The rules for dealers to close customer leads have changed.
Dealers need to abandon a one-size-fits-all approach for identifying, nurturing, and closing leads. Dealers also need to stop thinking in terms of lead volume and focus on lead quality.
Leads come from so many different sources that, as a dealer, you need to customize your approaches to meet customers where they are on the purchase journey. For example, customers are on the phone with your sales teams, texting them, emailing them, completing lead forms, or walking on to the lot without contacting you ahead of time. In fact, about half of shoppers don’t contact a dealer before visiting the dealer’s lot.[1] And walk-in shoppers think and act differently than someone who calls you ahead of time. Phone leads are different than online leads.
Dealers also need better tools to identify and nurture quality leads. For example, you need to ask the right questions during a phone conversation or know how to interpret the tone of an email to evaluate a lead.
To help dealers embrace the new rules of closing quality leads, Cars.com has partnered with Jennifer Suzuki of e-Dealer Solutions to publish The Cars.com Guide to Converting Leads to Sales in the Digital Era. This brief and informative guide should help you improve your game closing leads. For example, we explain why walk-in leads are high priority and how to respond to them depending on where a consumer is in their research. We also explain how to better uncover consumer intent from internet leads and how to get a phone caller to visit your lot.
Cars.com is proud to collaborate with Jennifer Suzuki, who has more than 17 years of automotive industry experience. She is the founder and president of e-Dealer Solutions, Inc., which implements proprietary training solutions for automotive retailers.
Start winning now by reading The Cars.com Guide to Covering Leads to Sales in the Digital Era.
[1] Cars.com, Mobile Influence on Car Shopping, January 2017. Cars.com executed a quantitative survey of 337 recent and prospective car buyers. The survey was conducted between November 28 and December 9, 2016.
