- Jun 29, 2011
- 60
- 19
- First Name
- Dave
If you work at a VW dealer like I do chances are your area rep sends a report called "Lead Response Time Report" every single month to every GM and owner in your area (or at least in mine). This report can make or break your afternoon. I'm personally not a fan of lead response times as a primary indicator of how well a dealer does with leads, but I've learned to live with them. They exist, they get passed around, they are probably even used in presentations. What worries me is that if you're having a slow month (or the area or even VW as a whole) this report can incorrectly be attributed to as a cause.
Needless to say, our standings are usually in the top 4, but this month we had a new person in our internet sales department and he incorrectly stopped the clock on service leads by simply assigning them to service (our service department doesn't use the same CRM, so this obviously led to ongoing clock counts on the few he did this on).
If you work at a VW dealer you know that status changes don't "stop the clock" on VW provided leads, you actually have to log in your CRM an email or phone call event, even if you need to enter a fake number to do so (insane I know).
Though we had responded to 88% of leads in under 15 minutes our average response time caused us to be in last place because the few service leads weren't correctly stopped.
All hell broke lose. My GM wanted to know why. I figured it out and corrected the situation, but in doing so I began to look closer at the VW lead program managed by Urban Science and here's what you need to know:
If you received a lead last month and a duplicate lead the following month the duplicate lead response time is NOT reported even though duplicate lead is in your report for the current month. To make matters stranger the actual time it took you to respond to the new lead is the same time to respond time as the older duplicate lead (not the actual time).
This means if it took you 25 minutes to respond to the lead last month, but only 4 minutes this month it doesn't report the improvement. The newer lead will show 25 minutes and not 4. According to Urban Science they didn't want to confuse dealers with a second column called something like “new response time” and factor it in (personally I think we can handle it).
It was my fear all day that duplicate leads were reporting with inaccurate time to respond times, but Urban Science assured me they are not factored in and are just displayed for informational purposes. Displaying them for informational purposes only when they aren’t actually called that is also a problem because your GM may print the report and show you some of the leads and want to know why you aren’t doing better and if the lead is one of the duplicates that have an incorrect response time (about 13% in my case) then that’s a problem that’s much better solved by telling him to ignore it and pull up your own CRM report instead.
Or better yet just sit down with your GM and pick a lead or two from each day and personally evaluate it for not only acceptable response times, but also quality responses and successful engagement that lead to sales.
Because after all, that’s what it’s all about. Not how quickly you can stop a clock.
Needless to say, our standings are usually in the top 4, but this month we had a new person in our internet sales department and he incorrectly stopped the clock on service leads by simply assigning them to service (our service department doesn't use the same CRM, so this obviously led to ongoing clock counts on the few he did this on).
If you work at a VW dealer you know that status changes don't "stop the clock" on VW provided leads, you actually have to log in your CRM an email or phone call event, even if you need to enter a fake number to do so (insane I know).
Though we had responded to 88% of leads in under 15 minutes our average response time caused us to be in last place because the few service leads weren't correctly stopped.
All hell broke lose. My GM wanted to know why. I figured it out and corrected the situation, but in doing so I began to look closer at the VW lead program managed by Urban Science and here's what you need to know:
If you received a lead last month and a duplicate lead the following month the duplicate lead response time is NOT reported even though duplicate lead is in your report for the current month. To make matters stranger the actual time it took you to respond to the new lead is the same time to respond time as the older duplicate lead (not the actual time).
This means if it took you 25 minutes to respond to the lead last month, but only 4 minutes this month it doesn't report the improvement. The newer lead will show 25 minutes and not 4. According to Urban Science they didn't want to confuse dealers with a second column called something like “new response time” and factor it in (personally I think we can handle it).
It was my fear all day that duplicate leads were reporting with inaccurate time to respond times, but Urban Science assured me they are not factored in and are just displayed for informational purposes. Displaying them for informational purposes only when they aren’t actually called that is also a problem because your GM may print the report and show you some of the leads and want to know why you aren’t doing better and if the lead is one of the duplicates that have an incorrect response time (about 13% in my case) then that’s a problem that’s much better solved by telling him to ignore it and pull up your own CRM report instead.
Or better yet just sit down with your GM and pick a lead or two from each day and personally evaluate it for not only acceptable response times, but also quality responses and successful engagement that lead to sales.
Because after all, that’s what it’s all about. Not how quickly you can stop a clock.