Auto dealers: qualifying internet leads. Best practices.

Generating leads on the Internet is the relatively easiest part of an Internet marketing campaign for any auto dealer. The hard job is to properly qualify these leads as they're coming in from different sources (portals, own website, banner ads etc.)

The first thing an auto dealer should do is to ensure that the leads are suitable. This will significantly reduce wasted time and resources.  In order to determine whether a lead is suitable the auto dealer has to have in place a process called "lead qualification".

Lead qualification

I discussed Internet leads and relevant research in a different article. At an average, an internet sales manager can work with a total of 75-100 leads per month. With an average conversion rate of 10% - 15% you're looking to get around 10 finalized sales per month out of your incoming leads (and that's if you're getting 75-100 internet leads per month! An average automotive website has a conversion rate of roughly 3%, meaning that out fo 100 visitors only 3 will contact your dealership through your website. So in order to get at least 75 leads from your website you should get 2500 visitors monthly. This is not impossible, but it's a large number of unique visitors for any website. Chances are that your automotive website doesn't get this amount of traffic. )

At this point it's important that the company will determine and outline to the sales reps a set of criteria for qualifying internet leads (or any kind of lead for that matter).

In general, a good prospect should have all or most of the following characteristics:

• the financial resources to complete the vehicle purchase
• credit pre-approval if necessary
• plan to purchase a vehicle immediately, or in the near future
• need or desire to learn more about your vehicles and your services

As soon as you receive the information request your sales rep should email or call back immediately to investigate whether this is a good prospect.

Based on the above characteristics the sales rep should tailor a list of questions that will elicit more information from the client and will identify them in one of the following stages:

• raw lead: an initial request from any source (auto dealer website, portal, banner ad etc.)
• dead lead: a prospect who has little potential to become a customer
• inactive lead: a prospect who will not buy now but has future potential
• suspect: an inquiry that has been qualified and has the potential to result in a paying customer
• prospect: a lead that has been qualified in more detail
• customer: a prospect who has made a purchase

The terminology is not really important. What is important is to clearly categorize the prospects based on the information you've collected.  This way the sales team will put less time and effort towards leads that are qualified as "dead" or "inactive" and focus more on leads that can become customers immediately.

At this point it could be a good idea to setup a contact management database system (CMS) in order to record, maintain and review all contact opportunities. In the CMS system the sales rep can record and maintain information such as lead name and phone number, past phone or email conversations, times the prospect is available for phone calls, financial situation and dollar amount the prospect wants to spend in the vehicle purchase, other personal information.

All this can be used by the sales reps in future communications with the prospect, and can also be used by management to monitor all leads and ensure that important contact opportunities will not be missed.

Source: Jobber, David, and Geoffrey Lancaster. Selling and Sales Management. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Prentice Hall, 2005.

e²media (e-squared media) is an internet marketing and interactive advertising company based in Edmonton, AB offering affordable internet advertising, search engine optimization, web development and corporate identity services. Over the past 12 years we've worked with many organizations mainly in the Edmonton and Calgary area. We're specialized in the automotive industry and in Internet marketing and web development in general, but we've also worked in several projects for small, medium and large size organizations ranging from website design, flash movies, databases, shopping carts, search engine optimization (SEO) to full Internet marketing campaigns and corporate identity design. For more information on any previous projects, or for client references, please click here to contact us.