Video: Your Guide to Deals (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

A quick head's up before we get started: Please ignore any references to "My Little Salesman", "MLS", or differing brand imagery as this was simply the past name of much of the Dealership Drive functionality.

Chapters/Video Timestamped Breakdown:

[Select any to be taken to the sections of the transcript.]

00:00 - Introductions

00:27 - What is a Deal?

01:01 - Who may want to use Deals?

01:33 - How to access your Deals section.

01:55 - Deals panel overview.

02:15 - How to set up a new Deal, Invoice, or Quote.

03:17 - How to edit an existing Deal.

03:29 - The various parts of a Deal.

04:12 - Buyer Info

04:33 - Items

05:38 - Structure

06:44 - Settings

08:08 - Type of Sale

08:47 - Shipping

09:31 - Forms (Introduction)

10:23 - Form Submission (How & Why)

11:19 - Form Auto-Fill Capabilities Preview

11:58 - How to edit Form data within a particular Deal.

12:25 - How to undo edits on Forms on a Deal.

12:43 - How to email a form from within the Deals section.

13:31 - How to use DocuSign within the Forms section of Deals.

14:41 - Invoices, Quotes, and Payments Overview

16:24 - How to record a New Payment.

16:57 - Electronic Signatures (DocuSign Tracking)

17:47 - How to retrieve/download electronically signed documents.

18:06 - Summary

18:34 - Notes

18:51 - Documents & Files

19:10 - Update History

19:36 - Outro/Conclusion

Transcript of the video:

Howdy, friends. I’m Ken Lane — Communications Manager over at My Little Salesman. Today I’m very excited to pop the hood of our dealer management system to give you a closer look at the Deals section of your Dealership Drive Sales Desk.

But before we get to popping and diving beneath the hood, you may be wondering, “What the heck is a ‘Deal’?”

A Deal is the full documentation of a transaction at any stage of its journey—from quote to receipt—within your Dealership Drive Sales Desk. I like to think of Deals as the “story” of a transaction—capturing the who, what, when, and where—as it evolves in real-time. And the Deals section of your Sales Desk keeps every transaction at your fingertips at a moment’s notice—whether you’re on a desktop computer or out in the field on your mobile device.

Your Deals section is designed to be used by your entire sales and customer service team. More than simply a record of your transactions or a status dashboard, your Deals section was designed to be actively worked out of—like a sales workbench. It’s essentially the intersection of your customer database, your inventory, and your transactions—all converging in a Deal.

But enough talk—let’s pop the hood and check it out.

• Navigate over to mylittlesalesman.com and make sure you’re logged in.

• Just below your name in the upper right corner, click or tap on “MY ACCOUNT.”

• A window will appear with a number of sections. Locate “Sales Desk” and click or tap the word “Deals.”

On the table below, you will see a full record of all of your established Deals organized by customer (which can be changed at the top) and various key metrics at a glance—including a Deal’s status, salespeople involved, product information, and the like.

If you haven’t set up any Deals yet, you can easily begin by navigating over to the red “New” button on the upper left section above the table. When you click or tap this button, you’ll see a dropdown that gives you the option to start a “New Deal,” “New Invoice,” or a “New Quote.” You can also create any of the selections directly from a contact’s page or the backend of an inventory listing.

Now, technically speaking—all of these options will create a New Deal. If you select “New Invoice,” or “New Quote,” it will simply leapfrog your Deal creation process to that particular stage instead of where you would normally begin in the process of creating a New Deal.

Speaking of which, let’s see what this process looks like now.

I’m going to find a dummy Deal that I had with my boss Jason. Jason has bought a 1994 Peterbilt dump truck from me, but we have a few things to sort out.

Once I find him on the Deals screen, I’m going to click “Edit” alongside this corresponding Deal so I can continue fleshing out this Deal.

On the page for a particular Deal or any Deal, you’ll find many tile-like buttons across the top. These also exist on the mobile version—though I believe just below this Deal information panel due to the responsive design.

These tile-like buttons are very purposefully ordered where if you access each from left to right, by the time you reach the end, you will have completely traversed every section relevant to this particular deal in a very logical order—leaving no stone unturned. I like to think about this process like moving from space to space on a board game. Let me explain what I mean.

Let’s start with the first panel.

On the Buyer Info section, this is essentially the “Who” aspect of this deal. This is where you provide all of the necessary buyer information. You can do this by either selecting an existing name from your Dealership Drive Contact Management database or by entering the information right here.

Next up is the Items section. The Items section is the “what” aspect of this Deal—what are they buying or interested in buying?

Similar to the Buyer Info section, you can either select something from your existing inventory which can be automatically pulled from your Inventory Management section of your Dealership Drive dealer management system or you can enter the necessary information here.

Now, you can start to build a sort of a ticket here in Items. If the item in question is something that requires a lot of extra regulatory or tax data, like a semi-truck or something like that, we’d recommend that you make a single Deal for such an Item.

Still, with that being said, if you were to, say, include the price of new tires on here—let’s say that this dump truck needed ten new tires at $250 each, you can easily add these items on the same Deal by selecting “Add another line item” here.

Let’s keep moving to the Structure section.

The Structure section is part “how” and part “what” in the story of the sale—allowing you to enter the additional details of the transaction and provide a better price “out of the door” if need be. Some of these categories include registration fees, title fees, licensing fees, and including information about the taxable status of certain aspects of the deal.

You can also include information about Federal Excise Taxes, and tire credit data—which refers to a credit available in some situations when taxes had already been paid on tires and the like.

You’ll notice that as we change the data here on the left, the system automatically crunches the numbers and updates the Summary section here on the right.

The Settings sections of this Deal will be a continuation of the “who” and “how” sections of this Deal journey. In this menu, you can update information such as the source of the Deal—whether they found out about this piece of equipment from a social media post, a search engine ad, an email newsletter, or even if they walked in off the street.

In Settings, you can also enter information such as the current status of the Deal—which you will update as the Deal progresses. I would like to note that selecting “Sold” will lock the Deal, so make sure it’s actually sold before making that change. In this location section, let’s say that you have a few different dealerships. Here you can select which of your locations corresponds to this particular Deal.

The Settings page also houses an Expenses section so you can keep track of any sales representatives involved, their commission rates, finance & insurance representatives, and any overhead percentages to be taken out before commissions are calculated. You can also include Referral rates here—either in percentages or fixed amounts.

Let’s keep on trucking on over to “Type of Sale.”

Though currently a very basic section, the type of sale is very important. This is where you’d essentially select if this is going to be a Cash purchase or if the buyer is planning on utilizing outside financing.

If you select “Outside financing,” a few fields will open up to allow you to enter the Finance Lender and brokers. This section will likely be expanded in the future. So, if you want to provide your own financing—kind of a “buy here, pay here” model—the necessary functionality would exist to accommodate that.

So, let’s move on to the Shipping section.

Here in the shipping section, can select the shipping vendor for the items here and include all of the additional details, including Departure Date, Estimated Arrive Date, and even a Tracking number here. When the item finally arrives, you can include that date here as well for the sake of keeping accurate records.

Scrolling down just a little bit, you can enter the shipping address here. Shipping addresses are frequently different than the billing address, so you will want to make sure this reflects where your customer would like to receive the item. That’s fairly straightforward.

So, it may not seem like it, but this section alone may end up saving you several hours a week if you’re needing to process a lot of paperwork in reference to your transactions. This functionality alone could just about be its own service. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll explain why that’s the case in a bit.

This section will contain all of the necessary PDF forms and documents relevant to this Deal and your ongoing Deals. This can include truck registration forms, buyer guides that discuss warranty expectations, or even forms that you’re going to need to send off to the government. Basically, anything that needs to be filled out regarding this Deal and your company’s other Deals, you’re going to want to keep it here—and I’ll explain why in just a minute.

So, you’ll notice right now that I have several forms in this table. If you were to open this section for the first time, you would likely have no forms. No worries. Once you’ve located the PDF versions of any relevant forms regarding your Deals going forward, you can simply email them, not filled out—blank, with your relevant Dealership Drive account information, over to support@mlsinc.com.

You may be wondering why you need to submit them directly to us. Well, once we receive your forms, we will map each empty field against your Dealership Drive system. This essentially means that if you’ve entered any bit of information into your database before—such as the item you’re selling, the contact who is buying it or wants a quote, your own company information—any of these details will be automatically added onto the forms as you open them in the Forms section.

To give you a preview of what this looks like, I’m going to open one of these forms on this Deal that contains pre-mapped fields.

Here, you will see a tax exemption affidavit. Now, this information is for demonstration purposes only, but if this were your pre-mapped form in your Deals section, it would be automatically filled out with all of the relevant data. All of this data would be pulled from wherever else it is kept in your Dealership Drive system. In other words, so “say long” to redundant data entry.

However, let’s say that you need to change something on a particular form—some detail than what is different than the information you have on file. Editing this PDF within this Deal is as easy as clicking or tapping this relevant carrot/arrow icon, selecting “Edit” and then making the necessary change on the fly. Once you’re finished, simply select “Save changes” and the Form will retain the changes you just made.

What if you change your mind about these changes and want the Form to go back to pulling what’s on file for this particular Deal? Well, that’s as easy as selecting that arrow once again and clicking or tapping “Delete Edited State.”

Let’s say that you need to email some of these Forms for someone to review and you don’t feel like downloading the form, attaching it to an email, making sure you have the correct email address, and the like. Well, you can email the form from the Forms section.

Simply choose the form you’d like to send using the check box to the left and then clicking the “Email” button at the bottom. This will open a window that allows you to fill out all of the necessary information almost as though you were in your own email client, making sure the proper form is attached, selecting if you’d like the form to be read-only or not, and clicking or tapping “Send email.” Pretty cool, huh?

You may have noticed that all of the relevant fields for which there is data available are automatically filled out—all besides signatures. For obvious reasons, you can’t fill out signatures without the proper credentials. So, what happens when you need to send off a form to receive a customer signature or something like that? The process is remarkably similar to emailing them.

First, make sure that you have a DocuSign account and that it is connected to Dealership Drive. This is an extremely simple process I covered in a previous video. After that, select the form that you would like signed by clicking or tapping the side check box and selecting the “DocuSign” button at the bottom. A window will appear much like the email feature but with a few more options—including the option of personalizing the subject line, the addition of any co-signers, and a few other DocuSign features. From here, sending this electronic signature request is as easy as clicking “Submit.”

And that about wraps up the Forms section. Your next panel will be the Invoices, Quotes, & Payments section.

In your Invoices, Quotes & Payment section, you’ll be able to generate and store automatically-populated invoices on the fly. You’ll see that we have the invoice for this Deal right here in this table.

The system will pull all of the relevant data to auto-populate a quote or invoice. Once generated, using the down arrow/carrot icon, you’re presented with an array of options, including the ability to edit it, print it out, convert it to a PDF, email it, request a DocuSign signature on it, lock it, toss it in an archive, or delete it altogether.

Now, as we mentioned at the beginning of this, let’s say you’re on the Deals screen and just selected a “New Quote” or “New Invoice” from the drop-down options from the red “+New…” button. Choosing that selection would technically generate a New Deal but also do so and bring you to this stage in the Deal generation process.

This fast quote or invoice generation process may come in handy if, let’s say, you have a walk-in customer who is just purchasing a part. You may not want to say, “just give me a minute” while you start from literally square one with generating a New Deal. In that case, you may just want to get the customer a quick invoice and send them on their merry way. So, generating a “new invoice” or “new quote” will create a New Deal—even if some of the information is missing.

Let’s head back to that previous Deal.

In this same section, you’ll find the option to Record a Payment. So, at this point, the item has been sold, the invoice has been fulfilled, and payment has been exchanged. Using the Record a Payment section, you have the ability to document everything about that payment—including the amount applied to the balance, payment dates, types, check reference numbers, notes and upload relevant documents—such as receipts.

Let’s head over to the next section—electronic signatures.

Just a head’s up—if your DocuSign account is not connected to your My Littles Salesman account, you won’t see an Electronic Signatures button here—or the DocuSign options anywhere else within Deals at all, for that matter. If you don’t even have a DocuSign account, you can reach out to us at support@mlsinc.com and we can help you out with a referral to get you started.

Once you have your DocuSign account connected, this Electronic Signatures section is somewhat of a continuation of the Forms page. What do I mean by that? Well, consider this the tracking dashboard for all of your DocuSign activity submitted through Dealership Drive. Without opening DocuSign, you’ll be able to see the status of every signature request that corresponds to this Deal and even retrieve signed Forms via the “Actions” button with the down arrow carrot, as it is sometimes called, and selecting “Download completed document.” It’s all there, right at your fingertips, and associated with its corresponding Deal.

Ok, we’re coming down the home stretch. Let’s check out the Summary section.

The Summary section exists as a place where you can record additional costs incurred as well as a place where you check out your Profit Analysis. This will give you a quick idea of your profit and revenue from this Deal. Essentially, the summary section gives you more data points to enter so you can get a better perspective of your business.

The Notes section is pretty self-explanatory. This is a good place to jot a quick note and know you can quickly access it associated with its corresponding Deal.

Let’s take a look at Documents & Files

This page has a very similar purpose to the Notes section—but allows you to upload all documents you have associated with a particular Deal including reports, titles, exemptions, or even text files of notes you’ve taken elsewhere.

Let’s say that something about this Deal seems off—maybe it’s not the way you left it, but you can’t put your finger on what changed or who changed it. The Update History page is essentially a record of who touched what and when. This is especially helpful if you have several different sales representatives working on a particular deal and everyone needs to stay on the same page.

Well, I think that will just about do it for this in-depth look at the Deal functionality built into your Dealership Drive dealer management system. Every aspect of this system was carefully designed to simplify the sales process for you, your team, and your customers.

Questions and Suggestions?

Contact your Dealership Drive sales representative.