Citroen UK – Fleet Sales

Citroen is one of the world’s oldest and most well-respected car manufacturers, with an outstanding reputation for technical excellence and innovative design. It has established a highly successful Fleet and Business Sales business in the UK, based on a strong car and van product range, backed by competitive pricing and effective after-sales care.

Background:

In the late 1990s, Citroen recognised that, in order to effectively manage the continuing growth of its Fleet and Business sales operation in the UK, it would need to move on from its essentially manual method of managing customer records.

“It was clear we needed a more sophisticated, automated system of telling us who our customers and prospects were and recording information about them,” recalls fleet marketing manager, Brian Roskell. “With a proper database in place and regularly updated records, we would, for example, be able to undertake more effective prospect generation and customer mailing programmes in building a more loyal client base.”

Citroen already had an established relationship with marketing services provider and FrontRange Solutions partner, Marketing and Data Matters (MDM), and took its advice that GoldMine would be the most appropriate CRM tool for the Fleet Business’s needs. “MDM had a strong track record in understanding our business at several levels and we saw that GoldMine was right for us,” confirms Roskell.

Citroen’s use of GoldMine functionality has expanded significantly over the past seven years, but at heart it remains an integrated sales reporting and customer contact tool which has become increasingly central to the development of UK operation’s Fleet business.

Sales development

In common with other automotive manufacturers, Citroen is strongly sales-focused and one of the first objectives in implementing GoldMine was to increase control and drive improved performance of its fleet sales operation. “Key to this from day one has been GoldMine’s exemplary ability to produce a wide range of sales reports,” says Roskell. “Indeed the amount of analysis available was so extensive that we have had to get smarter in our use of the information available.

“The result is that today we have reduced the level of reports from GoldMine, focusing only on those issues which relate directly to individual campaigns and driving sales overall.”

Critical to this has been GoldMine’s ability to support performance monitoring, in terms of appointments and follow-up as well as sales achieved. Citroen has worked hard to ensure that the sales team regularly record contacts and agreed actions, in order to help create a comprehensive history of contacts and transactions with each customer and prospect.

Roskell has a team of 14 field-based sales managers and a similar number based at the company’s Slough head office, all of whom use GoldMine on a daily basis. “GoldMine has dramatically improved the quality of information we can give our front-line sales team,” he confirms.

“On the one hand, they can access daily sales figures and customer information as an aid to more effective planning. Previously, sales figures had to be manually collated, photocopied and faxed to individual sales staff each morning, which was time-consuming, less efficient and more prone to inaccuracies. Today, by contrast, it is easily accessible through GoldMine’s InfoCenter.

“And, when individual managers change territories or roles, detailed customer histories and current trading analysis enables them to ‘hit the ground running’ in maintaining sales performance. In short, with a database today of more than 5,000 fleet customer records, it would simply be unmanageable without GoldMine.”

Hosted solution

The role of MDM has been crucial to the success of the implementation and its subsequent development. The Citroen team has found GoldMine to be highly intuitive and easy to use, helped by MDM’s initial training and regular refreshers and updates to ensure they get the best from the FrontRange software, which forms part of a detailed service level agreement.

In addition, the complete GoldMine system is hosted by MDM, a cost-effective move which, believes Roskell, has been fully vindicated. “We took the strategic decision not to have the hardware or software on-site,” he says.

“At the same time, as the system was new to us, we wanted to take full advantage of the MDM team’s specialist experience and expertise, which we felt would be best achieved if they retained full control.”

GoldMine today

Citroen UK has refined and extended its use of GoldMine considerably since its introduction.

In the Fleet sales operation, for example, the availability and use of demonstration cars is especially important. The earlier stand-alone system has been integrated into GoldMine and MDM has developed a Crystal Reports add-on that enables the sales team to access information directly from their own copy of GoldMine.

“Demonstrators play a key role in the sales cycle,” confirms Roskell, “and these reports enable them to locate relevant models and check immediate availability.”

Motorbility is another huge target sector which Citroen treats as a distinct ‘fleet’ market. The dedicated telesales team uses GoldMine to track all Motorbility enquiries and the cars available under the grant scheme and also to monitor advertising campaign effectiveness.

Still in its infancy, the Re-marketing Department has started to use GoldMine to underpin dealers’ second-hand car sales programmes and it also supports the Franchise Management team in managing existing franchisees and prospecting for new partners.

Other parts of the network also use GoldMine as part of their own operation. The customer service team, for example, has equivalent visibility of customer and sales data, though GoldMine reporting and analysis functionality is not, as yet, used in after-sales.

Premier Citroen dealers use a GoldMine system hosted by MDM to provide CRM support. This is currently a separate dataset so that Citroen and each individual dealer are unable to see each other’s prospects: looking ahead, plans are underway to use GoldMine to distribute sales leads to Premier dealer partners.

“One of the best features of GoldMine overall is its flexibility as a reporting and measurement tool,” believes Roskell. “Our business is highly dynamic and the FrontRange software is able to look at and evaluate different aspects of the business in different ways depending on our focus at any point in time.”

Competitive market

For Citroen, GoldMine is a continuously evolving CRM system, with regular review meetings exploring how to make better use of its functionality in supporting the company’s sales and marketing efforts. “At the present time, our sales staff have to access multiple systems for different aspects of their role”, he says. “It is our goal however to pull this together so that all records are held centrally within GoldMine, which becomes the system driving all that they do.”

As part of this “brave new world”, GoldMine will be used increasingly to assist Fleet Sales appointment-making and itinerary planning and improve lead generation and prospecting. For Roskell, “the primary goal is get our sales people in front of customers as much as possible. The teams at FrontRange and MDM fully understand our markets and its challenges, with the result that they continue to propose solutions which make our lives easier, so enabling sales staff effectively to get on with the job of selling.”

This is essential in a tough fleet market which, he confirms, “accounts for 50 per cent of total UK automotive sales and which is at least as competitive as the retail market. Indeed, GoldMine’s ability to support the planning process is particularly valuable as generating sales in the fleet market involves a much longer and more complex sales cycle.”

And what of the customer? For FrontRange’s sales and marketing director, Northern European, Steve Feeney, “GoldMine is ideally designed to drive improved client experience for companies like Citroen, without being visible to that customer: it is, put simply, ‘the art that conceals art’.

“GoldMine enables better-targeted promotional campaigns and ensures that, for each interaction, client-facing staff are always well-armed with a complete, up-dated contact history. Customers respond positively to this, viewing the company as highly professional and well-informed, so giving them greater confidence.

“The result,” he believes, “is a much greater likelihood of converting prospects into sales and increasing retention rates through improved customer loyalty.” And it is working, as latest car sales figures show Citroen’s UK market share up 15 per cent and now holding a top three position in the van market.