According to Harley-Davidson, its dealers spend on average between $300 and $400 in advertising for each walk-in customer.

Gone are the days of waiting lists and, for the most part, easy sales. Dealers are instead harboring a newfound respect for leads. Problem is, many dealers never learned how to manage leads — or how to measure their sales staff’s performance. They simply didn’t have to.

They do now.

Harley-Davidson has worked closely with its dealers to build a much-improved version of Connect, its Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The system's home page (story continues below):

The company unveiled the system at this past summer’s dealer meeting. Since then, more than 40 dealers have signed up for the service that usually costs $250 per month and is accessed through h-dnet.com, Harley-Davidson’s global dealer portal. Including users of the previous version launched in 2007, all of whom have been upgraded for free, more than 200 of Harley’s roughly 700 dealers use Connect.

The company says that more of its dealers use its CRM system than any other system. Harley-Davidson’s main competitor in the CRM world is V-SEPT, which claims to service roughly 100 Harley dealers (click here for a Dealernews story on V-SEPT). In addition, some Harley dealers use Traffic Log Pro and Higher Gear.

Even so, many Harley dealers don’t use any electronic system. They’re getting by with a labor-intensive paper traffic log. Often they’re not aware of what they’re missing.

Some dealers who have invested in a CRM system are not using it properly. For Connect to be of real value, salespeople must learn how to use it, then use it and keep on using it.

Dealernews recently spoke with Kathy Koshgarian, manager of Vehicle Sales Excellence at Harley-Davidson. We also spoke with Deb Nilsestuen, a member of the Connect Team who gave us a demonstration and shared with us her frontline perspective.

All Leads, Customer Info in One Place
Connect is another tool offered in h-dnet.com’s toolbox area. Dealers use the system to collect all their leads in one spot. Leads include not only walk-ins and people who call or e-mail the store, but also those automatically downloaded from Harley-Davidson corporate, which has about 40 different sources.

Connect also manages online leads. Website provider PowerSports Network is responsible for the majority of Harley-Davidson dealership websites, Koshgarian says. So Harley has integrated with PSN so that online leads are automatically downloaded.

To enter a customer manually, sales associates need only a name and a phone number or e-mail address. Then they can enter all sorts of info: address, age, gender, the motorcycles in which the prospect has shown interest, even whether the person has a motorcycle license endorsement or has taken a rider’s course.

Salespeople also may type in notes. This makes it much easier for them to remember details about each prospect.

In the world of Connect, each prospect (including prospective repeat customers) is called a “sales opportunity.” Every contact with that customer in the sales process is an “activity.” Once prospects are entered into the system, Connect automatically prompts the salesperson to schedule the next activity. This way, customers can’t fall through the cracks.

Up to 20 users are covered under Connect’s monthly subscription fee. Most Harley dealers pay $250 per month under a three-year contract, although corporate also offers a one-year contract for $300 per month. Both contracts include 20 user licenses, and additional licenses can be bought for $500 apiece.

More than 1,500 people use Connect, an average of nearly eight users per dealership. “Some of the really big stores may need a couple of additional licenses, but usually 20 licenses covers it,” Koshgarian says.

Because the system is user-based, sales reps have the flexibility to customize their home page. “They can add and remove what it is they want to view,” Koshgarian says. “If they want information in a different place than where it currently resides, they can move it.”

Prospects and customers are permanently tagged with the salesperson whom they first contacted. Nevertheless, every staff member can see every lead. So when prospects contact the store or walk in and their rep is not available, another rep can quickly review that prospect’s history and fulfill the next activity.

This is worth repeating: Instead of salespeople collecting — and controlling — customer info, the dealership owns it all. “If a sales associate leaves, they really can’t remove that information from the dealership,” Nilsestuen says.

Connect gives subscribing dealers access to Harley-Davidson’s consumer database consisting of millions of records. When a salesperson enters a prospect into Connect, the system will search this database. If a match is found, the system populates the customer record with all interactions the prospect has had directly with Harley-Davidson (a demo ride at Sturgis, HOG membership, etc.). It won’t, however, divulge the prospect’s interactions with other dealers. This time-saving feature helps to avoid duplications.

In fact, because no dealer wants to accidentally contact the same person multiple times, data integrity is one of Harley-Davidson’s top priorities. The system cleanses all data to eliminate duplicates and people who’ve indicated they don’t want to be contacted. Connect also validates street addresses using U.S. postal service data.
(Story continues on page 2.)

“We also prequalify leads as much as we can to make sure they’re not cold leads,” Koshgarian says.

Before manually entering in new prospects, salespeople are trained to first search the system for that person.

Once a prospect becomes a customer (i.e., buys a bike), Connect automatically schedules the next 24 months of follow-up activities. “We have auto-populated follow-up activities for any sold deal starting with 24 hours all the way through 24 months,” Koshgarian says. “It could be an e-mail or a phone call or a letter. … We also have loaded into the system some best practice forms and letters created with input from dealers — high-impact letters to thank people for visiting the dealership, thank them for their purchase, thank them for showing interest.”

Connect also offers auto-populated prospect sheets, deal sheets, trade-in forms and motorcycle appraisal forms. “In addition, if dealers want to load in their own forms and letters, we can do that for them,” Koshgarian notes. “Or if they have a specific follow-up process that they want to load into the system, we can do that for them, too. It’s highly personalizable.”

In addition, Connect contains links to the Black Book, Kelley Blue Book and NADA price books.

So this is how Connect helps salespeople manage each lead in the sales process, and then follow up with each customer. But Connect empowers Harley dealers and their managers in two other ways: It lets them monitor and gauge their salespeople, and it tells them about their customers and what they want.

Lifted Veils: Sales Reps and Customers Understood
After dealers have entered all their customers and prospects into Connect, they can filter the data to create all sorts of lists, and export them to an Excel file.

Dealers can prepare for targeted-marketing campaigns, for example, by creating a list of all customers interested in a particular motorcycle, or perhaps by listing all female customers. “We’ll help them set up e-mail blasts,” Nilsestuen says.

Dealers also can view all recent deliveries, all customers who are at the F&I stage, and so on.

“We’ve got 21 preset reports currently in the system. So they can basically report on anything and everything that they would like, including taking a look at the ROI from marketing events,” Koshgarian says.

Dealers quickly learn what percentage of customers are walk-ins, referrals, online leads, repeat customers, etc. “What’s nice about Connect,” Nilsestuen says, “is that they can not only track how many, but see how many were sold or lost. They can track their conversion rates for different sources.”

An example of a sales analysis report (story continues below):

Dealers can also record why sales are lost — whether it was a lack of inventory or financing, or the customer just stopped responding.

Similarly, dealers can create performance reports for their salespeople. With a few clicks of the mouse, they can learn their store’s overall conversion ratio, along with the conversion ratio of each salesperson.

“Dealers can see what bikes individual sales associates are selling over time,” Nilsestuen says. “They can trend them month after month, year after year.”

As mentioned earlier, Connect records each step in the sales process: which salesperson performed it and when. “Sales associates can’t steal the customer,” Nilsestuen notes. “But if an opportunity was entered by a salesperson, but another associate did all the work, a manager may reconsider who gets the commission.”

Nilsestuen continues: “In Connect, you should always have an open activity on your customer. So no matter what’s going on, even if you’ve lost the sale, there is a follow-up activity scheduled, even if that customer bought a bike at a different dealership. It costs you nothing to shoot him an e-mail every three or six months. It’s free advertising. You’re keeping your name in front of him.”

Connect also makes communication among managers and sales associates easier and more efficient, because everything can be tracked and scheduled through the system.

Getting Set Up; Free Support
Does Connect sound right for your Harley-Davidson dealership? If so, Harley can set you up for free. All training and support is also free. Each dealership receives a dedicated trainer. Support is available 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Friday, and on select weekends.

Connect’s support is hard-core from the start. “We have so much training before we even activate their system,” Nilsestuen says. “We spend a lot of time learning the dealership’s processes, learning about their individual employees, learning about their management structure. We can help them transfer whatever processes they have into an electronic system.”

Koshgarian says dealers have varying preferences when it comes to the forms of training. So in addition to over-the-phone training and on-site visits, Harley offers videos, online training, webinars and “self-paced training” with workbooks. “Training is spread over the course of multiple modules so that they can learn a little and then do a little,” she says.

The Connect support materials also coach salespeople on how to collect contact info. “They’re not going to be able to use this system if they haven’t even tracked stuff on paper,” Nilsestuen points out.

Interested Harley-Davidson dealers can contact the Connect Team at 800-664-7762, option 2. They can also e-mail DealerCRM@harley-davidson.com.