Website Inquiries vs. Sales Leads

Conversions are a big focus for auto dealerships. However, when looking at the numbers being thrown around, we should stop and think about which numbers mean what. Because, the bottom line is that increasing the number of vehicle sales derived from your online activities is the most important outcome for your dealership.

A website inquiry is a potential buyer raising their hand, making that transition from anonymous to known, and telling you they have interest.

A sales lead is that inquiry taking further steps in the buying process to actually move toward closing the deal.

Obviously, not all of your inquiries will do this. So let's look at a scenario to get an idea of how the numbers relate to the transitions you really want.

Dealership X gets 12,500 website visitors per month and 1,000  of those become website inquiries. This is an 8% visitor-to-lead conversion. Of those 1,000 leads per month, 160 actually buy cars - a 16% lead-to-customer conversion.

So that means that at the end of the month 840 are left. Some of those will opt out of the process by not responding at all to your follow-up. But there are a bunch of them left who haven't chosen to buy yet who probably will..eventually. Statistics show that up to 80% of people who raise their hands (submit an inquiry) will buy within a eighteen months.

The trick is to get them to buy from your dealership. This does not mean that those 672 leads should be dumped on sales as qualified leads. What it does mean is that the Internet department needs to stay in touch and try to re-qualify them at the time when they're ready to move forward in the process.

One of the ways to do this from the start is to ask them to tell you how far out they think they are from making a buying decision. Either on the inquiry form or from the immediate follow-up you make.

Another thing to consider is what the "tells" are in the buyer's process. Sometimes people will re-submit an inquiry when something changes. These duplicate inquiries can be indicative of a rejuvenated intentions. Putting together a lead nurturing strategy can help you benchmark the changes in behavior that indicate a shift in buying attitude.

A considered approach to nurturing your leads will help you "see" the patterns in response that trigger a sales activity. But you won't get this far if you're not focused on the long-term horizon. It takes repeated efforts to nurture inquiries into sales leads. Inquiries should be nurtured and qualified opportunities should get sales conversations. Perfecting the ability to tell the difference varies for each dealership. You're spending a lot of your marketing budget to generate inquiries that have the potential to become buyers, and you certainly don't want to waste it.

Nurturing takes time, something we all hate to admit. Your lead database will grow month after month and the sooner you start wrapping strategy around how you'll work to qualify this growing database of leads, the better results you'll get down the road. The thing is that buyers are going to buy when they choose to buy. Getting smarter about how you use the intelligence their website interactions generate will help you capitalize on those conversions in the future.

But one thing is for certain, all leads are not sales leads, and treating them like they are will only frustrate your sales team and dissuade your website visitors from inquiring at all.