When the pandemic hit in 2020, car dealerships were forced to close their physical doors overnight. This was the beginning of a disruptive and fast-moving time for the automotive industry. Customers still required vehicles to get around but couldn’t go to a dealership to see them, forcing them online. The semiconductor shortage was also severely impacting the supply of new cars, fueling demand for used cars.

One established local used car dealership in Exeter, Devon, moved quickly to react to customer demand. Rebranding itself as Tangelo in 2021, and with a new e-commerce website due to go live imminently, the company has quickly evolved itself into a nationwide car sales platform with customers spanning all corners of the UK.

During this incredible period of growth, Tangelo knew that its CRM and marketing systems needed updating to successfully implement its new brand and growth strategy without roadblocks.

Tangelo’s sales team still relied on manually recording customer information and team activities. This was likely to hamper the business in the future, especially in the context of a revamped online platform.

Tangelo needed its sales and marketing systems to be linked and collaborative, with a single access point. It required a CRM system to serve as a single source of truth (SSOT), where everyone could find integrated, accurate, and updated data, in a unified business-wide system. Enter SugarAI and its implementation partner, Provident CRM.

Looking for a suitable solution

After researching the market and watching demos for several different CRM platforms, Tangelo’s management concluded that Sugar Sell and Sugar Market together met all its requirements, including the need for flexibility, collaboration, and customisation.

Provident CRM was recommended to Tangelo through Sugar’s partner channel, handling the onboarding process and providing extensive training to their transaction managers and marketing team.

Tangelo’s sales team also elected their own internal Sugar champion, who helped colleagues to develop their Sugar skills and build the CRM system around individual workflows.

Centralizing customer data for a better experience

With automated data acquisition and company-wide access to information, the Tangelo sales team began using Sugar Sell to track the entire sales process, from lead enquiries through to opportunities and orders - all in one place.

Meanwhile, Sugar Market enables the marketing team to pull clear data and market effectively to individual customers for the first time.

By integrating the two solutions, and linking sales results back to marketing campaigns, the company now benefits from better decision-making and far more efficient use of time and resources.

Not only has the new system saved the sales team time, but it has also enabled them to deliver a better customer experience, with all a customer’s information and past conversations in one place.

Looking to the future

Tangelo is now adding more elements to its Sugar solutions, including integrating data with major auto marketplaces and the website showroom. This will provide a clearer view of the lead enquiry process and quickly flag up when a prospect places a deposit against a car order, so that invoicing can also be unified with the CRM system.

Tangelo’s marketing data was previously an untapped resource, so it’s seen a real benefit in being able to pull that data and market to individual customers. Previously, once a customer had purchased a car they then fell through the cracks, but Tangelo can now build long lasting relationships through opt-in data. Since onboarding Sugar its database has grown by 22%.

Provident CRM is there to provide extensive and ongoing staff training and customisation that works at an industry and business level, to help Tangelo continue its growth trajectory.

With the revamped Tangelo site due to launch shortly, Provident CRM’s expertise also supports the team in gaining insight into how customers interact with their campaigns, tracking results, and fine-tuning. In just a relatively short time, Sugar and Provident CRM have helped Tangelo put the customer in the front and centre of its business to grow from a successful local dealership to become a UK-wide car sales platform. The sky is now the limit as the partnership grows further.