Consumers visiting dealer websites, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and other sites can use a new product from automotive digital marketing company AutoRevo to start a live text conversation with an actual sales professional.

Those consumers can do that instead of having a conversation with a chatbot or someone who “doesn't understand your dealership or your inventory,” AutoRevo said.

The company says that when it comes to buying and selling, messaging from a dealer to its consumers is a helpful tool.

But those techniques need to be updated to how consumers want to communicate, paired with quickly accessible data. Without that updating, those older habits can slow the sales cycle, causing sales teams to stumble.

AutoRevo says its new product, called inLine Text, can eliminate that frustration and lost sales opportunity. It does that by connecting consumers with dealers through a text-on-the-go, real-time connection.

According to AutoRevo, the open rate for text messages is 98%. Users read 90% of those within three minutes.

The company says inLine Text can provide a direct, clutter-free channel for dealers to educate, market to, and sell to consumers.

Mike Anderson, general manager at Hopper Motorplex in McKinney, Texas, said in a news release that inLine Text is “a much simpler yet data-rich texting tool for car dealers.”

Anderson continued, “It auto-populates our CRM and accesses our inventory management system, pushes the salesperson’s business card, directions to the dealership, images, documents, and more to the prospect. Our salespeople love it.”

Time kills deals, said AutoRevo chief executive officer Ken Roberts.

“And this product was designed with that in mind, having all you need to close a deal quickly,” Roberts said.

Roberts continued, “inLine Text is changing the way dealers can communicate with their customers. With real-time actionable information, our dealers can use this application to communicate across many of their advertising mediums in any language.”

AutoRevo says inLine Text moves prospects from initial inquiry to a closed deal with the following features:

— CustomerID: Dealers can receive a real name, address, age range, and more when a customer calls or texts them. Instant Customer ID and Social Profile — including real name, address, age range, photo and social signals — can help start the conversation on familiar ground.

— Integrated Facebook Messenger: Dealers can connect directly with customers while pushing to their CRM.

— Lead attribution: Dealers can assign their advertising channels to see which sources are working and which ones are not.

— Trade appraisals: When a customer sends a VIN, dealers can get vehicle values from NADA, Black Book, CARFAX, and the inLine market pricing tool.

— Integrated inventory: With real-time integration, dealers can match inventory with customers and cross-sell.

— Digital business card: A dealer can send a vCard through text with the click of a link. That allows customers to add the dealer to their contacts.

— Vehicle deposits: With Square integration, the dealer’s team can be PCI-compliant through elimination of salespeople’s handling of sensitive information.

— Real-time language translation: That allows the dealer to have text conversations with customers in 100 languages.