What We Did

When PDL began the engagement, Crestline didn't have a CRM in any operational sense. DealerSocket IDMS sat at the center of the business for inventory and deal management, but its CRM module had never been activated. Leads entered through phone, web forms, AutoTrader, Facebook Marketplace, and walk-ins, and from there they lived in Gmail threads, Google Sheets, and individual memory. There was no pipeline. There was no source attribution. There was no reliable way to know which past customers were due for outreach. The strategic gap was sharper than the operational one: Crestline's business strategy depended on repeat buyers and family relationships, but the infrastructure to support that ambition didn't exist.

PDL recommended activating IDMS CRM rather than introducing a new tool. The reasoning was practical. The team was already in IDMS daily for other work, the system was already paid for, and the lowest-friction path to building the capability was the one that didn't require learning a second platform. Before pipeline stages were configured, PDL worked with the team to define what information actually needed to be captured for both contacts and deals. The pipeline followed from there. Follow-up sequences and post-sale workflows were configured with input from the people who would use them, not handed down from above. During the engagement, PDL also evaluated AI-assisted call capture as a way to remove the documentation burden that drives most CRM adoption failures, weighing DealerSocket's roadmap against the option to build a lightweight workflow now. The change management work wasn't a separate workstream. It was how the engagement ran.

By the end of Phase 1, the outcomes that mattered weren't activity metrics. They were operational shifts:

• Lead response time moved from same-day at best to under two hours consistently.

• Source attribution data went from non-existent to actionable, giving Crestline its first real visibility into which channels were producing buyers worth retaining.

• Post-sale touchpoints ran systematically for the first time, reaching every delivered customer in the first 90 days.

• The foundation that the AI pilot and marketing strategy both depended on became real rather than theoretical.

The Phase 2 conversation, which had been hypothetical at the start of the engagement, became a concrete one. Crestline didn't just adopt a tool. The business is now better positioned to do what its strategy actually requires.