Lead follow-up software at a dealership has to do six things: put every new lead in front of a named person straight away, make sure a first response goes out, keep reminding until real contact is made, record every touch, hand the customer cleanly between the business development team and sales, and show managers which leads nobody has touched. If it does those reliably, the rest is decoration.
We are not going to quote response-time research or conversion figures here. You do not need them to see that a lead nobody answered is a lead wasted.
Routing: a name, not a queue
A lead that lands in a shared inbox belongs to nobody. The software should assign each lead to one person the moment it arrives, using rules you can read and change: by source, by new or used, by rota, by who is on shift. It needs to know who is off today, and it needs a fallback when the assigned person does not pick the lead up within the time you set.
Test it by sending a lead through your own website on a Sunday evening and watching what happens.
First response and reminders
An automatic acknowledgement is fine as long as it says something true and a person follows it. The follow-up that matters is the human one, and the software's job is to make skipping it difficult.
- A task for the assigned person with a due time, visible on their phone
- Reminders that repeat until a two-way contact is logged, not just until an email is sent
- A sensible schedule of further attempts by call, text and email, which stops when the customer replies or asks you to stop
- Opt-out handling for texts and emails that a salesperson cannot override
- Escalation to a manager when a task goes overdue
One record and a clean handover
Calls, texts, emails, showroom visits and notes belong on one timeline per customer. When texting lives on personal phones, the record leaves with the salesperson. The timeline is also what lets somebody else pick up a customer on a colleague's day off without asking them to repeat themselves.
Duplicates belong here too. The same customer may enquire through the website, a listing marketplace and a manufacturer feed in the same week. The software should merge those into one person with three enquiries.
Where a business development team sets appointments and the sales floor takes over, the handover is where customers get dropped. The software should show who owns the customer at each stage, pass the appointment across with the notes attached, and return the customer to the team if the appointment is missed. Both sides should see the same record.
The manager's view
- Leads with no human touch yet, oldest first
- Overdue tasks by person
- Appointments set, shown and missed this week
- Leads by source, so spending can be questioned
One screen, checked every morning. If your managers build this by exporting to a spreadsheet, the tool is not doing the last of its six jobs.
Buy, keep or build
Your CRM may already do all of this, in which case a separate follow-up tool is a second bill for the same job. Price both at your real headcount using our free software bill calculator, which shows the yearly and three-year totals.
Our guide to owning your software covers when a custom build is sensible and when it is not. For a store paying per user for a large CRM and using mainly these six jobs, Hiro rebuilds them around the dealer management system and the manufacturer feeds, which stay where they are. The page for car dealerships goes through it.