As the year comes winding to a close, let’s talk sales. You track how many cars you sell, right? Everybody tracks their sales—both on an individual level and for your dealership as a whole. But that’s only part of the picture. Hopefully you also track how many leads you generate as well.

Dividing your cars sold by your number of leads gives you an idea of how many leads you currently need to sell a car. Even through the number of leads and cars vary from month to month, you will often find a consistent percentage for conversion of lead to sale.

So maybe you sold 55 cars in October on 275 leads and 58 cars in November on 284 leads. In both cases you are converting about 20% of your leads into sales. Now when you set your sales target, you also can set a lead target based on past history.

So now what do you need to do to double your sales? If you want to sell more cars (and who doesn’t?), you have two choices

Convert a higher percentage of your leads

Obtain a larger number of leads to work

The first idea is something we’ll tackle in a future posting—maximizing each and every lead. But the second—increasing your number of leads—is a tried and true method to increase your sales. If you’re looking to double your sales, doubling the number of leads is one way to get there.

How to double your leads, though? Here’s a few steps that we’ve found to be effective. Take one (or all) of these steps, and you will find yourself buried with new leads.

  • INCREASE THE FREQUENCY OF YOUR ADVERTISING: If you’ve followed our advice, you’ve created a marketing message that sets you apart from all your competition, and you’ve focused that message on one medium. Increasing the frequency of that message allows you to both reach more potential customers and have a more powerful effect on those you reach.
  • PURSUE REFERRALS: When trying to solicit new customers, what better way than to have your previous customers who had an incredibly positive experience serve as your ambassador to future sales? Hopefully, they are already thinking good thoughts about your dealership and if you set a fair reward for leads that turn to sales, you make them even more willing to vouch for your service.
  • TARGET THE SLEEPING BUYERS: Remember to not just fight for the 2% of the market actively looking for a car—you want to turn the other 98% into potential customers as well. And they are possibilities your competition is not even considering, so you have a massive advantage when working those leads.

With these guidelines, you can expect a huge uptick in lead generation. But we’re not going to lie—you still need to put the work in to convert those leads into car buyers. Next time we’ll talk about moving those leads through the funnel and down toward a close.