Lead management: Why it must be a priority for your car dealership

Lead management: does the very sight of those words cause stress and anxiety?

For many automotive marketers, tracking leads through the sales funnel is a headache they could really do without.

We’ve previously talked about some alarming statistics – namely that up to 45% of unique calls into dealerships don’t get entered into a lead management system (LMS).

This obviously isn’t great for dealership marketing success. And it certainly won’t help you demonstrate an accurate ROI for your marketing efforts.

In an ideal world, leads would manage themselves. Calls coming into the dealership would be automatically added to your lead management system, with an appropriate tag – for example ‘hot lead’ or ‘servicing enquiry’.

The days of manually adding leads to a spreadsheet – or worse, a paper-based system – would be well and truly over. Leads would no longer be missed, or forgotten about. True marketing ROI would be reported with all leads accounted for.

And the customer experience would be greatly improved too, as all leads would be responded to in a timely way by salespeople with information about each lead to hand.

Not convinced? Here are some reasons why you should be focusing effort on perfecting your lead management and marketing attribution in the coming months.

You’ll give a far better customer experience

Having an effective LMS means your leads will always be in one, central system at all times. You’ll be able to access all the valuable data you need to respond to enquiries quickly and keep prospective customers moving through your pipeline.

This isn’t just better for you; it’s better for your customers, too. With all enquiries and leads at your fingertips, you’ll respond to them quicker and no-one will be forgotten (or lost in those dreaded spreadsheets).

You won’t miss any sales

Talking about dreaded spreadsheets, nothing causes leads to slip through the net faster than these outdated methods. If you fail to respond to enquiries quickly (or forget about them completely), customers will simply look elsewhere.

When your leads are automatically added to your LMS, it means you no longer need to worry about manually logging their details, or remembering to follow up with them.

What’s more, when you connect your lead management system to a call tracking and marketing attribution tool – such as Mediahawk – you’ll also get real-time call data and marketing information on every lead and enquiry.

You’ll attribute every lead to its true source

In Mediahawk, dealerships can see and understand the entire customer journey – from marketing activity customers engage with, right through to completed sale and beyond.

This includes the web pages they viewed, giving you insight into the types of vehicles they’re interested in; conversations with your team leading up to the sale; and any other interactions beyond this point – for example, with the aftersales team, service department, and the like.

The real plus point here is knowing exactly where every lead comes from. That’s right – lead management isn’t just about organising and processing leads more efficiently. It’s also about giving you, the marketer, a way to identify the best-performing channels and marketing activities.

Mediahawk facilitates this with its marketing attribution and sales reporting features. Working in tandem, these tools allow you to understand the full customer journey, pinpoint your most profitable marketing activities, understand the common paths to conversion, see true customer value, and much more.

You’ll get way more from your marketing budget

As marketing budgets are squeezed ever tighter, cutting wastage and maximising the effectiveness of your marketing activities is key.

Mediahawk’s speech analytics feature allows you to create voice tags to flag each sales enquiry and service booking. This gives you an instant overview of whether your budget is spent in areas that bring in the right kind of phone calls.

You can also create tags to categorise dealership locations and enquiries about specific car brands. With that, you can see at a glance which dealership or brand campaigns are generating the best leads.

All this means one thing: the ‘ideal world’ I spoke about earlier can be a reality. In fact, for car dealers such as Marshall Motors, Swansway Group, and Dick Lovett, it already is.

And effective lead management and 100% marketing attribution certainly can be a reality for you, if you want it to.