The 10 Best Automotive CRMs for 2024

Activity management — View all your relevant tasks, emails, and upcoming appointments in one digitized place to monitor your customer interactions and ensure no missed opportunities. This also helps larger dealerships, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding sales progress and each team member’s workload.

AI features — Salesforce’s AI, Einstein, is really impressive. During testing, I found that you could ask it questions about a business’s performance, for example, and it used data from reports to provide a detailed answer. It can also generate personalized messages for each customer, which improves customer engagement and enhances customer retention.

Pipeline management — Salesforce gives you a complete overview of your sales funnel and the customers moving through it. If you want to target high-impact deals, Salesforce can also make this easier by using AI to flag and label customers who are more likely to close the deal sooner.

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers five pricing tiers to accommodate a range of business sizes. Here’s more information on the cost of each plan and its features:

• Starter Suite — Contact, lead, task, account, and opportunity management, Gmail and Outlook integration, email productivity features, mobile app, and customizable reports.
• Pro Suite — Everything in Starter, plus individual buyer accounts, Salesforce meetings, Sales Cloud Everywhere, forecasting, Lightning App Builder, Flow Builder, and full offline mobile functionality.
• Enterprise — Everything in Pro, plus conversation and deal insights, opportunity scoring, pipeline inspection, waterfall charts, workflow and approval automation, and data synchronization.
• Unlimited — Everything in Enterprise, plus sales engagement and conversation intelligence, Premier Success Plan, Einstein relationship insights and forecasting, buyer assistant, email insights, and lead scoring.
• Einstein 1 Sales — Everything in Unlimited, plus Generative AI, unified data, sales planning, programs and collaboration, faster access to the knowledge base, and Slack integration.

Salesforce is a tried-and-tested, well-developed CRM platform that is suitable for larger car dealerships with a large inventory, and numerous salespeople and customers. It’s a good choice for multi-national businesses thanks to its scalability and multi-language and multi-currency support.

Its AI features go the extra mile to ensure your salespeople do not miss an opportunity and that sales potential is squeezed out at every stage of the buying process, from casual browsing to closing a deal.

Since its pricer and more complex to get to grips with than other platforms on this list, it may not be the most suitable CRM for small car dealerships.

Free Plan Tools — HubSpot’s free CRM tool is suitable for smaller car dealerships wanting to keep operational costs low while benefiting from a diverse platform for marketing, sales, content, operation, website traffic analytics, and ecommerce for up to 5 users.

It also allows you to store and manage up to 1 million contacts with no limits on users or customer data.

Speedy AI Content Generation — Forming strong relationships with customers is at the heart of any successful automotive dealership, and your content assets will form a big part of your communication strategy as a business.

HubSpot offers AI-powered content generation to help you perform targeted marketing material that resonates with existing or potential customers. This means there’s no need to outsource content generation; you can create your own effective emails and blog posts in-house to attract new customers or inform existing customers of vehicle deals and new stock.

Contact Synchronization — HubSpot CRM allows you to maintain a central, live-updated database of all your dealership customers and leads.

This way, whenever a new deal is made, a contact is added, or an amendment is made, the changes automatically reflect across all channels so that your whole team is on the same page and can offer your buyers the best possible service.

The HubSpot pricing model is versatile and can accommodate various business types and requirements. It offers five plans, including a feature-rich free option.

• Free — This plan provides all the tools small dealerships need to generate and contact new leads and maintain ongoing customer relationships. It supports up to 5 users and offers free marketing, sales, service, content, operations, and commerce tools.
• Marketing Hub Starter — This plan provides marketing tools for dealerships to engage and convert potential new business (leads). Its features include simple marketing automation, HubSpot payments in the US, and the possibility remove HubSpot branding from your content created with the AI content generation tool.
• Starter Customer Platform — This package is ideal for automotive companies that need more advanced features to carry out essential marketing, sales, service, content, and operations activities to target customers.
• Marketing Hub Professional — This plan offers comprehensive automation, reporting, and campaign marketing software for medium to large car dealerships. It allows you to add 2,000 marketing contacts for free. Users need to pay a one-time professional onboarding fee of $3,000.
• Marketing Hub Enterprise — This is the most advanced marketing automation software plan for larger dealerships to access maximum control and flexibility over their customer database. It allows the addition of 10,000 marketing contacts for free. Users need to pay a one-time professional onboarding fee of $7,000.

HubSpot is an ideal solution for smaller dealerships and car rental agencies. This dedicated CRM platform can help establish long-lasting and trustworthy relationships with their customer base without huge financial investment.

While monday CRM focuses on sales, HubSpot offers a more diverse range of features, covering marketing, customer service, and operations. This means you can attract, retain, and build trust with your customers rather than just focusing on hard selling.

One drawback is that the free plan may be too limited for larger dealerships, but there is the option to upgrade to a paid plan if needed.

Activity management — Sales teams need to record every conversation, which is why it’s important to be able to track activity. This feature lets you automatically keep a log of all the phone calls, emails, and messages sent to your client.

Sub-accounts — You can also create individual sub-accounts for each client to make it easier to find what you need. If you log a piece of data twice, monday CRM will also notify you to reduce duplicated efforts.

Communication — You can integrate your Outlook or Gmail accounts with Monday and send bulk correspondence to remind your customers to upgrade their vehicles or inform them of the latest new models in stock at your showroom.

monday.com offers four pricing tiers to accommodate businesses of various sizes. Here’s detailed information about the cost and features of each plan:

• Basic — Unlimited, customizable pipelines, contacts, and boards; templates for lead, contact, and deal management; mobile apps; and unlimited free viewers.
• Standard — Everything in Basic, plus advanced account, contact, and deal management, 2-way integration with Gmail and Outlook, AI email generation, activity management, quotes, invoices, and 250 custom CRM automations and integrations per month.
• Pro — Everything in Standard, plus sales forecasting, email templates, tracking and automations, mass emails, Google Calendar sync, and 25,000 CRM automations and integrations per month.
• Enterprise — Everything in Pro, plus lead scoring, advanced analytics, account management, enterprise-grade automations, integrations, security features, and HIPAA compliance.

monday CRM is the ideal platform for independent dealerships due to its affordable pricing and smooth learning curve. It’s great for those new to CRM who want an easy setup process and tons of options to customize the platform to your own needs.

It is rather sales-focused, so it is more suited to teams wanting to track and close deals, vs. those who want to branch out into marketing and after-sales CRM, who may find HubSpot or Freshsales a better solution.

Email marketing — Pipedrive’s email marketing suite includes templates, a builder, analytics, and contact segmentation so that you can easily contact new or existing clients to inform them of deals or updates.

Deal rotting — In addition, Pipedrive’s “Deal Rotting” tool automatically notifies you when a deal has been sitting idle for too long without any communication from the lead. With this insight, you can either follow up with the lead or focus your time on a different lead.

Meeting scheduler — Once your customers show interest, you can use Pipedrive’s meeting scheduler to schedule a call with them in person to answer any of their questions.

Pipedrive offers five pricing tiers to accommodate businesses of various sizes. Here’s detailed information on the cost and features of each plan.

• Essential — Lead and deal management, customizable pipelines, products catalog, data import and export, merge duplicates, 3,000 deals, 30 custom fields, 15 reports, API access, and a mobile app.
• Advanced — Everything in Essential, plus 10,000 deals, 100 custom fields, 30 reports, 30 active automations, 1 active email sync, 2-way email sync, customizable emails, group emailing, automations, and Smart Contact Data.
• Professional — Everything in Advanced, plus 100,000 deals, 300 custom fields, 150 reports, 60 active automations, custom visibility groups and permissions sets, multiple email accounts sync, free Smart Docs add-on, AI sales assistant, unlimited dashboards, revenue forecasting, and 24/5 live chat support.
• Power — Everything in Professional, plus 200,000 deals, 500 custom fields, 250 reports, 90 active automations, 3 active email syncs, free Projects add-on, 24/7 live chat support, and phone support.
• Enterprise — Everything in Power, plus unlimited deals, custom fields, and reports, 180 active automations, 5 active email syncs, and security alerts.

Pipedrive is best for state-wide car dealerships that want to focus on building a strong, trustworthy client base within their region. Its email marketing campaign templates offer a straightforward way to attract new business, while its LeadBooster add-on helps to target new leads from a global database filtered by job title, location, and industry. 

Rules — Assignment rules dictate the flow of new customers to the sales reps. For instance, if it’s a new contact, you might want to assign them to an experienced agent. scoring rules use your customer’s past conversation and engagement level to calculate their likelihood of making a purchase.

Email parser — Zoho’s Email Parser tool is a great time-saver. It scans your emails for names, contact details, and addresses and adds them to the client’s profile saving you from manual data entry and potential missed details.

Performance analytics — Zoho CRM’s performance analytics, particularly the anomaly detector, is also worth highlighting.

Suppose it usually takes you two weeks to close the deal with an interested buyer, but for some reason, it takes four weeks for a certain buyer—the anomaly detector will notify you of this.

Zoho offers four pricing tiers tailored to accommodate businesses of various sizes. Here’s detailed information about the cost and features of each plan:

• Standard — Basic modules for contact management, advanced filters, multiple pipelines, scoring, sales forecasting, email insights, multiple currencies, workflow rules, homepage customization, custom fields, reports, analytics app, social media integration, and mass emailing.
• Professional — Everything in Standard, plus automated follow-ups, custom dashboards, assignment rules for new leads, and CRM for Google Ads.
• Enterprise — Everything in Professional, plus multiple scoring rules, email parsing, data entry wizards, CommandCenter, page layouts, custom modules and buttons, translations, developer sandbox, anomaly detection, webform analytics, autoresponders, and a range of AI features, including conversational AI, email intelligence, and sales prediction.
• Ultimate — Everything in Ultimate, plus added business intelligence, analytics, and customizable features to better manage multi-department, multi-national teams.

Zoho CRM is a great fit for online auto dealerships with a steady, incoming flow of customers who need a smart system to manage sales, inventory, and job assignments.

This platform can offer a welcome sense of organization to your sales processes and help maximize sales potential with intelligent analytics.

It’s also not too expensive, even on the Ultimate plan. While it offers a comprehensive service, it can be a little difficult to get to grips with so it may not be ideal if you’re seeking a simple, quick set-up CRM.

Accounting integration — Accounting and CRM all-in-one platforms are advantageous for auto dealers because selling a car can be a lengthy process, and many car buyers may need financing. Bonsai’s integrated CRM and accounting tool can simplify your accounting procedures.

Lead scoring — In terms of more purely CRM features, you can create your own lead-scoring rules, ranking leads based on their interest level.

Templates —Bonsai also offers many professional templates that will speed up time spent on manual data entry. You’ll find a template for client intake and registration, a client feedback form, and a client information form, for example. Once you’ve collected the data, you can add them to your Contact List.

Bonsai does not offer a free plan, instead, it offers three paid subscription tiers. Here is the breakdown of the pricing and features of each plan:

• Starter — All templates, unlimited clients and projects, invoicing and payments, scheduling, time tracking, CRM, and expense tracking.
• Professional — Everything in Starter, plus workflow automation, branded client portal, unlimited scheduling, and integration with QuickBooks, Calendly, and Zapier.
• Business — Everything in Professional, plus resource planning and scheduling, custom task fields, premium customer support, and profitability and productivity reporting.
• Scale — Everything in Business, plus custom roles, custom data report, assisted account setup, dedicated onboarding and support,  and advanced integrations.

Bonsai is a great option if you or your team are new to implementing software as part of your dealership management. It provides access to accounting, CRM, expense, and time tracking, all in one platform.

This means you don’t have to pay for and learn multiple different software platforms to address these separate needs.

However, Bonsai lacks marketing features, so it’s not the best choice if you want software that will help attract new customers. It is more of a consolidated way to track finances with an existing customer base.

Email tracking—Sage offers email tracking, however, you’ll need to integrate with Mailchimp. This is worth doing because you’ll be able to see email open rates, click rates, and soft and hard bounces.

For any auto dealership using email marketing to establish and nurture customer relationships, these insights will prove invaluable, particularly for decision-making.

Targeted campaigns — With insight into your customers’ buying preferences, you can design and schedule targeted marketing campaigns to reach them at the most opportune moment to encourage sales.

Customer metrics — It also provides detailed metrics on your customer’s problems, such as the frequency with which they have occurred, the number of times they have been solved, and the timeline of the process.

Also, like Maximizer, the SageCRM tool lets you create a central repository of solutions you’ve already devised. If a new customer has a similar problem, your team can use this database to fix it faster.

Sage CRM’s pricing is available on request, so you’ll need to contact the sales team directly to discuss the plans available.

Similar to Bonsai, SageCRM is ideal for used car dealers looking for an all-in-one solution for CRM and accounting. Where Sage goes further is with its marketing features, ability to engineer targeted campaigns, and offer email tracking. This makes it a more well-rounded solution that could better suit larger dealerships engaging in mass marketing efforts.

Custom tables — Custom tables are unique and not available by default on any other automotive CRM tools, but Act! lets you create them yourself. You can create unique fields such as insurance details, the loan/EMI car plate number, etc.

Preferences — Act!’s generous customization is also evident in the Preference tool. As the name suggests, this lets you redesign the functions of Act! CRM.

For example, you could create a record of a new client, complete with their name and contact details. You can also set preferences for your tasks. For example, you can set reminders for certain tasks or choose to roll over the remaining tasks of the day automatically.

Customer profiles — Act! also allows you to create detailed customer profiles filled with information to personalize your interactions and build a stronger rapport.

Act! offers two pricing models. Your choice depends on whether you need a cloud-based or on-premises solution. Here’s everything you need to know about each plan’s cost and inclusions.

• Act! Premium Cloud — Brower-based CRM with secure hosting, automatic updates and backups. Technical support is included.
• Act! Premium Desktop — Online and offline access, self-managed security, and control of updates. Technical support is included.

Act! is best suited for no credit check car dealerships with many custom processes that want software that they can tailor to their needs and workflows.

Another plus is the flexibility it offers regarding hosting the CRM system in the cloud or on-premises. For dealerships concerned about data security and want to reduce the likelihood of data breaches, hosting CRM on-premises can offer peace of mind. Be mindful that you will have to take care of software updates yourself though.

Customer retention — Maximizer CRM is also an excellent option if your focus is on customer retention. You’ll be able to store all complaints and their solutions in one database. This can be used to solve similar problems quicker in the future, ultimately helping you provide more consistent service and aiding in repeat business.

Built-in quota tracker — In addition to this, car salesmen often work on commission and have a fixed quota assigned to them. If that’s the model you’re following, you’ll be happy to know that you’ll get a built-in quota tracker.

Activity management — Maximizer also helps you monitor your team’s activity. You’ll be able to see how often they contact a customer, the mode of contact, and the duration.

Since you’ll be able to track your team’s performance, you’ll also be able to provide any necessary training to upskill individuals in areas of improvement.

Maximizer offers three editions of its automotive CRM platform. Below, I’ve highlighted what each plan offers and how much it costs.

• Base Edition — 3-user minimum, advanced contact management features, lead, task, and opportunity management, integration with Microsoft Outlook, and in-house support.
• Sales Leader Edition — Everything in Base, plus pipeline and activity tracking, sales reports, and revenue and activity targets.
• Financial Advisor Edition — Everything in Base, plus advanced account management, activity tracking, targets, and reporting.

You must enter your credit card information to access the free trial. However, you can cancel this at any time.

Maximizer offers different products that suit diverse priorities and roles across larger, national dealerships. Its Sales Leader Edition is suitable for managing customers throughout the sales process, while its Financial Advisor Edition will help you make informed decisions regarding your accounts with advanced reporting and analytics features.

Since it’s at the pricier end of the spectrum, Maximizer is not my top recommendation for smaller car dealerships.

Built-in phone system—A built-in phone system will enable smoother communication with your customers and save you the money and trouble of buying a separate phone line. If calling isn’t convenient, you can also reach out to your contacts via live chat, SMS, or social media.

AI chatbot—For chat support, Freshsales has its own AI chatbot, Freshbot, which is designed to capture a customer’s intent. This helps them find the best answers for the lead and saves you from having to manually answer repetitive and easily solved questions.

Social media integration—If you want to use social media, Freshsales integrates with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Line, allowing you to receive, manage, and respond to your social messages on your Freshsales dashboard. Social media is becoming increasingly important as a means of communication and public presence for your business.

Freshsales provides three pricing tiers designed to accommodate a variety of business sizes. It also has a 21-day free trial. Here is additional information regarding the cost of each plan and its inclusions:

• Growth — Kanban view, contact lifecycle phases, built-in chat, email, and phone, email templates, custom fields, basic workflows, product catalog, Freshworks Marketplace, 1 CPQ license, mobile app, and 24/5 customer support.
• Pro — Everything in Growth, plus AI contact scoring, advanced custom fields, auto-assignment, AI sales emails, AI text editing, multiple sales pipelines, AI deal insights, advanced workflows, and custom reports.
• Enterprise — Everything in Pro, plus field-level security permissions, custom modules, AI sales forecasting, developer sandbox, and audit logs.

Since it offers one of the most affordable plans out there, Freshsales is a great option for smaller dealerships. The inclusion of the phone system is also massively helpful for newer dealerships who are building up their software and communications suite from scratch.

Having a CRM and phone system all-in-one helps you get your business off the ground quickly and with a smooth learning curve, compared to getting to grips with two different systems.