Dealership CRM RFP Template

Sections you can copy, questions written so they cannot be answered with a slide, and a scoring method that survives the last demo.

Two failures account for nearly every wasted CRM selection process, and both happen before a demo is ever booked.

The first is asking questions that can be answered yes. "Do you support texting" gets a yes from every vendor in the market, including the ones whose texting is a third party bolt on with a separate login and a separate bill. Yes and no questions do not separate vendors, they separate careless buyers from careful ones. Every question below is written so the answer has to be a description, a number, or a screenshot.

The second is running the process backward. Stores book three demos, get sold by whoever presented most recently, and write the requirements afterward to justify the choice. By then the requirements are a description of one product. Write the RFP first, from your own pain, before anybody shows you anything.

There is a third habit worth breaking. Do not send the RFP only to the vendors you already know. The names you recognize are the ones with the largest marketing budget, which correlates with nothing about whether they fit a twenty car independent lot or a four rooftop group. Add at least one vendor you had not heard of before you started.

If you have not settled what you actually need yet, work through the CRM requirements checklist first. An RFP written from a vague sense of dissatisfaction produces vague answers.

Open with facts about you rather than requirements. Vendors who have to guess at scope will quote defensively, and you will end up comparing three proposals built on three different assumptions.

State the number of rooftops and where they are, franchise or independent or both, monthly new and used volume, current headcount by role including anyone who would need a login, whether individual salespeople get their own access, and whether a BDC exists and how it is staffed. Name the dealer management system you run and any systems that currently push leads into or pull data out of your CRM, because integration questions later will be meaningless without that list.

Then state your current spend honestly, including every module and per seat charge, plus anything you pay separately for texting, call tracking, chat, or a landing page tool. If those are separate line items today, say so, because consolidating them is one of the few ways a CRM change actually reduces total cost rather than just moving it.

Close the section with your timeline and your decision process: who signs, who else must approve, and when you intend to be live. Vendors behave differently when they know the process is real and dated.

This section decides more than any other, because a CRM that handles leads badly costs you money every single day regardless of how good the rest of it looks.

Ask them to describe, in writing, every way a lead can enter the system, and specifically how a lead from a source you have not told them about gets in. Ask what happens to a duplicate. Ask how a lead is assigned when the assigned salesperson is off, and what happens when nobody touches it for an hour.

Then get specific about routing rules. Can rules be set by source, by vehicle, by territory, by time of day, and by user availability at once. Can a manager reassign in bulk. Does a round robin skip somebody who is at their limit or does it just keep dealing cards. Ask for a screenshot of the actual rules interface rather than a description, because this is where the gap between what a system can do and what it can do without a support ticket shows up.

Ask what the system does the moment a lead arrives with no human involved: which notifications fire, to which devices, and whether an automated first response can go out and how it is configured. Then ask how response time is reported, per user, per source, and whether the clock starts at arrival or at assignment. Those two are not the same number and vendors will quote you whichever is prettier.

Ask one framing question first and let it do the work: which of the following are built by you, and which are supplied by a partner with a separate contract or a separate bill.

Then list them. Two way SMS and MMS with threaded history. RCS messaging and whether there is automatic SMS fallback for handsets that do not support it. Click to call, and whether there is a real softphone or it dials your desk phone. Call recording, and whether recordings are transcribed to text or only stored as audio. Voicemail drop for outbound waves. Inbound call routing and IVR. Email with an actual inbox and composer inside the CRM rather than a link out to your mail client. Bulk email with recipient management and unsubscribe handling. Live chat on your website. Email domain authentication for deliverability.

Two follow ups separate the serious from the assembled. Ask whether an email validator and a phone validator are included, because most CRM vendors have never been asked and the answer tells you how much of the stack they actually own. And ask what happens to message history when a customer replies to a text six months later: does it thread onto the original record or create a new one.

Finally ask how opt outs propagate. A customer who unsubscribes from service marketing must not then get a sales blast. If that is handled per campaign rather than per customer, you have found a compliance problem you will otherwise discover the hard way.

Every vendor claims automation. The question is who can build it and how long it takes.

Ask whether a manager can create a follow up process without vendor involvement, and how long a change takes to go live. Ask to see the editor. Ask whether processes can branch on behavior, meaning does a customer who replies drop out of the sequence automatically, because a cadence that keeps sending after a reply is worse than no cadence. Ask how tasks are generated, who they are assigned to, and what happens to an overdue one.

On desking, be precise, because this is a common gap. Does the system desk both loan and lease. Does it handle all fifty states' tax treatment, and how is that maintained when a state changes its rules. Does it support semimonthly and biweekly payment frequencies. Does it apply trade in tax credit caps correctly for states that limit them. Does it handle more than one lease tax method. Can a customer be sent a deal page to review and sign electronically, and what does the signing record look like afterward.

Then ask about deal documents: can print templates be customized, and does a deal jacket hold the paperwork against the record. Our desking tool page shows what those answers look like when the engine is built rather than licensed.

Ask every vendor to send you a real report, populated with demonstration data, as an attachment. Not a screenshot in a deck. This one request eliminates more vendors than any other question in the RFP.

Specify the reports you need to see: activity by user, lead source performance through to sold, response time distribution rather than an average, appointment set and shown and sold, and a management roll up across rooftops if you have more than one. Ask whether reports can be scheduled to email themselves and to whom.

On attribution, ask the question that matters: when a customer calls the number on a campaign page, buys three weeks later after walking in, and the salesperson writes the deal as a walk in, how does the system connect those. If the answer is that a manager has to remember, attribution is manual and you should price your own time accordingly.

Ask what is available on a phone, because your managers are not at a desk. Ask specifically whether the mobile experience is a separate cut down app or the same system, and what a salesperson can and cannot do from it.

Then ask the uncomfortable one: what does your reporting show when a salesperson works a customer from their personal phone. Every vendor's honest answer is nothing, which is precisely why the communication tools need to be good enough that people use them.

Short section, high stakes. You are handing a vendor your customer database.

Ask where the data is hosted and in what country. Ask how permissions work by role, and specifically whether a salesperson can see gross, whether a service advisor can see sales data, and how granular that gets. Ask whether there is a login log and an audit trail showing who viewed and exported what, because the most common data loss at a dealership is a departing salesperson exporting a customer list.

Ask how customer personal information is protected at rest, and whether sensitive fields are encrypted. Ask what their breach notification commitment is and how quickly you would be told. Ask what happens to your data if the vendor is acquired.

Ask about consent records: does the system store when and how a customer consented to be contacted, and can you produce that record if a complaint arrives. That is not a nice to have. It is the evidence you rely on.

Then a practical one. Ask how blacklists and do not contact requests are handled, whether a blacklist can be imported in bulk, and whether it applies across every channel and every campaign automatically. A per campaign suppression list is a lawsuit waiting to be filed.

Ask for the total monthly cost with every module you need and every seat you actually have, plus the price at renewal. Introductory pricing that steps up in year two is standard, and the RFP is where you make them write down the step.

Ask the contract length, the notice period, the cancellation process, and whether the agreement auto renews and for how long. Ask what happens if you add rooftops mid term, and what happens if you shrink.

Then the exit, which is the section vendors hope you skip. Exactly what can you export if you leave. In what format. Does it include communication history, meaning texts, emails, call recordings and notes, or only contact records. How long does an extraction take, what does it cost, and how long after cancellation can you still request it. Get the answers in the contract, not in an email from a sales rep who will have moved on.

Ask who owns the customer data in plain language, and ask whether the vendor uses your data for any purpose beyond running your account. Read the answer carefully.

The CRM data export checklist covers the extraction question in detail, and contract negotiation covers what is actually movable once you have the responses back.

Score before the demos, not after. Build a sheet with your sections as rows and weight them by your own pain: if lead response is what hurts, part two carries the most weight. Score each vendor out of five per section on the written answers alone. Only then book demos, and only with the top three.

In the demo, verify rather than watch. Hand them a scenario from your own store and ask them to do it live: a lead arrives at 7pm from a source they have not seen, the assigned salesperson is off, the customer texts back a question about a specific stock number, and a manager needs to see it. A vendor who can do that in front of you has told you more than any presentation.

Our own answers, briefly, so you know where we sit. LeadLocate is a lead generation platform with a full CRM built in: lead inbox with distribution rules, SMS, MMS and RCS with SMS fallback, a VoIP softphone with call recording and transcription, voicemail drop, IVR and call routing, email inbox and composer, bulk email, an email validator and a phone validator, automations and follow up processes, drip campaigns, appointments and reminders, lead pages, salesperson websites, live chat, desking across loan and lease with a fifty state tax matrix, customer deal pages with e-signature, role based permissions with a login log, and three reporting layers. We are not an OEM certified CRM and we do not sell a dealer management system, so if your franchise agreement specifies a certified system, verify that requirement before you shortlist anyone.

Month to month, no long term contract, US only. Neither DMS access nor an inventory feed is required to operate. Pricing sits on the pricing page rather than behind a quote request.

How many vendors should receive the RFP?

Five to seven, narrowed to three demos on the written answers alone. Fewer than five and you have no contrast. More than seven and reading the responses becomes the project instead of the decision.

How long should we give vendors to respond?

Two weeks is normal and fair. A vendor who cannot answer written questions about their own product in two weeks is telling you something about the support you will get later.

What single question separates vendors fastest?

Ask which communication tools they built and which come from a partner with a separate contract. The answer reveals how much of the stack they actually control, which predicts what happens when something breaks at 6pm on a Saturday.

Should we ask for pricing in the RFP?

Yes, and ask for total monthly cost at your real seat count with every module you need, plus the renewal price. Vendors will resist naming renewal pricing, which is exactly why it belongs in writing before you have narrowed the field.

Do we need an RFP for a single rooftop store?

A short one, yes. Cut it to parts two, three, four and seven and it is a two page document. The value is not formality, it is getting the same answers from every vendor in a form you can compare side by side.

What should we do about the exit terms?

Settle them before signature, when your leverage is highest. Get the export scope, format, cost and timeline written into the agreement, and confirm that communication history is included rather than contact records alone.

No slide deck, no discovery call first. Send the document, get written answers back, and compare us against everyone else on the same sheet. Call 844-376-2274.