Industry conversion rates?

[Burt Lewis]

Thank you for this great resource, I hope I'm posting this in the right place and have the right terminology. My first posting, and a question please.

I'm an old time retired government IT manager/application developer/designer and have been working part-time for the past 7 years for a 75 year old family independent used only 130+ vehicle dealership in New England in the town I live in. I'm the Sunday sales guy and in addition, I remotely handle all the website coordination, and all the online email and text leads that come in from our website and advertisers. For commission purposes, at the end of each month I count the number of customers I responded to or communicated with that resulted in an actual dealership sale for that that month and I calculate the percent of my "sold leads" to the total number of dealership total sales that month. Is that percent considered the "conversion rate" and if not what's the correct terminology for phone and text leads resulting in sales? I'm wondering what the industry standards are also.

Thank you!

 

[ryan.leslie]

at the end of each month I count the number of customers I responded to or communicated with that resulted in an actual dealership sale for that that month and I calculate the percent of my "sold leads" to the total number of dealership total sales that month.

Hey Burt,

Welcome to the Refresh Forums!

Someone else that really has conversion funnels mastered will likely chime in and be able to give you a bunch of ways to look at your performance. You may want to track your lead to appointment, appointment to show rate, and then your show to close too. All of those buckets will help you understand your strengths and opportunities for improvement.

If I understood you correctly, you may have the wrong denominator. You want to divide your closed leads by the leads assigned to you to find your personal conversion percentage.

Personal close % = (Leads you worked that closed)/(leads assigned to you)
Dealer close % = (All Leads that closed)/( All leads received by the dealership)
% of sales = (Leads you worked that closed)/(Total dealer sales)

Hope that helps, and again, welcome to the Forum.

Ryan

 

[Burt Lewis]

Ryan, thank you, that helps. It's the % of sales = (Leads you worked that closed)/(Total dealer sales) that I pass along to the boss every month.

I'm just wondering what the industry average is for that statistic. Thank you.

 

[jon.berna]

What you are referring to is your share of the dealership sales and that is a heavily dependent metric. Dealerships have used this in the past as a gut check on the internet department's performance. Say based on your method of credit assignment you are at 20% share. If the rest of the sales team does a better job in a specific month your share will go down. There are a number of flaws with this approach, the biggest being it doesn't help you really know that you are getting better or how to.

Ryan definitely gave you a list of more useful metrics, here is a live resource that shows those benchmarks: https://www.driven-data.com/live-stats/performance-trends

 

[Burt Lewis]

Good info, thank you. We are small operation, 130+ vehicles, I am the entire Internet sales department, I receive and respond to every email and text lead including setting up and using the CRM to send out templated responses and automated follow ups. I know how many of the email and text leads I respond/communicate with that result in a sale, and I know what percentage of those sales are to the total monthly dealership sales. I'm not that familiar with car and sales lingo and couldn't quite find an industry percent average for exactly that, thought I might have luck here. Thank you!