Dealerships no longer have the luxury of clinging to outdated, manual processes.
By: Johnathan Aguero
Last month, I attended AIMExpo 2025 in Las Vegas to learn more about the trends in the powersports industry and what the top players are doing. Engaging with leading dealers, consultants, manufacturers and providers led me to a simple conclusion: Dealerships no longer have the luxury of clinging to outdated, manual processes. Instead, top dealers are focusing on practical, incremental upgrades that streamline operations, boost efficiency and elevate the customer experience.
Rather than chasing every emerging tech trend, the most profitable dealers are prioritizing digital improvements that integrate quickly into their processes and reliably improve the impact of each team member. But which moves make the biggest difference, especially when it comes to customer engagement? Here’s a list of the five key digital moves to create a smoother journey for today’s buyers.
1. Upgrade Your CRM — Stop Leaving Lead Follow-Up to Chance
Too many dealerships still rely on sticky notes and manual processes to track leads. A modern dealership customer relationship management (CRM) tool helps ensure that every lead is followed up with the right message at the right time. The upside? No more lost sales due to slow responses or dropped leads. It’s for the full customer life cycle too.
There are unexpected benefits too. According to Phong Tran, president of DP360 CRM, “One of the most surprising insights dealerships often discover after fully implementing a CRM is just how much potential they have with existing customers. The CRM reveals that their current customers are often ready for additional purchases or services. By tracking interactions over time and identifying opportunities for re-engagement, dealerships discover that focusing on customer retention can significantly boost their sales without constantly needing to find new leads.”
The key takeaway? Don’t just see CRM as an add-on for sales. It’s the digital foundation for building long-term customer relationships.
Tran shares the story of one dealership that installed a CRM with AI features and saw a notable improvement in its closing rates. Prior to the switch, the dealership had issues with inconsistent follow-ups and messaging, which led to missed opportunities. “After implementing the new CRM,” Tran says, “they saw a 35% increase in closing rates in just a few months.”
2. Get an Outside Perspective on Your Marketing
An unbiased agency review can identify holes in your marketing strategy, from lead capture gaps to missed opportunities in digital ads. A fresh perspective might be the difference between spinning your wheels and accelerating sales.
Cade Hart, co-owner of H&H Marketing Team, puts it this way: “One of the biggest money-wasting mistakes I see dealerships make is a lack of clarity on what they’re actually paying for in their digital marketing. Many dealers invest in multiple advertising platforms, SEO services and third-party lead providers without truly evaluating their performance. The first step to an effective marketing strategy isn’t just adding more services — it’s auditing what you already have.”
A simple yet powerful change that can drastically improve a dealership’s lead flow is implementing more effective lead tracking. “Many dealers are unaware of how many leads they’re actually receiving, where they’re coming from and how well they’re being followed up on,” Cade shares. “By adding proper tracking at every touchpoint — phone calls, form submissions, chats and social media inquiries — you can quickly identify bottlenecks in your process.”
Many dealership-focused marketing companies will offer complimentary or low-cost evaluations of your dealer strategy, making it easy to see if you have low-hanging marketing opportunities.
3. Refresh Your Website for a Frictionless Experience
Your website is your digital showroom. Is it fast, easy to use and mobile-friendly? If not, customers won’t stick around long enough to convert.
“Your website should be your most powerful sales tool … an extension of your showroom that goes beyond just listing inventory,” says Derrick Brown, president of DealerAttract. “It should showcase your brand with high-quality visuals; engaging videos; and clear, informative content. By providing clear information and easy access to support, it helps shoppers feel confident in their purchase every step of the way.”
Brown summarizes this way: “Smart website design guides shoppers through the buying journey just like an in-store experience. Strategically placed add-ons ensure upsells happen naturally — just like what a skilled salesperson would do.”
Andy Korolenko, director of strategic partnerships at DealerSpike, suggests not leaving out the service and parts departments when designing your experience. “Website design typically caters to new and used sales,” he points out. “Yet having a design that promotes your service center and your PG&A — as well as building out packages in your inventory to promote additional upsells — is a much better way to increase upsells.”
Convenience for the customer is key, and Korolenko reports seeing “Buy Online” and “In-Store Pickup” options on websites drive sale volume upward.
The digital engagement doesn’t need to stop there. According to Korolenko, “Most dealers still rely on sending a monthly email to the masses. We see dealers achieve massive gains in leads and conversions from personalized automated email marketing strategies. Price drop alerts is one option that dealers sometimes resist having on a website, yet these leads end up closing at an incredibly high rate.”
Taken together, these insights underscore how critical it is for your digital storefront to guide customers effortlessly — from the moment they land on your site to the final purchase. So, if your website design has room for opportunity, consider calling up your rep and asking what he or she can do to freshen up your site and make sure it truly guides the user through a buying experience that today’s customer will find easy and convenient.
4. Add Digital Retail Tools
Speaking of, more customers than ever before want to take meaningful buying actions online before stepping into the dealership. Digital retail platforms help them apply for financing, calculate payments and even reserve units — giving your team higher-quality leads and resulting in more in-store traffic.
Some people associate the term with online sales outlets, like Carvana. However, according to Jason Nierman, co-founder of Rollick, “Digital retailing doesn’t mean buying a vehicle online. It simply means engaging digital shoppers with activities that allow them to take buying actions online.” The key, he says, “is ensuring those activities are visible to your sales staff so they can recognize the work already done by the prospect and speed up the process at the dealership.”
Nierman suggests offering your customers a variety of ways to engage you on the website. “By offering multiple ways to engage based on the shopper’s stage in the buying process, we’ve seen dealers increase leads by over 50% — a percentage of which follow through with an in-store visit,” he says. “A good example is a ‘Special Offers’ button that entices shoppers to see if they qualify for any deals based on their affiliations. People love to get a deal nowadays, so showing available incentives and even creating special ones for key audiences like the military can go a long way.”
Jory Anderson, CEO of Revvable, points out that staff involvement is critical. “The biggest hurdle,” he notes, “is that dealers like to believe and are often told that digital retailing is a set-it-and-forget-it easy button. At the end of the day, digital retailing is a tool, and you still need to know how to use it effectively.”
A notable example is an increasingly popular type of digital retail tool that captures visitors’ financing application one time online and then enables dealership staff to use that information to auto-fill major common finance applications (like Sheffield or Synchrony). Making it easy to start financing online will, according to Anderson, “one-hundred-percent drive more foot traffic. When an online buyer sees a professional website mixed with a secure and well-designed finance platform, it builds trust to step foot in the door. Your website is just a window into your dealership.”
How willing customers are to share financial information is actually a shock to Anderson. He shares, “Most surprising is how many customers will complete a full credit app without ever reaching out to the dealer ahead of time. To those dealers, it can feel like Christmas.”
Due to demand, the range of digital retail tools available to powersports dealers is ever-increasing, offering everything from pre-qualification website elements to trade-in calculators, to “buy now” functionality. If you haven’t yet enabled digital retail elements on your website, consider diving in soon.
5. Get Your Team Using Text Messaging for Faster Responses
Increasingly, customers don’t want to call you. They want to text. There are tools that can make it easy for your team to respond quickly, schedule appointments and close deals faster — all through text messaging.
Michael Kidd, enterprise partner at Kenect, says that his company’s data supports that texting does increase deal sizes or upsells compared to phone or email. He also sees it increase deal volume. “We had a new dealership go live recently where they had an increase in total sales that month and sold 14 new deals completely from webchat. The deals were entirely sold via text and the customer only had to come in for paperwork and to pick up,” Kidd explains.
Texting can help with getting paid too. “The most successful [dealers] find unique ways where a text can replace a phone call,” Kidd shares. “What many of our dealers do is use texting to provide tracking numbers and updates for special order parts. Others have seen huge increases in accounts receivables by sending text to pay requests for past due invoices that get paid quickly and up-front. Many times, these invoices have been outstanding for weeks and months … but a simple text to pay request, we have seen some invoices as much as $5,000 get paid in a matter of minutes.”
The key for seeing this success? “Buy-in from the managerial teams is an absolute must,” Kidd asserts.
If you want to capture more leads, improve conversion rates and increase overall customer satisfaction, focus on frictionless experiences — both online and in the dealership. Implementing a top-notch CRM, refining your marketing strategy, revamping your website, enabling digital retail and using texting for fast communication will all give your customers the smooth journey they expect. Embrace these moves now, and you’ll be well positioned to take market share in 2025 and beyond. Read more here.
