ROI stands for 'return on investment.' Basically, it's a measure of how much sales increase after a dealership invests in something. The main difficulty in calculating ROI is attributing additional sales directly to new investments; through the use of specialized software, however, this task can be made simpler.

 

Say that you ran a dealership, and you chose to invest in a billboard across town. After a period of time goes by, you could compare the overall amount of sales your dealership made during that period to the amount of sales it made in the past, before you put up the billboard - but that assessment may be skewed. Your dealership may have gained sales for reasons that were completely unrelated to the billboard, or a downward economic trend may have mitigated the positive effect that the billboard would have otherwise had. To obtain useful analysis results, you need a reliable method for identifying which new sales are being generated by the investment.

 

For a billboard, you salespeople can ask your customers whether it was because of the billboard that they chose to go to your dealership. After logging their answers to this question in a customer relationship management platform (a CRM), you could calculate whether the amount of customers who answered 'yes' represent a net positive growth that's attributable to the billboard. However, probably not every customer who sees the billboard will remember seeing it; it will instead have been a subconscious reason for them going to your dealership. It is also possible that some customers who did see your billboard will answer with 'no.'