The add-ons to check first for overlap are the ones sold separately to do a job the CRM already claims to do: texting, follow-up reminders, website chat that creates leads, equity alerts and review requests. The way to find the overlap is to ignore product names and list the job each tool performs and who in the store opens it.
The stack around the dealer management system
The dealer management system is the core: accounting, deals, parts, service, and in many stores the link to the manufacturer. Around it, a dealership accumulates tools, each bought to fix one problem:
- CRM: customer records, lead log, tasks and the sales pipeline
- Lead follow-up tools: automatic first replies and reminder schedules
- Website chat: conversations that become leads
- Trade-in valuation widgets: a form on the site that captures a vehicle and contact details
- Equity mining: finds existing customers who could change vehicle
- Texting: a business number for sales and service
- Reputation: review requests and monitoring
- Inventory merchandising and photo tools
Each one arrived with a good reason. The question is whether the reasons still hold now that the tools sit side by side.
Map the job, not the product
Make a sheet with one row per tool and five columns: the job it does in plain words, who opens it and how often, where its data ends up, what it costs per month and how that is charged, and the renewal date.
Fill in the second column honestly. Ask the people, or look at the login report if the tool has one. A tool that nobody has opened this month is not doing a job, whatever the contract says.
Then read down the first column and look for the same sentence twice. Sends a text to a customer. Reminds a salesperson to call. Captures a lead from the website. Where the same job appears in two rows, one of those rows is a candidate to go.
Overlaps worth checking first
- Texting in the CRM and texting in a separate tool, with conversations split between two inboxes
- Follow-up schedules in the CRM and in a lead response tool, so a customer can receive two automatic messages
- Chat and trade-in widgets that both create leads, sometimes duplicating the same customer
- Equity alerts from a dedicated tool and from a CRM report built on the same service history
- Review requests sent from the reputation tool and from the service scheduler
Overlap is not always waste. Sometimes the separate tool does the job better and the CRM's version is the one to switch off. Decide by which one the staff really use.
What stays whatever you decide
Systems your manufacturer requires stay. So do the manufacturer's lead feeds, the listing marketplaces, the credit and finance portals and the payment processor. These are networks, and the value is in being connected to them. Check your franchise agreement before cancelling anything close to the core, and have a lawyer read the notice and renewal terms where the sums are large.
Putting a number on it
Total the rows. Per-user tools should be priced at the headcount you plan to have, including the business development team. Our software bill calculator, a free calculator, turns per-seat prices and flat fees into yearly and three-year totals.
If cancelling duplicates fixes the bill, that is the whole job and it needed no new software. If the remaining add-ons are still expensive for what the store uses, our guide to renting versus owning business software explains the other option and its risks. Hiro builds that kind of system around the required core for one flat monthly price, and the dealership owns the code and the data. The page for car dealerships describes which add-ons can be rebuilt and which cannot.