Overview

Companies that sell and service high-value products through a dedicated franchise network, including industries such as Automotive, Powersports, Transportation, and Equipment manufacturing, face a unique set of challenges. These challenges encompass performance review, collaboration between field teams and retailers, and the implementation of corporate initiatives across the network. Building a strong, collaborative relationship with franchise partners is essential to effectively represent the brand and achieve success.

The above relationship and corresponding set of activities are managed by a team of Field Managers specializing in Sales Operations or After-Sales/Fixed Operations. Such teams help coach their franchise partners / dealers into delivering high quality services, ensuring product competitiveness, improving customer satisfaction, and elevating brand reputation. While standard Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are designed for managing sales pipelines and direct customer sales, they fall short in catering to the unique requirements of the franchise sales model. Customizing a standard CRM system to meet industry-specific needs can be a costly and complex endeavor.

In this perspective article, we highlight 5 key benefits that set a vertically focused CRM solution designed for OEMs with a dealer network, such as Optimum’s IKON, apart from traditional standard CRMs.

1. Performance Tracking

IKON Contact Reporting Solution Dashboard

In the franchise model, closely monitoring the sales and after-sales performance of partners is paramount. Metrics like sales performance, sales effectiveness, inventory, finance sources, customer satisfaction, service performance, warranty spend, and repair parts purchases demand continuous scrutiny.

Therefore, a performance scorecard is an integral part of the requirement and should be embedded in the collaboration process. Standard CRM systems do not have pre-built scorecard and performance tracking tools – which will always need to be developed at an additional expense.

Optimum IKON, on the other hand, includes an integrated performance scorecard / dashboard which can be configured out of the box or enhanced to address each customer’s requirement. The performance metrics (KPIs) are also integrated into various other reports to help with better management of the network performance.

2. Structured Visit / Contact Management Processes

Contact Meeting Scheduling Calendar

Field Managers regularly meet with dealership counterparts, usually on a monthly basis. Such visit reports can be added in a traditional CRM system as separate documents or as notes, but they are typically not well structured for better analysis and controls.

Additionally, standard CRM systems may not have other tools for escalations, internal notifications, and collaboration.

IKON helps users manage the full contact meeting process – starting from meeting scheduling, centralized calendar, defining agenda (based on performance) and then tracking discussions around specific topics.

These discussions can also be tracked for follow-up action plans (detailed below). IKON also provides opportunities for internal collaboration and notifications to inform other departments or management of any important developments within the dealer network.

3. Collaborative Action Plans

People Collaborating Action Plan

Standard CRM systems have features to manage activities and tasks linked to each entity. Through this feature, field managers can track all their follow-up activities that they need to carry out with their retailers.

But the important missing link is that these activities are managed internally and not in collaboration with the network.

Optimum IKON includes a framework through which it becomes easier for the sales / after-sales field managers to collaborate with their franchise partners. They can create activities / tasks (Action Plans) for their franchise partners and assign these activities to specific users to complete within a defined period of time. These activities are tracked, and performance improvements are monitored, fostering productive collaboration.

4. Internal Collaboration

Field Assignments Progress Report

Internal Collaboration is another important area of difference between a standard CRM solution and a vertically focused Field Operations solution like Optimum IKON.

Any sales / after-sales operations require channeling a large number of activities and projects that are managed by other corporate groups. These could include groups like Network Development, Vehicle Distribution, Marketing, Incentives, Warranty, Parts Sales, etc.

All these corporate groups require many activities (tasks) to be carried out by the field with the network – an area that is usually not addressed by standard CRM solutions.

Optimum Info’s IKON solution includes extensive processes to manage field assignments / projects and collect data from the field.

Most manufacturers tend to manage such projects and tasks through email communications or other tools, while these processes are already integrated within Optimum’s IKON Field Operations CRM.

5. Industry Focus

IKON OEM Industry Focused Solution

Optimum IKON system is tailored exclusively for automotive, powersports, transportation and equipment OEMs that sell and service their high value products through a closely knit franchise network.

This industry-specific focus allows manufacturers to enhance Field Operations cost-effectively with out-of-the-box features and functionalities aligned with their business needs.

Customizing a standard CRM solution to meet industry requirements can be prohibitively expensive, while industry-specific solutions like IKON offer a more practical and cost-efficient approach.

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