Moving your car shipping desk off spreadsheets and into a CRM

Spreadsheets fail a car-shipping desk at the hand-offs between people and apps. A CRM puts each customer's quote, messages, contract, posted load and payments on one record, and the move itself takes a switch day, a sorted sheet and some typing.

What breaks when a car shipping desk runs on spreadsheets

A sheet can carry one salesperson for a while. As the desk grows, the same problems show up:

• Follow-ups live in memory. The sheet has a follow-up column, but nothing sends the text. On a busy day the quiet quotes wait.
• The conversation is somewhere else. Texts sit in the phone app, emails in Gmail, notes on sticky notes. Before every call back, the salesperson goes looking.
• Two people quote one customer. A shipper who fills in forms with two lead vendors shows up twice, and two of your salespeople quote against each other.
• Opt-outs get lost. A customer texts STOP to one salesperson, and another texts them the next day from a different line. TCPA and carrier rules restrict texting people who opted out.
• The price check is another tab. The salesperson opens Central Dispatch, looks up the lane, comes back and types a price.
• Contracts and deposits sit in other apps. The sheet says signed when someone remembers to update it.
• The owner has to ask. Who quoted what today, which vendor's leads book, which callers are still waiting. Each answer means a message to someone.

What changes when the desk moves to a CRM

How to move your open quotes and orders

Move only what is still open. Closed and lost deals can stay in the old sheet as a record.

1. Pick a switch day. Connect your lead vendors, phone app and Gmail before it. From that morning every new lead goes into the CRM and nowhere else, and nobody adds a new row to the sheet.
2. Sort the sheet into three groups. Open quotes that have not booked, booked orders that do not have a carrier yet, and orders already dispatched or picked up.
3. Enter the open quotes. Add each one as a quote with the car, the route, the price and the ship date, newest first. For each, decide whether it goes into automatic follow-up or a salesperson calls it. Before anyone texts an old quote from the new system, check the old phone app for customers who texted STOP.
4. Move booked orders that have no carrier yet. Enter the quote and convert it to an order. If the contract is not signed, send it from the order. If the load is not on Central Dispatch yet, post it from the order. If it is already posted, finish that order in the old sheet so the same load does not go up twice.
5. Finish dispatched orders where they are. Retyping carrier, driver and payment details for a car already on a truck gains you nothing. Let those orders deliver from the old sheet.
6. Lock the old sheet. When the last old order delivers, make the sheet read-only.

If you have hundreds of open quotes, ask on the demo how to bring them in, and agree on a cutoff date before anyone starts typing.

What to watch in the first week after the switch

• The owner dashboard shows every connection working: phone and texts, email, Central Dispatch, automatic follow-up and lead vendors.
• New leads reach a salesperson, and no lead from today sits in the queue unassigned.
• Someone works the Follow-up Today list every day.
• The missed-calls board has nobody still waiting at the end of the day.
• Salespeople stop opening the old sheet. If one keeps going back, ask what the sheet has that the CRM is missing.

The first-week setup plan walks through those settings in order.

Before you book a demo, count three things in your sheet: open quotes, booked orders without a carrier, and orders on a truck. Those counts tell you how much typing the move takes and what to ask about. To plan the move with us, book a live demo.