During some recent conversations, I’ve discovered that dealerships continue to mistakenly perceive CRM lead duplication badly. I strongly believe we have to change the mindset in the industry.

If the same visitor interacts continuously with your site, you’re actually engaging them and building their trust.

Yes, it will result in duplicate leads. However, every time a person interacts with your website, the percentage of that person coming to your showroom to buy a vehicle increases.

Duplicate leads convert at a 167% higher than average rate, according to a Velocify study, and I’d venture to say that percentage is even higher today as websites have become even more personalized to consumers.

I work with dealers every day as a technology provider and see firsthand that more clicks and time on site generates a significant increase in conversion.

Think about your own interaction with websites. If you visit a site and leave quickly, you’re likely not finding what you were looking for.

If instead, you arrive on a site, begin clicking around and get lost in the experience, so to speak, you’re more likely going to trust the source of the information and be more likely to become a customer.

When a shopper comes into your dealership, talks to more people on your team, touches more cars, shares more information about themselves, then they’re much more likely to end up buying from you.

The way a visitor interacts is similar online, but it happens at a much faster pace. One extra minute on the site can make a huge impact online (compare that to a shopper who’s spending one more hour at your dealership).

There is a stronger likelihood visitors who interact on your site for a longer time will end up as a duplicate lead. Capturing the most information about a lead should be a priority, so instead of looking at lead duplication negatively, here’s how you can start to manage and embrace it.

1. Educate and Train your Dealership Team

Whether it’s the BDC, sales reps, a sales manager or the GM, anyone who works leads or helps to pull or review reporting from your CRM needs to know why duplicate leads are good.

It can be more work to manage duplicate leads (at least initially), but these are often the most interested website visitors and can help you sell more cars.

The message often gets lost, so if you’re reading this article, make sure your entire team understands why they shouldn’t view duplicate leads negatively.

I would even suggest producing a report that shows you duplicate or merged leads to find out who has been interacting with your site the most. This will help you focus on those website visitors that are more likely to buy a car.

2. Take Advantage of CRM Functions and Features

You have a CRM to help you manage and automate all the information you capture, but sometimes we see dealerships not taking full advantage of their systems.

Talk to your CRM provider to help you handle duplicates. With changes or updates to XML formatting, you can automatically merge lead duplicates within your system, saving you time on backend cleanup. Your CRM should be able to merge duplicates by looking at lead name, email or phone number. Also make sure these merged leads are labeled correctly in the CRM so you can see just how many times one lead interacted with your site.

You obviously want your key performance indicator reporting to be accurate. It affects departmental compensation and upper management’s understanding of performance.

If you start seeing a lot of duplicate leads and it affects reporting, you may need to readjust your goals or benchmarks. Make sure to include definitions in your reporting so that the rest of your team understands more duplicate leads means more consumer engagement on your website and that’s a GOOD thing… even if it means a change in KPI’s.

For example, if you sign up for a new trade-in tool that creates duplicates, then you can configure your CRM to create a separate “lead source” for leads that are duplicates. This will allow you to separately report on duplicate leads and not allow it to impact your overall lead-to-sale conversion percentage.

You can always adjust your reporting once your CRM begins merging duplicate leads on the front end.

3. Work Closely with Vendors
 

You can optimize lead triggers and lead delivery so information about a lead comes into your CRM in an ideal format and so that they’re labeled correctly.

We help clients set up different lead sources for each lead type so they know what CTAs visitors are interacting with on their websites.

You can use the XML format to parse out data correctly. For example, we can trigger leads in a CRM after a website visitor goes through the first step and the second-to-last step of an interactive experience. We can change when a lead triggers or can put criteria around an experience to say to only trigger a lead during certain points throughout an experience.

Your vendor should be able to work with your CRM provider to help you make changes so you capture the information that’s going to be beneficial to you.

4. Embrace Duplicate Leads

Most dealers aren’t used to a large number of duplicate leads in their CRM because they only have static lead forms on their website. In these instances, a consumer is entering their information and leaving the site.

Ideally, you want to encourage visitors spend more time on your website. Interactive CTAs helps with this and your CRM will capture more lead data because of multistage conversion. You can expect to see duplicate leads, but take time on the front end to work with your vendor and CRM provider to make sure these leads are merged.

Remember, embrace duplicate leads and help change the old mindset. They’re likely your next buyer.