A LEADS management system, AutoPlay, which operates from a single platform and is used by 80 per cent of franchised dealers in New Zealand, is being rolled out this side of the ditch by its new owner, Marque Group.

AutoPlay was purchased by Marque Group in New Zealand in late 2018 and was introduced in the Australian market last year.

It is now subject to a major drive by Marque Group to sell the system into dealerships across Australia and is being showcased to Australian dealership management at this week’s AADA Convention and Expo in Melbourne.

Marque Group says that AutoPlay is an intuitive leads management system that digitises the road to the sale, without fundamentally changing the way salespeople sell cars.

AutoPlay’s Sales Pipeline has multiple features including lead and data capture, digitised forms, video emailing, API integration, reporting, and more – all of which work to make the sales process easier, faster and cheaper for dealerships.

The general manager of AutoPlay Australia, Brendan Bates, told GoAutoNews Premium: “AutoPlay is about lead management and replacing the lost art of nurturing a lead.

“We really focus on better nurturing the leads from the point of getting the lead into the dealership and then supporting the activities of the salesperson with that lead contact to get them through the road to the sale. This results in a better experience for the buyer of a vehicle and a better conversion for the dealership.”

The platform is used by the sales team and the sales managers. All the leads – electronic, online leads and offline leads – get entered into the platform automatically. If someone walks in then the salesperson enters them into the platform.

“So that is the starting point. All the leads in one place,” Mr Bates said.

“Often in dealerships you can have three different salespeople and they are all managing their leads in different ways. Somebody is doing it in a spreadsheet, someone in the DMS and someone is doing it in some lead management app.

“Because it is all in the one place, with visibility to the dealer principal and the sales manager in real time, they know where their leads are at any one time. So leads cannot fall through the cracks anymore. Sometimes they are written on a piece of paper and get handed to the salesperson and then it gets buried or falls on the floor and lost.

“We are purely about lead management and giving the dealers the digital tools along the road to the sale that are very easy to use. AutoPlay was built by salespeople for salespeople,” he said.

Mr Bates said: “AutoPlay has not been overbaked with features that might get used once in a blue moon. It is fit for purpose, very easy to learn and very easy to get started and get up to a high level very quickly.

“Any leads from any source that come into the dealership go into AutoPlay. Walk-in leads have to be entered manually but we have the tools to scan a business card or driver’s licence. So wherever there is a manual intervention required we try to let the technology assist the process.”

One major feature of the platform is its ability to follow up a lead for a car that has been sold by offering an alternative similar vehicle to the buyer and tracking their interest in the offer.

“The platform carries all of the dealership’s current inventory. So if a car that was the subject of a lead gets sold, and a new car comes into stock that matches the car in the original lead, then it creates an opportunity for the dealership to recontact the buyer,” Mr Bates said.

“So we say to dealers: ‘You had a lead that you could not fulfil so why not send out a video of this new stock to the buyer.’

“If the buyer plays the video it pings back and tells the salesperson the buyer has seen the video and how many times.”

The founder of AutoPlay, Craig Brown, said that his team started AutoPlay “because we saw a real need in the market to have all leads from all sources to come into one single platform because, as soon as we could do that, we could immediately measure the return on investment from all marketing outlays as well as benchmark the sales teams”.

“That benchmarking means we are now able to establish best practice and really analyse what is working well in the sales process and create really huge changes in dealerships in both customer experience and profitability,” he said.

“We are very excited at AutoPlay about the amount of data we are collecting from multiple countries and with the intelligent business analysis tools that we are able to put on top of this data we are really able to get into understanding and refining the sales process for dealers to make sure they are ahead of the game.”

Footnote: In Australia and New Zealand, AutoPlay will work alongside other Marque entities including Smart Loyalty – which runs the genuine parts B2B loyalty program GetGenuine, and Influence, its latest dealer network performance incentive channel solution – and Vital Software, which provides data-driven solutions across CRM, lead distribution, CSI management, service and parts performance reporting.

By John Mellor