Customer Story: Tangelo

Scaling From a Local Car Dealer to National Car Sales Platform

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 SugarCRM and its implementation partner, Provident CRM.

Looking for the 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.

Centralising 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.

Sugar Sell and Sugar Market work together seamlessly and do everything on our wish list. Our marketing data was previously an untapped resource, so it’s a real benefit to be able to pull that data and market to individual customers. We’re now adding additional data feeds and moving towards adding invoicing to the platform. Provident CRM provided extensive staff training and customisation that works at an industry and business level. With our revamped site due to launch in the near future, we can see how customers interact with our campaigns, and track our results. Choosing SugarCRM was a great move, and working with Provident CRM has been brilliant. I really didn’t expect the amazing level of support that Emma provided.

– Lauren Blackler-Hinks, Marketing Specialist at Tangelo

Integrating SugarCRM with market-leading automotive retail marketplaces 

Tangelo adverts and sells cars through online retail marketplaces such as Auto Trader, UK and Ireland’s largest digital automotive marketplace for new and used cars. Since the new GDPR legislation implementation, online portals can no longer share customers’ personal data with partners via email. Without data coming through external systems, Tangelo sales reps needed to manually input leads names, phone numbers, and key details associated with an inquiry – increasing the risk for errors, inaccurate data and failure to follow up with prospects – resulting in missed sales opportunities.   

Tangelo sought Provident CRM to develop an integration that automatically records all leads coming from Auto Trader within their SugarCRM for a single source of truth. This would ensure that the sales team could see exactly which vehicle each lead was looking for on the website, enabling them to follow up quickly and efficiently, track activities, and generate reports without collating information from different sources. 

A challenge for any business with a continuously growing database is to manage data duplication within its CRM system. During implementation with the ongoing account support provided by Provident CRM’s Customer Success Manager, Emma Haines, the Tangelo team can easily spot duplicate contacts within Sugar, diminishing any future confusion or frustration with the new processes. 

Communication and collaboration between Provident CRM and Auto Trader resulted in a smooth development process and experience, facilitating the integration documentation, testing and implementation. This cooperation for customisation enabled Tangelo’s sales team to easily adopt the new system’s features within Sugar. This empowers Tangelo to mitigate future issues with a tailored recovery feature and have all client and vehicle information at their fingertips, all in one place.  

Overall, the integration has been massively beneficial to Tangelo in terms of productivity, with nearly eliminating all manual tasks and SugarCRM becoming a be-all, end-all hub for sales leads. The sync between Auto Trader and the CRM system is down to about five minutes – virtually real-time lead creation – generating heightened time and opportunity for sales reps to focus on more meaningful relationships with their customers.   

Besides Auto Trader, Tangelo’s use of other lead generation systems means that future integrations may be necessary. Ideally, all the leads from each external system would go directly into Sugar, creating a centralised repository and single source of truth for all operations. 

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. As Sugar’s leading European implementation partner, our expertise was crucial for friction-free deployment, culture change and exceptional after-sales support.

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.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is how marketing, sales, and service teams finally get a clear picture of each customer to help businesses reach new levels of performance and predictability. Sugar is the CRM platform that makes the hard things easier.

Thousands of companies in over 120 countries rely on Sugar to achieve high-definition CX by letting the platform do the work. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Sugar is backed by Accel-KKR.