In auto sales, you need customers that are ready to buy, right now, and have the resources to do so. You need qualified leads to get anywhere, and generating these leads can be a challenge. Potential leads are everywhere—just open a phone book and start cold-calling—but unless you're willing to waste a lot of time sifting through the masses to find qualified leads, you need ways to start generating those qualified leads that are ready to buy.

How Can I Get More Qualified Leads for My Business?

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to generate qualified leads, and some of these are simpler than you may expect.

Get Smart About Ads

There’s a reason that Facebook and Google are valued so highly as companies: They’ve become the dominant platforms for advertisements and connecting buyers and sellers.

When you’re looking for more leads, therefore, optimizing your ad buys and follow up is one of the most important ways to boost the number of solid, qualified leads.

Where many businesses go wrong, however, is how they track and respond to interest generated from Facebook and Google ads. Invest in tools that help your dealership do more with ad clicks, tools such as lead generation service, LeadsBridge.

LeadsBridge works by connecting your lead generation tools such as landing page builders or Facebook Lead Ads directly with your customer relationship management (CRM) software so prospects can be stored and acted upon more easily. If you’re using a dealership CRM such as VinSolutions, for instance, you can have prospects who come from a lead ad automatically added to a drip marketing campaign or added to a sales rep call list. This can significantly boost the effectiveness of your ads in generating leads because every lead is automatically acted upon and nothing falls through the cracks.

Answer Customers Rapidly.

If your customers are contacting you, whether looking for information or lodging a complete, the iron is hot. Strike it by responding, quickly, to those customers. A study from The Social Habit found that 42 percent of customers expect a response within an hour of contact. Moreover, 32 percent of customers expect a response within 30 minutes.

The faster you can respond to customers, the more likely you are to retain those customers. These, in turn, become some of your most qualified leads: the ones who actually told you what they will buy if you can get it for them.

Keep your Web Presence Up To Date.

Have you updated your websites lately? Are you using both mobile and desktop web presences? If you're keeping up, then you're improving the chances of customers finding you and becoming a qualified lead. There's more to this than just good website management, though.

• Be at the right place... A Dealer.com study noted that shoppers coming in from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter spend 20 percent more time on the website, and view 27 percent more pages per visit. And with 41 percent of traffic on dealer websites coming in from mobile devices—tablets and smartphones—being available where the customer wants to see more information improves your chances.

• ...at the right time. That same Dealer.com study found that over a third—37 percent—of total leads hit on Mondays and Tuesdays, so be prepared to hit extra hard during those days. Not being ready for days where customers are cropping up makes you that much more likely to miss qualified leads. Finding qualified leads is all about sorting the wheat from the chaff, and the more stalks you have to work with, the more likely you are to find wheat.

Become an Authority.

Building customer trust is a great way to build qualified leads. Since many car buyers start their search online, you can take advantage of tools like search engines and your CRM to better connect with those online car shoppers. Start writing for the web, specifically about cars. Set up your own car blog addressing those questions that you hear every day on the lot: which cars have the best gas mileage, what's a good car for a rough winter, what's a good car for senior citizens, and the like are fodder for things your customers want to read anyway.

When you become a trusted information source, you're also likely to draw more attention, more questions, and more qualified leads.

Use the Right Tools.

No one fixes an engine by hitting it with a hammer. No one makes a website more relatable by using tools that any 12 year old can use to set up his blog. Start out right from scratch by using dealer-specific website development tools like Flexdealer or Dealersocket, or the aforementioned Leadsbridge. Use inventory management tools like Lotwizard. The more industry-specific your development tools, the better the quality of your leads; these are tools inherently designed for use in this field.

Why trust anything else to the development of your main communications measures with your customers or how you keep track of what's on the lot?

Where Do I Begin To Improve My Count of Qualified Leads?

There is, in the end, no wrong way to start here. The more methods you put into practice, the more likely you are to generate leads that will give you a much better chance at sales. It's better if you don't try to put too many into play too rapidly—it's possible to have too many balls in the air to successfully juggle, after all—but casting a wider net improves your chances of landing your target.

In the end, it's all about getting more leads, and better vetting the leads you have to turn these into qualified leads.