In an era defined by rapid technological advancements and shifting consumer behaviours, the automotive industry finds itself grappling with a persistent challenge: lead management.
Despite significant investments in marketing strategies and customer relationship management tools, effectively managing leads remains an endemic problem for automotive businesses.
More than 40% of Salespeople cite prospecting as the most challenging phase of the Sales process. And yet when talking about the art of the follow-up: 60% of customers say “no” four times before saying “yes,” but nearly half of Salespeople throw in the towel after a single try.
Not exactly a recipe for success.
With a wealth of information readily available at their fingertips, prospective buyers flock to online platforms to research, compare, and explore their options. Consequently, automotive web traffic has surged, reflecting the growing interest and engagement of consumers in the online sphere.
95% of car shoppers rely on online resources to gather information, bypassing dealerships as their starting point.
However, despite the influx of visitors to automotive websites, the industry has witnessed a puzzling trend: sales remain stagnant or fail to reflect the same level of growth. This disconnect between heightened web traffic and sluggish sales performance poses a perplexing challenge for automotive businesses.
Nearly a quarter (23.5%) of dealer leads miss 24-hour follow-up, and 13.3% vanish before CRM entry. Dealers risk losing 37% of online leads through missed follow-up and CRM gaps, highlighting the crucial need for a seamless online-to-sales journey for car shoppers.
From manufacturers to dealerships, the struggle to convert leads into sales adversely affects revenue streams and customer satisfaction. For years, the conventional approach to addressing this issue has revolved around deploying human resources, whether through in-house teams or outsourced contact centres. However, the efficacy of this approach has been limited, often resulting in missed opportunities and wasted resources. Understanding the root causes of this issue sheds light on why lead management continues to plague the automotive sector.
The people predicament
The average cost for an automotive lead is £230 and this figure is on an upswing.
And yes, while pouring more money into ads becomes harder to cut through the noise. To keep your cost-per-lead (CPL) low you need to ensure you have a strong attribution and optimisation strategy.
But what happens when the number of marketing-generated leads exceeds the capacity of the sales team to touch every one?
To make the best of this situation, many companies have dedicated Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) or Inside Sales teams prioritising their time on the hottest and most recent leads in hopes of converting them into opportunities.
Research shows that leads left waiting longer than just 5 minutes are 10 times more difficult to contact and 4 times less likely to be considered a qualified lead.
Some may try to solve this equation by simply hiring more frontline sales reps — others might just accept the dropped opportunities as an inevitability.
Can you afford to do either?
The power of AI in creating genuine customer connections
For all the digitalisation of the car buying process that has taken place, people are still looking for human interaction.
Dealers using marketing automation are twice as likely to see a higher return on investment (ROI) for their marketing efforts compared to those who don’t. However, many Marketing Automation Platforms are only good for sending triggered and targeted comms to a database. What they can’t do is force a lead ready to buy or provide a true one-on-one experience that is so crucial for moving leads through the funnel.
It’s also important to know that these tools and solutions don’t replace 1:1 human interaction; it still takes a human employee to do the work of engaging leads in a two-way conversation.
The solution? Automating the revenue-influencing early conversations that draw in, qualify and convert prospects with the power of AI.
The optimal number of touches to instigate a lead to convert is between 5 and 11. Most Salespeople only make 1 or 2 attempts.
Revenue Digital Assistants (RDAs) can help your team with lead management without adding more tasks to their to-do list and can nurture every single inbound and outbound lead that comes into your business. An AI-powered assistant will handle everything outside of your reps’ capacity.
With AI handling the revenue-influencing conversations, you don’t have to worry about scaling your team up or down based on the number of MQLs you have. Instead, your sales team can now focus on leads that have been Conversationally Qualified by the RDA.
This new approach can be called a Growth Workforce model, freeing your marketing team to generate more leads at the top of the funnel without overburdening your sales reps. The Revenue Digital Assistant handles the murky middle ground between MQL and opportunity, using tailored, humanlike conversations to move contacts through the funnel. Their unlimited conversational capacity and powerful human intelligence ensure nobody falls through the cracks, allowing Sales to prioritise the leads that are qualified and ready to meet.
For example: one service AI assistant managed 38,000 leads, messaging them 198,000 times in 60 days, turning dormant data into circa £80k worth of revenue.
RDAs not only drive intent and understand common messages like out-of-office notifications and requests to reach out at different times, but they wait until prospects are back in the office or ready to talk and pick the conversation back up automatically. Best of all, these conversations feel authentic and personalised for potential buyers.
Conclusion
In the world of automotive sales, lead management is a personal journey and powerful AI-powered assistants handle crucial conversations, ensuring that leads get the attention they deserve.
From analysing customer data and initiating timely follow-up communication across various channels, including email, SMS, and social media, to automating repetitive tasks and streamlining the follow-up process, retailers can not only increase SQL volume, the number of touches and speed to touch but also cover often-ignored lead segments.
Forget pumping more in at the top, isn’t it time to re-evaluate your lead management strategy and think about what happens to the fruit not picked?
As strategic partners, we are proud to bring Conversica‘s state-of-the-art Conversational AI technology to the UK. Their AI-driven assistants help companies engage with leads effectively, nurturing and qualifying them to unlock business opportunities, thereby revolutionising sales and marketing strategies. Conversica has been servicing the Automotive industry since 2009 with over 1,700 dealers live and 50 proven sales and service use cases.
Contact us for a free demo – call us 020 8087 0138
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