I mystery shopped your dealership, there's nothing to celebrate today.

During the last week, between July 27th and July 31st, I mystery shopped a dealer 4 times with 4 unique names, numbers and email addresses at his request. It’s worth mentioning this dealer uses his sales floor to handle the follow up for internet leads and phone ups/pops.

Of those 4 unique customers, I received follow up on 2 of the leads. Shops 2 and 3 received zero calls, texts or emails, as of this morning when I’m posting this, days after the leads we submitted.

Of the two leads that did receive follow up, I want to examine what that follow up looked like. Shop one received a total of exactly one phone call with a (terrible) voicemail; no email, and no text. Shop four received 6 phone calls within 45 minutes. Not one voicemail ?? (stalker vibes) not one email.

How is it that we have become so insanely lazy to accept ghosting behavior of many of our customers literally raising their hand asking to do business with us? And on the last week of the month, of the customers we followed up with, we lost so many opportunities either only making one half hearted phone call with a piss poor unenthusiastic sounding voicemail, or blew the customer up into oblivion with stalker-ish type behavior that would turn anyone off.

I know what you're thinking, that was some "other" store, my process is well thought out, we are consistently timely and meaningful when our customers try to make the 2nd largest purchase they will ever make from us. Sadly, this is about average for many; dare I say most dealers today. There is no sustainable, duplicatable process whatsoever and your sales reflect it. There are no email templates (and if there are, they are the CRMs stock default setup which have never been customized) there is zero expectation for what a timely response is, no expectation for what’s acceptable-and what’s not with our customers who are just trying to buy from us.

Check out todays podcast on Apple and Spotify below to hear more about what your process looks like then, if having a better process appeals to you, schedule a call with me