DEARBORN, Mich. -

FordDirect claims its lead volume for both the new and used vehicles has climbed by more than 20 percent year over year while the remainder of the industry has stayed flat.

How can company leadership make such an assertion? Executive vice president of marketing Stacey Coopes says it stems from slightly changing the value proposition to the consumer.

In an interview with Auto Remarketing, Coopes emphasized FordDirect is trying to go beyond just having a shopper request a price quote to generate a lead. The company has tested concepts such as reserving a vehicle the shopper might find in dealer inventory or inquiring about more incentive details. When finding an element that appeals to consumers beyond the sticker price, Coopes believes it helps Ford dealers do what they do best — sell vehicles.

“What we’re testing and have done over the last couple of years at FordDirect is try to innovate on that value proposition for consumers so that we can offer more value to the consumer but at the same time generate more traffic to the dealership,” Coopes explained.

And once that lead arrives at the dealership, it falls on store personnel to turn it. Coopes shared that FordDirect has discovered if a dealer responds to a lead within a 30 minutes of lead submission, the close rate comes in at 25 percent. If the response takes an hour or as long as five hours, Coopes indicated that close rate plummets to as low as 5 percent.

Ford Dealers Share Their Experiences

The turn percentages Coopes offered apparently aren’t a surprise to some Ford dealers.

“I’ve noticed the leads are becoming more and more detailed,” stated Jon Weber, Internet sales manager at Siemans Ford in Bridgeman, Mich.

“There are more facts about what the customer is looking for because they are more knowledgeable about specific packages or features that are on a certain model,” Weber continued. “Whether its word of mouth, or trusting the Internet more, or a friend or relative who had a great experience buying a vehicle online, or what, but it’s made people want to go online and try it.

“It’s always a constant battle but I’d say call everybody,” Weber went on to say. “Call, call, call. Don’t give up on anybody. You have to do the follow-up.”

Peggy Watson, Internet sales manager at Watson Quality Ford in North Jackson, Miss., is geared up to call leads and more. Watson thinks the steps are necessary because of what’s contained on dealers’ websites nowadays.

“I believe that customers’ expectations of a dealer’s website are greater now than they have been. They want to see actual pictures. They want a price quote. They want to know about the window sticker so they can see everything that is on that vehicle,” Watson shared.

“We’ve recently expanded our Internet department from two to six people. We’re going to have coverage around the clock,” she continued. "And we’re going to handle our leads more efficiently with the increased number of individuals that we now have in our Internet department.”

Dennis Perry, business development center manager at Valenti Ford in Mystic, Conn., touched on lead generation as well, delving into another element of the sales tool that Coopes emphasized FordDirect is researching, too.

“The biggest thing we have seen over last year is the proliferation of mobile,” Perry began. “We are sending responses and getting a lot more immediate responses because they are on their mobile devices.

“The thing we have to do to match up with that is shorten our responses so they can see everything in a brief sentence or two. So it has to be shorter and harder hitting,” Perry continued. “The newest thing that we’ve done is put in a new CRM tool for 17 stores. So the resolutions we’ve made so far are to get everybody onboard and get everything going in the right direction.”

More Emphasis on Technology & Future Applications

Based on a belief that 97 percent of text messages are opened, Coopes explained a couple of other projects FordDirect tested to harness that mobile technology Perry discussed. She stated tools that utilize text messaging are based on the concept of having different approaches and innovative ways that the automaker and its franchise dealers go after lead generation.

Coopes detailed to Auto Remarketing a program FordDirect unveiled late last year in the text marketing space.

“We saw a lot of dealers looking for solutions to take what historically was people who would submit for contest and incentives, dealers would get lists of customers in their text campaign and they didn’t know what to do with them because the customers had request to win something but not necessarily in-market consumers,” Coopes explained.

“We actually piloted an approach where we would put the SMS code on our advertising and our commercials,” she continued. “As the customers would text that in, they would get series of questions that would indicate they would be in the market for a Ford vehicle and would also give them a value proposition to keep going.”

So how far did these consumers engage with the brand and franchise dealerships?

“It was surprising the conversion of people who came through that process to be a lead because we would sequentially collect more and more information with each question until we had the name, phone number and vehicle of interest,” Coopes responded. “We were able to see 15 percent conversion on those leads versus our site conversion that tends to be in the 8 to 10 percent range.

“For us, it’s very important that the leads we send to dealers are really high quality because the last thing that an Internet manager wants to do is pore through a bunch of leads and not have many of them close,” Coopes conceded.

“We’ve spent a lot of time refining our system, looking at lead scoring so that we can make sure the leads we send them are going to result in a sale,” she went on to say. “Over the last two years, we’ve grown the number of retail sales that are accountable to a lead submission to 20 percent. We right now represent over 20 percent of Ford’s total retail volume, which compared to others in the industry is very high. I think it’s because FordDirect was established with Ford dealers to really focus on how we get that traffic to them and make it useful so they can focus on what they do best which is selling that vehicle.”

And beyond that final sale, Coopes asserted that FordDirect’s lead generation tools can help franchise dealers in other ways such as what inventory to stock or what service campaigns might be most effective in their specific market.

“It’s really competitive marketplace out there. They’re looking at getting the best traffic they can get as far as leads and ups to the dealership. Bringing all of these pieces together into a system, we’re looking at that as differentiator for Ford dealers,” Coopes declared.

“If you can provide unique value propositions and you can drive traffic in nontraditional ways, looking into the DMS systems and pulling out new data for dealers to take approach their new and pre-owned customers and market to them before they’re actually submitting a lead, if you can focus on the treatments and track it all, that’s going to be differentiator for dealers and OEMs to really take that competitive marketplace and make a difference in how they can penetrate the market,” she concluded.