I spoke to a good friend Friday night who is with Hyundai. His store is part of a developed Auto Group and added a new Hyundai point. He was telling me about how great Auto USA leads are for new and how few AutoTrader leads he gets for Used. My leads are just the opposite. We did not find the same success with Auto USA and no longer with them and get great leads from AutoTrader for Used.

So my question is if your store said you can only keep one “Third Party” lead source, which one would you keep and why? Please reply and support Used “I’d keep ______” and New “I’d keep_________” or if you are weeding them out all together. Please also include the Make your dealer supports and the main city you sell from.

There are two basic Internet lead processes.

An Internet Team that handles leads from start to finish and an appointment setting process more like a BDC. We current have one person handling the 90% of the “used car” calls from Autotrader, Cars, our site etc and another handling the email leads. The other phone calls get routed to the floor to available sales.

Because we have someone is in a class of his own when it comes to phone skills, we are looking to transfer ALL calls to him (of course not possible), set appointments and turn the appointments.

Has anyone made the transition to from one to the other?

What was the most difficult part of the transition?

How were the Appointments distributed?

Knowing he cant take 100% of the calls, who handled the overflow?

How was it received to the sales floor?

My thoughts are it will be tough to make the change. I do see the sales floor moral to jump because they could be with an customer while a phone up appointment was just made for them.

I would appreciate the feed back.

I wanted to introduce myself as a contributor to the Driving Sale community. My name is Gary Sanders and I am the Internet Director at Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood which is just west of Denver Colorado. This year I am celebrating my seventh year at Stevinson and tenth in the car business. I started at a Ford store in Colorado Springs in 2000 when I moved to Denver in 2001. In March of 2003, I was hired at Stevinson Lexus of Lakewood on the floor. When the Internet position became available I started with the basics of Internet lead comes in, answer and repeat. I then learned as a dealer we had to option to edit our Cobalt site. As I dived in, my first step was to the other Lexus dealers in the area then region to see what they were doing with there site. For the life of me, I could not understand why dealer had the options and the tools and did nothing with them? As my career, understanding and education continued, I recognized I had a truly great opportunity to take it to the next level. One person I want to thank and consider a friend that has guided me is Gary May of http://www.imacsweb.com/. He has been very helpful in sharing ideas and always great to chat to. He is the one that introduced me to sites like drivingsales.com and others. My post will be about dealer to dealer chats and how we can improve. From sale, fixed ops to training. Although titled “It not all about the vendors”, I encourage everyone to comment. Thank you to Jared, Bart and the Driving Sale team. Follow me on twitter @DenverLexus and recently created @cardealerblog