New 2011 Cobalt Study Reveals Top Five Lead-Handling Best Practices Needed

New 2011 Cobalt Study Reveals Top Five Lead-Handling Best Practices Needed

By, Todd Lange
Performance Improvement Consultant @ ADP / Cobalt

When was the last time you did an email Mystery Shop of your own Internet Department? If you have, did you feel like the response was informative, polite and urgent? Did you feel like the value portrayed in the response made you strongly consider the dealership as a place with whom to do business? Did you then receive a follow-up phone call? If the answer to most of these questions is “no,” you are not alone.

NEW LEAD-HANDLING STUDY SHOWS LEAD RESPONSE HAS IMPROVED, NOT QUALITY

 If you have read the newly published 2011 Automotive eShopper Experience Study released by ADP/Cobalt(http://cobalt.com/eshopper2011/), you are now fully aware of the current Internet lead- handling performance-or lack thereof-that exists in the dealership world today. For example, the study showed that 2 out of 10 qualified sales leads submitted never received a response from the dealer and 2 out of 3 car shoppers were not invited to test drive a vehicle.

Have dealers made strides in the last decade? Yes, but mainly in the area of response time. In 2003, the average response time was 7.5 hours, but this year the average has dropped to 3.2 hours with over 60% of responding dealerships coming in at under 1 hour. That shows dedication by dealers and OEMs alike to drive down response time, and it has worked.

However, driving down response time should not come at the expense of delivering a poor response. If a shopper asks questions, then you should answer them all. Demonstrate courtesy and professionalism and remember that 70% of the shoppers in this study never received a price quote. A few other compelling statistics from the 2011 Automotive eShopper Experience Study are:

• Only 18% of dealers answered the ‘Why This Vehicle’ question.
• Only 22% of dealers answered the ‘Why My Store’ question.
• Only 42% of dealers both sent an email and called the shopper.

Not only did just 42% of stores both email and call a shopper as part of their follow up, but many of the stores  make their first phone call follow up after day 1. Also, phone call follow-up activity all but ceases after 1 week. With the ability to at least gain some control of the customer, albeit conversational, when on the phone versus relatively zero control of a customer through email, it is hard to imagine any dealership not following up with eLeads via email and telephone 100% of the time as part of their process.

BETTER PROCESSES PROVIDE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE LEAD-HANDLING TUNNEL

This data is supported by my own experience in the field. In one particular case, I was working with a dealer who did not attempt to call the shopper until one to two days after the initial email response was sent. They also did not build any value into their first few email responses, and offered zero incentive to come to their store. Further, they very rarely quoted any prices in email responses.

After resetting their eLead handling process using 5 basic principles listed below, they saw an immediate uptick in appointments made and their overall closing ratio rose 2.7% the first month. Here are five lead handling best practices that I used in that case. You should be using these as part of your process:

Top 5 Lead-Handling Best Practices

1.  Respond to EVERY eLead within one hour, or as fast as possible.

2.  Answer all of the shopper’s questions and offer a test drive as a next step/call to action in your response. ‘Feel free to contact me’ or ’I look forward to speaking with you’ are directionless  statements.

3.  Add value to the response by including a ‘Why My Dealership’ statement.

4.  Make a follow-up phone call between 10 minutes and 1 hour of the sent email response. Be sure to focus on selling the ‘appointment’ not the ‘vehicle’ and use scripts to coach this strategy.

5.  Have a written eLead handling process for when to email and call and enforce its use. You can’t manage what you don’t measure so enforcing a process will help show you possible weak areas to edit.

I think you will agree that paying attention to your internal eLead handling process to look for a few of the deficiencies I touched on in this post is a great way to start rebuilding a potentially broken process. Use the Top 5 Lead Handling Best Practices to not only improve but to respond to your shoppers in a manner that goes above and beyond what your competition is doing.

Todd Lange
Performance Improvement Consultant @ ADP / Cobalt