PLAYBOOK 04 · CRM AND FOLLOW-UP
Four hundred leads. One hundred eighty never called back.
The CRM is full. The reps are busy. And the customer who came back to the same car for the third time this week is on page four of a list nobody sorts. DealerCortex is built so that never happens, and so the owner sees proof instead of a report.
The problem
Every dealership CRM holds the same two numbers: how many leads came in, and how many sold. The space between them is where the month is won or lost, and it is almost entirely dark. A lead gets one call and an email template on day one. If the customer does not answer, the lead slides down the list under the next day's leads, and by day five it is a name in a database.
Meanwhile the signals that should pull a customer back to the top are invisible. They came back to the same car page three times. They opened the price-drop email twice. They replied to a text at 9 PM. A rep would call them in a heartbeat if a rep knew.
What it costs
- The 180. In a 400-lead month, the leads that got one touch and were never called again. Paid for, logged, lost.
- The customer who came back. They were ready on Thursday. Nobody noticed. They bought Saturday somewhere else.
- The provider nobody audited. A lead source billed every month for leads that have not produced an appointment since spring.
- The missed call. Rang through on a Saturday. No text back. The customer called the next store.
- The switch nobody wants. Every new CRM costs the store a month of rep productivity, so the bad one stays.
How DealerCortex handles it
Identical on the basics. The CRM is built on one rule: on the things a rep does fifty times a day, it must be identical to the CRM they already use, so the switch costs the store nothing. Everywhere else it must be better.
Lead providers, measured. Every source the store pays for, by what it actually produced: leads, appointments, shows, sales, gross, by month, with the dead ones named. The provider conversation stops being an opinion.
The Day Board. The rep's morning: every call to make, in priority order, with the reason on the line. A hot-signal engine watches for the moments a customer comes back, a second visit to the same car, a price alert triggered, a text reply, and moves that customer to the top the same hour.
Follow-up programs and Win-Back. Email, text and voice agents work the store's own rules on the store's own sending domains, registered properly for texting. Every message is short, specific to the car and signed by a real name. Win-Back goes after the customers who went quiet and the sold customers coming back into the market. Nothing automated turns on in the first 30 days; the store's data settles first.
Calls. Every sales call recorded and scored by a call coach. Every missed call caught, with a text out before the customer dials the next store. Click-to-dial runs through the store's own call-tracking account so every call is logged. Review invites go out after every sale.
The lost-deal audit and the 14-Day Proof. For every lost lead, what happened and what should have. And for the owner: the leads that came in, what happened to each in the first fourteen days, and the sales that came from them.
A day board with a reason for every call. The customer who came back, surfaced the same hour. Lead providers ranked by sales, not by leads. Fourteen days of proof instead of a monthly report.
What changes in the first 30 days
The CRM export loads on day one. Lead providers are measured by the end of week one, and the first dead provider is usually found there. The Day Board goes live for the reps. Automated outreach stays off until the test lead has gone through the whole system end to end.
DEALERCORTEX AI