pixall. This consumer data is utilized through VinSolutions Connect Automotive Intelligence and Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions to provide dealers with real-time insights to further improve the car buying experience for their customers through personalization. Benefits to this update includes:
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details. |
Dealers can now utilize new marketing channels with Automotive Marketing Platform Direct Mail and Text Message Marketing. With these added channels, dealers can implement automated, omni-channel campaigns that are personalized for each individual customer, boosting engagement and enhancing the car-buying experience. “Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions has helped our dealership increase unit sales using equity mining. The tool has also benefited our service department by increasing appointments and revenue.” Tania Cruz, Internet Director/BD Manager Bluebonnet Ford |
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
A new insights reporting dashboard is now available to all VinSolutions dealers. The Team Performance Dashboard is a new one-stop shop for managers, providing a centralized view for evaluating overall team performance.
Enhancement features include:
- Glanceable information: Quickly determine if your team is on track with multiple visualizations
- Drill down details: Drill into key data points for further insights
- Team numbers: Set monthly targets with a data panel
- Create versions and scheduled reports: Set up a report for each of your teams and have them emailed to you on a recurring basis
- Report type filter: View data with a Salesperson or BD Agent focus
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Provide an even better seamless car-buying experience from online to your dealership’s showroom. Dealers with Connect CRM and Kelley Blue Book Instant Cash Offer can now receive appointment requests right from within their CRM. This enhancement will help with quicker customer engagement to confirm appointments and enhanced customer experience.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
Automotive Marketing Platform Approved by 20+ OEM Co-op Programs
Deliver a personalized marketing experience across every stage of the car-buying journey with Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions.
Automotive Marketing Platform is now approved by more than 20+ OEM co-op programs and counting!
To find out more about Automotive Marketing Platform or how to claim or reallocate reimbursement funds to maximize your marketing results, contact your Performance Manager for details.
New enhancements to Connect CRM Insights Pace Report are now available. Dealers now have access to new Breakouts Sections for both the Current and Comparison timeframes. These sections provide additional insight into the data that makes up the aggregate rows without drilling into another page.
In addition, new fields can now be selected on the Summary Options filter to give users more flexibility when grouping data for analysis. Previously, the report was grouped only by Dealer.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
To assist dealers with their vehicle acquisition strategies and streamline sales efforts, five new fields have been added to Connect Automotive Buying Signals dashboard to add customers’ predicted trade-in vehicle details, and are available for immediate use for VinSolutions dealers with Connect Automotive Intelligence.
The additional fields include predicted trade-in a vehicle’s year, make, and model, as well as trade-in confidence and likelihood of that customer to have a trade-in vehicle.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager for details.
New Sold On-Order Process Enhancement for Connect CRM
Did you know a new enhancement for Connect CRM was released last month? This new update enables you to create follow-up processes for Sold On-Order deals. Take advantage of this new feature to help you adapt to market changes due to inventory challenges as Sold-On Order sales continue to increase.
To learn more about this enhancement, contact your Performance Manager.
Dealer User Summit Recap
If you missed our Dealer User Summit 2021, no worries! You can still watch all the recorded sessions from the event. Check out the session highlights to learn the secrets of selling in a digital world, using the technologies you already have.
VinSolutions dealers now have access to a recently launched enhancement to the Dealertrack F&I integration. With this integration enhancement, users can create and update leads from Connect Desking and Customer Dashboard. In addition, this new functionality streamlines the workflow for sending lead data from the Customer Dashboard, which will reduce duplicates within Dealertrack.
Additional benefits for Dealertrack credit leads:
- Full buyer and co-buyer details along with vehicle and trade details, which means less reentering of essential information
- Ability to update credit leads, which will reduce duplicate credit leads submitted to Dealertrack
Deliver a personalized marketing experience across every stage of the car buying journey with Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions. Automotive Marketing Platform has been approved by more than a dozen OEM co-op reimbursement programs.
Approved OEM Programs:
- Buick • Chevrolet • Chrysler • Dodge • Fiat • Ford • GMC • Jaguar
- Land Rover • Jeep • Lincoln • Mazda • Porsche • Ram • Hyundai
To find out more program details, contact your Performance Manager.
Starting this month, CRM users will experience a more modern UX in Connect CRM, including new and improved navigation and header menu. This update consists of a new dark theme option for the top navigation menu, as well as new search capabilities added to the dealer switcher. These updates improve the overall UX across tablets and smaller device screens and overall styling throughout the CRM. If you have questions about this update, please contact your Performance Manager for more details.
Coming soon, Connect Desking dealers will be able to present two deal scenarios side-by-side within the same proposal using QuickPrint and Preview. A new option will be available to edit scenarios to choose different available payments to compare. Once options are selected, the proposal in Preview will update and be ready to print, email, or text message to your customers. Additionally, deal proposals will be saved in the notes of the customer CRM record.
To learn more about Connect Desking and the multiple proposals enhancement, contact your Performance Manager.
Accelerate My Deal, Dealer.com’s digital retailing solution, helps dealers provide a flexible retailing experience. The solution now offers new functionality for customers to securely upload and manage personal documents after submitting a deal from your website. Customers can share their driver’s license, proof of insurance, W2, and paystubs, which saves time in store and minimizes document management errors. Salespeople are notified of uploaded documents via email or text, and through Accelerate My Deal’s integration with VinSolutions Connect CRM, users are assigned tasks to review and check in the documents.
To learn more about Accelerate My Deal and the shopper document upload enhancement, please contact your Performance Manager.
eliver a personalized marketing experience across every stage of the car buying journey with Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions. Dealers with Connect CRM and Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions can now market to customers who have scheduled service appointments, giving you an additional opportunity to acquire used vehicle inventory and increase sales.
Want to know more? Contact Your Performance Manager
Connect CRM now allows a co-buyer to be added to a lead directly from the Customer Dashboard. This will save you time, allowing salespeople to use quick search functionality to look up existing customers. If a customer already exists in the CRM, you can now quickly add them as a co-buyer without the need to enter additional information, preventing duplicates.
Dealers with Connect CRM and Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions can now enable settings to automatically create leads from Automotive Marketing Platform emails directly in the CRM. When your dealership’s customers engage with personalized emails, a unique link can be added as the call-to-action in the email. Consumers will not need to enter any additional information and can be used with processes created in your CRM for assigning follow up by your team. This enhancement can be utilized in emails for new car sales, service campaigns, and targeting older leads.
The Connect Mobile app has been enhanced with a new driver’s license scanner that is faster, easier to use, and more accurate. Users will no longer be required to tap to capture an image of the driver’s license; it will capture images automatically once the license is visible. Once the scanner opens, simply follow the on-screen prompts to position the driver’s license in frame and flip it over to scan the back.
Did you know you can now select various locations in Connect CRM when scheduling appointments to provide flexibility for changing consumer preferences? Whether setting up a sales appointment, a vehicle delivery, an appraisal, or any other type of appointment, you can now choose whether that will be at the dealership, the customer’s address, virtual, or remote.
Expand your Demand! Streamline Your Deals with a Seamless Deal Workflow
The integration between VinSolutions’ Connect CRM and Cox Automotive Digital Retailing allows you to capture all shopper activity directly in the CRM and receive alerts when a customer updates their deal. Your sales team can pick up each deal right where the customer left off in Connect Desking (no data re-entry), helping you close more deals in less time, while providing a great car buying experience to your customers.
With 700Credit soft pull credit checks, you can accelerate the path to purchase by pre-qualifying your customers earlier in the car buying journey, putting your customers in the right vehicle for them and their budget.
A new feature in Connect Automotive Intelligence brings lifestyle and demographic data from numerous sources, including banks and DMVs, into the customer record to give you a clearer picture of each prospective buyer. These insights, combined with the power of Buying Signals, gives you the information you need to deliver the personalized experience that customers expect wherever they are in the buying journey.
“Start a Deal” With Shoppers With Digital Retailing and VinSolutions Connect CRM
As customers continue to expect fast and personalized responses from dealerships, VinSolutions Connect Mobile provides your salespeople with full follow-up functionality and quick, easy access to critical information, including inventory, customer records, and conversation histories. The app provides direct, mobile access to lead buckets and customer conversations, which allows salespeople to follow-up quickly while also recording these interactions in the customer history.
To download the latest Connect Mobile app, visit the App Store or Google Play Store