Car Dealers Detect Signs of Life in Dormant Sales Leads

A new approach called buyer detection can help dealers get more value from Internet sales leads, whether they are new or have been sitting a while in the customer-relationship management system.

How? By finding out when a person is ready to buy and by providing information on what competitive vehicles the prospect is checking out and how these vehicles rank in terms of shopping activity.

Buyer detection gives you an instant sanity check. Is the shopper likely to be qualified? Knowing this helps determine how much time and effort to put into the lead.

For instance, if a luxury-brand salesperson knows every other option a particular shopper is exploring is a used low-end car, the salesperson may deprioritize that lead, or at least approach it differently.

There are many valid reasons a vehicle shopper might put a search on hold and then resume it. Buyer detection helps dealers determine when a “dead” lead returns to the market.

Marketers call it the Lazarus Effect when a dead lead comes back to life.

Buyer detection typically is an analytic service dealers subscribe to. Here’s how it works:

When a customer or prospect clicks on a link in an email or visits the dealer’s website, a cookie is placed on his or her device.

When prospects shop on tracked automotive websites, the dealer gets a report. It provides information on shopping, shopping intensity what’s being shopped. 

A sales rep can then reach out and say, “Hey, we talked a few months ago. How’s your search going? Are you ready to buy yet?” It restarts the conversation.

Dan Smith is chief marketing officer for Outsell, a digital-marketing software firm. He can be reached at 612-236-1500 or [email protected].