Industry stats show that 80% of your ups will walk without buying. Yet if you can re-contact them within 48 hours and address their real reasons for not buying, the evidence shows you’ll get 33% of them back into the store and convert approximately 67% of them into sales.

For many dealers, this extra effort to pursue shoppers who left, and convert them into be backs, can net you up to 50 or more additional units per month. In any economy, that’s great incremental business!

Here’s how you can enjoy this success at your dealership:

• Determine to pursue every unsold. Build this objective into your sales plan and your pay plans.
• Devise a process for ensuring this pursuit; here is where using a CRM to scan or enter contact information on every up is going to be a critical step. Without complete customer data in the CRM, it can be impossible to really measure and understand who was an up and who wasn’t – and what happened and why.
• Establish that every unsold will be re-contacted within 48 hours or less of their leaving your store by a designated unsold follow-up specialist.
• Determine who this pursuit specialist or specialists will be. The right individual or individuals need not necessarily be strong sales-types, but should have warm, engaging and curious communications styles that will enable them to disarm shopper reluctance to learn their real reasons for walking.
• Depending on how the dealership is structured, this re-contact function may be more productive when outsourced to a vendor skilled in making the kind of delicate calls required to successfully interview these customers and get them back into the dealership.

Dedicated pursuit of unsolds may also produce valuable business insight that can help improve ongoing sales and marketing efforts.  Asking the right questions to these shoppers can give you invaluable information:

• What the advertising source was that brought the customer into the dealership?
• Why the customer did not buy – what was their true objection or barrier?
• Did the dealership sales representative and sales manager follow the correct steps in your Road to the Sale process?

If you want to close more units per month without having to generate more ups, put in place and then practice a dedicated unsold follow up program. The resulting surge in retail sales that can result (up to 100% increase in sales to showroom traffic) will sure look good on the monthly sales board!