Duplicate leads. Just hearing these words make many dealers wince.
Why? Well, the mindset is that duplicate leads can cause confusion among your salespeople. Different information is scattered across multiple consumer profiles, and you don’t know who’s been catered to and who hasn’t.
In your mind—and in the minds of many other dealers—it’s a pain.
But despite that frustration—and the supposed futility of duplicate leads—the smart folks at Velocify have revealed that they actually convert at a rate almost 170% higher than average leads. Seriously.
Now, I know you’re thinking, “Duplicate leads are still a pain because they clutter my CRM.” And you wouldn’t be wrong. Unfortunately, lead duplication is a reality that’s often unavoidable—especially for dealership websites that get lots of traffic and have consistent engagement.
This is because interested consumers are more inclined to explore different areas of your website to look at inventory, trade-in info, and credit applications. And if they see something that genuinely interests them, they’re going to inquire further through experiences and forms on your website.
Despite all the positive that can come from duplicate leads, tracking those leads (and their corresponding info) can still prove frustrating for your salespeople. And when their main priority is to create the best customer experience possible, why should they have to sift through multiple leads to get the information they need? Not only is your customer’s time valuable, but so is the time of your sales team.
CRM and lead management
Your sales team deserves to utilize its time in the best way possible. Instead of sifting through duplicate leads and trying to combine them while retaining valuable information, they should be spending that time to craft the perfect follow-up.
Thankfully, in this age of advanced technology, there’s software that can help make everyone’s lives easier. CRM lead management, coupled with duplicate-detection software, can help alleviate a lot of the stress that comes from duplicate leads.
Often, this software works on the front end of your website. When information is submitted, it automatically combines with consumer profiles that have matching information: first/last name, email address, etc.
Another thing that’s proven to be helpful is multistage lead triggering. This essentially tracks each selection consumers make via a call to action (CTA), and personalizes the experience for them based on their choices.
The different stages often consist of various questions that push consumers further down the purchasing funnel. For example: After consumers go through a trade experience, a CTA will pop up that encourages them to move forward with something else: looking at special offers, scheduling a test drive, and so on.
When consumers go through a particular experience—and as they continue to answer questions about their shopping preferences or where they are in the shopping process—that data will be immediately sent to the dealership’s CRM and appended to the appropriate consumer profile.
Multistage lead triggering is extremely useful because it provides your dealership with an opportunity to gather the information your salespeople need to hone their follow-ups.
Managing CRM functions
One of the biggest issues that many dealerships run into is that the leads captured aren’t being collected or formatted properly. This is because some of the form-fill options won’t correspond directly with the spaces in your CRM that can trigger a duplicate lead.
Sure, the name, phone number, and email will be collected appropriately, but what about the area for shopping preference selection or even purchasing timeline? You want to make sure all of that vital information is being collected and being associated with the same lead.
If you’ve noticed that your dealership captures a large volume of duplicate leads, work with your software or website provider to change or update XML formatting to help merge lead duplicates. You can then work with your CRM provider to merge duplicate leads through that XML formatting as they’re being delivered through your online experiences.
Another step I highly recommend: Work with your CRM provider to create separate lead sources for the duplicate leads you capture. Knowing where your leads are coming from is important, but possessing an understanding of how returning visitors navigate your website (and the web) is arguably more important.
Seeing more leads being captured into your CRM is both exciting and intimidating, especially if you’ve only ever used static lead forms before. Different experiences on your website (trade experiences, e-price, evaluations, etc.) are likely to be utilized by the same consumers during the current website visit and during future visits.
Duplicate leads might initially seem like a pain, but they’re a sign that your dealership’s website is interesting enough to continually engage consumers. And the more they engage with your website, the more likely they’ll become paying customers.
Isn’t that reason enough to pay attention to duplicate leads?
With more than a decade of experience in the auto industry as a dealer, Russ Chandler has seen firsthand the problems dealerships face every day. As a product marketing manager for PERQ, Russ combines his expertise with powerful technology to provide his clients with increased response and conversion on their marketing.
