Simplify Lead Management and Increase Conversions With Marketing Requests
7/17/2024It’s a fact of the modern e-commerce era: Most consumers start their product searches online because it’s more convenient and offers the widest visibility to compare features and pricing. This also applies to potential customers shopping for new and used equipment.
In response, dealers must ask themselves, “Is our dealership prepared with the tools and resources to connect with these customers to grow the business?”
Whether your business calls them “marketing requests,” “inside sales,” “internet leads,” or “inbound leads,” these online forms are a major part of an effective marketing and sales strategy. However, properly managing online leads and potential prospects effectively through the sales funnel remains a significant challenge to sales and marketing departments at dealerships.
Challenges in managing and converting online leads faced in most dealerships
The following are some common difficulties dealerships often face in tracking, managing, and converting leads – along with some digital solutions to overcome these issues. Some of these might resonate with your own experiences, as many dealerships still rely on the same organizational methods they have used for years.
- Manual processes and human error: Manually handled tasks such as data entry, follow-up scheduling, and lead tracking can be prone to mistakes, resulting in lost or mishandled leads.
- Marketing automation tools can reduce these risks by streamlining processes and ensuring that no lead falls through the cracks.
- Siloed information storage and reporting: Different departments or team members often handle different parts of the sales process, leading to fragmented and uncoordinated efforts. For example, marketing might generate leads that sales teams aren’t tracking, or customer service may receive inquiries that aren't communicated back to sales. A lack of integrated information flow can result in missed follow-ups and lost sales opportunities.
- Operating from a centralized platform ensures no opportunity falls through the cracks.
- Lack of performance reporting: Many dealerships lack tools to report the ROI of campaign efforts or track the time it takes for reps to follow up on leads, resulting in missed opportunities for improvements and unclear insights into marketing efforts.
- An inbound sales dashboard with reports on lead-tracking and performance metrics increases visibility and enables optimization of campaign strategies.
- Inadequate customer relationship management (CRM) systems: Many dealerships struggle due to a lack of having a customer relationship management (CRM) system in place. Without a CRM, tracking interactions with potential customers becomes challenging, making it difficult to nurture leads through the sales funnel. On the other hand, an inadequately configured CRM system can result in poor customer data quality and organization, hindering the ability to personalize communication and track the progress of each lead.
- Adopting a dealer CRM that uses relevant data and integrates with other business systems can significantly enhance management of customer relationships.
- Inconsistent lead nurturing: Leads require timely and relevant follow-ups, but without a structured approach, some leads may receive too much attention while others are neglected.
- Implementing a standardized lead nurturing process helps ensure all leads are properly guided through the sales funnel.
Without a CRM system, 79% of all marketing leads are never converted to sales. – Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
How to improve your dealership’s lead management practices
Overcoming all these challenges requires a combination of technology, strategy, and consistent execution. By implementing a robust CRM system, integrating communication channels, leveraging analytics, and automating processes, equipment dealerships can turn their online leads into sales conversions and foster customer loyalty.
Ask yourself these questions about transparency in your marketing and sales process:
- Do managers have visibility to ensure the sales team stays accountable for their leads?
- Does the handoff provide everything a sales rep needs to complete a follow-up contact?
- Can you pinpoint the volume of requests flowing into your funnel each month?
- Do you have access to metrics on your dealership’s responses to those requests?
- Can you tie results (win/loss) back to the source of the lead?
Discover how Wright Implement utilized Anvil Pro to find solutions to these questions.
“Hope” is not a strategy – How Wright Implement enhanced their lead management process
When managing marketing requests from digital channels, Wright Implement’s operations manager faced challenges in tracking activities, relying on email correspondence without consistent follow-up procedures. This created disorganization and an inability to take advantage of leads.
Before adopting the Anvil Pro platform, every marketing request was forwarded to the sales team through their managers. “We would dish it out to the salespeople and just hope that they followed up,” says Joe Smith, Wright’s operations manager. “There might have been some checking back to say, ‘Did you talk to that customer from the email I sent you?’ But there were enough requests that you couldn’t keep track that way.”
As the flow of leads increased across their multiple store locations, Smith saw a missed opportunity and wanted more transparency and accountability. “We needed to respond quicker,” he says. “And we wanted to track how many leads were coming in and the results.”
When Wright Implement began to deploy Anvil Pro’s Marketing Requests solution, they immediately saw improvements in response times and were able to consistently track lead generation results. Within a year, Wright achieved a 300% growth in annual marketing request volume and a 20% increase in lead conversions.
Anvil Pro fosters visibility and accountability
By activating the right dealer CRM solution, management issues caused by marketing requests flowing from multiple marketing channels into one email inbox can be resolved. Anvil Pro brought transparency and accountability to Wright Implement’s process in several key ways:
- Improved responsiveness: In a highly competitive equipment market, quick responses to customers are crucial. Anvil Pro enabled Wright to set response time parameters, send notifications, and escalate alerts to ensure timely actions. These customizable settings helped ensure timely responses to every inquiry, reducing the risk of losing customers to competitors.
- Greater consistency: Anvil Pro tracks and measures every step of the process, providing reports on average response times, quality of requests from each source, timeliness of sales team contacts, and closed sales status (won/lost). Trackable customer interactions create accountability throughout the sales process, with visibility into customer records, process metrics, and reporting/analytics.
- Seamless handoffs: The platform automates data capture from marketing requests, integrates it into the CRM, and forwards it to the sales team, eliminating data loss and ensuring smooth transitions.
- Enhanced customer relationships: Quicker response times and improved connectivity through Anvil Pro help build stronger customer loyalty and position the dealership as a preferred choice for future purchases.
“We came from a situation where we really had no idea of what was happening to these marketing requests,” says Smith. “With Anvil Pro, we can see the outcome. We can see how many leads are coming in, from where, which ones led to sales, and which ones we do better at converting. It’s information we never had before.”
These marketing and sales enhancements are not unique to Wright Implement, as other Anvil Pro partners also acknowledge its value. According to Brian Marshall, Corporate Systems Director at United Ag & Turf, “Anvil Pro now tracks every step, including lead outcomes, comments from the sales rep, and lead sources. It also records whether we make the sale and the corresponding revenue. The software then provides the ability to segment those results for more detailed analysis.” Marshall adds, “That’s not something we could have accomplished without a lot of intense manual labor.”
It’s crucial for dealerships to have a solid strategy for managing marketing requests and inbound leads. Using Anvil Pro’s solutions, dealerships can achieve greater transparency and accountability throughout the sales process, leading to increased conversions.