Every lead starts somewhere different

Ask a dealer how many ways a lead can start and the answer is usually two, online or walk-in. Deeply consider the Entry Point, Lead Source and Lead Type and there are many more, and every one of them tends to be treated differently to meet the customer where they truly are from the word go.

One distinction before we count them, because it trips up almost everyone. How a lead arrives, a walk-in, a call or a digital enquiry, is its Entry Point. Where it came from, Google, Facebook, Instagram, a portal or publisher site, or an answer from a tool like ChatGPT, is its Lead Source. They're different questions, and the starting points below are about the first one.

The first is the digital lead where we know the car they want, what we call a vehicle of interest, or VOI for short. That's the easy one, because the customer has already told us the most important thing, and it's very hard to sell somebody a car if we don't know which car they're after.

The second is the digital lead with no VOI. Somebody contacts a franchised dealership and says they want a car from that brand, and that's all we know. That's a different customer with a different job, because nothing can be quoted until a conversation has turned a wish into a shortlist, and too often those people get the same email as everyone else.

The third is the partial VOI, where they've picked a car the dealer doesn't physically have, a model that isn't out until next year, say, which the dealership is still trying to sell. Then come the walk-ins, who turn up in different types, and each type needs its own first step, because the one who's in the building for twenty minutes and leaves without giving a name has walked out of our records altogether.

Many different starting points and a single, one size fits all, path for all of them. No one chose that, and it's how the system was set up for all of us on day one, and it's why leads from different sources get judged against each other as if they were the same animal. A Facebook lead isn't a weak lead, it's an early one. They've only just become aware of the brand, they aren't thinking about buying yet, and they need a different journey.

So we start with a question, and it's a simple one. What would you love your Customer Journey to be? Take a blank canvas, the way the big online car retailers had, and describe what you'd want to happen at every stage of every customer's dealings with the business. Before the test drive and after it, when they miss the drive, when they get a quote and when they don't, when the finance is pending and when it's approved, when it closes, and later on when the car needs a service.

Here's what the question brings out for us. The dealer knows better than anyone how a customer should be treated, and always has. What's been missing, for all of us in the trade, is the tools to make it happen on a busy Tuesday afternoon when someone's off sick and the phone won't stop.

The road isn't the same for every customer or every dealer either. The cash customer who wants the car this week needs something different from the one waiting on finance, and a single-site independent with five people runs the whole thing with the owner doing most of it, while a franchised store hands the front door to a BDC and the later stages to the sales team. The stages are similar. The names in the owner column are not.

That's the part we like most (and it's a relief for us too, because we don't have to tell anyone how to run their business). We sit down with the dealership, show them what we think the right Customer Journey looks like, and they tell us what they like and what they don't. Then we lock it in, build it into the system and train the team, and the dealer stamps ownership on it, because it's theirs and not ours, and that's how we get buy-in.

Solution time. Three things.

1. Sort the starting points. Write down every way a lead reaches the business, with a vehicle of interest, without one, with a car we haven't got, and each kind of walk-in, and give each one its own first job.
2. Describe what the dealer would love to happen at every stage after that, and put a next step and an owner beside each one. Not "follow up", but something specific enough that two people would do the same thing, and a rule for what happens when that person's off.
3. Make it theirs and make it visible. The dealer signs it off, the system runs it, and the manager can see every lead, customer and vehicle, and every team member not following the journey that was agreed. That's what we built TheCarSite Operating System - TCSOS to hold, and we design the Customer Journey with the dealership, roll it into the system and train the team on it.

None of this starts with a tool. It starts with a dealer who knows what they'd love to happen and a team willing to put their name on it, which is where we begin with every dealer. If it would help to see a journey built for each starting point, book a demo and we'll walk through it.