A customer can buy elsewhere because you don't have the vehicle they need. They can also buy elsewhere because they asked for a price three times and never got one. Both deals get the same CRM entry: "Bought elsewhere." Accurate — and almost useless. This episode walks through the free one-sheet check that finds out whether a tool is still helping you run the dealership, or quietly running it.
In this episode of Dealer Leadership, Jason Rigby walks through Is This Tool Helping Us Do the Job?, a free worksheet for GMs. Use one sheet per tool: ask the people who use it, watch one task all the way through the handoff, sort what you found, and leave the vendor call with a written commitment and a recheck date.
What's on the sheet:- Ask the people using it — what it makes easier, where they get stuck, what they keep in Excel or on paper and why, what they don't trust, where they enter the same information twice
- Watch one task from start to finish — a staff member does the job while you watch, including the handoff to the next person or department
- Review the answers, then book the vendor call — training, wrong or missing info, systems not talking, or can it do the job?
- Leave the call with a commitment — agreed fix, owner, due date, included in the price or extra, and the date you repeat the task
- Why "bought elsewhere" can be accurate and still hide the whole story
- The Excel sheet your salespeople keep next to the CRM you're paying for — and the one question that turns it into something you can fix
- Why splitting information between spreadsheets and the CRM makes the CRM less trustworthy, which gives people another reason to work outside it
- What it costs when employees become the connection between ten tools that don't talk to each other
- Why another training session won't make missing information appear
- The vendor call done right: your staff does the real task while the vendor watches — no feature tour
- Why AI on top of a broken tool just produces confident follow-up from incomplete history
https://dealerleadership.com/worksheets/gm-tool-check.pdf
Print one sheet per tool. Run it with the people who use the tool every day, and repeat the same task with staff before calling anything fixed.
More free worksheets for dealership leaders: https://dealerleadership.com/resources/worksheets
Bring one tool, process, or number that's stuck to a free 30-minute Leak Finder Session: https://dealerleadership.com
Jason Rigby — Dealer Leadership jason@dealerleadership.com
Bring me one thing that's stuck.
Thirty minutes, free. A person, a process, or a number that won't move. We work on it on the call and you'll know by the end whether more of this would help your store.
Text me one deal that fell apart today, one flat salesperson, or one CRM number that doesn't make sense.