Mike,
You're not the only one that is having problems with GM's 3rd Party Lead Program. I spent a great deal of time in Jan/Feb this year going through all of the leads and doing a little research. You've probably noticed that the bulk of them come in after hours (usually between 9pm and 3am PST) and that the customers are either fake or extremely difficult to get a hold of.
While GM, OneSource, and Torque will deny that they hold the leads and send them out in groups the data suggests otherwise. Unless you have an overnight BDC to handle these leads they can/will affect your Average Lead Response time and therefore your bonus. Given the times the leads come in and quality of the leads I cancelled our enrollment in the program. I cut 120 GM 3rd Party leads, didn't replace them with another source, and sold an additional 22 units the next month because of the increased productivity.
You could try calling OneSource, but they would not divulge when they actually received the lead or even when it was sent to your CRM provider.
Over several calls the following questions were never answered by OneSource:
1. What is my lead radius?
2. Why are the few customers that I am speaking with telling me that they requested information anywhere between 12 and 36 hours before I call them?
3. How are the leads being verified?
4. How do I dispute a bad lead?
The simple answer...the support staff does not know, or they can't tell you.
1. When I cancelled the TPL program the form clearly stated that the next closest GM dealer that participates in the program would begin to receive the leads that we were getting. So it seems like there is no "lead radius" and you could potentially have leads from customers several hundred miles away. At least this was the case with some of my leads (there is a mountain range between us and some of the customers).
2 & 3. None of the support staff at OneSource could explain why customers were telling me that submitted their information a day or so before we received their information. Also, they could not explain how the customer information was being verified either.
4. After 3 phone calls I was told I could fax in the lead and then wait at least 2 weeks before I knew if we were going to receive a credit.... No option to email or call anyone because "we are too busy with all of the potential bad leads that it is taking several weeks in some cases to respond to dealers."
Why would GM fix something that is poorly designed, has poor quality, allows the 3rd party sites to sell the same leads to dealers and other vendors, and works in their favor because it impacts your bonus?
I shot off an email about all of this to our zone rep and SFE Facilitator and they shot it up the chain. I received a few calls from people at GM and OneSource about my email but they never left a message or returned an email about these questions.
If anyone has any questions about this or would like more infor let me know and I'll be happy to share.
