by Steve Conner

Responding to your customer’s interest in your vehicles consistently and with the right persistence is a very difficult task for sales managers at most dealerships. According to recent research published at the Harvard Business Review, over 30% of leads are never called at all. There are four parts of the published research to digest and learn from to apply solid policies to your dealership’s lead management program.

The following parts of the study include best practices for lead response management:

1. Best days to make contact – Some people may be surprised considering the results found over 100,000 call attempts in this study. The study shows that the best days to make contact in order are Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday and finally Tuesday. They found these statistics based on first call dials. Qualifying a customer on Thursday was 49% better than Tuesday according to the study.

2. Best times to make contact – I often talk with my sales team about the golden hours of selling. These two best time periods may not come as a shock to you. The number one best time to make contact with a lead is from 4 to 5 pm. In fact there is a 164% difference between attempting contact at 4 to 5 pm compared to 1 to 2 pm. The second best time to make contact in a day is from 8 to 9 am.

3. Response time – The study shows that a sales person is 400% more likely to qualify a customer if they are contacted within 5 minutes of filling out a lead submission-form compared to waiting 10 minutes. Contact and qualifying rates drop in just minutes and then continue to decrease over the next few hours.

4. Persistence – The study indicates a major increase in a sales person’s chance of making contact by just making a few more all attempts. Sales people can experience as much as a 70% increase in contact rates if they make 6 attempts compared to one.  Most reps give up too early on leads.

Taking the time to manage your lead opportunities by incorporating policies for your sales and online or internet sales management teams will lead to increased opportunities which would translate to several more sales per month. In addition to considering a lead management program, also consider adding a company that can help increase your sales by 15% every month.  Feel free to contact me via email contact@steveconner.org for tips about managing sales reps to accomplish your policies.