Summit Digital 360

Top Reasons Why Internet & BDC Departments Usually Fail:

Your dealership is most likely already successful, but if your Internet Close % is less than 10%, you're performing under the national automotive average and are leaving money on the table.

Get your Internet and BDC departments performing at peak levels this year. Let's act now to identify and correct areas where opportunities are being lost.

The most common points of failure are:

1. Many Internet and BDC departments fail to accomplish the dealer's mission because they have been turned into customer service centers and the sales peoples' work is offloaded to them, producing higher payroll costs to yield about the same number of sales and profit;

2. Internet and BDC teams lack basic and consistent processes that are proven to create higher engagement with customers (the "volley"). Instead, shiny new tools, website widgets, and 3rd party lead providers are sought to create a "magical" solution;

3. The ratio of new leads to Internet/BDC staff is too high, causing "cherry-picking" of the leads and allowing other low-funnel buyers to be ignored or without proper follow up (= "Bought Elsewhere");

4. Faced with increase pressure to improve Internet and BDC performance, managers often "pack" their Internet metrics and "work their payplan" by maninuplating CRM buckets and thereby masking the real problems with the follow up process. Dealers need to sell more cars, not allow staff to move sales to buckets where Internet pay plans are calculated on;

5. After "packing" the Internet numbers and creating false reporting, top management relies on those exaggeratered numbers to incorrectly make critical decisions regarding lead sources and monthly investments.