CRM for Automotive

What selling cars actually looks like

A used-car lot with forty vehicles receives the same message forty times a week: "is the white one still available, what is the last price". It comes from a listing, an Instagram reel or a friend's forward, usually in the evening, and the person sending it has sent it to two other lots about two other cars. The salesperson who replies first with a photo of the service book and a proposed time for a drive gets the visit. The one who replies the next morning gets "already bought, thanks".

The evidence on speed is not new. The Harvard Business Review's study of 2,241 companies found that firms responding within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited even an hour more, and that the average response time was 42 hours. Dealerships are not slow by temperament; the salesperson answering WhatsApp is also on the forecourt with a customer.

The second shape is the car that sold itself twice: two salespeople promise the same vehicle to two buyers because stock lives in a spreadsheet nobody refreshes. The third is the offer that dies quietly — a buyer who took a drive, got a number and went silent, with no task reminding anyone to call. Each of these is a data problem before it is a sales problem.

The pipeline we recommend starting from

Every stage below is something that verifiably happened. "Hot" and "warm" are not stages; they are opinions, and opinions cannot be reported on.

The stage that leaks is test drive done to offer made. The same-day follow-up task after every drive is worth more than any other single rule, because it captures the objection while the buyer still remembers the car.

Vehicles as stock: cost, price, quantity

In SaleInline every vehicle is a product. A product has a sale price, a cost price and a stock quantity — for a used car that quantity is one, for a tyre size it might be forty. The product also carries custom fields you define: make, model, year, mileage, colour, plate, chassis number, fuel, gearbox. Listing the lot is a CSV import; re-pricing the whole lot after a market move is a bulk price change by percentage or amount.

1. Add the vehicle as a productPurchase price as cost, asking price as sale price, quantity one, plus the fields that describe it.
2. Attach it to the dealThe buyer's deal carries the vehicle; the deal value is the agreed price.
3. Win the dealStock drops to zero, the cost price is booked as a cost-of-goods expense, and the margin on that car is visible without a calculator.

Because stock is deducted on the win, the "sold twice" problem becomes visible the moment it happens: the second deal cannot win a car with zero quantity without someone noticing. For workshops and tyre centres the same module tracks consumables — oil, filters, brake pads — with a cost and a quantity, and the margin on a service job follows from the parts attached to it.

Customer and vehicle fields worth having

The customer detail layout is configurable per role: the salesperson sees vehicle, budget and trade-in fields up front, the workshop reception sees plate and service dates, and the finance desk sees deposit and deal value. Nobody sees forty inputs they never fill.

WhatsApp: photos in, photos out

Car buying is a photo conversation. The buyer sends a screenshot of a listing; the salesperson replies with six more photos, the service history and a video of the engine running. On a personal phone that conversation belongs to the salesperson and disappears when they do. Through the shared inbox it belongs to the dealership: the first message creates a customer record, photos go both ways from the same thread, and the whole exchange sits on the record next to the calls and the deal.

Two settings matter. Distribution: each channel carries a list of salespeople to whom unowned conversations are assigned in turn, so a Sunday-evening enquiry has an owner before Monday. Working-hours reply: a message outside shift hours triggers an automatic answer — "we open at 09:00, the car is still available" — which holds the buyer instead of losing them to the next showroom. Instagram direct messages and Messenger land in the same inbox, which matters for lots whose stock lives on reels.

Phone numbers are normalised to international format on the way in, so the buyer who messaged from WhatsApp and later called the landline is one record, not two, and the duplicate report catches the ones that slip through.

Phone and IVR: sales on 1, service on 2

The browser softphone connects to the dealership's existing SIP line — Turkish providers such as Verimor and NetGSM are bridged directly, others through their SIP credentials — so a call made from the customer record is logged with duration, direction and disposition, and an inbound call from a known number opens the record before the phone is picked up.

The IVR on the main number separates the two businesses that share one line: "press 1 for sales, 2 for service, 3 for parts". Each key routes to a department, in working hours, to whoever is on shift; outside hours the caller hears the opening time and the call becomes a task. Sales calls stop interrupting the workshop and workshop calls stop reaching a salesperson on a test drive.

The power dialer works through a filtered list — "everyone who test-drove in the last 14 days and has no next task", or "every customer whose service is due next month" — one call after another, with a disposition recorded on each. It is the closest thing to a follow-up discipline that survives a busy Saturday.

Test drives and the no-show

A test drive is an appointment with a vehicle, a customer and a salesperson. It is booked from the customer record or straight from the WhatsApp thread, sends reminders by WhatsApp, SMS or e-mail on the schedule you set, and its outcome — attended, cancelled, no-show — moves the pipeline. Two drives on the same car in the same hour show on the calendar before they become a problem on the forecourt.

No-shows are the largest invisible leak: a booked drive that did not happen looks like a booked drive in a spreadsheet. Marking the outcome makes it visible, and the rebook task means the buyer is late, not lost. The same appointment module handles workshop bookings — the customer's slot, the bay and the reminder the day before.

Service, tyres and the date-based reminder

The customer who bought a car is the workshop's next customer, and the workshop's customer is the showroom's next buyer in four years. Both live in the same record. A "next service date" or "tyre change season" field on the customer, plus a date-based automation — "30 days before next service: send a WhatsApp message and open a task for reception" — turns a database into a service calendar.

For inspection and insurance renewals the pattern is the same: a date field and a rule. Recurring tasks cover the fixed rhythm — the monthly call to fleet clients, the quarterly check of vehicles in stock for more than ninety days — without anyone re-creating them.

Rental desks: a second pipeline

A rent-a-car desk has a different process — enquiry, quote, reservation, pick-up, return — and a different cycle, days rather than weeks. Give it its own pipeline; Starter allows two, Growth five, Business ten. Vehicles are the same products, and a reservation is a deal whose value is the rental total. The customer who rented twice and asked about buying is already in the sales pipeline's reach, because there is one record per person, not one per desk.

Commissions per salesperson

Sales commission is a percentage of the deal, a flat amount per unit, or a percentage of the margin once cost is known — and it is usually different per salesperson. The finance module holds the rule per user and applies it when the deal is won, booking the income from the deal value, the cost of the vehicle as an expense, and the commission attributed to the owner in one movement.

Month end becomes a report — commissions by salesperson by month, against the test drives and deals behind them — rather than a spreadsheet and an argument. The activity log records who changed a commission and when.

A salesperson's Saturday

1. 09:00 — clock in and the overnight queueFriday-night messages, already assigned by distribution, held by the auto-reply; each answered with photos and a proposed drive time.
2. 10:30 — walk-insEach one becomes a record with the vehicle of interest before they leave the forecourt; a drive is booked from the record.
3. Through the day — drives and outcomesAttended, marked; no-shows, rebooked; offers, recorded with trade-in value.
4. 17:00 — the follow-up tasksEvery drive from yesterday has a task; two calls from the softphone each.
5. 18:30 — the manager's glanceResponse time in working minutes, drives booked by source, offers older than a week. Three numbers, one screen.

Who sees what on the lot

Salesperson

Own customers and unassigned enquiries; view and edit, no delete; sees stock and prices, not other salespeople's commissions or the cost price.

Sales manager

Department scope over the showroom; reassigns customers, sees deals, margins and commissions for the team.

Workshop reception

Appointments and customer records for the service side; no sales pipeline, no finance.

Dealer principal / owner

All scope: finance, reports, activity log, settings.

Department scope exists for the salesperson who leaves: their customers are the dealership's, visible to the manager and reassignable in one bulk action. The activity log shows who exported what, and the cost price stays hidden from anyone whose role does not include it.

Numbers a dealer principal should watch

• First-response time in working minutes — the message at 21:10 answered at 09:04 is four minutes, not twelve hours, and the number that predicts drives more than any other.
• Enquiry → test drive rate by source — which listing site, which ad and which reel produce people who actually show up.
• Test drive → sale rate by salesperson — the real conversion, separated from activity.
• Days in stock per vehicle — the product list filtered by creation date; the car past ninety days is costing money.
• Margin per vehicle and per salesperson — with cost prices on products, the model that sells fastest is not always the one that pays.
• No-show rate on drives and service bookings — usually fixable with reminder timing.

What this is not

This is not a dealer management system. It does not handle registration paperwork, plate lookups, manufacturer warranty claims, financing calculations or accounting ledgers, and it does not publish vehicles to marketplaces or pull leads from them automatically. Vehicles are a catalogue inside the CRM for matching, deals, stock and margin; the enquiry arrives by WhatsApp, Instagram, phone, web form or the lead webhook, which any listing source able to send an HTTP request can use.

It is also worth saying plainly that automated daily backups of your workspace are not currently part of the service, and that there is no mobile app — the interface works in a phone browser. Export what you must retain.

When it stops working

Which plan fits?

A single lot with two salespeople runs on Starter: stock, inbox, phone, drives and commissions are all there. A dealership with a showroom, a workshop, ad-driven enquiries and salespeople who need chasing lands on Growth, for the automations, the IVR departments and the roles more than anything else. See the pricing page, and the products and stock and inbox pages for the two modules that carry the load.