"Would you leave a customer walking around the lot for over 2 hours?"
One of our OEM reps chooses to pull a lead response time report every Monday morning before dealerships open and send it to everyone he can. The message above accompanies the report and I'm dying to respond "Well if it's 3AM on a Sunday, yes I would."
I'm not a fan of auto-response emails and don't see the value in setting up some IFTTT operation to "improve" our response time let alone pay another company to do that for me (For only $495/mo we can get you a 5 minute response time!). I'm fortunate enough to work for a GM that sees my point of view. However, he's noticed that we have a lot of leads that come in after hours and asked me to look into tasking our BDC reps with answering those leads. While I'm exploring the possibility I want ask the question here: Does your BDC work after hours?
When I say work I don't mean stopping the clock; rather, I mean intelligently responding to a prospect's inquiry. Furthermore, I would also envision compensating them for their effort along the lines of maybe a $5 per lead responded to. It will give them the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars on the attempt as well as beat any competing dealership to the prospect possibly increasing their show and sold count. In addition, if we do start this
When I earned my first IM position I was eager to impress and would answer leads at any time, going so far as to have set appointments on Christmas. Obviously I've stopped that practice as I've proven myself and value my time but I understand how cumbersome answering the leads can be. I don't want to force my team to do anything I'm unwilling to do so before I went any further I spoke with my staff about the possibility and some are open to it.
I haven't really dug into any stats yet but I can tell you that we received 37, 31, 38, and 52 leads over the past 4 Sundays. Furthermore about 27% of our leads come in between 9 PM and 9 AM so there does appear to be an opportunity there. I still have yet to take a look at the lead sources that come in during those times and our success rate with them.
Any thoughts?
One of our OEM reps chooses to pull a lead response time report every Monday morning before dealerships open and send it to everyone he can. The message above accompanies the report and I'm dying to respond "Well if it's 3AM on a Sunday, yes I would."
I'm not a fan of auto-response emails and don't see the value in setting up some IFTTT operation to "improve" our response time let alone pay another company to do that for me (For only $495/mo we can get you a 5 minute response time!). I'm fortunate enough to work for a GM that sees my point of view. However, he's noticed that we have a lot of leads that come in after hours and asked me to look into tasking our BDC reps with answering those leads. While I'm exploring the possibility I want ask the question here: Does your BDC work after hours?
When I say work I don't mean stopping the clock; rather, I mean intelligently responding to a prospect's inquiry. Furthermore, I would also envision compensating them for their effort along the lines of maybe a $5 per lead responded to. It will give them the opportunity to earn a few extra dollars on the attempt as well as beat any competing dealership to the prospect possibly increasing their show and sold count. In addition, if we do start this
When I earned my first IM position I was eager to impress and would answer leads at any time, going so far as to have set appointments on Christmas. Obviously I've stopped that practice as I've proven myself and value my time but I understand how cumbersome answering the leads can be. I don't want to force my team to do anything I'm unwilling to do so before I went any further I spoke with my staff about the possibility and some are open to it.
I haven't really dug into any stats yet but I can tell you that we received 37, 31, 38, and 52 leads over the past 4 Sundays. Furthermore about 27% of our leads come in between 9 PM and 9 AM so there does appear to be an opportunity there. I still have yet to take a look at the lead sources that come in during those times and our success rate with them.
Any thoughts?