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Is nurturing high-funnel leads a drain on your BDC resources?

Devorah Wolf

Moderator
Mar 20, 2017
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First Name
Devorah
Ilana's Zur's article outlines some ways to nurture early stage leads- the ones who are months away from buying- without draining your sales and BDC resources constantly calling these people who aren't ready to buy.

https://www.dealerrefresh.com/lead-nurture-gut-bdc/#more-22338

Does your dealership spend time nurturing early-stage leads and do those shoppers become paying customers?
 
In my travels the last few years, I've seen an obsession with "Managing Leads."

Not so much Managing Customers... but man, some Tom, Dick or Harry types a few letters on some web form designed to capture those few letters and POW! We spring into action.

We're insane: we'll spend 85% of our resources chasing the 85% of leads who never buy... like the greyhound chasing that rabbit around the track: we know we're never going to catch it, but we can't help it -- we HAVE TO CHASE THOSE LEADS! hahaha.

Internet "Leads" Suck. :)
 
A Repeat Buyer is > a Floor Up that is > someone pulled from the Service Lane who is > a Phone Up and all of these are far greater than an Internet Lead.

BUT we spend thousands of dollars buying 3rd party Internet leads, we turn our websites into poor user experiences in the pursuit of capturing 1st party Internet leads, and we pay non-essential people to handle Internet leads.

We RARELY, if ever, appropriately entice our previous buyers to take advantage of opportunities they didn't know existed. Maybe the green-pea is instructed to work the service lane and MAYBE one dealership out of 1,000 has a kiosk looking for trades in the service lane. Phone training is a berating in the Saturday morning meeting over a poorly-handled-recorded call. And when was the last time a manager inspected and/or trained how sales people were handling the first few steps on the road to a sale? Yeah, let's throw the bulk of our concentration and a good chunk of valuable resources at the online mooch....whom we created.

Just the opinion of a former Internet Manager who built a BDC and is now a technologist whose income mostly comes from dealers' spending money on buying leads.