Dealership Lead Follow-Up: How, When and Who.

How dealerships delegate leads is instrumental to having a successful sales/marketing process especially while in the thick of year end. Having an improper system in place will result in a few things. For starters, your customer isn't getting the experience they signed on for. If there is a digital lead entered in the system, how does your dealership assign a representative?

Do you have cyclical process that changes from person to person? Do you have an internet lead/sales manager? We'll be discussing different ways you can effectively distribute and follow up with leads. From who should be doing it, how they should come about doing it and reducing lead follow up times.

To start, you're going to want to evaluate the system you currently have in place. Are you the type of dealership that doesn't avidly assign someone to follow up with internet leads? Lacking in that department will result in lost business, consider that as that potential customer submits a lead form to you, they've also sent one out to 4 other dealerships in the area. Having a system in place that allows either a single individual as an internet sales manager is a fantastic start. Here are a couple of articles with some interesting information regarding lead follow up and statistics.

DialogTech's Derek Andersen has a great statistics article for 2020 automotive marketing:

Andrei Smith has a great article on internet leads + responses worth reading up on for your 2020 plans.

That one person will be dedicated to following up with your leads, and upon booking an appointment that person can designate a sales person to that customer. You can even customize the engagement experience of the customer by assigning the sales person that you think would be the best fit for that customer.

This pulls sales away from "Cherry Picking" leads, following up with some and ignoring others. Not saying this is the most effective method, as dealers that have a multitude of clients and sales staff will need to adapt and cater the follow up process for their situation. Many dealerships will already have a internet sales department, multiple people assigned to specifically following up with internet leads.

Not having this is place will result in leads not being called; or an overwhelming amount of calls for that matter. These are simply having the tops picked at, like a child not wanting to eat his vegetables. Would you be surprised to hear a dealership say that "this is too many leads"? It's a very strange objection to hear, since "too many leads" should never be something you want to hear. That concept is simply brought on by ineffective time management strategies and sales processes.

"When" to handle the internet leads is simple - as soon as possible. You should have a time frame that each time a lead is followed up with, you try and reduce the time it took. If it took an hour to follow up with that internet lead, do it in 30 minutes next time. Ideally your follow up time would be almost instant, but this isn't typically the case. Some dealers have a system where internet leads must be followed up with in under 20 minutes. This process should be done upon form submission or campaign engagement, the more time allotted from submission to follow up will be detrimental to closing that sale efficiently. For the new year, create a goal for your internet team to bring your lead follow up time exponentially lower. Present incentive to your team (however you choose to do so) and measure results accordingly.

This year let's stay away from cherry picking, leaving leads solely due to the fact that there's too many, and make sure you're finding the right person to pair with that customer. Ensure you have a concrete system in place to make your customers know that you're the right dealership. There is no "end all be all" system, and neither is this one. There are many ways that are tried and true with following up with internet leads.

If you're looking for assistance when it comes to achieving your lead follow up goals, reach out to me directly and we can organize a lead training seminar with a dedicated Bumper Performance Manager.

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Zackary Fulmer