Great question! I should have clarified that the vehicle that was already sold was a 1998 Pontiac Trans Am. Ha. Not a lot of comps.
Another good question that I could have explained better. The leads that were repeats were not marked bad in the system and were left under "Internet," I just excluded them from the conversion rates, because they naturally converted higher.
Unfortunately, the problem is very clearly online. We only scheduled 5 visits. Three of them were the one that was sold, bad credit on a 2009 Pontiac G8, and a no-show. The other two were a customer that came even though we told them we didn't have the vehicle they wanted (so technically not even an appt), and the last I felt the salesperson did a phenomenal job, but the customer just didn't like anything we had (I'm pretty sure she was just appeasing the spouse because she wanted a Cadillac all along - which she bought).
Honestly, looking through the leads I only felt that there were three the department did a less than stellar job on. I know that it is easy for me to say this through a biased lens, but my entire goal when I started was to show myself and my team that we were (myself included because I built the templates, processes, etc.) doing a poor job. I did not set out to make myself feel better and find excuses. There are only two possibilities in my eyes at this point though:
1. The leads are junk: I hate to be that guy, but that's the feeling I was left with. It was so brutal to go through them that I felt bad for the department that they had to deal with them. I feel like I have good enough self-awareness that I wouldn't use that excuse lightly.
2. Our processes stink: While I think this area always has room for improvement, it seems our response rate and response times hint that our processes probably aren't terrible. I'm going to have to review our templates, retrain on follow up cadence just to make sure we are all on the same page, and listen to some outbound calls.
A less than 1% conversion rate still says there is a problem somewhere, but after reviewing our leads so intently I, like many here, am left to question how honest other dealers are with themselves when calculating their conversion rates. The only leads I excluded were the ones mentioned.
I think one key point that I made when displaying the data was that the data was generated by myself alone. I wonder how many times dealers are using the data that their staff and/or their vendors give them to make the numbers sound good for their own purposes.